Book Review: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe (1968)

The first edition of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe, 1968.

Writer Ken Kesey on the bus in the 1960's.

Tom Wolfe in 1968. One of the Merry Pranksters said to him, "You know, you've got on the wildest costume around."

Tom Wolfe’s seminal exploration of the hippie culture, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, was published in August of 1968. Wolfe’s second collection of newspaper and magazine pieces, The Pump House Gang, was published on the same day. While The Pump House Gang is an excellent book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test has achieved the status of a classic work of non-fiction. It’s the first of Tom Wolfe’s three masterpieces, the others being, in my opinion, The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test tells the story of novelist Ken Kesey. As the book opens in late 1966, Kesey had produced two novels: the critically acclaimed and best-selling One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Sometimes a Great Notion. Kesey was regarded as one of the best of the new generation of American novelists, and in 1966 was more famous than Wolfe, a journalist who had scored a surprise success with his debut collection of newspaper and magazine pieces the previous year, published under the unwieldy but memorable title The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Thanks to Wolfe’s reporting, Kesey is one of the few American authors who wrote a classic novel and is the subject of a classic non-fiction book written by another author. 

Nearly the whole book is a flashback, as Wolfe chronicles Kesey’s life, his experiences with the drug LSD, and the many friends and hangers-on he gathered around him, a group that called themselves the Merry Pranksters. A centerpiece of the book is the 1964 cross-country bus trip that Kesey and the Pranksters took, with the end goal of getting to New York City in time for the publication of Sometimes a Great Notion. Before that trip, Kesey had acquired an old school bus, which the Pranksters painted with wild colors and designs. On the top of the bus, where the destination was usually written, one of the Pranksters wrote “furthur,” later corrected to “further.” This word became a metaphor for where the bus was going—Wolfe refers many times in the book to a fictional place called “Edge City,” and the bus kept rolling on, past each new Edge City they kept discovering. 

Wolfe didn’t directly experience most of the events he chronicled in the book, which demonstrates what an amazing reporter he was. You forget that he wasn’t actually there because it’s all described so vividly, so intimately, that you feel he must have been there, stowed away on the bus somewhere, riding in the seat over the wheel well, taking notes in his hulking green notebook as the wind blows through the windows and makes his blue corduroy tie bend back against his chest, so you can see the tag, and you try to read it to figure out what store this guy shops at, where does he get these clothes? But the cool breeze stops and he grins and smooths out his tie again, hardly even breaking stride as he takes his notes!

One of the most notable of the Merry Pranksters was Neal Cassady, who exemplified the search for the next Edge City, as he served as the model for the character of Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s classic 1957 Beat novel On the Road. Cassady is a supporting player in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and he was behind the wheel for most of the cross-country trip to New York City in 1964. Unfortunately, Cassady was dead by the time Wolfe’s book was released, found unconscious beside railroad tracks in Mexico. 

Probably the most famous quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is Ken Kesey’s “You’re either on the bus…or off the bus.” (p.83) The quote can be taken literally, but it’s also a metaphor for the lifestyle that Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were living. You were either part of the trip, or not. You could still be on the bus physically, and yet off the bus mentally. 

Wolfe hit on the idea that this new culture that Kesey and the Pranksters were embracing and celebrating through psychedelic drugs was actually quite similar to the beginnings of a new religion. As Wolfe wrote in the book:

“In fact, none of the great founded religions, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, none of them began with a philosophical framework or even a main idea. They all began with an overwhelming new experience, what Joachim Wach called ‘the experience of the holy,’ and Max Weber, ‘possession of the deity,’ the sense of being a vessel of the divine, of the All-one.” (p.126-7) 

For Kesey and the Pranksters, LSD was the key to this new experience. At the time the Pranksters were forming around Kesey, LSD was also still legal—it wouldn’t be criminalized in California until October 1966, just at the time of the opening scenes of the book. 

The book follows Kesey and the Pranksters as they go on numerous adventures, including trekking to the Cow Palace in San Francisco to attend a Beatles concert while high on LSD. The Pranksters also make unlikely friends with the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. After Kesey is arrested by the cops twice for possession of marijuana he faces the possibility of five years in jail. So he decides to hoof it for Mexico, hoping that no one will find him there and that the United States won’t go to the trouble of extraditing him. After several months in Mexico, Kesey goes back into the United States and gets arrested by the FBI, after briefly taunting the authorities by appearing on television. 

