Merry Pranksters

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

by Tom Wolfe  · 1 Jan 1968  · 224pp  · 91,918 words

return and his acid graduation plan were causing the heads' first big political crisis. All eyes were on Kesey and his group, known as the Merry Pranksters. Thousands of kids were moving into San Francisco for a life based on LSD and the psychedelic thing. Thing was the major abstract word in

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and—well, for a start, I begin to see that people like Lois and Stewart and Black Maria are the restrained, reflective wing of the Merry Pranksters. The Warehouse is on Harriet Street, between Howard and Folsom. Like most of San Francisco, Harriet Street is a lot of wooden buildings with bay

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unlikely expression, "you understand—" Chapter II The Bladder Totem FOR TWO OR THREE DAYS IT WENT LIKE THAT FOR ME IN THE garage with the Merry Pranksters waiting for Kesey. The Pranksters took me pretty much for granted. One of the Flag People, a blonde who looked like Doris Day but was

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and scatter it over San Francisco County, and Babbs would be somewhere around saying to some other bemused soul: "Yeah, yeah, right! right! right!" The Merry Pranksters were all rapidly assembling, waiting for Kesey. George Walker arrives. Walker has on no costume. He is just like some very clean-cut blond college

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... the blood that was available to him in intercourse ... made us believe he was in the apple sauce for twenty years . . ." Only lucky dogs and Merry Pranksters can understand this supersonic warble! ... most likely .. . ". .. the blissful counterstroke . .." ... the current fantasy ... Even back on Perry Lane, where everyone was young and intellectual and

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—" "—a lightning beam ! " "The Intrepid Traveler—" "—shortens the circuit!" "The Intrepid Traveler—" "—short-waves the band!" "The Intrepid Traveler—" "—and his band of Merry Pranksters!" "The Intrepid Traveler!—" —and his band of Merry Pranksters take a journey to the East. chapter VI The Bus I COULDN'T TELL YOU FOR SURE WHICH OF THE

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MERRY Pranksters got the idea for the bus, but it had the Babbs touch. It was a superprank, in any case. The original fantasy, here in the

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"form a part of it—a part that is insignificant to us, yet most meaningful to Chinese minds" ... these things THAT ONLY LUCKY DOGS AND MERRY PRANKSTERS HEAR—and SO many mysteries of the synch from that time on .. . There is another book in the shelf in Kesey's living room that

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gone even further. He had stopped writing. He was now working on a vast experimental movie entitled—the newspapers solemnly reported— Intrepid Traveler and His Merry Pranksters Leave in Search of a Cool Place. "Writers," he told a reporter, "are trapped by artificial rules. We are trapped in syntax. We are ruled

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made of huge woodcutter's saw blades and has a death mask on it—and a big sign, about 15 feet long, that reads: THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE HELL'S ANGELS. Music is blasting out of some speakers on top of the house, a Beatles record— Help, I ne-e-e

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of La Honda knew, there was a huge sign at the Kesey place—15 feet long, three feet high, in red white and blue. THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE HELL'S ANGELS Saturday, August 7, 1965, was a bright clear radiant limelit summer day amid God's handiwork in La Honda, California

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's front steps. But he was too wasted at that point to really do much. So it was wonderful and marvelous, an unholy alliance, the Merry Pranksters and the Hell's Angels, and all hours of the day or night you could hear the Hell's Angels gearing and winding down Route

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cast of millions, the castoff billions .. . Control Tower to Orbiter One CONTROL chapter XV Cloud A HULKING GREAT SIGN ON THE GATE OUT FRONT THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES The Beatles were going to be at the Cow Palace outside of San Francisco on the evening of September 2. The papers

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. Kesey's idea, the current fantasy, is that after the show the Beatles will come to La Honda for a good freaking rout with the Merry Pranksters. Now as to how this is to all come about... But one has to admit the sign creates an effect. THE

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MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES Out on Route 84, Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis in their Ocelot Rabies 400 hardtop sedans, they slow down and stop and stare.

