| Part of the Hippie movement | |
 An Acid Test handbill | |
| Date | 1965–1966 |
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| Location | California, Texas |
| Part of a series on |
| Psychedelia |
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The Acid Tests were a series of parties held by author Ken Kesey primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area during the mid-1960s, centered on the use of and advocacy for the psychedelic drug LSD, commonly known as "acid". LSD was not made illegal in California until October 6, 1966, under Governor Ronald Reagan’s administration. [1]
The name "Acid Test" was coined by Kesey, after the term "acid test" used by gold miners in the 1850s. He began throwing parties at his farm at La Honda, California. [2] The Merry Pranksters were central to organizing the Acid Tests, including Pranksters such as Lee Quarnstrom and Neal Cassady. Other people, such as LSD chemists Owsley Stanley and Tim Scully, were involved as well.
Kesey took the parties to public places, and advertised with posters that read, "Can you pass the acid test?", and the name was later popularized in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test . Musical performances by the Grateful Dead were commonplace, along with black lights, strobe lights, and fluorescent paint. The Acid Tests are notable for their influence on the LSD-based counterculture of the San Francisco area and subsequent transition from the beat generation to the hippie movement. The Jefferson Airplane song "A Song for All Seasons" (from Volunteers ) mentions the Acid Tests.
1965
1966
1967
1968
| Trips Festival | |
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 | |
| Genre | psychedelic |
| Dates | January 21, 22 and 23 |
| Location(s) | Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco |
| Years active | 1966 |
| Founders | Ramon Sender, Ken Kesey, Stewart Brand |
Ramon Sender co-produced the Trips Festival with Ken Kesey and Stewart Brand. It was a three-day event that, [28] in conjunction with The Merry Pranksters, brought together the nascent hippie movement. [29] The Trips Festival was held at the Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco in January 1966. [30] Counterculture sound engineer Ken Babbs is mostly credited for the sound systems he created for the Trips Festival. Prior to Babbs' creation, it was discovered that particular music usually sounded distorted when cranked to high levels because of the cement floor on the San Francisco Longshoreman's Union Hall (where the Trips Festival was taking place). Babbs being a sound engineer resolved the problem. He made sound amplifiers that would not create distorted sounds when turned up to high sound levels.[ citation needed ]
Organized by Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey, Owsley Stanley, Zach Stewart and others, [31] [32] [33] [34] ten thousand people attended this sold-out event, with a thousand more turned away each night. [35] On Saturday January 22, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company came on stage, and 6,000 people arrived to drink punch spiked with LSD and to witness one of the first fully developed light shows of the era. [36]
Big Brother and the Holding Company was formed at the Trips Festival. In the audience was painter and jazz drummer David Getz, who soon joined the band. [37] [38] [39]
The Grateful Dead was an American rock band formed in Palo Alto, California in 1965. Known for their eclectic style that fused elements of rock, blues, jazz, folk, country, bluegrass, rock and roll, gospel, reggae, and world music with psychedelia, the band is famous for improvisation during their live performances, and for their devoted fan base, known as "Deadheads". According to the musician and writer Lenny Kaye, the music of the Grateful Dead "touches on ground that most other groups don't even know exists." For the range of their influences and the structure of their live performances, the Grateful Dead are considered "the pioneering godfathers of the jam band world".
Ken Elton Kesey was an American novelist, essayist and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.
Philip Chapman Lesh was an American musician and a founding member of the Grateful Dead, with whom he developed a unique style of playing improvised six-string bass guitar. He was their bassist throughout their 30-year career.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a 1968 nonfiction book by Tom Wolfe written in the New Journalism literary style. By 1970, this style began to be referred to as Gonzo Journalism, a term coined for the work of Hunter S. Thompson. The book presents a firsthand account of the experiences of Ken Kesey and a group of psychedelic enthusiasts, known as the Merry Pranksters, who traveled across the United States in a colorfully-painted school bus they called Furthur. Kesey and the Pranksters became famous for their use of psychedelic drugs to achieve expansion of their consciousness. The book chronicles the Acid Tests and encounters with notable figures of the time, and describes Kesey's exile to Mexico and his arrests.
