Magic Trip: The Film That Popped the Myth of the Merry Pranksters
Anyone nostalgic for the mythic image of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as fearless cultural trailblazers who shattered the postwar complacency with their psychedelic energy should skip Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and Alison Ellwood’s 2011 documentary, Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place.
Assembled from dozens of hours of raw 16mm footage shot by the Pranksters on their cross-country bus ride from California to New York (and back), the film lays bare a mundane reality: the Pranksters were far less interesting and meaningful than their self-image and the elevated place they occupy in the public imagination.
The author, who'd discovered LSD while a student in the Stanford University writing program, had become disenchanted with crafting novels all alone in his writer's shack in La Honda, California. Kesey settled on “creating art out of everyday life.” Charismatic and already a literary star, he was able to persuade a ragtag bunch of acolytes to go along with his plan and believe they were creating art. But what the film often portrays is more like the grown-up, stoned version of kids playing in the sandbox, sculpting structures they were sure were special.
In the summer of 1964, when Kesey (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Sometimes A Great Notion) was a big literary name, he bought an old International Harvester school bus—to be named ”Furthur”—that his Pranksters transformed into an LSD-mobile with Day-Glo swirls, psychedelic artwork, rooftop speakers, and bunks inside. The group recruited Neal Cassady as their main driver before setting off to see the World’s Fair in NYC. Embracing psychedelic chaos, they dressed in funny hats and striped shirts, blasting their music loud at amused and confused passersby.
Had Tom Wolfe not documented the story in his 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, it could've slipped into obscurity, remaining as half-legend known only to insiders in that era’s psychedelic scene. As it happened, it was a smash hit that transformed an obscure experimental excursion into a counterculture watershed moment. The Wolfe book, with its dazzling New Journalism prose, manufactured an almost superheroic narrative: Kesey as the Great Explorer, Neal Cassady as the manic, speed-talking driver, and constant “meaningful” fun and hijinks on the bus.
The book made an outsized impression on many, myself included. Kesey’s bunch of merrymakers came off as a fun-loving gang holding the mirror up to straight society. But a recent viewing of Magic Trip made me think I’d been fooled by a pumped-up, second-hand narrative. Wolfe’s prose was so compelling that it made readers feel he was on the bus with the rest of the Pranksters. But he didn't take LSD, and never got on the bus. Instead, the author pieced together a riveting story with extensive retrospective research that included interviews with Kesey and his gang.
The film tells a more prosaic story. Creating art out of everyday life is a concept worth exploring, but any kind of meaningful art takes discipline and preparation, foreign concepts to the Pranksters.
Upon seeing the film, I'm hard-pressed to see the famous bus trip as much more than a drug-fueled lark. One revealing scene captures the gang visiting an old Marine friend of Prankster Ken Babbs, Kesey's best friend from Stanford. They arrived at the house before he did, and Kesey came up with the idea to film something theatrical in his back yard as a greeting. When the buddy steps out of his car in his uniform, the Pranksters are dancing in a circle in his back yard, unsuccessfully trying to play flutes, trombones and saxophones. It comes off as self-indulgence that's passed off as the channeling of some profound cosmic energy.
Kesey saw himself and his crew as a bridge between the Beat Generation and the next rebellious movement, so having Cassady as the bus driver had symbolic meaning. But Magic Trip tells a different story. When the Pranksters arrived in New York City, they invited Jack Kerouac to attend a party they threw. But they tried to get a rise out of him with their usual antics—cacophonous flute playing, dancing, etc. Kerouac’s shown looking lost on the couch while pounding back a 32 oz. can of Budweiser. After an hour, Cassady drove him back to his mother's Long Island house, where he was living.
Then Furthur heads to Millbrook, NY so the Pranksters can hang out with fellow psychedelic pioneer Timothy Leary and his coterie of former PhD students and their wives who’d followed the Harvard psychology professor down to New York State after the university fired him. The film captures the Pranksters arriving, with great fanfare and expectations, at the lavish mansion Leary’s group lived in. Someone set a green smoke bomb off. But when they got out their flutes for their usual “musical” performance, “everybody fled,” as Leary’s research partner, Richard Alpert, explains in a voiceover.
The Harvard exiles were coming down from their own trip, while the Pranksters were just beginning theirs. Leary, with an in-your-face insult, never even came downstairs, although he did hang out upstairs with Cassady for a while. Kesey reportedly dismissed Leary as someone who wanted to run the psychedelic experience rather than live inside it.
The bus riders moved on. The Pranksters returned to San Francisco and participated in a few “Acid Tests” that were open to the general public for mind expansion, and then faded out of relevance. Their final failure, although it was impossible task to complete alone, was not being able to turn all the footage that got stashed away in Kesey’s barn into something watchable.
As for Kesey, after the “Acid Tests” were finished, he announced it was time to go beyond drugs, and moved back to Oregon for a quiet life on a farm. This hardly seems a likely scenario to grow out of Tom Wolfe’s supercharged narrative but, reading between the lines, Magic Trip predicts it. But that's what great artists do, and there's no shame in such failure.