Prankster’s Memorable Gift

In late 1965, I went to the Trips Festival at the Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf: three nights of celebrating the music, art and energy of the burgeoning counterculture. The festival was run by Ken Kesey, who had hired his new friends, the Hells Angels, to handle security.

Inside the hall, professional dance groups threaded their way throughout the floor, interacting with the public. A kinetic sculptor, also mingling with the crowd, set up machines that destroyed themselves. Drama groups got the audience involved and performed improvised sketches. People painted or were painted, colored lights flashed, dripping colors appeared on a huge screen above the bands, and there was continuous music from the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company.

If normal art is based on reproducible events or permanent artifacts, the Trips Festival was the opposite: a celebration of the non-reproducible and the impermanent. I was a 25-year-old English major who’d left Baltimore to follow the Beats, and to me the atmosphere seemed electric, creative. For many in the crowd, it was the first inkling that their dreams were shared by others.

In the next few years, there would be packaged, more commercial versions of this type of event in places like the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom. But the Trips Festival, which started it all, felt pure and democratic.

And in the center of it was Ken Kesey. Dressed in silver spacesuit, including silver shoes and carrying a walkie-talkie, he was in constant communication with the Hells Angels and with others running the show. Kesey--bald, with a wrestler-dense body--moved gracefully and quickly from one corner of the hall to another, making sure that things ran smoothly.

I was amazed at Kesey’s apparent nonchalance. Only a few days before the festival, he had been busted for marijuana possession. He and a young woman had been on a rooftop in Telegraph Hill, smoking, and they had thrown some pebbles down to the street. Someone called the police. The timing was terrible, because in a few days Kesey was scheduled to appear in court for yet another bust that had taken place months earlier at his home in La Honda.

Kesey faced the probability of serious prison time, and yet there he was, moving swiftly, keeping control of everything, periodically talking into the walkie-talkie. I watched as he came close to Neal Cassady, the living legend who had inspired Jack Kerouac. Cassady was giving his version of a political speech: He nominated Kesey for governor. “He’s going to run on his record,” said Cassady.

What started out as semi-rational oratory turned into a parody of self-important political speechifying. Cassady repeated certain words as if he were a crazed bureaucrat: “Nevertheless. However. Notwithstanding. Stands to reason. Howsomever. Albeit. Nevertheless.” Over and over, endlessly--a legalese audio loop gone mad. A few faithful followers stuck with him, nodding to the rhythm.

At one point during the first night, the two screens above the bands caught my attention. One of these showed a movie. The other screen displayed messages written on an overheard projector in the balcony level.

Kesey was at the projection pad. Earlier in the evening, the messages had been practical communications to those who did not have walkie-talkies. Now, late at night, Kesey had a more urgent, personal use for the projector. In a few days he would have to deal with jail, humiliation, uncertainty.

But the words he wrote, projected to the crowd, seen by anyone who chose to look up at the screen, did not seem to be motivated by fear. He shaped each letter carefully, laboriously scratching out every stroke. After a group of words, he’d erase them to make room for the next phrase.

He wrote: “Being of reasonably sound mind and body ... [erase] I hereby bequeath [erase] all my earthly and unearthly belongings... [erase] to the Hells Angels [erase] the first ones to teach us [erase] GOOD IS EVIL [erase] RIGHT IS WRONG [erase] PLEASURE IS PAIN [erase] HEAVEN IS HELL [erase].”

Then he printed the single word: POWER. Instead of erasing it, he made it darker and darker, extending the lines, thickening the letters, as if he were etching it in stone. POWER. P-O-W-E-R.

I walked up to the balcony, but by the time I got there, Kesey had moved to a different part of the hall. I sat down and focused on the screen showing the movie. In it, people ran up to the camera and made faces, jumped into a swimming pool, horsed around. It showed people reading or sleeping or eating or talking.

During the whole of the festival, this movie played continuously. It had no beginning and no end. One could leave it and come back without any loss of continuity. No attempt had been made to mitigate the less exciting aspects of life. In fact, this movie was life: senseless, shapeless, occasionally amusing, rarely brilliant: a giant home movie with no plot, no heroes, no villains. Just a movie version of what went on all the time.

As I watched, I thought of Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux medicine man who--when he was 9 years old--had been feverish and near death. He had a vision, a dream in which he saw horses and warriors of different shapes and colors.

When he was 19, the tribal elders decided that his vision should be acted out. So the community prepared the drama, then portrayed it in slow, ceremonial manner. They fleshed out Black Elk’s childhood vision. And once the dream was acted out, because it had been acted out, Black Elk then had the power of healing and a respected place in the community.

And I also thought this: For the artist or politician or holy man of our society, it is the same process. Those whose books are published and bought, whose films are made and watched, those whom we choose to lead us in prayer or politics, these become the people who have power within our society, just as Black Elk had power in his. By acting out the dreams and visions of certain individuals, we--the people--give them power.

But Kesey’s movie signaled a different kind of power arrangement between artist and audience, between leader and followers. Kesey presented life as it was, and it was the viewer’s responsibility to give it meaning, a process made easier, one would suppose, if the viewer had ingested a substance that lubricated the imagination.

The way that dance and drama groups mingled with the audience, the movie, what Kesey wrote on the overhead projector... everything about the Trips Festival gave me the feeling that he was trying to tell us something: Here, take the power, I don’t need it any more. It was yours all along, not mine.

Two days after the Trips Festival ended, Kesey did not show up for his court hearing. It was soon clear that he had disappeared. His psychedelic bus was found abandoned at a beach near the Oregon border.

In the bus was a rambling note in Kesey’s handwriting, in which he said that he was tired of his position as “leader in the scene” and that he was giving it all back to the people. Some interpreted it as a suicide note. The beach area was searched, but no evidence of Kesey was found.

As it turned out, Kesey had not gone to the Oregon border. He had written the note, then given it to friends, who had taken the bus north and left it there. Kesey, meanwhile, had gone to Mexico.

But soon he came back, did his time in prison, and then moved back to Oregon, where he was from. There, for the next 35 years, he lived the life of farmer and teacher--a father and grandfather, a community activist. He wrote a novel together with his students, a populist literary act if there ever was one.

He continued to write, but he was no longer the literary lion who had written two acclaimed and popular novels while still in his 20s. And he was no longer a leader of the scene.

Over the years and especially this past week, in the days since Kesey’s death Saturday, critics have bemoaned his life as an abandonment of the promise he showed as a young man. And yes, he did abandon the role of novelist; and he abandoned the bus. But he did not abandon us.

He did not abandon the promise that I felt he made that night long ago, at the Longshoreman’s Hall. As he told all of us who read his words and watched his movie, he did what he said he would do: Like Prospero in “The Tempest,” he turned in his magician’s wand and gave it back to the people.

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Roberto Loiederman is co-author of “The Eagle Mutiny,” a nonfiction account of the only armed shipboard mutiny in American history.