The Merry Pranksters were followers of American author Ken Kesey. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters lived communally at Kesey's homes in California and Oregon, and are noted for the sociological significance of a lengthy road trip they took in the summer of 1964, traveling across the United States in a psychedelic painted school bus called Furthur, organizing parties, and giving out LSD. During this time they met many of the guiding lights of the 1960s cultural movement and presaged what are commonly thought of as hippies with odd behavior, tie-dyed and red, white, and blue clothing, and renunciation of normal society, which they dubbed The Establishment. Tom Wolfe chronicled their early escapades in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and documents a 1966 trip on Furthur from Mexico through Houston, stopping to visit Kesey's friend the novelist Larry McMurtry. Kesey was in flight from a drug charge at the time.
Furthur is a 1939 International Harvester school bus purchased by author Ken Kesey in 1964 to carry his "Merry Band of Pranksters" cross-country, filming their counterculture adventures as they went. The bus featured prominently in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test but, due to the chaos of the trip and editing difficulties, footage of the journey was not released as a film until the 2011 documentary Magic Trip.
The Love Pageant Rally took place on October 6, 1966—the day LSD became illegal—in the 'panhandle' of Golden Gate Park, a narrower section that projects into San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. The 'Haight' was a neighborhood of run-down turn-of-the-20th-century housing that was the center of San Francisco's counterculture in the 1960s.
Augustus Owsley Stanley III was an American-Australian audio engineer and clandestine chemist. He was a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area hippie movement during the 1960s and played a pivotal role in the decade's counterculture.
The psychedelic drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was first synthesized on November 16, 1938, by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in the Sandoz laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. It was not until five years later on April 19, 1943, that the psychedelic properties were found. Today, the discovery of LSD is celebrated worldwide during the annual Bicycle Day holiday, serving also as the day celebrating the psychedelic revolution in general.
The Psychedelic era was the time of social, musical and artistic change influenced by psychedelic drugs, occurring from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. The era was defined by the proliferation of LSD and its following influence in the development of psychedelic music and psychedelic film in the Western world.
Carolyn Elizabeth Garcia, also known as "Mountain Girl", is an American Merry Prankster and the former wife of Jerry Garcia, the lead vocalist and guitar player of the band Grateful Dead.
Ken Babbs is a famous Merry Prankster who became one of the psychedelic leaders of the 1960s. He along with best friend and Prankster leader, Ken Kesey, wrote the book Last Go Round. Babbs is best known for his participation in the Acid Tests and on the bus Furthur.
Who'll Stop the Rain is a 1978 American crime war film directed by Karel Reisz and starring Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld, Michael Moriarty, and Anthony Zerbe. It was released by United Artists and produced by Herb Jaffe and Gabriel Katzka with Sheldon Schrager and Roger Spottiswoode as executive producers. The screenplay was by Judith Rascoe and Robert Stone, based on Stone's novel Dog Soldiers (1974), the music score by Laurence Rosenthal, and the cinematography by Richard H. Kline. The movie was entered in the 1978 Cannes Film Festival.
Paul M. Foster was a Merry Prankster best known for illustrating the book Kesey's Garage Sale. He was a founding member of Wavy Gravy's Hog Farm commune.
The hippie subculture began its development as a youth movement in the United States during the early 1960s and then developed around the world.
Furthur was an American rock band founded in 2009 by former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Phil Lesh. The original lineup also included John Kadlecik of Dark Star Orchestra on lead guitar, RatDog's Jeff Chimenti on keyboards and Jay Lane on percussion, and Joe Russo of the Benevento/Russo Duo on drums. Named after the famous touring bus used by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in the 1960s, Furthur was an improvisational jam band that performed music primarily from the extensive Grateful Dead songbook, as well as their own original music and that of several other well-known artists. In addition to the original members, the band's lineup included backup vocalists Sunshine Becker of the a cappella ensemble SoVoSó and Jeff Pehrson of the folk rock bands Box Set and the Fall Risk.
Magic Trip is a 2011 American documentary film directed by Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney, about Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and the Merry Pranksters.
Lee Quarnstrom was an American journalist, executive editor of Larry Flynt’s Hustler Magazine, and a Beatnik. He was a core member of the Merry Band of Pranksters, a group loosely led by novelist Ken Kesey.
The Sepulveda Unitarian Universalist Society is a Unitarian Universalist church in Granada Hills, Los Angeles, California; holding services the 2nd and 4th Sundays of each month at 17622 Chatsworth St.
Going Furthur is an American-Canadian documentary film about taking Ken Kesey's bus Furthur back on the road in 2014 for a 75-day trip covering 15,000 miles, along with a group of new Merry Pranksters.
For many years, the small Troupers Theatre was a familiar site on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood...
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