On the Road Again

...This mental net was suffocating our sovereign states inl964...

...And the Smithsonian Institution wants to acquire the psychedelically-painted school bus that transported the novelist and his Merry Pranksters on their legendary 1964 pilgrimage from California to New York...

...One witness tells the jury the Pranksters helped to combat "a growing complacency with the ethical direction of the state, a hardening of the heart which finally spreads to render the victim's perceptive senses paralyzed, so that the only sights, sounds and ideas that can be accepted by the person are those already prescreened and marked permissible...

...Once formed, the screen becomes impenetrable...

...There were great philosophical differences between us and the Pranksters...

...Paul Perry and Ken Babb's On the Bus is basically a photo collection, too, yet it surpasses Kesey's effort in virtually all respects...

...Once you've caught that wave, you're addicted...

...with the destination sign in front reading 'Furthur' [sic] and a sign in back saying 'Caution: Weird Load...

...Baba Ram Dass (formerly Richard Alpert) provides a particularly interesting description of the Pranksters' visit to LSD guru Timothy Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery at the Hitchcock estate in Millbrook, New York: "They came in with the idea that this was going to be a meeting between East and West, the acid tribes of the different coasts...

...The real intention here clearly is not to study Cassady's charismatic personality or the role he played in the social revolution of the '60s, but to convey a sense of the wide open, spacedout abandon that was a hallmark of the period...

...It does, however, manage to give us a feeling of what life was like outside American mainstream culture at the dawn of the Hippie era...

...And if all this were not bad enough, both volumes contain cavalier descriptions of dreadful sexual exploitation, unmitigated by any hint of misgivings...

...The scores of photographs by longtime Kesey associate Ron Bivert so predominate (there's even a "flip book" built into the lower right-hand corner) that by comparison the farcical proceedings of the trial hold little interest...

...On the scholarly front, the University of New Mexico Press is preparing an anthology of interpretive essays about his renowned work, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962...

...And the number of such readers seems to be increasing steadily, accounting in part for the current Kesey renascence and the profusion of other works purporting to illuminate aspects of the Beat/Hippie scene...

...and the pop graphics of Milton Glaser...

...As most readers will recall, that drugfueled Odyssey was celebrated in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968...

...Now we have been given two more accounts of the trip: Kesey's own The Further Inquiry, and Paul Perry and Ken Babb's On the Bus...

...The disease spreads until the entity has lost all its powers of spontaneity...

...Editors at Thunder's Mouth Press worked closely with Perry (himself a former editor) and Prankster Babbs to achieve an effective orchestration of the disparate elements...

...21.95 (paper...

...Various witnesses are summoned to provide testimony concerning his involvement in the bus trip shenanigans...

...Thompson and Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia contributed forewords, and extensive commentaries are included from a variety of other literary and paraliterary figures like Robert Stone, William S. Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti...

...Melodramatic as that assessment is, it makes a valid point...

...I don't think our group was into any part of the myth...

...Kesey's version is a curious amalgam —part picture album and part a surrealistic courtroom trial where the late countercultural folk hero, Neal Cassady, is being charged with upsetting the status quo...

...Thought patterns repeated over and over form a mental screen...

...The notorious bus trip took place more than 25 years ago...

...Unfortunately, The Further Inquiry fails to seriously develop its case, or to satisfactorily explore Neal Cassady's mystique...

...Thunder's Mouth editors Neil Ortenberg and Michael Schwartz at least saw fit to observe in a jittery epilogue that "the innocence with which it [LSD] is regarded may seem anomalous to the contemporary reader...

...Drugs had something to do with it, but the wave happened in science, cinema, art, music, and politics...

...Neither one sufficiently acknowledges the harshly discordant flipside of the '60s drug rhapsody...

...Reviewed by George J. Searles Associate professor of humanities, Mohawk Valley Community College...

...To an even greater degree than The Further Inquiry, this paperback resembles an impressionistic collage—a jumpy, self-indulgent cut-and-paste job...

...The best-seller chronicled the wanderings of "the Hieronymus Bosch bus...

...Kesey himself has attracted attention by venturing into collaborative writing with graduate students at the University of Oregon...

...195 pp...

...However, the use of certain drugs in the 1960s occurred in a somewhat different context from that of drug use in the 1990s...

...were making more of a social-political statement than we were...

...Whatever, the LSD experience is fundamental to these books, and that raises a troublesome matter...

...Not surprisingly, the authors culled from a wider range of sources, drawing upon the photos taken by Bivert and assorted Pranksters, as well as the observations of poet Allen Ginsberg, "gonzo journalist" Hunter S. Thompson, Kerouac's biographer Ann Charters, and others...

...But it is a very good one...

...And in the drive to pitch a new, less inhibited Weltänsicht to a generation ripe for change, the antics of Cassady, Kesey and company played an important part...

...Moreover, people at Viking were consulted to ensure minimal duplication of material...

...Now hyperenfranchised boomers who came of age during Kesey's original heyday are looking back nostalgically at that period when members of their generation defined themselves by whether they were, in a metaphorical sense, "on thebus"—when, in short, there was still a bus to be on...

...I think that the Pranksters...

...Nonetheless, those years were a mix of political activism and guerrilla theater, each reinforced by the other...

...Still, too much use is made of posterization (the photographic process whereby a picture is rendered in two or three unnatural, sharply contrasting colors), and every page is superimposed over a color shot of a lovely, cloud-filled sky...

...Divided into four sections—"Origins," "The Trip," "The Acid Tests— and Beyond," and "Aftermath"—On the Bus covers far more territory than Kesey's Inquiry...

...Their weaknesses notwithstanding, The Further Inquiry and On the Bus would be fitting additions to the library of anyone interested in the literary counterculture or, indeed, the counterculture in general...

...On the Bus: The Complete Guide to the Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Birth of the Counterculture By Paul Perry and Ken Babbs Thunder's Mouth...

...In October, Kesey read that Ozark fable over National Public Radio...

...But the book jacket's promise of "a serious meditation on the '60s" turns out to be merely another instance of characteristic Prankster hyperbole...

...By waffling, though, they sell the subject short...

...Perhaps the renewed interest can be explained by the simple passage of time...

...Tellingly, Kesey dedicates The Further Inquiry "to Neal, and Page, and Gordon, and Bubbles, and Cass, and Tramp, and Janice, and Pigpen, and Tim, and Billy, and other casualties from this vector," but that is the extent of his recognizing the issue...

...By treating Cassady as a part of the larger Prankster pageant, rather than making him the book's focus, the authors are better able to dramatize how "the torch had been passed from the Beat to the Psychedelic, with Cassady as the driver, the tour guide, the swing man, foot in both eras, the flame passing from Kerouac to Kesey...

...author, "The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike" From all appearances, Ken Kesey is a hot item again...

...You want to catch another one...

...A good deal of the Pranksters' appeal—and significance —derived from their being among the first organized groups to publicly challenge the stifling, bureaucratized conformity that was a legacy of the Eisenhower Administration...

...Last summer, the Eugene (Oregon) Ballet Company staged an adaptation of his "Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear...

...Kesey recently put it this way to an interviewer: "We caught a wave back then...

...During the past year, Viking has released three Kesey-related titles, and more are on the way...

...The deliberately anachronistic design is meant to recall such cultural artifacts as Abbie Hoffman's Woodstock Nation, Jerry Rubin's Do It...

...Our country was dying...

...The format, with one oddsized column of dialogue running down each page, also minimizes the text...

...Millbrook was primarily a research space...