http://www.myspace.com/zanekesey
TAKEN FROM WIKIPEDIA
Early life
Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado to Edward and Dulce Kesey.[citation needed] Later he moved with his family to Springfield, Oregon. A champion wrestler in both high school and college, he eloped with his high-school sweetheart, Faye Haxby, between high school graduation and starting college at the University of Oregon. They had three children, Jed, Zane, and Shannon. Kesey had another child, Sunshine, in 1966 with fellow Merry Prankster Carolyn Adams.[1] Kesey attended the University of Oregon's School of Journalism, where he received a degree in speech and communication in 1957. He was awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship in 1958 to enroll in the creative writing program at Stanford University, which he did the following year. While at Stanford, he studied under Wallace Stegner and began the manuscript that would become One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Experimentation with psychoactive drugs
At Stanford in 1959, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study named Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital on the effects of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, and DMT. Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the Project MKULTRA study and in the years of private experimentation that followed. His role as a medical guinea pig inspired Kesey to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962. The success of this book, as well as the sale of his residence at Stanford, allowed him to move to La Honda, California, in the mountains south of San Francisco. He frequently entertained friends and many others with parties he called "Acid Tests" involving music (such as Kesey's favorite band, The Warlocks, later known as the Grateful Dead), black lights, fluorescent paint, strobes and other "psychedelic" effects, and, of course, LSD. These parties were noted in some of Allen Ginsberg's poems and are also described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, as well as Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs by Hunter S. Thompson.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The inspiration for Kesey's first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, came from his work at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital on the night shift. There, Kesey often spent time talking to the patients, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs with which he had volunteered to experiment. Kesey believed that these patients were not insane, but that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was an immediate success. It was later adapted into a successful stage play by Dale Wasserman; Milo,, Forman directed a screen adaptation in 1975. The film starred Jack Nicholson and won the "Big Four" Academy Awards: Academy Award for Best Picture, Academy Award for Best Actor (Nicholson), Academy Award for Best Actress (Louise Fletcher) and Academy Award for Best Director (Forman), as well as the Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay (Lawrence Hauben, Bo Goldman). Kesey, who was originally involved in creating the film, left two weeks into production. He claimed to have never seen the movie because of a dispute over the $20,000 he was initially paid for the film rights. Kesey loathed the fact that the film was not narrated, as the book was, by the character Chief Bromden, and disagreed with the casting of Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy (he wanted Gene Hackman). Despite this, Faye Kesey has stated that he was generally supportive of the film and pleased that it was made.
Merry Pranksters
When the publication of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, in 1964 required his presence in New York, Kesey, Neal Cassady, and others in a group of friends they called the "Merry Pranksters" took a cross-country trip in a school bus nicknamed "Furthur" or Further. [1] This trip, described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and later in Kesey's own screenplay "The Further Inquiry") was the group's attempt to create art out of everyday life. In New York, Cassady introduced Kesey to Jack Kerouac and to Allen Ginsberg, who in turn introduced them to Timothy Leary. Sometimes a Great Notion was made into a 1971 film starring Paul Newman, which was nominated for two Academy Awards, and in 1972 was the first film shown by the new television network HBO, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.)
Legal trouble
Kesey was arrested for possession of marijuana in 1966. In an attempt to mislead police, he faked his own suicide by having friends leave his truck on a cliffside road near Eureka, along with a suicide note that said, "Ocean, Ocean I'll beat you in the end." Kesey fled to Mexico in the back of a friend's car. When he later returned to the United States, Kesey was arrested and sent to jail for five months. On his release, he moved back to the family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon in the Willamette Valley, where he was to spend the rest of his life. He wrote many articles, books (mostly collections of his articles), and short stories during that time.
Twister
In 1994 he toured with members of the Merry Pranksters performing a musical play he wrote about the millennium called Twister: A Ritual Reality. Many old and new friends and family showed up to support the Pranksters on this tour that took them from Seattle's Bumbershoot, all along the West Coast including a sold out two-night run at The Fillmore in San Francisco to Boulder, Colorado, where they coaxed (or pranked) the Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg into performing with them. Kesey, always a friend to musicians since his days of the Acid Test, enlisted the band Jambay, one of the original bands of the jam band genre, to be his "pit orchestra." Jambay played an acoustic set before each Twister performance and an electric set after each show. While the show was critically panned,[citation needed] Kesey was still pushing the boundaries of performance art that included large scale multi-media, music, and audience participation.
Final years
Kesey mainly kept to his home life in Pleasant Hill, preferring to make artistic contributions on the Internet, or holding ritualistic revivals in the spirit of the Acid Test. He occasionally made appearances at rock concerts and festivals, bringing the second bus "Furthur2" and various Pranksters with him. In the official Grateful Dead DVD release "The Closing of Winterland" (2003), which documents the monumental New Year's '78 concert, Kesey is featured in a between-set interview. More notably, he appeared at the Hog Farm Family Pig-Nic Festival (organized by Woodstock MC Wavy Gravy, in Laytonville, California), where they mock-canonized a very ill but still quite aware Dr. Timothy Leary atop "Further2". He also performed on stage with Jambay at the Pig-Nic, playing a few songs from Twister with members of the original cast.
