counterculture in california is born, because more and more people then want to try to experience what keasey experienced, and he becomes a promoter of it. keasey created a drug commune at la honda, which is an hour from san francisco. great artists love smashing traditions, and at his best, keasey was doing that. everybody would have this communal lsd trip together. tom wolf would write the electric kool-aid acid test about it. people were constantly slipping drugs into my food. the number of times i would get up and i d wonder what happened. they thought they were doing me a favor. they were having the world s fair in new york, so a bunch of us were going to do. but the bunch of us were too big to fit in his station wagon, so he bought this converted school bus. keasey, he was going to put the bus in dayglow, bright colors and then go with what he called unsettling america, blowing people s minds.
ken keasey took classes of writing at stanford university, and he writes the great novel one flew over the cuckoo s nest, and this makes him a celebrity. while i was at stanford, i was given the opportunity to go to the stanford hospital and take part in the lsd experiments. keasey had volunteered to do tests for lsd, a government-sponsored test. lsd was isolated in a pharmaceutical company in switzerland. are you happy? yes. you have tears in your eyes. oh. is that a beautiful experience would you say? i would say yes. some people think it s when keasey discovers lsd that the
i are i really felt like the torch had been passed from those guys to the psychedelic generation. keasey was very messianic, and he start the feeling that acid would let you see a larger strugt. and thought he wanted to get as many people to try lsd as they can. so we started renting halls. we called the thing the acid test. the band of course was known as the warlocks. as time went on, they changed their name to the grateful dead. st. stephen with a rose, in and out of the garden he goes country garden in the wind and the rain wherever he goes, the people all complain lsd was not an illegal drug. when keasey held these acid tests, as they were known, they d have two vats. one was punch and one was punch with lsd. the acid tests were like a party. the scene is a lot of light shows and music and people dancing. when the dead were playing, it
was a way to feel that acid in waves. and i looked down and i saw kids in front of me moving to the music. they looked up at me and i said, yeah. the drug culture really took hold. and that s where artists, whether it was the grateful dead or jefferson airplane, were able to embrace it and put it in their music. the counterculture in california is born because more and more people want to try to experience what keasey experienced, and he kind of became the grand poobah of the carnival in san francisco in the 1960s. there s nothing a grown-up or sophisticated in taking an lsd trip at all. they re just being complete fools.
the los angeles county sheriff s office has begun foot patrol on the sunset strip to cope with the growing influx of youngsters. the notion of teenagers who had a culture of their own, that weren t listening to their parents music, kind of opens up this giant space for rebellions large and small. at least 10% of the students have used and are using marijuana. also, probably a very significant thing is that acceptance is gaining steadily and the usage is really increasing very rapidly. in l.a., we were all kind of, you know, smoking god s herb, whereas up in san francisco, it seemed like they were experimenting more with mind expansion, you know? ken keasey took classes of writing at stanford university, and he writes the great novel