Fact #74683
When:
Short story:
Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters organise the first public Acid Test, in San Jose, California, USA, the same night as the Rolling Stones play the Civic Auditorium.Full article:
Ken Kesey : I owned a big old wooden house in the middle of a redwood park in La Honda. There was a bunch of us, we called ourselves Merry Pranksters, who'd done a bus trip across America together about a year earlier, and now we started doing events at my house. LSD was still legal at this point.
Mountain Girl (Merry Prankster) : We had this idea to give LSD away free to people. Every Saturday night you have a colossal party and invite everybody and turn them all on, show weird movies, light shows, anything we could think of.
Charles Perry (journalist) : After you walked over a little footbridge to Kesey's property, you were kind of in a forest playroom full of people reeling around on acid. There were bizarre things to look at, such as grotesque assemblies glued together from doll parts. Out among the woods were giant metal sculptures you could crawl into and a growing armoury of electronic gadgets, including microphones and amplifiers for anybody who wanted to say or play something weird while being stoned.
Ken Kesey : After a while, the events at La Honda started spilling out into other places, and the name Acid Test got attached to what we were doing. It was a test because we felt like we were choosing warriors to fight on the side of love. We had cards made up that said 'Can you pass the acid test?' We were choosing the people who would go on to become environmentalists, feminists, black panthers.
Lee Quarnstrom (Merry Prankster) : The first Acid Test was held at a place called 'the Spread', a little ranch outside a small town adjacent to Santa Cruz. It happened in the living room. Allen Ginsberg was there, Neal Cassady (Merry Prankster) was there, Jerry Garcia and a couple of the Warlocks were there. It was like a Mickey Rooney movie where we suddenly said, 'Hey, I know, we can put on a show.'
Jerry Garcia (leader, The Warlocks/Grateful Dead] : A guy named Page came to one of our late sets, and he told us about the parties every Saturday night up at Ken Kesey's place. Page said, "You guys should come up there". Luckily, the following week we got fired and we had nothing to do. Saturday comes around and we went to one of those parties that later became known as the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Ken Babbs (Merry Prankster) : Roy Sebern did one of the first light shows. He had an overhead projector and he got a bug and put it on the tray. And this bug was just huge up there on the wall. Then he put a spider on the tray, and these two things fought. I'll never forget it. It was one of the best shows I've ever seen.
Bob Weir (guitarist, Grateful Dead] : The Acid Tests were complete chaos with little knots of quasi-organisation here or there that would occur and then dissipate. A lot of lights, a lot of sound, a lot of speakers all around the room. You would walk by a microphone, for instance, and maybe say something, and then a couple of minutes later you'd hear your own self in some other part of the room coming back at you through several layers of echo. The liquid light shows began there. I think it was the first time anyone saw them. People were rather gaily adorned: dyed hair, colourful clothing and stuff like that. And everybody was loaded to the gills on LSD.
Ken Kesey : So we did these things until it got too big and we had to move them elsewhere. Three or four weeks later (4 December 1965) , we did the first public Acid Test, in San Jose, the same night as The Rolling Stones played the Civic Auditorium. We had various members of the Dead hooked up on three separate floors. They couldn't see each other. It was kind of questioning the notion of stage.
Jerry Garcia : After a while they moved the party out of Kesey's place and started sending guys out to rent bigger rooms. We just set up our equipment and everybody would get high. Kesey and his Pranksters were doing this for a long time, so they knew how to set up these kinds of things. Mostly it was completely free. There were no real performances of any kind. Everybody there was as much the performer as they were the audience. We plugged for five minutes, and we devastated these people. They begged us to come back to the next one, and we did. The neat thing about the acid test was that we could play if we wanted to. But if it was too weird, we didn't have to play. That was the only time we ever had the option of not playing.
(Source : not known)
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Mountain Girl (Merry Prankster) : We had this idea to give LSD away free to people. Every Saturday night you have a colossal party and invite everybody and turn them all on, show weird movies, light shows, anything we could think of.
Charles Perry (journalist) : After you walked over a little footbridge to Kesey's property, you were kind of in a forest playroom full of people reeling around on acid. There were bizarre things to look at, such as grotesque assemblies glued together from doll parts. Out among the woods were giant metal sculptures you could crawl into and a growing armoury of electronic gadgets, including microphones and amplifiers for anybody who wanted to say or play something weird while being stoned.
Ken Kesey : After a while, the events at La Honda started spilling out into other places, and the name Acid Test got attached to what we were doing. It was a test because we felt like we were choosing warriors to fight on the side of love. We had cards made up that said 'Can you pass the acid test?' We were choosing the people who would go on to become environmentalists, feminists, black panthers.
Lee Quarnstrom (Merry Prankster) : The first Acid Test was held at a place called 'the Spread', a little ranch outside a small town adjacent to Santa Cruz. It happened in the living room. Allen Ginsberg was there, Neal Cassady (Merry Prankster) was there, Jerry Garcia and a couple of the Warlocks were there. It was like a Mickey Rooney movie where we suddenly said, 'Hey, I know, we can put on a show.'
Jerry Garcia (leader, The Warlocks/Grateful Dead] : A guy named Page came to one of our late sets, and he told us about the parties every Saturday night up at Ken Kesey's place. Page said, "You guys should come up there". Luckily, the following week we got fired and we had nothing to do. Saturday comes around and we went to one of those parties that later became known as the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Ken Babbs (Merry Prankster) : Roy Sebern did one of the first light shows. He had an overhead projector and he got a bug and put it on the tray. And this bug was just huge up there on the wall. Then he put a spider on the tray, and these two things fought. I'll never forget it. It was one of the best shows I've ever seen.
Bob Weir (guitarist, Grateful Dead] : The Acid Tests were complete chaos with little knots of quasi-organisation here or there that would occur and then dissipate. A lot of lights, a lot of sound, a lot of speakers all around the room. You would walk by a microphone, for instance, and maybe say something, and then a couple of minutes later you'd hear your own self in some other part of the room coming back at you through several layers of echo. The liquid light shows began there. I think it was the first time anyone saw them. People were rather gaily adorned: dyed hair, colourful clothing and stuff like that. And everybody was loaded to the gills on LSD.
Ken Kesey : So we did these things until it got too big and we had to move them elsewhere. Three or four weeks later (4 December 1965) , we did the first public Acid Test, in San Jose, the same night as The Rolling Stones played the Civic Auditorium. We had various members of the Dead hooked up on three separate floors. They couldn't see each other. It was kind of questioning the notion of stage.
Jerry Garcia : After a while they moved the party out of Kesey's place and started sending guys out to rent bigger rooms. We just set up our equipment and everybody would get high. Kesey and his Pranksters were doing this for a long time, so they knew how to set up these kinds of things. Mostly it was completely free. There were no real performances of any kind. Everybody there was as much the performer as they were the audience. We plugged for five minutes, and we devastated these people. They begged us to come back to the next one, and we did. The neat thing about the acid test was that we could play if we wanted to. But if it was too weird, we didn't have to play. That was the only time we ever had the option of not playing.
(Source : not known)