The Day-Glo Beautiful People

a book report on "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by the incomparable Tom Wolfe.

So in comes Tom Wolfe, surging with manic poetic energy to describe in regular journalistic terms the experience of LSD culture in the sixties �" Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Neal Cassady swinging a sledgehammer, Hell’s Angels parties on country hilltops at dawn, The Beatles and the many-tentacled monster of teenage girls that rippled after them, wild cross-country careening in a bus painted all the fluorescent colors of hellfire. All these details become ours, artifacts and anecdotes in the whole cosmic movie of The Experience. Tom Wolfe was there for it all �" invisible and very minor-character in his own prose, but he was there �" and he is now trying to set it all down in plain English, full of the facts his job requires, honest-toned and just as wildly mashed together as the crazed perception of a generation of Day-Glo beautiful people under the influence of holiness, sensory brilliance, and good old amphetamines.

Tom Wolfe has a crystalline-fine steel-trap mind for detail and acute observation (crucial to writing a good chunk of journalism, which is what the book is). His sentences careen on and on, building up into litanies of syllablistic fever, multiplying out over the pages in a quasi-coherent mash of his own personal vernacular. Tom Wolfe has quite a thing for words �" a penchant, to be academic about it; it’s really an absolute passion. He wields an arsenal of medical terms, hip-talk slang, historic-cultural references, catch-phrases and slogans (used like repeated riffs throughout the book), college vocabulary, sound-effects �" it all gets thrown in. He may be formidable in his field as a writer, but he is up against an absolutely insane task, trying to bring this indescribable scene about into an ink-and-paper book called The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, published in 1968.

What the acid test is is this: : : : well, actually, it comes from… it all started with a moment on… well, there’s a bus, anyway. The magic bus. Ken Kesey elected himself the prophet of acid for America, set out to turn everyone onto this mind-blowing, soul-opening, all-out-there experience. He formed a band of Merry Pranksters, dedicated to The Life, The Experience, The Freak-out Kick of LSD. They were out to change the world with spontaneous and total confidence �" because they already knew they could change their own worlds, with this new visionary thing �" and also wanted to make a big, bawdy, giggly, heartfelt and happy joke of it. For those who were not in on this (because you’re either on the bus, or off the bus), hate came naturally. It was unthinkably strange to watch as these people racketed all over the country with their noise of mantras and chants and loudspeakers, their strange Oriental flute music, their sheer apparatus overflowing from the bus that was carrying them on a wave of fumes past town after town of soft-faced, quietly-confused middle-class mystified America.

They were out to promote, to “propagate their lust for life”*, to make it their own movie, and pull off a huge performance of joyful combustion to enlighten America out of its complacency once and for all. They all became characters, ordinary American kids turned into the fabulous entities of Mountain Girl, Babbs, Doris Delay, Sensuous X, Gretchen Fetchin the Slime Queen, Black Maria, Zonker, and all the rest. They organized massive parties (be-ins, love-ins, impromptu mayhemic bonanzas) to release their love and drugs into the square-but-curious public. At the first of these gatherings, the centerpiece to the whole mess of lights and paint and bodies and dirt was an empty trashcan filled with LSD-laden Kool-Aid, which was passed around in innocent plastic cups. Everyone there had some, and individually lost themselves from there (in Wolfe’s phrase: to become “zonked” out of one’s “gourd”). The acid opens you up, opens and dissolves all fear and knowledge and only the self remains… your perception straddles deliriously the edge of all its angles, all sensation blows straight to your core and sends your mind into an ongoing spasm of rapidfire realization. It’s a view into the absolute unadulterated stuff of the senses.

To those who were in on it, part of the Experience, ON the bus and turned ONto acid… this was the purest reality in the world. It needs no justification or explanation; you just need to try it. Tom Wolfe, being on the scene but still shielded with his professional-observer guise of a reporter (albeit a pretty crafty, virtuosic one), tries his hand at forming conclusions to the whole mess to record it in its essence, and ends up with an Experience of his own. The story of The Merry Pranksters told as narrative is evidence enough of the whole thing (Was it a movement? a revolution? a piece of performance, or just one big joke?). It was wild, unprecedented, brave, no-holds-barred, revelatory, incomprehensible, culture-forming, path-forging, destructive, absurd, gloriously impetuous, too perfect to describe, and ABSOLUTELY not something to miss for the world.