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The trouble arrived sooner than anyone expected and at its center were the Merry Pranksters. As Alpert, who perhaps caught an intimation of the future that evening in La Honda, described it: "We thought we had a few more years of sneaking under the wire with legitimacy before the whistle got blown. But Ken made them blow the whistle. I mean, the day after the San Jose 'acid test' the big headline in the paper was about a 'drug orgy.' Then the legislators had to act. Their hand had been forced ." 22
The Acid Test was Kesey's experiment on the nature of group mind and a possible new art form. It was total experience, Kesey explained to Wolfe, "with all the senses opened wide, words, music, lights, sounds, touch— lightning ." 23
The first Acid Test was a dry run held at Babbs's place in Sequel, a town outside of Santa Cruz. Except for an enigmatic poster— Can You Pass The Acid Test?— that appeared in a local bookstore, no effort was made to publicize the event and aside from a contingent of San Francisco bohemians who came with Allen Ginsberg, attendance was limited to the Pranksters and their friends. The second Test, in San Jose on the night of a Rolling Stones concert, was closer to the Grand Design. Although the Pranksters failed in their quest to find a public hall, they managed to procure a rambling old house out in the suburbs that was owned by an aging and somewhat gullible bohemian named Big Nig. When the Rolling Stones concert ended and the doors opened to emit the flood of satisfied rockers, there were the Pranksters, dressed in their Day-Glo finery, pressing handbills bearing that enigmatic ... Can You Pass ... plus Big Nig's address ... into eager hands.
Kesey had hired a band for this Acid Test, a group of Palo Alto rockers who called themselves the Warlocks, although they shortly would change their name to the Grateful Dead. Consequently Big Nig's living room was filled with electronic equipment— amplifiers and assorted Prankster playthings, microphones and tape recorders that were hooked into each other, feeding Cassady's voice or Babbs's voice— "Have you lost your mind yet?"— out over the suburban turf and into the suddenly wide-awake consciousness of the neighbors. Who promptly called the police. Who found hundreds of people milling around Big Nig's yard, a few freaking out, but most totally absorbed into whatever meaning the Pranksters plus the LSD had been able to create.
"They had film and endless kind of weird tape recorder hook ups and mystery speaker trips and all," recalls Jerry Garcia, the Warlock's lead guitarist. "It always seemed as though the equipment was able to respond in its own way. I mean it ... there were always magical things happening. Voices coming out of things that weren't plugged in ... it was just totally mind boggling to wander around that maze of wires and stuff like that. Sometimes they were like writhing and squirming. Truly amazing ."
In a sense, the electronic whisperings, the bop raps of Cassady, Babbs's metanoic chants— these were comparable to the huge eight-hour tapes that Metzner had devised at Millbrook. Both were designed to manipulate the suggestibility of the psychedelic condition, to move the tripper in novel directions, except that the Acid Test piled on roaring guitars and flashing lights and hundreds of ecstatic fellow voyagers going wherever the flow led them. The ideal was to get everyone participating, adding their own creative juice to the gestalt. To get hundreds, maybe even thousands, synched up ... to leave the planet!
(Storming Heaven: LSD and The American Dream by Jay Stevens)
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