|
 
Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! Please  login or  register to post messages and view our members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, encrypted messages, file attachments, board customizations, and much more!
|
 veggie
Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 5,797
|
 Ken Kesey's original magic bus being restored
#5151159 - 01/07/06 03:47 PM (2 years, 7 months ago) |
|
|
If you are a fan of Ken Kesey and the escapades of the "Merry Pranksters" you may get a kick out of this story...
Ken Kesey's original 1939 magic bus Furthur being restored
January 7, 2006 - oregonlive.com
PLEASANT HILL, Ore. (AP) — Zane Kesey picked at moss competing with swirls of brightly colored paint and patches of rust to cover the 1939 International school bus that his father, the late author Ken Kesey, rode cross-country with a refrigerator stocked with LSD-laced drinks in pursuit of a new art form.
"This comes off pretty easy," he said, a fond smile playing over his face. "It's amazing, some of the things that are coming out — things I remember.
"It's going to take a lot of bubblegum."
For some 15 years, the bus dubbed "Furthur" has rusted away in a swamp on the Kesey family's Willamette Valley farm, out of sight if not out of mind, more memory than monument.
That is where Ken Kesey — the author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and hero of a generation that vowed to drop out and tune in with the help of LSD — intended it to stay after firing up a new version.
But four years after his death, a Hollywood restaurateur has persuaded the family to resurrect the old bus so it can help tell the story of Kesey, the Merry Pranksters and the psychedelic 1960s.
"I read his books back in high school and through college," said David Houston, owner of the historic roadhouse Barney's Beanery in Hollywood, Calif. "I just always thought he was a fascinating and brilliant man. The story of the bus was always very compelling. To find out it had been just left to go — I really wanted to restore the bus and tell its story to the world."
Houston hopes to raise some $100,000 he figures it will cost to get the bus running and looking good. The Kesey family will maintain control of the bus, taking it it to special events.
"People think of a bus as transportation," said Zane Kesey. "No. It's a platform, a way to get your messages across."
Last fall, a group of old Pranksters hauled the bus out of the swamp and parked it next to a barn to await restoration.
"One of the things that is really optimistic for me is it's got full air in the tires from Cassady," said Kesey, referring to Neal Cassady, who was the wheelman in Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," and drove Further on that first trip. "Honestly, if the tires had been flat, I would have said, `Just leave it there.'"
The restoration will be a tough job. On a cold misty day, Houston, Zane Kesey and former Green Turtle bus mechanic Mike Cobiskey climbed on ladders, peered under the hood, picked at paint, and crawled underneath to look it over, and what they saw was daunting. The body is badly rusted. The paint is peeled. The roof leaks. The engine, not original, and transmission have both been underwater. The original bunk beds and refrigerator are gone, though the driver's seat remains.
"The most important thing is the paint," Cobiskey said to Zane Kesey. "I'm sure you have a thousand pictures of it."
"And no two are alike," said Zane Kesey.
"It's gonna go," said Houston. "It can definitely run. It shouldn't drive across country. But certainly it should be a living, healthy, valuable piece once we are done with it."
Fresh from the stunning success of "Cuckoo's Nest," Ken Kesey bought the bus in 1964 from a family in San Francisco that had fitted it out with bunks as a motorhome. The plan was to drive it to New York for the World's Fair and a coming-out party for his new book, "Sometimes A Great Notion."
"At first a bunch of us were going to go in a station wagon," said Ken Babbs, one of the original Pranksters. "Then it was getting too big for that.
"Kesey went up and bought it. I think it was around $1,500."
At La Honda, Kesey's home in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco, they installed a sound system, a generator on the back, and went wild with the paint. Artist Roy Sebern painted the word Furthur on the destination placard as a kind of one-word poem and inspiration to keep going whenever the bus broke down. It wasn't until much later he found out he had misspelled it. Just as the bus was constantly being repainted, somewhere along the line the Further sign was corrected.
The day they were ready to go, Kesey recruited Cassady from a bookstore where he was working, Babbs recalled. Pulling out of the driveway with Ray Charles singing "Hit The Road Jack," the bus ran out of gas. That was quickly remedied, and down the road they went, Cassady spewing the speed-talking rap-babble that inspired Kerouac's writing style.
"For me and Kesey, too, we were trying to move into a new creative expression which was movie making, and being part of the movie," said Babbs. "This was all a tremendous experiment in the arts. We always figured we would be totally successful and make a lot of money out of it."