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The last sign, the one reading THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE HELL'S ANGELS, for that one they mainly just slowed down. After all, it didn't say when. It might be 30 seconds

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bone marrow from the last cannibal rape job up the road. Well, it worked with the Hell's Angels. They put up the sign THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE HELL'S ANGELS, and sure enough the Angels came, these unbelievable bogeymen for the middle class, in the flesh, and they became part

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of the Prankster movie, in the rich ripe cheesy Angel flesh. So they put up the sign THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES and maybe the Beatles will come. There is this one small difference of course. Kesey knew the Hell's Angels. He invited

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work them into the great flow of acausal connection and then it will happen of its own accord. This sign starts the movie going, THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES, and our movie becomes their movie, Mom's and Dad's and Buddy's and Sis's and all the Berkeley kids

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and aprons and ascots and wigs and warlock rattles and Jungle Jim jodhpurs and Captain Easy epaulets and Fearless Four tights—and Merry Prankster Page Browning special face paints. The Merry Pranksters are getting ready to head bombed out into the mightiest crazed throng in San Francisco history, come to see the Beatles at

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the big beano with the Beatles. The party. Zonker did his work in the highest Prankster tradition. The sign still hangs on the gate: THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES Kesey is not in the mood for a goddamned thing and heads into the house. The whole head-freak-boho-slug mob

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. . . the great banner rippled on the Prankster gate in the nighttime in ripples and intergalactic billows of great howling owsley electro-mad-chemical synchronicity... THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES chapter XVI The Frozen Jug Band SYNCHRONICITY SPOKEN HERE! —and the Pranksters sit around Kesey's living room at night, grooving on

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LSD, using light effects and music, mainly. The big night, Saturday night, was going to be called The Acid Test, featuring Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Kesey and the Pranksters were primed for the Festival. Even Mountain Girl was on hand. She had wrestled the thing out in her mind and

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curly hair, who had seemed earlier to be frightening and strange"— —this was Paul Foster—"and looked at him and understood. The costumes of the Merry Pranksters had seemed bizarre, and now they were beautiful and right. I recalled a poster which we'd had on the ceiling of the Free Press

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an infection among the youth—which, in fact, it had. Very few realized that it had all emanated from one electric source: Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. A team from Life magazine turned up, led by a photographer, Larry Schiller, who was on to the LSD world and had taken the pictures

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she found Zonk and, unexpectedly, the famous Ken Kesey and beautiful people. But one thing about the beautiful people themselves—Namely, the Merry Pranksters. She had heard of the fabulous Merry Pranksters even in San Jose. Kesey and Zonk talked about them all the time, of course. The fabulous Babbs, the fabulous Mountain Girl

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Millbrook, N.Y. As for Kesey—he is swamp-bound in exile in some alligator-infested Mexican hideaway, it was presumed ... Yet here come the Merry Pranksters pulling back into San Francisco from Mexico via their own route ... The Calliope Company gives them their Warehouse on Harriet Street to live in for

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and flummoxing the bass like the creamy days of Siam Stewart. The New Dimensions—now that's very funny, you know. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters have to smile over that. Kesey and the Pranksters are off to one side of the Barn waiting for their turn to go on, setting

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

by Fred Turner  · 31 Aug 2006  · 339pp  · 57,031 words

society. In McLuhan’s writing, and in the artistic practice of groups like USCO and, later, the psychedelic practices of groups like San Francisco’s Merry Pranksters, technologies produced by mass, S t e w a r t B ran d M e e t s t h e C y b

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that psychedelic drugs could alter one’s perceptions took. Brand soon began to hang out with a group devoted to “tripping” in every sense: the Merry Pranksters. The Pranksters had first come together around Kesey’s house on Perry Lane on the edge of the Stanford campus. Not long after he began

