The Magic Bus : ON THE BUS <i> By Paul Perry and Ken Babbs (Thunder’s Mouth Press: $21.95; 224 pp.; 0-938410-91-1)</i> : THE FURTHER INQUIRY <i> By Ken Kesey (Viking: $24.95; 215 pp.; 0-670-83174-3)</i>

There was a bus.

You were either on the bus or off the bus.

In the summer of 1964, Ken Kesey and some friends boarded a 1939 International Harvester school bus named Furthur or Further (the spelling varied). The sides screamed with swirls of bright paint, a style soon to be called psychedelic; the back sported a deck and motorcycle, and a turret punched through the roof. The vehicle was armed with endless supplies of movie film, an intricate sound system that could broadcast and record whatever interesting decibels happened by, and a larder of LSD and marijuana. At the wheel was Neal Cassady, a.k.a. Dean Moriarty, the phantom helmsman of a generation dreaming of going on the road after reading Jack Kerouac’s novel. Probably no one on Earth had seen such a sight before.

The idea was to travel to the New York World’s Fair, do some dope, have some experiences and make a movie at the same time. Tom Wolfe based a best seller (more than 30 printings), “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” on Kesey, the bus, and his band of Merry Pranksters. Furthur had the face that launched a thousand hippie school buses. Now, a quarter century after the ride, two new books try to figure out what happened on the bus.

Paul Perry and Ken Babbs’ “On the Bus” is a scrapbook (with 100 black-and-white and 16 color photos) that mixes simple narrative with observations by various Merry Pranksters, transcripts of tapes made at the time, and comments by observers like Hunter S. Thompson, Gordon Lish, Jerry Garcia and others. The book gives a handy history of LSD, and a chronicle of Kesey and the Pranksters after the bus ride--the acid tests, the busts, and the eventual descent of the band into relatively ordinary lives.

For Furtherologists, it constitutes a treasure trove of material and will fuel many dissertations in pop culture or deviant behavior. For anyone seeking solid ground in the stoned information system of Merry Pranksterdom, the book has real dates, a map of the route and many other hard little kernels of fact to cling to in the afterflashes of an acid trip. The various visits by Hunter Thompson to the text function as ice picks in the brain. The inventor of gonzo here functions as the sane person who has wandered into a madhouse--for example, his chilling account of a gang rape at a Prankster-Hell’s Angels party.

Kesey’s book, “The Further Inquiry,” originally written as a script, imagines the trial of the ghost of Neal Cassady by the authorities. It is confusing at first, laid out in an unconventional manner (there is a flip book of Cassady photos that makes him whirl and shout), always bizarre, and above all, alive.

Kesey has one of the battered reputations in American letters--the young hotshot who cranked out a best seller, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and then wrote the big book, “Sometimes a Great Notion,” a novel that most critics did not like, and that has been largely dismissed by all but a cult following since its publication.

“On the Bus” has Kesey saying: “Unless you get up very near that precipice where you’re likely to make a fool of yourself, you’re not showing much of how you feel. You’re playing it safe--the way Hemingway did most of the time.” After finishing “Sometimes a Great Notion,” he got on the bus, stepped off the precipice, and stopped writing novels. At one level, both these accounts describe how Ken Kesey tried to detox from modern American fiction.

The two books overlap but do not compete. Perry and Babbs nail down the record, Kesey wrestles with the meaning. And both volumes are dominated by one dead man, Neal Cassady, a creation who successfully blows Kesey to the edge of the page.

Cassady was the street kid from Denver who stole 600 cars before he was 16, the sojourner in reform schools and prisons, the pal of the Beats such as Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg and William Burroughs, the man who made a living changing tires, the nonstop talker who never really got around to writing but whom everyone else wrote about. He showed up at Kesey’s house three days before the bus left, signed on as a tire expert, and quickly took over the action.

One of the key moments in the trip occurred when the bus got stuck in the mud at Wikieup, Ariz., and a tractor came and pulled it out. During the wait, the passengers swallowed a lot of LSD and wandered along a desert stream, stoned out of their minds. When the bus is finally freed, in Kesey’s screenplay, Ken Babbs shouts, “We’ve done it. We’ve done it! . . . We’ve won!” Kesey chimes in with, “We’ve conquered! Conquered! . . . Some the worse for wear, perhaps, but conquered nevertheless.” A few pages later, Cassady puts a different spin on the hours doing acid in the desert. “That’s the whole thing we’ve been talking about,” he explains. “It is. Can’t you freaks see it?”

See what? The bus trip by and large was full of humdrum events, or failed meetings. At Larry McMurtry’s in Houston, one Prankster wanders off stoned and naked to be nabbed by cops and left behind. In New Orleans, the crew decides to take a swim, stumbles onto a beach for blacks only and leaves in time. A New York meeting with Kerouac fails when he scorns their hospitality.

They descend on Millbrook, Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary’s acid-research center in New York State, a huge mansion where spiritual inquiries are made into the meaning of the drug experience. Kesey, Cassady and band arrive with smoke grenades, a desire to boogie, and when West meets East it just doesn’t work. One of the joys of “On the Bus” is Alpert’s (now Ram Dass) explanations of why he failed to sense that this visitation of modern Vandals mattered at all. So why are we recalling a botched bus ride on paved interstate highways 25 years after the event?

Because something happened back then, something that we’ve chosen to see as perhaps beginning with a ride in a 1939 International Harvester school bus. Something that can be scented in the manic raps by Cassady that both books record, the incoherent chatter that makes a kind of sense.

Here is Cassady at the wheel, stoned with a joint in his hand, driving a bus with essentially no brakes down the Jersey Turnpike toward the bowels of New York, and riffing: “All right, I’ll bring it down. Bring it down gently. Gotta bring it down. . . . I think the elementals are getting through! They get through in a continuing pattern. In other words: In every force, in every world, in every stream, in every structure-- like, say a road--its weakest link, the road is no better than its weakest link, you see? Now the weak spot is always attacked by the highest of the next lower forces. Like a second dimensional, third dimensional, fourth dimensional . . . worlds separate, but worlds that still touch . . . . We are actually fourth -dimensional beings in a third -dimensional body inhabiting a second -dimensional world!”

For several years now, there has been a cottage industry of ‘60s nostalgia. And a counter-industry of denunciations--Just Say No--of whatever bonfires the ‘60s lit. These two books are about something else: genesis. They contain a lot of what those years looked like and sounded like, some of what they meant, and much more important, a few moments of feeling that capture why their memory won’t seem to go away. There is a stoned Hunter Thompson racing his motorcycle in pursuit of mysterious red lights only to find after an hour or so that he is four feet from the taillights of a terrorized family in a sedan. There is Neal Cassady’s ghost being tried by the authorities for poisoning American life.

The verdict is still out. Read these books if you are interested in who dunnit.