Counterculture history holds a special fascination for me, both in literature and the visual arts.
From the birth of “modernism” with Manet and Baudelaire to the early 20th century Greenwich Village of Mabel Dodge and the “left bank” antics of Stein, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Hemingway in post World War I Paris, the pure excitement of bohemia has always held a powerful personal sway.
There were also the “auteurs” of the French “new wave” who had been influenced by early American cinema and would return the favor by influencing a whole slew of later generations of American filmmakers. With most all artistic disciplines, it has proven over time that what goes around comes around.
And in this country, it went around from Greenwich Village to Taos to the French Quarter of New Orleans to the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco to Venice Beach in L.A. and assorted other subterranean haunts nationwide. By the early 1960s, as has been well documented, the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco continued the tradition by flaunting a quite singular and flamboyant vibe.
Herb Caen, who as a columnist and pundit for the San Francisco Chronicle enjoyed coining culturally-defining terms such as “beatnik” almost as much as downing a nightly quorum of Stolichnaya vodkas with a twist of lemon rind served in an iced martini glass, soon came up with “hippy” as a pejorative within which to deal with these new inhabitants of “the Haight.”
Mainstream media never did really “get” bohemia, of course, but there were artists of various disciplines both within and without the movement who took a crack at it. Some, like Picasso, Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey would achieve various levels of qualitative and quantitative success within their lifetimes.
Others, to their credit, would continue mining the underground for that ever-illusive “original thought.” Still others — the “new journalism” practitioner Tom Wolfe comes immediately to mind — would find a path to fame and fortune that totally bypassed real “depth” of any manner. But, that said, they can be useful. Literary bamboozlers need love too.
And therein, now that we have entered into evidence both Kesey and Wolfe, reposes the crux of this matter: a film screening as part of the new Documentary Premiere category at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival later this month with the somewhat provocative title of “Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place.”
Kesey, who had written much his iconic novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” after volunteering for a covert CIA-sponsored LSD human-research program at the VA Hospital in Menlo Park during his years at Stanford University, had, of course, become enamored with the drug to the point of blatant evangelism.
This would lead to the formation of his quite-creatively outlandish entourage known as the Merry Pranksters, an affiliation that would go on to purchase and re-configure a 1939 International Harvester school bus, paint it in extreme psychedelic gaudiness, name it “Furthur,” and take off from the Bay Area for all points east.
Kerouac’s muse Neal Cassady, the Dean Moriarty character from “On the Road,” signed on as helmsman and driver, and off they sped, a busload of freaks, careening cross country with pre-installed audio and filming potential to their rendezvous with counterculture destiny.
Their plan of arriving in New York in time for the July publication of Kesey’s second novel, “Sometimes a Great Notion,” and taking in Tomorrowland at the World’s Fair proved successful, but a bit too early for my own great notion.
My entourage of two suffered a near miss with these usual suspects that auspicious summer of 1964 as our somewhat less stimulated hitchhiking foray from Ft. Benning, Georgia to the Big Apple played out a month too late.
No sour grapes, however. We did get Thelonious Monk and Nina Simone to go along with Tomorrowland and a Mets-Giants game at the new Shea Stadium which, it should be noted, we played almost exactly one year ahead of the Beatles.
With only Mr. Wolfe’s somewhat suspect “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” to go on as a narrative artifact of Furthur’s historic saga, it will be welcome indeed to view actual footage shot by the Pranksters themselves. Check it out! As they used to say, you’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.