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’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Brand did not go with them. As Wolfe put it, Brand represented “the restrained, reflective wing of the Merry Pranksters.”40 Even so, to Brand the Pranksters were a West Coast version of USCO’s techno-tribalism. If USCO had emerged out of an East

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. That meaning could be experienced as an ecstatic state of enlightenment that was itself in tune with the deeper, mystical laws of experience: satori. The Merry Pranksters thought the Beats offered a model of how to step outside mainstream American culture, build an alternative community, and pursue psychic wholeness even within the

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only exchange information, but, at least imaginatively, merge with one another in a spiritually harmonious state. Whereas USCO took up technology to make art, the Merry Pranksters deployed technology expressly to create a new consciousness and a new form of social organization. In this sense, the Pranksters represent a key origin point

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enough in the face of nuclear weapons and the draft to grow up at all. In myth, if not always in fact, Kesey and the Merry Pranksters became San Francisco’s wizards, and as they did, they made visible to mainstream Americans the possibility of living a mobile, tribal life, a world

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reformer, part genial party host, he moved from project to project, trying to create holistic media environments of the kind favored by USCO and the Merry Pranksters. He also turned to making buttons: One afternoon, probably in March in 1966, dropping a little bit of LSD, I went up onto the roof

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, founders of the intentional communities of the Southwest embraced the technophilic, consciousness-oriented value systems that Brand had encountered earlier in USCO and among the Merry Pranksters and, beyond them, though less explicitly, the collaborative research culture of cold war America. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, intentional communities tended to

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City blossomed in a cluster of geodesic domes on the plains of Colorado, near the town of Trinidad. Like USCO and, to some extent, the Merry Pranksters, Drop City was devoted to pursuing collective harmony and creating traveling pieces of multimedia theater, T h e W h o l e E a

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that process has its stride, don’t tinker with it, let it work for you.”46 As he had seen Ken Kesey do with the Merry Pranksters, Brand downplayed his own power within the system. Apart from the “Purpose” section at the start of each Catalog, his editorial comments and reviews tended

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role of traveling hippie nomad. The user of the I Ching likewise could throw his coins and find himself imitating the ancient Chinese and the Merry Pranksters, and, in his attempt to read the I Ching’s sayings as clues to a set of otherwise invisible probabilities, he could also act in

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capacities resonated well with the New Communalist emphasis on transforming human consciousness. Engelbart’s group bore a strong resemblance to groups like USCO and the Merry Pranksters. Like those groups, the Augmentation Research Center featured a relatively leveled community led by a visionary. Also like those groups, ARC was devoted to changing

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, information-community vision of Resource One were two sides of the same coin, Brand implied. Both groups, he suggested, were high-tech versions of the Merry Pranksters, and the computer itself was a new LSD. Drawing on the rhetorical tactics of cybernetics, Brand offered up Xerox PARC, Resource One, and the

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Merry Pranksters as prototypical elites for the techno-social future. He allowed each to claim some of [ 118 ] Chapter 4 the cultural legitimacy of the others: in

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into the maw of Big Brother on the screen. Thanks to the Macintosh, a voice then intoned, 1984 would not be like 1984. Like the Merry Pranksters in their bus, the ad implied, the executives of Apple had unleashed a new technology on Americans that would, if they only embraced it, make

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from their own social and cultural communities of origin. Within GBN, this shared cultural affinity took the place of other forms of management. Like the Merry Pranksters, the network members of GBN were a loose group, able to come and go as they pleased. Yet they were also subject to what Brand

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Buckleyite conservatism that got me—it was the individualist, anti-statist conservatism that got me.” At about the same time that Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were rejecting the politics of the New Left and the hippies of the Haight were heading back to the land, Rossetto was coming to a

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a revolution begun in the 1960s. In June 1994, for instance, Wired ran Joshua Quittner’s profile of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), entitled “The Merry Pranksters Go to Washington.” The headline streamed across a full page, in one-and-aquarter-inch hot pink type; underneath it, a little dotted arrow directed

