In the spring of 1964, Ken Kesey invested nearly all his writing royalties and created a company known as Intrepid Trips, Inc., which funded the adventures of the Merry Pranksters -- essentially a group of hippies determined to live and explore life to the fullest, in the Here and Now. To the establishment, the Pranksters were the epitome of the stereotype of the era, the Drug-Crazed Freak. Kesey's first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, (about an insane asylum that revealed the madness of society itself) and his then just-completed second novel, Sometimes A Great Notion (about the logging business) had both received critical acclaim, and both eventually wound up on the silver screen. Kesey, at age 28, was being heralded as one the great writers of the day. With Intrepid Trips established, Kesey bought an old bus, a 1939 International Harvester school bus to be exact, fully equipped with bunks, a refrigerator, cabinets and sink, the perfect road vehicle. With Babbs and numerous other Pranksters -- including Neal Cassady (Speed Limit,) Kesey's brother Chuck, Carolyn Adams (Mountain Girl,) Page Browning, George Walker, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, and Mike Hagen (Mal Function)-- Kesey painted every last inch of the old school bus in blasting psychedelic day-glo patterns, swirling colors, images and mandalas. The Pranksters rigged it with a sound system so they could broadcast outside as well as inside of the bus, and cut a hole in the roof so anyone who felt like it could sit up there and play music or trip on the bird's eye view of the ride. Finally, they fashioned a destination sign and placed it on the front of the bus: 'Furthur' it read. They balanced it with one on the back that read: 'Weird Load' When the bus was finally Prankster approved, they mixed up a huge batch of orange juice. Not just any orange juice. But orange juice spiked with LSD. Since LSD would not be outlawed until 1966, this was the one drug on board that was perfectly legal. On a warm summer day, the Weird Load took off bound for New York. There, they would take in the World's Fair and celebrate the publication of Kesey's second book. The plan was to film the journey along the way. It was supposed to be the first acid movie, a veritable breakthrough in artistic expression. It was, in fact, the original magical mystery tour. Beyond the acid, the Pranksters were equipped with costumes --overalls, T-shirts, jeans, most all accented in screeching green and halting orange day-glo. Babbs, especially, was seriously into day-glo, and used it to paint virtually everything, including his face. The Prankstersí now-famous journey, chronicled in Tom Wolfe's American classic, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test included endless encounters with straight America. For instance, Kesey was invited to speak at a Unitarian Church Conference for youth, influencing quite a number before the talk was done. The Pranksters partied with the Hell's Angels; tripped through the Beatles performance at the Cow Palace; and virtually blew away Timothy Leary and his cast of LSD voyagers with their wild and crazy approach to life. As strange as Leary may have been to the average American bear, Kesey and the Pranksters were viewed by the Leary crew as downright -- weird. Kesey rose to prominence in the psychedelic scene, and was hailed as 'The Chief' among those who followed his lead. The Merry Pranksters took their philosophy of living NOW public with staged Acid Tests -- public happenings where people could explore the far reaches of consciousness and achieve altered states through readily available psychedelics, primarily LSD. In fact, just about everything truly Sixties -- from the swirling day-glo or blacklight, radiantly colorful pop art and op art to the Grateful Dead's acid rock sound to campus rebellion against the establishment -- was seeded by the Merry Pranksters. They did it first. It wasn't all a party. Kesey was arrested twice for possession of marijuana, spent some months in Mexico as a fugitive from justice, and ultimately served five months on a work farm and three years probation. In the end, Kesey urged young people to go beyond acid. Some saw it as a cop out, because, they claimed, he didn't want to go to jail. Can't blame him for that. But, really, it did make sense. And a few people got it. A few people got on that bus, too. And the bus . . . back to the bus. It became bigger than life. A grand metaphor that symbolized the 'Question Authority/Think for Yourself/Be Free/Go With The Flow/Good Vibrations/Make Love Not War/Keep On Truckin' Sixties. Either you were on the bus, metaphorically speaking -- or you weren't. Either you got it -- or you didn't. Either you tuned in --or the static ate your brain.

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