Acid and its chemical relatives—the family known as psychedelics—have spawned musical innovations, political ideals, and societal revolutions. Also: wasted time, ill-spent youths and evaporated minds. From a cultural perspective, psychedelics have led to some results that are less than worthy: tiresome music (the Grateful Dead), unreadable books (the worst are by Timothy Leary) and films that can only be described as “unwatchable” (best known: The Spirit Molecule). Without question, drugs can render your creative pursuits incomprehensible or unbearable.
But it is also without question that psychedelics have catalyzed incredible forms of art. Countless rock, funk and techno artists: George Clinton, Jimi Hendrix, Aphex Twin, The Chemical Brothers—the list is endless. And immaculate prose I can only hope to rival: Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception is a work of genius.
Thus it is unsurprising that drugs that have shaped such vast cultural movements have lately become the focus for a range of documentaries, from the spectacular to the truly awful.
Renewed Lif •
Sometimes a Great Lawsuit
One morning in December 1983,
MiSchelle McMindes and Mike Hagen piled into Hagen's Ford Mustang and drove 325 miles west from Eastern Oregon to see Ken Kesey.
Both had high hopes as they set out from Pendleton to Kesey's farm, about 15 minutes southeast of Eugene.
McMindes was a 26-year-old go-getter from Grand Island, Neb., a brunet beauty-pageant scholarship winner recently turned private eye. She had an idea for a movie about the quintessential Oregon sporting event—the Pendleton Round-Up, a famed annual rodeo that began in 1910. McMindes had spent months researching the Round-Up's history and collecting photographs before teaming up with Hagen, a 46-year-old television and commercial sound engineer in Pendleton.
All they needed was a screenwriter, and Hagen knew just the guy—Kesey. Hagen had been Kesey's fraternity brother at the University of Oregon. And in the 1960s, he was one of Kesey's Merry Pranksters as well as a co-pilot on the LSD-fueled cross-country odyssey that Tom Wolfe chronicled in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Kesey was a
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Furthur (bus)
Ken Kesey's Merry Band of Pranksters' 1960s hippie-bus
Motor vehicle
Furthur is a 1939 International Harvesterschool 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.
History
Kesey traveled to New York City in November 1963 with his wife Faye and Prankster George Walker to attend the Broadway opening of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which was based on his 1962 novel. Kesey also saw the 1964 New York World's Fair site under construction. He needed to return to New York City in 1964 for the publication party for his novel Sometimes a Great Notion, and hoped to use the occasion to visit the Fair. This plan grew into an ambitious scheme to bring along a group of friends, turning their adventures into a road m