Conversations with Ken Kesey by Scott F. Parker

Author:Scott F. Parker [Parker, Scott F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781617039706
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2014-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

Ken Kesey: The Prince of Pransksters

Rick Saunders, Bob Nesbitt, and Vaughn Binzer / 1976

From Marijuana Monthly, Vol. 2 No. 3. © 1976 by Marijuana Monthly.

Anyone with the guts and civic responsibility to turn on the Hells Angels can’t be all bad.

—CRAZY BOB

The Intrepid Traveler

For those of your Marijuana Monthly readers who don’t recognize the vehicle in this [picture], its name is Furthur and it belongs to Ken Kesey. For those of you who don’t know who Ken Kesey is, he’s the guy who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (and Kesey’s Garage Sale and Sometimes a Great Notion), and he’s also widely known through Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as owner and pilot of the Magic Bus whose only destination is Furthur. Ken was the Intrepid Traveler whose band of Merry Pranksters toured the country in the Bus in the ’60s consuming inordinate quantities of Acid and blowing everybody’s heads, including their own—and the Hells Angels as well.

Kesey and the Bus are for the present back on the farm. Kesey ploughing and digging and the Bus basking (and rusting) while cows munch grass indifferent to the glorious past of the DayGlo apparition now comfortably settling into the green Oregon turf.

Stewart Brand had a notion (and not a great one) to “snatch the Bus away” from Kesey and stick it in the Smithsonian Institute with other relics. Brand must have been a history major. He writes in the CoEvolution Quarterly that he was around for some of the ’60s and came to realize that “the Bus is a true and unusual artifact of a true and unusual time in American grassroots history.” So Brand wrote to the Smithsonian and told them about Furthur. They responded that they had never heard of the Bus, but agreed that “this is a dimension of cultural history with which this museum must come to grips . . .” And sure enough, just as Brand dreamed, the Smithsonian got around to asking Ken for the bus. But Ken’s not ready to give it up, as Marijuana Monthly learned in our phone interview with him recently.

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