American Fun Read online

  Kesey? Not so much. He was all about personal freedom. Like many of the young white men who would form the sixties counterculture, his basic political rights were secure. In the spirit of the rebel without a cause, Kesey took pleasure in rebellion proper—against bugbears of authoritarianism and narrow-mindedness—and flew off in search of absolute American liberty: sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, bullhorns.

  A talented young actor and wrestler, Ken Kesey came to Stanford University’s Writing Seminars in 1958 and moved with his wife, Faye, a fellow working-class Oregonian, into the woodsy enclave of Perry Lane, the same bastion of bohemian exclusivity where Thorstein Veblen had lived at the turn of the century. Kesey, with his junky dooryard and bad table manners, finally alienated the colony’s tweedy elite when, in the fall of 1959, he participated in CIA-funded laboratory experiments with LSD, a drug unheard-of by the rest of world, then passed it around among his neighbors. The history of American fun often entails forbidden booze. At Merry Mount, on the wharf, in the Wild West, in speakeasies during Prohibition, alcohol is the illicit social liberator that puts people in the mood for dancing and pranks. Cocaine had amped up the hip jazz crowd; marijuana was popular among mid-twentieth-century Mexican Americans and beats. But the designer drug Kesey brought home to Perry Lane, and which attracted curious hipsters from all around Northern California (Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Robert Stone, Larry McMurtry, and Jerry Garcia were among the now-familiar names), was proof that rebellious American pleasure had entered the nuclear age. To the acid taker, its benefits seemed limitless. As a passport to lunacy and cosmic amusement, it left alcohol to a quainter time. Kesey was eager to get its message into the world. He served it to guests in his venison chili.

  With the proceeds from his first novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the weirder passages of which he wrote on LSD, Kesey established his own psychedelic Merry Mount, in a redwood forest outside the “Wilde West” town of La Honda. He equipped his log-cabin lodge for wild parties and guided head trips into the woods, where loudspeakers, light shows, and avant-garde “Funk Art”—like the copulating male and female sculptures that orgasmed with garden hoses—anticipated the 360-degree “happenings” that would typify the coming era. Among the dropouts, drifters, writers, and heads who answered Kesey’s open invitation, Kenneth Babbs—an honors English major and an NCAA basketball star who most recently had flown choppers for the Marines in Vietnam—“introduced the idea of pranks,” writes Tom Wolfe, “great public put-ons they could perform.” The American institution of pranks, which dated back to the scroll of lascivious verse that Morton tacked up for Plymouth’s delectation, was just the trick for rousing a nation lulled to stupor by professionalism and obedience. But it was one thing to keep shocking the rustic folks of La Honda, another altogether to take their show on the road and electrify the keyed-up U.S. citizenry. With the introduction of a 1939 school bus, every inch of it painted with Day-Glo mischief, wired inside and out with microphones and loudspeakers for an ongoing dialogue with clueless America, what began as a road trip to New York City, where Kesey’s second novel was being released, was transformed into a “superprank.”

  They startled pedestrians and gas station attendants with flamboyant costumes and bemusing nicknames—Hassler, Dis-Mount, Lord Byron Styrofoam. Kesey wore a pink miniskirt, pink socks, and pink shades and wrapped his head in Old Glory to become “Captain Flag”; he demanded salutes along the Jersey Turnpike. Cassady, the lead-foot chauffeur, was “Sir Speed Limit.” They staged impromptu games with red rubber balls and “tootled” passersby with flutes from the roof of their bus, interpreting their expressions with merry riffs. Inside the bus, among the Pranksters themselves, their only edict was to “go with the flow” and let each have his or her own trip—even if that meant going clinically insane, as happened to a couple of them. Most of them, however, just rode the white water. On Lake Pontchartrain, New Orleans, they haplessly stopped at a segregated black beach, where the Prankster named Zonker was nearly trounced for being white (his wide, tripping grin saved his hide) and where a crowd of blacks surrounded the bus for an impromptu party, “doing rock dances and the dirty boogie” to a blaring Jimmy Smith record—until the cops shoved the bus along. And in Millbrook, New York, paying a highly anticipated visit to Timothy Leary’s League for Spiritual Discovery, they encountered a surprising culture clash. Expecting a summit of the nation’s (microscopic) psychedelic community, they arrived at the peaceful upstate retreat in a torrent of American flags and loud rock. But they could have been crashing Plymouth Plantation for all the warmth in the LSD’s welcome. Leary, who had been kicked off Harvard’s faculty for turning students on to acid, was taking a contemplative three-day trip and would meet only with the celebrated Cassady. His followers regarded them with beatific dismay. Ignoring the chilly reception, Babbs elbowed in and led everyone on “the first annual tour of the Prankster’s Ancestral Mansion.” West Coast fun was coming home to roost. Or as Leary’s colleague Richard Alpert (aka Baba Ram Dass) expressed it at the time: “I feel like we’re a pastoral Indian village invaded by a whooping cowboy band of Wild West saloon carousers.”

