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 Ripple
Ripple
 
Registered: 05/16/02
Posts: 21,014
Loc: the timbers of Fennario
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 The Acid Tests 
#1628549 - 06/12/03 10:04 AM (20 years, 10 months ago) |
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Quite a lot is written about The Acid Test's including the famous book by Tom Wolfe in 1968. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid test.
Here are a few items from Jacksons chapter 5 in his book about Jerry Garcia " An American Life" which I recently dug out.
Can you pass the Acid Test?
No one seems to know when Garcia and the others first connected with Kesey and the Pranksters. Garcia and a couple of other members of the group were definitely at the party that is usually considered the first acid test, held in late November at Babbs' spread near Santa Cruz. Neil Cassady and Allen Ginsberg were there as were all the Pranksters who were around , and even a few curious thrill seekers who responded to a little sign hassler had put up in the Santa Cruz bookstore he ran: can YOU pass the acid test?
At the end of the night, as Prankster Lee Quarnstrom put it "it was like a Micky Rooney movie where we suddenly said, 'Hey, I know- we can put on a show!"
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The bus came by and I got on that's when it all began!
Edited by Ripple (06/12/03 11:35 AM)
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Ripple
Ripple
Registered: 05/16/02
Posts: 21,014
Loc: the timbers of Fennario
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Re: The Acid Tests [Re: Ripple]
#1628582 - 06/12/03 10:20 AM (20 years, 10 months ago) |
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The next Acid test took place in the wee hours of December 4 1965 after the Rolling Stones had played a show at the San. Fran. Civic Auditorium with the Dead and Kesey's gang in attendance.
As the Stones concert ended the Pranksters swung into action passing out "can YOU Pass The acid Test?" handbills to the masses filing out of the auditorium then hopping onto the bus and hustling down to San Jose.
Roy Seburn's lights washing past every head, Cassady rapping, paul Foster handing people weird little things out of his Eccentric bag, Old whistles, tin crickets, burnt keys, spectral plastic handles-Wow! The things that shake and vibrate and funnel freak out in this blackness
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The bus came by and I got on that's when it all began!
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KOPELANDIAA
Stranger
Registered: 11/17/01
Posts: 805
Loc: under a pine
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Re: The Acid Tests [Re: Ripple]
#1628640 - 06/12/03 10:45 AM (20 years, 10 months ago) |
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great reading...
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Ripple
Ripple
Registered: 05/16/02
Posts: 21,014
Loc: the timbers of Fennario
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This is repeted in another thread but it's worth the read!
Jerry Garcia on the Acid Test's:
Nobody came to the Acid Test to see us, particularly. We got to play or not play, depending on how we felt. We could play anything we could think of, which meant we didn't have any constraints on our performance. We didn't have to be good, or recognizable even. We had an opportunity to visit highly experimental places under the influence of highly experimental chemicals before a highly experimental audience. It was ideal. And that was something we got to do long enough to get used to it.
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The bus came by and I got on that's when it all began!
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Ripple
Ripple
Registered: 05/16/02
Posts: 21,014
Loc: the timbers of Fennario
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The third Acid test was held in a club in Palo Alto called the Big Beat. This was the first acid test where the dead got to play on a real stage, but as usual they were just part of a larger, more amorphous event.
Kesey, Babbs and Cassady always moving in three equally weird but compelling directions at once, doing strange things with microphones laying down rap or playing ghastly tuneless harmonica or chanting nonsense of narrating the insane scene in the room, sometimes even while the dead were playing.
Sometimes the Dead were too high to play and other times they'd hit monstrous fat grooves that had everyone in the place dancing deliriously.
"Our trip with the acid test was to be able to play long and loud... as long and loud as we wanted and nobody would stop us," Garcia said.
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The bus came by and I got on that's when it all began!
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Ripple
Ripple
Registered: 05/16/02
Posts: 21,014
Loc: the timbers of Fennario
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Re: The Acid Tests [Re: Ripple]
#1628731 - 06/12/03 11:33 AM (20 years, 10 months ago) |
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The following week The Acid Test moved to the South Bay/Peninsula area for the first time. It took place in the long lodge at Muir beach.
Because it was closer to the city (San Francisco) the Muir Beach Acid Test drew a lot of new faces.
Owsley Stanley, who was already legendary in the underground circles for making high quality LSD was at Muir Beach that night seeing the Grateful Dead for he first time. he had met Kesey about a month earlier in La Honda, after friends had tipped him off about the acid parties in the redwoods and before too long he became a primary supplier to that scene, though he continued to live in Berkeley.
Owsley, known then and now as "Bear," was an interesting fellow. He and Kesey were the same age and like Kesey he had grown up in a very straight world.
