Electric Kool Aid and Counterculture in the 60s

Timothy Leary... Ken Kesey... Augustus Owsley...

All thanks to the book I was reading last night.. The 60s by Blake Bailey ljlj
They are quite interesting characters.



First off, Timothy Leary referred to the Beatles as, "The wisest, holiest, most effective avators the human race has ever produced."
He also said the famous,
"Tune in, Turn on, Drop out."
People back in the 60s had a choice..
Attaining Cosmic Consciousness while partaking of free love and loud music.. or.. going the way of the Establishment..the squards.. 1 job, 1 mate...
He conducted psychedelic lessons in the 1960s in his psychodrama room filled with Hindu ragas, candlelit Buddha posters, and Leary, himself, sprawled on a mattress...
Needless to say, Harvard pretty much kicked him out in 1962.. he was a professor there..
Mr. President Nixon even called him, "The most dangerous man in America"
He also formed the "League of Spiritual Discovery," an LSD advocacy group.
Here is an interesting interview with Timothy Leary from PBS

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Ken Kesey
He discovered LSD as a paid volunteer in a government experiment and was inspired. He wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest while working as a night attendant at a hospital's psychiatric ward... where he was usually in a hallucinatory funk.
He became the leader of the Merry Pranksters and in 1964 he bought a 1939 school bus and ppsychedelically painted it with swirls and bright, vibrant colors/ He crammed with amplifiers, cameras, costumes, and assorted contraband as cargo and Beat legend Neal Cassady at the wheel. The destination sign read" Further" and on the back there was a sign that read, "Caution: Weird Load"
"It was a whole new world. 'Do it now' was the motto, anything not naked was wrong . . . There were no rules, fear was unknown, and sleep was out of the question."
-- Hunter S. Thompson
"You're either on the bus, or you're off the bus," became the metaphor for the Merry Pranksters and was repeated endlessly on the long and now famous cross-country journey in the psychedelic bus... AND reference is made in the movie, Across the Universe..
They had super hero get ups.. Day Glo paint and brightly colored capes and goggles and all had nick names... Ken Kesey's was Swashbuckler and some others were Zonker, Mal Function..
They armed themselves with the task of freaking out the "squares"

Nobody could sleep so they kept taking more speed to keep them going.. then weed to take the edge off the speed... then acid to make the whole thing turn into something else...
It ended up being a looong trip... the burning summer heat.. lots of unbathed hippies in close proximity.,. nonstop drugs... The bus was rampant with rivalries, paranoias, and nervous breakdowns... the atmosphere seemed to be more hysterical than merry...
They came to the realization:
Acid is better enjoyed in a controlled environment.

Thus, the Acid Tests.. .
They staged these at parties through out San Fransisco. They set out vats of Kool Aid spiked with LSD (making it electric Kool Aid). Many of the people drank it without realizing that it was spiked. Ken Kesey and his fellow pranksters kept their eyes open and observed the spectacle as hundreds of "first time fliers" gazing down at the freindly lizard nipping at their toes.