  As far as the Pranksters were concerned, Leary and his followers were establishment types just playing another social “game.” The Pranksters wanted to change the game—as quickly and as often as they pleased. All that mattered was that they stayed “out-front.” So long as they were as frank and freaky as their most natural selves, they permitted themselves—and each other—to be as rude as they pleased, fostering a roughneck sense of civility that was as old as the California hills. This rollicking attitude liberated these youths as much as their drugs did.

  In the culturally uptight year of 1964, the Pranksters’ mere existence was a prank. The powder in their rifles, of course, was LSD, gunpowder which they wanted to give to the natives. And even though their drug hadn’t yet been made illegal, they enjoyed a de facto outlaw status. Not long after the Pranksters returned to La Honda, cops and Feds staked out their compound, providing a new source of childish amusement. A sign on the lodge called the chief narc by name: “We’re Clean, Willie!” Communiqués were sent over loudspeakers in the woods. “It was fun,” Wolfe writes, “the cop game.” Even the raid, when it happened, was “high farce, an opéra bouffe,” full of great setups for comebacks and wisecracks. Kesey may or may not have been caught flushing some marijuana, but fourteen of them were arrested all the same, mostly for satirically resisting arrest. The upshot was a wave of sympathetic publicity among San Francisco’s embryonic counterculture—for whom Kesey became a “hipster Christ” and “modern mystic.” In the tense months to come, awaiting his trial, unwilling to lie low, he posted a red-white-and-blue banner across the entrance to his property, stating, “the merry pranksters welcome THE HELL’S ANGELS.” It hailed what would become a three-day blowout.

  On August 7, 1965, the infamously violent and racist biker gang, some of whom Kesey had met through Hunter S. Thompson, came rumbling into La Honda past ten flashing squad cars and were greeted by a crowd of Perry Lane regulars, along with curious Bay Area intellectuals like Alpert and Allen Ginsberg. But the meeting wasn’t frosty like the Ancestral Mansion tour. When the beer got flowing—and then the LSD, which the Angels were encountering for the first time—it better resembled the miners’ ball that J. D. Borthwick observed at Angels Camp. Sidestepping all their cultural, ethnic, and ethical conflicts, the bands of outlaws locked (figurative) elbows and had a rowdy California frolic. The Pranksters even joshed the Angels, who found it refreshing. Lord Byron Styrofoam ad-libbed a fifty-stanza blues, and eventually everyone was joining in the chorus:

  Oh, but it’s great to be an Angel,

  And be dirty all the time!

  And what fun it was to be an outlaw, with cops and Feds surrounding your premises and thousands more Americans starting to get the joke.

  THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WEREN’T the era’s premier pranksters—that distinction goes to the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Th
is so-called street theater company, started in 1959 by R. G. Davis, was a funmakers’ training camp for the as-yet unchristened Haight-Ashbury district. Put off by commercial theater and what he called “the inordinate boredom of middle-class life,” Ron Davis, a political activist from Ohio University, combined his leftist beliefs, his stateside training in modern dance, and his French training in traditional mime to found an improvisational and radically participatory new American drama. In the spring of 1960, he quit as assistant director of San Francisco’s groundbreaking Actor’s Workshop (convinced that they had sold out by accepting a Ford grant) and revived the Renaissance form of commedia dell’arte, originally a “working-class” drama that, as he described it, “pleased its audience by farting and belching at the stuffier stuffed classes.” Appropriately, commedia, with its grotesque masks and satire, had also taught Thomas Morton his best tricks.