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longing for the reduction of government, Dyson’s Internet became an idealized political sphere in the image of the forms of organization pursued by the Merry Pranksters, USCO, and many communes— forms in which authority was distributed, hierarchies were leveled, and citizens were linked by invisible energies. The Internet became both a

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access to people in power, and their material success. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe took readers inside the garage where the Merry Pranksters painted their psychedelic bus. Quittner here took readers inside San Francisco’s Bistro Rôti—“a cozily upscale place overlooking the bay . . . woodburning stove . . . valet parking

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, head of Interval Research Corporation; Wired’s own Jane Metcalfe; and a handful of other Silicon Valley luminaries alongside the current board members. Like the Merry Pranksters in Wolfe’s account, this new elite inspired a hush in onlookers: “Waiters and waitresses quietly remove the uneaten shrimp and satay and whisper to

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if readers simply went online, the article seemed to suggest, they too could share in that world.27 Wired [ 221 ] The prototypical elements of “The Merry Pranksters Go to Washington” reappeared in Wired’s profiles of the Global Business Network, the Media Lab, and the WELL. In November 1994, for instance, journalist

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; Rossetto, Metcalfe, et al., Wired business plan. 22. “Reader Report,” internal document, Wired, January 1996, no pagination (in Louis Rossetto’s personal collection). 23. Quittner, “Merry Pranksters Go to Washington,” 79, 80, 81. 24. Ibid., 131. 25. Ibid., 80 – 81. 26. Ibid., 80, 81 (original emphasis). 27. Two years later, Wired ran

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, 1984. Perry, Paul, Ken Babbs, Michael Schwartz, and Neil Ortenberg. On the Bus: The Complete Guide to the Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Birth of the Counterculture. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1990. Pfaffenberger, Bryan. “The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the

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. ———. “Neither Market nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization.” Research in Organizational Behavior 12 (1990): 295 –336. “Psychedelic Art.” Life, September 9, 1966. Quittner, Joshua. “The Merry Pranksters Go to Washington.” Wired, June 1994. Rabbit, Peter. Drop City. New York: Olympia Press, 1971. Rau, Erik P. “The Adoption of Operations Research in the

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politics, 216; Long Now Foundation, 206, 285n67; as a manager, 79, 89 –90; The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, 178 – 81; and the Merry Pranksters, 61– 62; military service, 46; mirror logic of cybernetics, 259; at MIT’s Media Lab, 177; modeled the synthesis of counterculture and research culture, 253

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; embraced information theories and collaborative work style of the research world, 240; embrace of systems visions, 39; embrace of technology and consciousness, 28 –39; and Merry Pranksters, 63; and military research culture, 245 – 46; relationship to postindustrial forms of production and culture, 239 – 49; view of cybernetics, 38. See also New Communalism

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Kent State University killings, 98, 118 Kepler’s bookstore, 70 Kerouac, Jack, 62 Kerr, Clark, 11, 12 Kesey, Ken: and geodesic dome, 94; leadership of Merry Pranksters, 63, 65, 67; and LSD, 61, 63; notion of Acid Test, 65; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 59 – 60, 64; rejection of agonistic

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; Understanding Media, 53, 269n24 McMurtry, Larry, 60 Mead, Margaret, 26, 122, 123 Meadows, James, 149 Media Lab, MIT, 163, 177, 178, 179 Merck Manual, 80 Merry Pranksters, 54, 61– 64, 65, 67 mescaline, 60 Metcalfe, Jane, 208, 209, 211, 217, 220 Meyer, Leonard B., 47 Michael, Don, 191, 192 microbiology, became a

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx  · 18 Nov 2025  · 642pp  · 142,332 words

Money, and Find Hope Early internet culture boasted an immaculate countercultural pedigree. Its lineage began with Stewart Brand—a disciple of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters—who founded the techno-utopian magazine Whole Earth Catalog. Brand believed that tools and technology were critical for expanding human consciousness. (Kesey agreed; personal computing