In tom Wolf's account on the evening, the Muir Beach Acid test ended with Owsley screaming denunciations at Kesey for the dark power he had seen unleashed on the world during ths peculiar night at Muir Beach. Owsley jumped into his car and started to roar off into the night but crashed into a tree anmost immediately and tumbled out of the car still raving and railing at Kesey and the Pranksters. as Garcia said later, "Owsley's mind was completely shot - he thought they'd come and taken it from him
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The bus came by and I got on that's when it all began!
Edited by Ripple (06/12/03 01:00 PM)
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Spiffy
Defender of theGnomes
Registered: 07/04/02
Posts: 1,693
Loc: Next to your mom
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Re: The Acid Tests [Re: Ripple]
#1628975 - 06/12/03 01:21 PM (20 years, 10 months ago) |
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why oh why did I have to be born so late  . I swear I belong in the sixties. Alas, its about the here and now....anyone up for a 21st century acid party?
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Namaste: "I honour that place in you where the whole Universe resides. And when I am in that place in me and you are in that place in you,
there is only one of us."
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chinacat72
eyes of theworld
Registered: 11/14/02
Posts: 3,626
Loc: Terrapin Station
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Re: The Acid Tests [Re: Spiffy]
#1628991 - 06/12/03 01:25 PM (20 years, 10 months ago) |
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Quote:
anyone up for a 21st century acid party?
Head to Red Rocks in july 
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Some rise
Some fall
Some climb
To get to Terrapin!!!
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Ripple
Ripple
Registered: 05/16/02
Posts: 21,014
Loc: the timbers of Fennario
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Re: The Acid Tests [Re: Spiffy]
#1629024 - 06/12/03 01:36 PM (20 years, 10 months ago) |
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Bob Weir on the Acid Tests:
" When we played the Acid Tests, we set up before the whole thing began - wisely so. Then we'd take acid and wait until we could deal with the physical. Back then, god knows who decided what the doses were gonna be, so there were times where it was a couple of hours before we'd make a stab at trying to play. And oftentimes we'd pluck around a little and then abandon ship pretty quick.
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The bus came by and I got on that's when it all began!
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Ripple
Ripple
Registered: 05/16/02
Posts: 21,014
Loc: the timbers of Fennario
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Re: The Acid Tests [Re: Ripple]
#1629226 - 06/12/03 03:28 PM (20 years, 10 months ago) |
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It was under that aegis of the Acid tests that Garcia encountered Kesey, Babbs, bill Graham, Owsley, Wavy Gravy, Stewart Brand and many of the people who would become the movers and shakers of the San Francisco music scene. But the figure who impressed Garcia the most during this period was Neil Cassady, the Fastestmanalive!, legendary for his verbal and physical dexterity and his death defying feats of reckless driving. His exploits were dutifully chronicled by writers from Kerouac to Wolfe and seemingly everyone who encountered him was affected by him.
"He was the first person I met who he himself was the art. he was an artist and he was the art also. he was doing it consciously as well. he worked with the world."
"He scared a lot of people a lot of people thought he was crazy. A lot of people were afraid of him. Most people I knew didn't understand him at all."
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The bus came by and I got on that's when it all began!
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RebelSteve33
Amateur Mycologist
Registered: 05/28/02
Posts: 3,774
Loc: Arizona
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Re: The Acid Tests [Re: Ripple]
#1629923 - 06/12/03 08:28 PM (20 years, 10 months ago) |
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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was a very good read!
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Namaste.
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 gnrm23
Carpal Tunnel
Registered: 08/29/99
Posts: 6,488
Loc: n. e. OH, USSA
Last seen: 6 months, 9 days
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old enough to know better
not old enough to care
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gnrm23
Carpal Tunnel
Registered: 08/29/99
Posts: 6,488
Loc: n. e. OH, USSA
Last seen: 6 months, 9 days
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Re: The Acid Tests [Re: gnrm23]
#1630732 - 06/13/03 06:29 AM (20 years, 10 months ago) |
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old enough to know better
not old enough to care
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Squid
withdrawn fromthe everdayworld
Registered: 03/26/02
Posts: 323
Last seen: 14 years, 9 months
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Re: The Acid Tests [Re: Ripple]
#1631055 - 06/13/03 10:19 AM (20 years, 10 months ago) |
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I just picked up the pump house gang. Supposedly another excellent read by Tom Wolfe.
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A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move towards higher levels. -A. Einstein
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Ripple
Ripple
Registered: 05/16/02
Posts: 21,014
Loc: the timbers of Fennario
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Re: The Acid Tests [Re: Squid]
#1631523 - 06/13/03 02:34 PM (20 years, 10 months ago) |
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Let us know how it is!
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The bus came by and I got on that's when it all began!
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