  If Morton tailored the commedia to suit his New World conditions, the Mime Troupe repurposed its sixteenth-century scripts to surprise even post-beat San Franciscans—turning, for instance, bubbly medieval rounds into Mexican political songs. Many of their techniques were fashioned from early jazz. Like Buddy Bolden’s dance-based music, they kept an ongoing dialogue with the audience, which Davis called their “guinea pig.” And they played the commedia’s characteristic “lazzi” (stock comic routines) like “riff[s] of jazz from show to show,” reinventing them each time with new stunts and pratfalls. Improvisation and what Davis called “participatory fun” were essential to both street theater and jazz. In both art forms, “riffs or bits and gags are played out” according to “intuition and feel,” and the crowd’s reactions drive the performance. The Mime Troupe began their show as they assembled their wooden stage; they also included the audience in their warm-up exercises, blurring, then erasing, the line of spectatorship. To clinch the deal, their performances were free, a feature that guaranteed a big bohemian following.

  Their first outdoor performances were held in Golden Gate Park, at the mercy of the Park Commission, whose censorship they routinely ignored. By the summer of 1965, however, when their reputation for causing trouble rose with the tide of political unrest, the commission was paying much closer attention and closed Giordano Bruno’s Il Candelaio (1582) after three performances, calling it “indecent, obscene, and offensive.” Not entirely persuaded, the troupe widely advertised a fourth performance that drew a crowd of more than a thousand. Strangely, they hadn’t erected a stage. Davis, dressed in character as Brighella, announced that the permit had been revoked, engaged the crowd in a lively debate, and started the show as such: “Ladieeeees and Gentlemen, Il Troupo di Mimo di San Francisco, presents for your enjoyment this afternoon … AN ARREST!” He leapt with a flourish, was arrested as promised, and “ ‘guerrilla theatre’ was born.”

  The Mime Troupe’s theatrical acts of rebellion were right in step with the season. Adding teeth (and a grin) to the radical politics of Berkeley’s FSM and the straitlaced SDS (with whom the troupe shared a Howard Street loft); marrying Lenny Bruce ribaldry with the fun-loving audacity of the long-haired, costumed, and free-living “hippies” (who had only recently discovered the Haight-Ashbury’s surplus of cheap, colorful Victorian mansions), these populist entertainers turned willing outlaws would soon become the leaders and gadflies and conscience of a roiling Bay Area counterculture. But they lay low for most of ’64 and ’65, writing scripts and leisurely rehearsing plays while the rest of the world seemed to catch fire. While: race riots sparked off in Rochester, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. While: U.S. troops dropped bombs on Vietnam. While: Bob Dylan went electric, the Beatles discovered sitars, and an amateur chemist named Augustus “Owsley” Stanley III, living in Berkeley, allegedly cooked up enough LSD to turn on San Francisco’s every man, woman, and child—twice.

  Pine Street, where the Haight-Ashbury community began, was home to freaks in nineteenth-century dress. They reactivated their mansions’ gaslights. They smoked (and dealt) marijuana. But that was about it. In early 1965, nightlife was scarce; Tracy’s Donuts was where you went for food. So it almost makes sense that a contingent of young anachronists, following an art band called the Charlatans, pioneers of psychedelic music and style, should have decamped to Virginia City, Nevada—Mark Twain and Dan De Quille’s old Comstock Lode haunts—where a Berkeley beat named Chan Laughlin had opened the red-velvet Red Dog Saloon, devoted to campy Wild West fun. “This is an Old Western town,” Laughlin told his crowd, “and we’re more Old Western than anybody else. Remember when your feet hit the floor in the morning, you’re in a Grade B movie.”

  Freaks flocked in from states away. Milan Melvin remembered it as “an outlaw enclave” for an “eclectic mixture” of the new western riffraff: “revolutionaries, outlaws, hustlers and hookers and go-go dancers and anarchists and beatniks and musicians and Indians. You know, quality people. People you could trust.” The Red Dog scenesters got deep into their roles—they shot jiggers of bourbon and stray jackass rabbits; the men wore chaps, the women wore garters, and the vivacious chanteuse Lynn Hughes served as the saloon’s official “Miss Kitty.” The Charlatans, whose acid rock blended early blues with Appalachian old-time folk, may have been the most deliberate of them all. With their cowboy garb and rough demeanor, they openly defied the British Invasion vogue being slavishly followed by their contemporaries: “We knew we were American, so we decided to be … American.”