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

by John Markoff  · 1 Jan 2005  · 394pp  · 108,215 words

of political and cultural unrest. The group had emerged directly from a set of wrenching, mind-expanding LSD parties orchestrated by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters called Acid Tests, which would transform the culture of the Midpeninsula and ultimately the rest of the country. Now, more than three decades later, the

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-way community created a brief local sensation in the Bay Area. But it turned out to be just a stunt pulled by Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, one perfectly suited to the times, which were rapidly beginning to tumble out of control. Driving down La Honda Road on the way to the

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they were soon regulars at the Lupine Nature Preserve, a nudist colony in the Santa Cruz Mountains. In the mountains he also stumbled across the Merry Pranksters. Before buying his cottage on La Honda Road, he had rented another place near La Honda. Standing in the new house one morning attempting to

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cultures. Starting in 1964, he had begun performing his own multimedia presentation called “America Needs Indians.” Brand was also close to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and in 1966 he had helped organize the last of the Acid Tests, which served to launch the Grateful Dead. On the Friday evening of

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University connection. As a former infantryman, however, he found he had little patience for the antiwar activists. In 1965, he joined Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters at a Vietnam Day Committee rally in Berkeley where Kesey had been invited to speak. Kesey climbed onstage dressed in a Day-Glo orange wig

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, Robert Mad Doctor magnetic computing magnetic recording mail, electronic Malone, Michael Manes, Stephen Mao Zedong Matthews, Max MAXC Melvyn, John Memex Merkle, Ralph Merry, Diana Merry Pranksters Mesa Microsoft information sharing and Office Midpeninsula, see San Francisco Midpeninsula military ARPA, see ARPA magnetic computing and missile program in Pentagon, see Pentagon ROTC

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

by John Markoff  · 22 Mar 2022  · 573pp  · 142,376 words

dabbled in journalism, photography, activism, multimedia, social media, and business consulting. He has also been a provocateur. A member of Ken Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters, he helped light the spark that led to the Summer of Love and the San Francisco music scene. Among the first to catch wind of

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drive from Perry Lane—described by writer Ed McClanahan as “the lunatic fringe on Stanford’s stiff upper lip”[1]—where Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters first took root in the early sixties, and around the corner from where the Grateful Dead took up residence in an old mansion in the

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thing she noticed was that his van was full of books—in fact, it was like some kind of 1960s bookmobile. Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters, which would later be immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, was just starting to form. An eclectic mix of outsiders

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the pools. Although Brand would orbit around the edges of Kesey’s world for almost three more years, becoming close friends with several of the Merry Pranksters and taking part in a number of their adventures, ultimately he would hold Kesey at arm’s length and never become a full-fledged or

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in everyone from IBM, RCA, GE, and the US Army to the Mime Troupe, a custom car show, and a steam calliope run by the Merry Pranksters. In 2008, four decades later, a Maker Faire, which felt very much like the idea Brand had initially envisioned, was held at the San Mateo

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the writers and Kesey pals Robert Stone and Ed McClanahan, had previously lived just a couple of blocks over on Homer Lane, as had several Merry Pranksters. In a cottage at the other end of the tiny neighborhood, Bill English, Doug Engelbart’s chief engineer, was renting a home from Raymond. English

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La Honda home of, 88, 120, 128 legal problems of, 128, 131, 141, 143 LSD and, 88, 122–23 psychedelics renounced by, 143 see also Merry Pranksters King, Peter and Fox, 37, 50, 74, 75, 81 King Must Die, The (Renault), 52 Kirk, Andrew G., 135, 180, 340–41 Kirkland, Isabella, 234

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–79 Media Lab, The: Inventing the Future at MIT (Brand), 278, 280–81, 283, 286, 289, 292, 318 Megatrends (Naisbitt), 262 Meilstrup, Ann, 24–25 Merry Pranksters, 2, 24, 88–89, 97–98, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 129, 131, 141, 143, 160, 181 Metric Conversation Council, 230 Metzner, Ralph, 177

