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Pastimes : Deadheads -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SIer formerly known as Joe B. who wrote (27707)	11/22/2001 10:40:05 AM
From: Tom Clarke	Respond to of 49843

Glad you caught the Cajun stuff! AAAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

To: SIer formerly known as Joe B. who wrote (27707)	11/22/2001 8:40:20 PM
From: Tom Clarke	Respond to of 49843

This isn't the whole interview, they want you to buy the back issue. Have you ever read Gadfly? If you ever see it on the news stand I highly recommend it. Hope you're having a pleasant Thanksgiving. My Lunch with Kesey By Jayson Whitehead On November 10, sixties icon Ken Kesey died at the age of 66. Author of two seminal novels, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey may be better known today for his revolutionary actions in the 1960s as a proponent of LSD and leader of the Merry Pranksters as immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-aid Acid Test. It was certainly this latter status that led to my meeting with him. In May 1998, I was able to attend an intimate lunch with Kesey and a few others before he was scheduled to speak at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville as part of an exhibit on psychedelia. At our informal get-together at a nearby restaurant, Kesey was subdued and reticent to answer any direct questions (more on this later). At his performance later that day, though, he was what I and everyone else expected. With a small bottle of Vodka always nearby, Kesey ranted and raved about his likes and dislikes. "Cream rises to the top," he stated. "Shit floats to the bottom." "Hunter Thompson?" he posed, raising his hand high. "Cream." The crowd cheered. "Tom Wolfe," he said, obvious disdain in his voice. "Shit!" Raucous laughter and applause ensued. Kesey finished the afternoon in an offbeat fashion. Wrapping a shawl around his head, he recited a children’s story he had first heard from his grandmother (published in 1992 as Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear). For the next 20 minutes, Kesey acted out the different characters. Entertaining as it was, what this role playing had to do with psychedelia—except perhaps for its after-effects—escaped us all. But it seemed to reveal the true essence of Ken Kesey. Much like the character Hank Stamper in Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey that afternoon and over the course of his lifetime displayed a fierce individuality that never conformed to trends, beliefs or any other outside forces. As a result, Kesey blazed a trail that many still follow today and most likely will for some time in the future. But earlier that day, over a lunch of sushi—in between his musings on the potential of the Internet and typical light conversation—I had the chance to ask Kesey a few questions. His responses follow: Gadfly: Why do you think police still fight marijuana as much or even more than they did in the '60s? Kesey: It shows how dangerous they think it still is. And they ought to. It is dangerous to them from a social perspective. Nobody ever had anything physically bad happen to them from it. It's a good danger as far as I'm concerned. I remember when my dad found out my brother Chuck and I were dealing with drugs in one way or the other. We hadn't ever associated LSD with drugs. We thought of drugs as bad stuff like heroin. We sent off to the Department of Agriculture in Washington to get some psilocybin spores for some stuff we were doing with mushrooms. At that time, the government was investigating psilocybin's effect on people's consciousness. And along with all these spores, they sent us a little test tube with a small amount of powder at the bottom of it. Our dad, who was very religious, came over to see the spores and we took this little dab of powder, poured it into a seltzer bottle and divided it up into little glasses. My brother took some, my wife [Faye] took some, I took some and my dad took some. Well, my dad said, "Give me another little glass. I want to be able to feel this." Boy, did he get high. It was the first time he ever found out there was another consciousness to have. After my dad tried psilocybin—Chu When you went back to Oregon after getting out of jail, thousands of people would come visit you at your farm. Was that a mess? It was a mess but you can't really discriminate. You have to take what comes. When everybody left for Woodstock, I had a chance to go around and see what everybody's place looked like. They were all terrible fire hazards. The whole upstairs of the barn was filled with hay, somebody had stuck a candle in a bale and was sleeping up there. It was dangerous. What really broke it apart was the refrigerator. In the refrigerator was their stuff and my stuff, which was our stuff. And their stuff was not our stuff. People would put notes on theirs and that's where the conflict began. Women around the refrigerator didn't want anybody using their stuff. And I realized that they had to get their own refrigerator. Can people still drive up to your place and see you? Yeah. I'm in the phonebook. I always have been. It works a lot better than I think people understand. Being available keeps you from being cultish. You have a life there and your kids go to school there. By and large everybody respects that. Some people come seeking answers and, after hanging around awhile, realize I don't have any answers. They go on to somebody else. During that time [the '60s], it was hectic and scary. But the thing I always worried about was a fire. I'm not at all worried about nuts coming up anymore at all. They show up and we pretty much know what they're like and what to do about them. Faye is really good at it. She takes the phone and she'll know when to lie. But if I hadn't had that phone listed, I would've had a lot more problems. What did you think of the whole hippie and Haight-Ashbury scene? We were never hippies. That was a phenomenon that came way later. People are always surprised when they see pictures of the bus and no one had long hair. I was never really that much a part of it. None of us were. I went to Mexico and hid out for six months or so. When I came back, it was happening. The whole Haight-Ashbury scene had achieved a prominence. I always felt like we were somewhere in the crack between beatniks and hippies—we were crackers. The body of this interview was originally published in the July 1998 edition of Gadfly. gadfly.org