With short haircuts, and preppy clothes, they got stopped by cops, but never arrested, though they were carrying orange juice laced with LSD, which was still legal at the time. Kesey had been a guinea pig in government-sponsored LSD tests and was trying to turn the entire country on to it through events known as the Acid Tests.
The bus got stuck in an Arizona river. It stopped in Houston for a visit with author Larry McMurtry, who was with Kesey at the Wallace Stegner writing seminar at Stanford. The Pranksters jammed with a piano player in New Orleans and were ejected from a blacks-only beach on Lake Ponchartrain. Rolling through New York City, the Pranksters tootled saxophones and blew soap bubbles from the roof, and later stopped at Timothy Leary's Millbrook meditation center, where Kerouac sang a sad rendition of "Ain't We Got Fun."
The film and tape rolled constantly, but when they got back to La Honda, they could never get the two to synchronize. Author Tom Wolfe used the material for his book, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," but the movie lay dormant until 2000, when a digital editing machine made it possible and Kesey issued, "Intrepid Traveler and his Merry Band of Pranksters Look for A Kool Place."
"When people ask what my best work is, it's the bus," Kesey said in 2000. "Those books made it possible for the bus to become.
"I thought you ought to be living your art, rather than stepping back and describing it," he said. The bus is "a metaphor that's instantly comprehensible. Every kid understands it. It's like John Ford`s `Stagecoach' with John Wayne in the driver's seat just like Cowboy Neal."
After one last trip, to Woodstock in 1969, Kesey put the bus out to pasture, where it served as a dugout for softball games. The Smithsonian Institution expressed some interest in restoring the bus, but Kesey would never let it go. He towed it to the swamp in 1990 when he bought a 1947 bus for a whole new series of trips.
"People were always saying, `Is this the real bus?'" said Babbs. "And he would say, `Yes, there's only one bus, just like there's only one Starship Enterprise.'"
Kesey's widow, Faye, had reservations about restoring the old bus, but did not try to stop it.
"I kind of liked it in the swamp covered with moss and becoming part of the swamp," she said. "But I talked to everybody who had been on it. To a man they all wanted to see it restored.
"If not, it can always go back to the swamp. Nature does a pretty good paint job, too."
|
Jim
InjectableAmpoule
Registered: 04/07/04
Posts: 19,200
|
Re: Ken Kesey's original magic bus being restored [Re: veggie]
#5151602 - 01/07/06 06:18 PM (2 years, 7 months ago) |
|
|
they should have fun with that... last I saw pics of it from the farm it was pretty wasted.
--------------------
Use the Fucking Reply To Feature You Lazy Pieces of Shit!
afoaf said:
Jim, if you were in my city, I would let you fuck my wife.
|
TheHateCamel
Research &Development -DBK
Registered: 01/31/03
Posts: 15,723
|
Re: Ken Kesey's original magic bus being restored [Re: veggie]
#5151657 - 01/07/06 06:31 PM (2 years, 7 months ago) |
|
|
--------------------
Helping disrupt Christian Nationalism at every turn.
"...every one knows that a man can overtake a woman unless shes a fitness trainer" -dumbfounded1600
|
Jim
InjectableAmpoule
Registered: 04/07/04
Posts: 19,200
|
Re: Ken Kesey's original magic bus being restored [Re: TheHateCamel]
#5151685 - 01/07/06 06:38 PM (2 years, 7 months ago) |
|
|
yeah, exactly.
--------------------
Use the Fucking Reply To Feature You Lazy Pieces of Shit!
afoaf said:
Jim, if you were in my city, I would let you fuck my wife.
|
veggie
Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 5,797
|
Re: Ken Kesey's original magic bus being restored [Re: Jim]
#5151781 - 01/07/06 07:08 PM (2 years, 7 months ago) |
|
|
Then  Now 
It doesn't look too bad. Well maybe it does. Ya know, Kesey, the bus, the pranksters are such a part of American history you would think the Smithsonian would donate the money for the restoration.
Check out Zane's website. Good stuff.
--------------------
"You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case." ~ Ken Kesey
|
veggie
Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 5,797
|
Furthur Restoration Halted [Re: veggie]
#6408832 - 12/29/06 06:15 PM (1 year, 8 months ago) |
|
|
Furthur Restoration Halted
December 29, 2006 - sfgate.com
By JEFF BARNARD, Associated Press
 (AP) -- Dreams of getting author Ken Kesey's original psychedelic bus, Furthur, back on the road again have hit a pothole.
The Kesey family is looking for a new sponsor to finance restoration work and a TV documentary after breaking things off with Hollywood restaurant owner David Houston, who had hoped to raise $100,000 to restore the bus made famous in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."