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution

by Marc Weingarten  · 12 Dec 2006  · 363pp  · 123,076 words

, and began an experiment in communal living with fellow Stanford alumni and various other friends and family members. The group would become known as the Merry Pranksters, with Kesey presiding over it all like a benign pasha. Meals were taken together, women were shared, and drugs were consumed in prodigious quantities. It

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.” Wolfe was drawn into Kesey’s force field, taken in by the “strange up-country charisma” of the man. He traveled with some of the Merry Pranksters to an old pie factory on the ground floor of an abandoned hotel on Harriet Street in San Francisco, where they awaited their leader’s

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: he could observe Kesey and the Pranksters’ exploits without getting in the way. “We were beyond being freaked out by appearances,” said George Walker, a Merry Prankster and one of Kesey’s most trusted confidants at the time. “Tom was this very patrician guy who I don’t think ever got down

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us, but we were too busy with our own stuff to pay any attention to him.” Even for a group as willfully unconventional as the Merry Pranksters, it made for a bizarre tableau—a dandy among the heads. Wolfe observed the Prankster preparations for something called the Acid Test Graduation, accompanying Pranksters

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into their crash pads, offered their drugs and food to her. What Didion witnessed was a far cry from the pie-eyed exuberance of the Merry Pranksters that Tom Wolfe had chronicled so gleefully in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Instead, these were runaways living on handouts and day labor, organizing

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the two marijuana busts, had returned to La Honda like a man unburdened and eager to resume his position as the titular leader of the Merry Pranksters. For an ex-fugitive staring down the possibility of a long prison term, Kesey’s relationship with the Angels was a risky provocation, considering the

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the road leading to Kesey’s compound like lighthouse sentries. Undaunted, Kesey hung a fifteen-foot sign in front of the property that read THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE HELL’S ANGELS. For many of the Angels, the La Honda party was their initiation into psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, which was still

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itself. Emboldened, Wenner ventured out beyond Berkeley to La Honda, where he experienced his first acid trip under the auspices of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. In San Francisco, where an alternative culture rooted in rock and roll was simmering, Wenner attended concerts at places such as the Fillmore and Longshoreman

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson  · 6 Oct 2014  · 720pp  · 197,129 words

Engelbart publishes “Augmenting Human Intellect.” 1963 Licklider proposes an “Intergalactic Computer Network.” Engelbart and Bill English invent the mouse. 1972 1964 Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters take bus trip across America. 1965 Ted Nelson publishes first article about “hypertext.” Moore’s Law predicts microchips will double in power each year or

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his book, combined with some acid he had been able to liberate from the CIA experiments, to form a commune of early hippies called the Merry Pranksters. In 1964 he and his posse embarked on a psychedelic cross-country odyssey in an old International Harvester school bus dubbed Furthur (spelling later corrected

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few days earlier on Brand’s North Beach roof but was out on bail and orchestrating the event from a command scaffold. Featured were the Merry Pranksters and their Psychedelic Symphony, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead, and members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. The writer Tom Wolfe

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of money while addressing the crowd, and he wrote the suggestions on a blackboard. Paul Krassner, who had been a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, gave an impassioned talk about the plight of the American Indians—“We ripped off the Indians when we came here!”—and said the money should

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, ref1, ref2 memory unit: on Atenoff’s device, ref1, ref2 on Z1, ref1 Menabrea, Luigi, ref1 mercury delay lines, ref1 Merholz, Peter, ref1 Merlin, ref1 Merry Pranksters, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Merton, Robert, ref1 message switching, ref1 Metcalfe, Bob, ref1, ref2 Metropolis, Nick, ref1 Michie, Donald, ref1 microchips, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia

by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris and Christopher Scally  · 26 Jul 2011  · 171pp  · 54,334 words