In 1984, Kesey's son Jed, a wrestler for the University of Oregon, was killed on the way to a wrestling tournament when the team's bald-tired van crashed.[citation needed] This deeply affected Kesey, who later said Jed was a victim of conservative, anti-government policy that starved the team of proper funding.[citation needed] There is a memorial dedicated to Jed on the top of Mount Pisgah, which is near the Keseys' home in Pleasant Hill. In a Grateful Dead Halloween concert just days after Bill Graham died in a helicopter crash, Kesey appeared on stage in a tuxedo to deliver a eulogy, mentioning that Graham had paid for Jed's mountain-top memorial. An audience video of this concert exists and is actively traded via torrent sites, while audio streams at archive.org.
In 1997, Kesey and some of the Merry Pranksters appeared at a Phish concert during a performance of the song "Colonel Forbin's Ascent" .
His last major work was an essay for Rolling Stone magazine calling for peace in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Kesey died on November 10, 2001, following an operation for liver cancer.
SOMEONE'S BOOK REVIEW ON TOM WOLFE'S ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST.
This book is around 400 pages and a very detailed history, many stories, and it's hard to remember all the facts, you'll have to read the book yourself for that. The story is of the "Intrepid Travelers," Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters, a communal group of acid ingesters who were the progenitors of the acid consciousness in the California, in the US, in the world's consciousness of awareness . . . "your either on the bus or off the bus."
It was the influential chemists, Al Hubbard, Dr. Spaulding and the psychologists, Timothy Leary and Richard Albert, the Harvard psychology professors, who discovered for themselves psylobilin and with Michael Hollingshead and Albert Hoffman, LSD and subsequently held experiments using the right set and setting with experienced psychedelic guides. Yet to this the Merry Pranksters would say, "f**k that!" because they were from a different movie of living; in the now, the unserene and lurid art, your brain being your only guide, not some experienced taker and specific setting for a safe non-freak-out trip (and there were a lot of "freak-outs" from many young, emotionally inexperienced). And the acid influenced cultural movement they began in the early 1960's. It was Leary and Albert who endorsed the "set and setting," the intellectual approach or non-organizational religious approach, the religious experience of the mystics, in their dialogue with acid and mushrooms. With Kesey and the Pranksters it was spontaneous, wild party kind of living in Day-Glow colors, in the multimedia sound and movie.
The Pranksters account starts in North Beach on Perry Lane, which becomes a major hang out for all sorts and eventually ends up in a cottage near La Honda, where the loud party of outlandish, Day-Glo painted woods - rigged with microphones and massive sound equipment, in the communal life takes on a new meaning. The Hell's Angels befriend the Pranksters and there are stories of personalities, telepathic and psychic connections and synchronicity in new fields of human life, the overmind, the collective unspoken mind of the psychedelic group. The religious realm of mystical awareness as in the game of I-Ching and dream wars. The Jungian "synchronicity" seemed to occur uncanningly many times, as their bus out of gas in the middle of nowhere only to have a tanker pull up and fuel them from nowhere. The sign on their door welcoming the Hell's Angels to end up having them and succeeding in their prankster madness. The sign on their door welcoming the Beatles, did not synchronize them to appear, but what did was having Oswley appear, the famous acid maker, who in the ways of synchronistic noncausal effect, was responsible for the finest acid which spread to England, the acid that brought the Beatles to experience the unspoken mind which ended them up traveling by bus across the English countryside with cameras and microphones.
Imagine a Day-Glo painted bus, the magic bus, with Day-Glo painted people and clothes, tripping on acid traveling from California to the New York World's Faire with music blasting, a freak show on wheels, all in the year 1964! And Neil Cassidy (Jack Kerouac's buddy and drive from On The Road) driving the bus!! And their trip to the legendary Millbrook, thinking it would be some historic meeting with Leary and the Pranksters, but instead it was the mystical religious and intellectuals verses the wild party, American flag draped, painted, loud blaring music, party animals of psychedelic madness. I think it relates to the age and the introvert and/or extrovert type personalities that played the large part.
It was actually Stewart Brand who thought up the great Trip Festival of January 1966. The series of acid test parties held by Kesey and the Pranksters helped spawn the movement of higher consciousness, all held at the last minute, the same day notification was put, and the Pranksters playing their instruments, then finding a local band, the warlocks - later known as the Grateful Dead - to play and Roy Seburn's light shows at the acid tests. It was the acid test held in a Unitarian church where the Kool-Aid was spiked, unknowingly to those attending. It was not teachings in the stiff, reverent language and texts of scholarly limnings found in various religions being taught but instead an aura, a religious experience, an awareness that flashed deeper than cerebration, the tradition of the great prophets. People like the beats Allen Ginsberg and his entourage and Neil Cassidy were there. As this spread, so the acid tests, later without Kesey and Haight Ashbury became the scene.
Later on Kesey gets busted twice for weed and is on the run from the law, to Mexico and back until caught - he was in their movie that time, fortunately most charges dropped. A lot to read of the characters and generally a great book to get an idea of a unique and special time and place in history where a much larger degree of freedom existed for the white middle class with the ability to gain other realms of consciousness available for the taking. A great pictorial book on this is "On The Bus" by Paul Perry, Michael Schwartz, Neil Ortenberg & Ken Babbs.
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