Why 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' Endures

And you should definitely read Tom Wolfe's masterpiece for a definitive look at 1960s psychedelic culture.

Shit was always happening in 1968. I imagine it felt a lot like our last few years, but without social media. American troops had their deadliest year in Vietnam. Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy, JFK’s brother, was assassinated, and so was Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Yippie activists Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin publicly announced that they were going to send hippie girls to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to seduce delegates and give them LSD and that they were going to put LSD in the water at the convention center. That didn’t happen, but protesters and revved up Chicago police clashed in over four days of violence that resulted in more than 600 arrests, more than 100 hospitalizations, and hundreds treated for tear gas exposure. On the one hand, the Civil Rights Act finally happened; on the other hand Richard Nixon won the presidential election.

Amidst this tumult came a book that would define the lasting image of psychedelic culture of the time, Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Even among the noisy onslaught of foundation-shaking news at the time, this book made an impression, furthering mainstream awareness of the psychedelic movement and possibly a bit more appreciation for the hippie youths at its center.

This masterwork of New Journalism has Wolfe embedded with Ken Kesey, a charismatic novelist-turned-LSD evangelist, and his group of Merry Pranksters as they travel across the United States in their multicolored bus, Furthur. The tale is a perfect historical encapsulation of hippie culture at the time as the Hells Angels, the Grateful Dead, and Allen Ginsberg pass through; the bus is driven by Beat legend Neal Cassady, the inspiration for the Dean Moriarty character in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road; and the Merry Pranksters hold their “Acid Tests”—parties where everyone drinks LSD-laced Kool-Aid. Kesey, we learn, was turned onto psychedelics in 1960 when he was working in the psychiatric ward of a veteran’s hospital in Menlo Park, California, and volunteered for a CIA-backed experiment with hallucinogens. (Incidentally, his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was loosely based on his time at the hospital.) He realized their power and began spreading the word.

Wolfe’s work documents Kesey’s quest to create a new, psychedelic-based religion, preaching radical honesty and the goal of what he calls “intersubjectivity,” a state that lies beyond the ego.

Electric Kool-Aid would become an essential text of the psychedelic movement of the 1960s, the right book at the right time. It exemplified the best of what New Journalism could offer: a riveting, readable account of an essential social issue of the time. Wolfe’s kinetic literary style—sometimes maddening and hard to follow, but always reflecting the vibe of the moment—suits this particular subject matter beautifully. That said, Wolfe remained sober through the proceedings, which allowed him to maintain a sense of objective distance from his subjects. This decision could be questioned—how could he know what these people were truly going through, or striving for, if he didn’t trip himself? But it may have also helped him bring their story to the mainstream masses, who were more likely to question his reporting if he were to drop acid during it. The book, as it was reported and written, could be seen as a serious work of journalism, rather than an excuse for the author to party. Electric Kool-Aid remains one of the lasting depictions of the time in cultural memory, as evidenced by allusions to it during the recent Ted Lasso episode featuring psychedelics. It’s also a book that made a major impression on me decades after its release. I read it in my 20s at the beginning of my journalism career, and it inspired me to pursue narrative nonfiction rather than straightforward reportage. It also sparked my lifelong fascination with 1960s hippie culture, and especially its mystical elements, that led me to writing this newsletter.

Ken Kesey

The book seems to have had a mostly positive impact on the psychedelic movement as a whole, providing a gripping, but still empathetic, portrayal of a group often derided as “dirty hippies.” He takes their spiritual pursuits seriously, even if he often sees the humor in the individual characters. Spiritually bereft 20-somethings wearing purposely countercultural outfits in a clunky multi-colored bus putting on laser-light-show happenings in the woods where they all trip on a powdered, artificially flavored drink are bound to be a little bit funny, after all. They were trying to be funny, in fact. They would, for instance, broadcast on a loudspeaker to all of Kesey’s neighbors in LaHonda, California: “"This is non-station KLSD, 800 micrograms in your head, the station designed to blow your mind and undo your bind, from up here atop the redwoods on Venus." On the whole, Electric Kool-Aid is regarded as a major moment for mainstreaming psychedelics. C.D.B. Bryan, writing in The New York Times, called it “an astonishing book. It is to the hippie movement what Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night was to the Vietnam protest movement.” This is some high praise in 1968.

But the book wasn’t without its contemporary skeptics. Jay Cantor argued in a 1968 Harvard Crimson piece that Wolfe’s estimation of Kesey’s influence and power was overblown. Cantor wrote that “many of the Prankster activities that Wolfe describes with such fanfare of exclamation marks are now common currency. LSD is no respecter of persons, of individuality. Though Wolfe implies that people are copying what the Pranksters did, it seems more likely that the same kind of consciousness and the same ideas come to people who take the same drug.” Cantor’s is an insightful piece, worth reading in its entirety. I’ll give you one more snippet: “For a moment the trick works, and an aura of newness shimmers about Kesey and the Pranksters. I believed myself to be in the presence of some new prophet, of a new and radical insight. But then, a moment away from the presence of the style, and the outlines of the event began to blur, the figure of Kesey himself became insubstantial. In the end the Christ-like robes Wolfe fashioned for Kesey are much too large. We are left with another acid-head and a bunch of kooky kids who did a few krazy things.”

Still, the book’s effects echo to this day, in Ted Lasso, in me, and in many others. Musician Jarvis Cocker, frontman of the band Pulp, wrote of its impact on his life in a piece for The Guardian when Wolfe died in 2018, calling it “a literary ‘gateway drug’—a hallucination of a book that introduced me to a whole new way of looking at the world, writing about the world.” Cocker opined that The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is still reverberating throughout culture: “The effect and influence of the chaotic road trip documented in these pages are absolutely huge. It’s nothing less than a countercultural origin story. That’s why this book is not just an interesting period piece, an engaging historical curio: the revolution it depicts the birth of is still happening. We are not at the terminus yet.”