January weather rages in the city outside. Brand is a 1960s original. When Tom Wolfe first came across him as one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, madly driving a souped-up pickup through the streets of San Francisco, he recorded the encounter thus: Stewart Brand, a thin blonde guy with a

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. When I was 19, Ken Kesey came to my home town, Brighton, along with a reproduction of Furthur, the psychedelic school bus he and the Merry Pranksters first drove around the US in the late sixties on one long trip funded by the proceeds of selling Kesey’s film rights for One

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Nest. It was that journey that Tom Wolfe immortalised in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Thirty years later in 1999, some of the original Merry Pranksters came with him to the Peace Statue on Brighton Beach – the electrical whizz kid Babbs, Mountain Girl – but Brand, the man sitting in front of

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them get shot off their bikes by a Southern hick on the highway heading home from New Orleans. “WE BLEW IT!” chant Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters a year earlier in the final lines of Tom Wolfe’s novel. Well, the acid must have been good, if it helped them see that

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lived in The Farm, a religious commune in Tennessee. The WELL quickly became known as the online hangout of Deadheads, the dedicated fans of the Merry Pranksters’ in-house band, the Grateful Dead. And so it was that the sixties vibe was preserved into the eighties and beyond, if only on disk

Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson

by Corey Seymour, Johnny Depp and Jann S. Wenner  · 31 Oct 2007  · 462pp  · 151,805 words

Copyright Editor’s Note Foreword Introduction Chapter One: Coming of Age in Louisville Chapter Two: An Itinerant Professional Chapter Three: San Francisco, Hells Angels, and Merry Pranksters Chapter Four: Freak Power in the Rockies Chapter Five: The Golden Age of Gonzo Chapter Six: A New Voice on the Campaign Trail Chapter Seven

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out of the trailer, as it usually does. It was there where he mostly wrote Hell’s Angels. CHAPTER THREE San Francisco, Hells Angels, and Merry Pranksters I saw him two days after they beat him up. Both of his eyes were filled with blood. His ribs were taped. He could hardly

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drive.” Juan was with us, and he was still an infant. We drove up through these big evergreens, and we knew that Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were under surveillance at the time. There were narcotics agents and police in the hills looking to catch anybody doing anything wrong. And then we

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saw this huge banner stretched across the road and across the river that read, “The Merry Pranksters Welcome the Hells Angels.” I can’t imagine what the law must have thought when they saw that sign. Neal Cassady was there, and Ginsberg

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, and Cassady’s ex-wife. Kesey played this four-hour documentary of the Magic Bus and the Merry Pranksters doing their thing. After a while you couldn’t watch anymore. It was just endless people smoking and being high and being silly; smoking, being

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was writing The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I had gathered from Hell’s Angels that he had been present when Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters gave a party for the Hells Angels, which had happened before I had even known about Kesey and the Pranksters. I called Hunter up from

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World

by Joseph Menn  · 3 Jun 2019  · 302pp  · 85,877 words

adoption, and, as Mann put it, “better living through chemistry.” Even before the Dead had their name, they were a part of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, the eclectic and idealistic group that drove through America to have fun messing with people and to spread the good news about LSD. Another Prankster

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broader hacking scene: the modern hacking conference. And it was one of the reasons that Jesse helped turn cDc into a 1990s successor to the Merry Pranksters, as Barlow saw it. Like the Pranksters, the group would exude idealistic joy at tweaking the establishment and describing the rapidly evolving world they saw

…

, cDc relationship with, 58–62, 67–68, 80. See also Hong Kong Blondes Medium (website), 99 Mentor, the, 44 Mercer, Rebekah, 196 Mercer, Robert, 196 Merry Pranksters, 22–23 Messiah Village, 48–49 Metasploit, 177 #MeToo, 158 Microsoft, 37, 63, 108, 196, 212 BackOffice software, 66, 69 Back Orifice, response to, 67

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