Throughout all of their travels, the Pranksters meticulously document whatever is happening to them on Ampex tape recorders and 16mm movie cameras. The idea is that eventually they will make a movie of their cross-country trip, but no one can ever successfully edit all the hours and hours of rambling footage. Wolfe reveals to us that the film the Pranksters have been making has cost $70,000! (p.137) That’s the dirty little secret of the whole thing! They’re living this crazy, far-out existence, but it’s all thanks to Kesey’s royalties, earned out in the square, capitalist marketplace that they’re able to do it! If One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest hadn’t been such a massive hit, there’s no way they’d be able to afford to do all this crazy crap without anybody having a real job and bringing in the bread!

In an essay about the book A. Carl Bredahl sees the unfinished Pranksters movie as a key distinction separating Wolfe from the Pranksters: “Ultimately, the difference between Wolfe and the Pranksters is evidenced in Wolfe’s ability to keep his narrative eye focused on the physical world of the Pranksters and to unify The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in contrast to the talk and endless feet of film and electrical wires that the Pranksters can never manage to bring together.” (“An Exploration of Power: Tom Wolfe’s Acid Test,” by A. Carl Bredahl, collected in Tom Wolfe: Modern Critical Views, Harold Bloom, editor, p.68) 

One of the weaknesses of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is that despite the colorful supporting cast, no one comes close to matching Ken Kesey for holding our interest. There’s Kesey, and then there’s everyone else. And that may have been accurate as to how things actually were—there’s the leader, and then all of the followers, and that certainly connects to seeing Kesey’s group as a new religious group. Mountain Girl is probably the most interesting supporting character, but since we never see events from her point of view she never becomes a major character.

Wolfe’s hyper-kinetic writing style fit the material perfectly. To describe this new way of living that Kesey and the Pranksters had, it was necessary to document it in a new language. Before he wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Wolfe had already been writing radically different articles in newspapers and magazines, using techniques like onomatopoeia, multiple exclamation points, and entering into the minds of his subjects to get his point across. Wolfe wrote that he would try “anything to avoid coming on like the usual non-fiction narrator, with a hush in my voice, like a radio announcer at a tennis match.” (The New Journalism, by Tom Wolfe, p.17) Had The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test been written in that flat, radio announcer voice the book would not have had the same impact. 

Despite the bright Day-Glo excitement of Wolfe’s prose, he steers clear of some of his pet words and phrases in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. No one in the book is arteriosclerotic, which was Wolfe’s favorite word in the articles featured in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. There’s also no mention of Streptelon, a fictional synthetic material that is referenced in nearly all of Wolfe’s books. And, despite how crowded it might have been on the bus, absolutely no one is packed shank to flank. 

From the beginning of his reporting, Wolfe never tried to fit in with the Pranksters. As he said in a 1980 interview with Rolling Stone, “I began to understand that it would really be a major mistake to try to fit into that world.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.149) Wolfe didn’t attempt to change his signature sartorial style either, as he explained in a 1981 interview in Saturday Review:

“One of the Pranksters, a girl known as Doris Delay said, ‘You know, you’ve got on the wildest costume around.’” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.165) In the same interview, Wolfe explains that the only time he ever caught any flak was from one of the Hells Angels, who angrily questioned what Wolfe was doing there. Once he ascertained that Wolfe was a writer from New York, he said “New York’s a shitty town.” “And then it was very quiet all around. People could tell this was a confrontation. And I suddenly realized that everyone was listening to how I’d answer…so my brain’s spinning, and I say ‘You’ve got a point there. I don’t know why I stay there…’ At this point he seemed to realize that he wasn’t going to get a fight or at least not one that he could be proud of; so he suddenly changed completely…” (Conversations, p.165-6) 

The huge success of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test threatened to pigeonhole Wolfe. In his Rolling Stone interview he described his travails on the lecture circuit during the 1970’s: “I would talk about art, and the first question would be, ‘What’s Ken Kesey doing now?’ And I can’t tell you how many times that happened. I began to see that I was perceived as a medium who could put them in touch with the other world.” (Conversations, p.152) 

Wolfe also dealt with people’s perceptions that he was a hippie or a druggie himself: “I think they really wanted me to be on the bus. In fact, I never was.” (Conversations, p.152) But in the answer to the next question, Wolfe admits that he took LSD while writing the book.