Stephanie Kesey, who is married to the late author's son Zane, and overseeing the project, said the bus has been cleaned up a bit, and singer Willie Nelson has offered to put in a biodiesel engine, but they don't want to do any major work until they have a restoration expert and a documentary deal lined up.
Nelson's publicist was not immediately available for comment.
"I want to make sure we do this right and get involved with the right people," Stephanie Kesey said. "This involves the memory of my father-in-law and I take that very seriously. We just want to work with people with the same ideas about the bus as we do. We want to be sure it's on display for the most people possible.
"We are not looking to commercialize this ... and are not out to make money or make commercials. We want to make sure it stays pure."
Houston, who owns The Beanery, an old roadhouse, did not want to discuss details of the breakup.
"I thought everything was in sync," he said. "We wanted to restore the bus and tell the story. I think some other things were going on, I guess. They are just going with somebody else at this point. It's unfortunate, because we were really excited about it."
Furthur became a symbol in the 1960s of a rolling LSD trip. Ken Kesey was famously quoted as saying, "You're either on the bus or you're off the bus," which became a way of saying someone was part of the psychedelic explorations of the time or not.
Fresh from the stunning success of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Kesey bought the 1939 International school bus in 1964 from a San Francisco Bay Area family that had fitted it with bunks as a motor home. With a jug of LSD-laced juice in the refrigerator, clean-cut Kesey pals known as The Merry Pranksters on board and Neal Cassady, the driver in Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," at the wheel, the bus crossed the country from California to New York.
More than 15 years ago, Kesey put the old bus into retirement in a swampy patch of woods on his farm in Pleasant Hill, Ore., and bought a newer one, which in typical Prankster style he tried to pass off as the original.
After being approached by Houston with the restoration plan, Zane Kesey and some of the Pranksters towed it out of the swamp last year.
"This is an icon of America," said Ken Babbs, a writer, Prankster and close friend of Ken Kesey. "It would be nice to see it back out on the road again to bring the reality of the '60s into the 21st century.
"It's like a lot of projects. There is an initial enthusiasm. Then it becomes apparent how much work is involved ... and unless you are truly committed you back off."
|
 OneMoreRobot3021
punky jewster
Registered: 06/06/03
Posts: 55,477
Loc: new york shitty
Last seen: 3 minutes, 35 seconds
|
Re: Ken Kesey's original magic bus being restored [Re: veggie]
#6410204 - 12/30/06 10:17 AM (1 year, 8 months ago) |
|
|
Quote:
veggie said:
Ya know, Kesey, the bus, the pranksters are such a part of American history you would think the Smithsonian would donate the money for the restoration.
 
--------------------
The Drug Policy Alliance  Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
"The psychedelic experience - it has a tremendous force to revivify the spirit, particularly because it is not an ideology. It is not something someone 'figured out.' It is an EXPERIENCE. And this is important to bear in mind." - McKenna.
"We're not mad, we're just doing what we want. You rigid thinkers can't recognize the healthy sanity of that." - Harlan Ellison, "Crackpots"
|
 cybrbeast
No, this is nottrue
Registered: 01/06/03
Posts: 4,673
Loc: event horizon
Last seen: 8 hours, 4 minutes
|
Re: Furthur Restoration Halted [Re: veggie]
#6417643 - 01/02/07 09:18 AM (1 year, 8 months ago) |
|
|
I hope it continues and they fix it up. Although those pics of the moss covered bus also look beautiful and sad.
I read the book and really liked the parts when they were riding the bus. Too bad they can't use it for it's original purpose afte it's finished 
--------------------
 
|
Lion
Balance
Registered: 09/20/05
Posts: 3,211
Loc: Kali Yuga
Last seen: 5 days, 23 hours
|
Re: Furthur Restoration Halted [Re: veggie]
#6419086 - 01/02/07 05:17 PM (1 year, 8 months ago) |
|
|
The should blow the fuck out of it with dynamite then Day-Glo the earth where its ashes lie. Why try to resurrect what's dead and gone?
--------------------
"You can't make something original? Don't worry about it. Make a cup of clay so your brother can drink." ~Rumi
"My child, because you think you are the body, for a long time you have been bound. Know you are pure awareness. With this knowledge as your sword, cut through your chains and be happy!" ~Ashtavakra Gita
"May all beings realize the ecstatic transparency of their own minds." ~Lao Tzu
| |
|
|
|
Previous
Index
Next
Threaded
Edit 
Reply 
Quote 