  The Red Dog’s adherents were the avant-garde of 1965: they were high at all times and held legendary Monday-night LSD parties that attracted bands from up and down the coast. They advertised with drippy art nouveau posters and inaugurated Bill Ham’s sound-sensitive “lightbox,” a contraption that used colored lights and a chicken rotisserie to splash trippy prismatic designs on the walls. And yet to maintain that 1860s Washoe thrill, they also went around lethally armed, from the pistol-packing bartenders to the rifle-toting Charlatans; for a couple of weeks that summer, Mark Unobsky, the saloon’s proprietor, paid everyone’s wages in firearms. Their arsenal notwithstanding, however, the Red Dog’s band of longhair outlaws was genial, jovial, and self-regulating. “The bottom line,” Laughlin recalled, “is that almost nobody started any trouble, and very, very few persisted after Washoe Mike [Jones]”—the massive but gentle Native American bouncer, dressed in a purple velvet sash and black top hat—“pointed out to them the benefits of being peaceful.”

  Like the Pranksters and the Mime Troupe and the countless new communes springing up all across America, the Red Dog crowd was one more “tribe” that banded together in the name of freedom. Doyle Nance, a resident carpenter, said the participants came “from all phases of life” and made the place itself “a fireball.… You come inside the Red Dog Saloon and you just knew you’d entered someplace that was completely different.” But Virginia City was still the Old West, so when some Nevada teens were caught with marijuana, the California interlopers fell out of favor. And when one of their number was seen in the street portaging an armload of guns, V.C. sent its calling card: a tombstone decorated with the managers’ names. Late that savage summer, after a visit from the Merry Pranksters, who brought along one of their own trademark happenings (what they were now calling “acid tests”), the Red Dogs followed in Mark Twain’s footsteps: skulking off in fear to San Francisco.

  Back on Pine Street, four Red Dog alumni, living in what they called the “Dog House,” kept the Virginia City scene humming by hosting weekly “Tribute” dances at Longshoreman’s Hall near Fisherman’s Wharf. Their parents provided the seed money; they called themselves “the Family Dog.” For the inaugural dance—a tribute to Marvel Comics hero Dr. Strange—they booked the Charlatans (who performed in dusty Comstock style), two new mod bands called the Great Society and Jefferson Airplane, and a satirical DJ called “the Moose” to serve as the evening’s MC. It was a rock show that starred its theatrical audience: costumed kids mingling with Hell’s Angels and Allen Ginsberg and inventing snaky, trippy new dances
. The second dance party, “A Tribute to Sparkle Plenty,” was just as fun and peaceable and weird; the Airplane didn’t perform, but they showed up on acid, as did Jerry Garcia’s band, the Warlocks, angling to get booked for future events. The third dance, “A Tribute to Ming the Merciless,” resulted in broken windows and teenage fisticuffs while Frank Zappa, leading his L.A. band, the Mothers of Invention, “improvised lyrics about the fights on the floor.”

  But that same night, November 6, 1965, a much more significant event went down in the Mime Troupe’s scruffy practice loft. Five days earlier, Ron Davis had been found guilty for the truncated Il Candelaio performance, a conviction that added to their financial woes, so their business manager, a talented young businessman named Bill Graham, who had spent his childhood fleeing the Nazis, cruised the streets in a rented white Cadillac and pamphleted a festive “Appeal” for the troupe, a rock show starring the Airplane and the Fugs that was all the sexier for its anti-censorship cause. Outside the warehouse, hopefuls snaked around the block. At the door they were met by a sliding donation scale—from $48 (for the affluent) down to just anything (for the broke). Inside the loft, the walls were Day-Glo, donated fruit dangled from the ceiling, art films were “liquid” projected onto hanging bedsheets, and as the Haight-Ashbury historian Charles Perry puts it, hundreds of “people who’d never heard of the Family Dog dances or Kesey’s acid parties came out and experienced the same wide-eyed, unforeseeable freedom to act as strange as they felt.” The Appeal “represented,” as Bill Graham remembered it, “the artistic community coming together”—the writers, artists, actors, jazz and rock musicians, all of San Francisco’s sundry scenes; at the time he had also exclaimed: “This is the business of the future!” Davis remembers Graham being “slightly hysterical about collecting this money.” The cops tried to shut it down at twelve, but Graham, in all his cocksure diplomacy, fibbed that the crowd was still waiting for Rudy Vallee and Frank Sinatra; he then bartered with the crowd to give up their places to the hopefuls waiting outside. As such, he kept it jumping till dawn, when Allen Ginsberg led the cleanup crew in a few kitchen-yoga mantras.