“Well, I actually did it once during the writing of the book; I’d started writing the book, and then I thought, well, this is one little piece of reporting I haven’t done. So I did do it; it scared the hell out of me. It was like tying yourself to a railroad track to see how big the train is. It was pretty big. I would never do it again.” (Conversations, p.152) 

Wolfe also mentions that he took LSD in his 1983 interview with Ron Reagan. (Conversations, p.196) And again in his 1987 Vanity Fair interview with Toby Thompson. “At first I thought I was having a gigantic heart attack—I felt like my heart was outside my body with these big veins…As I began to calm down, I had the feeling that I had entered into the sheen of this nubbly twist carpet—a really wretched carpet, made of Acrilan—and somehow this represented the people of America, in their democratic glory. It was cheap and yet it had a certain glossy excitement to it—I even felt sentimental about it. Somehow I was merging with this carpet. At the time, it seemed like a phenomenal insight, a breakthrough.” (Conversations, p.212) In a 1979 interview with Henry Allen, published in The Washington Post, Wolfe told the story of taking LSD, and the details about feeling as though he was having a heart attack and merging with the carpet are the same. 

However, in an interview with Financial Review in November of 2016, Wolfe said he never took LSD. "I probably have given that impression in the past, but I didn't. I felt it was really far too dangerous to take a chance – and they didn't try to pressure me."

So, which is it? Wolfe certainly describes his lone LSD experience vividly, and the details of his trip are the same in multiple interviews given years apart. If Wolfe didn’t take LSD, then why did he lie and say he did? And why only admit it 11 years after the book was published? If he was going to lie about having taken LSD, why wouldn’t he have started the lie in 1968, instead of 1979? Of course, the truth could be that in 2016 he simply forgot that he had taken LSD. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter if he did or not. Wolfe captured the LSD experience in vivid prose, and writers are always writing about things they didn’t actually experience. Stephen Crane never saw combat, yet he vividly described the Civil War in The Red Badge of Courage. 

Wolfe wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test fairly quickly. In a 1974 interview he said, “See, there was a time problem in writing that book, too. It looked as if the whole psychedelic, hippie phenomenon was disappearing. So there was pressure to just get it done.” (Conversations, p.59) 

However, Wolfe also spent a long time researching various parts of the book.  In an interview just after the book was published, he said, “At one point, I thought I’d never finish—I was reading books on brain psychology, on religions, on sociology, books on psychology, cognitive psychology, all sorts of things.” (Conversations, p.19) 

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was a huge best seller when it was published, and the book made Tom Wolfe a household name. In 1974, Wolfe recalled when he had an inkling about the book’s possibilities: “I remember the first time I knew the book might be successful was when I found out that the girls at the duplicating service were competing to get hold of the thing as it came in, chapter by chapter.” (Conversations, p.59)

In 1988, twenty years after the book was published, Wolfe had this to say about the hippie culture he had chronicled: 

“When I wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I honestly thought it would stand up only until the highly educated people who were really involved—as I wasn’t—in the psychedelic world wrote their big novels. When I wrote Radical Chic, I thought it would stand up until, again, the highly educated people in the New Left wrote their books. Then I was going to be in trouble competitively. Those books were never written. That’s what’s astounding. Not that they were written and weren’t very good but that they were not written.” (Conversations, p.259) 

Wolfe’s feelings in the quote above tie into his idea, espoused in the 1973 collection The New Journalism, and again in the 1989 essay, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” that non-fiction was doing a better job of capturing the zeitgeist and explaining America than the fiction of the time. Once he turned his talents towards fiction, Wolfe pressed fiction writers to work more like reporters and do research on the subjects they were writing about. 

Fifty years later, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test remains one of the best books about the hippie movement and the 1960’s.