Episode 68: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Are you on the bus or off it, man? The book commies, dear listener, are decidedly off it. Or rather, we’re punching, clawing, screaming, and fighting our way out of this goddamn thing, past balls-trippin’ Ken Kesey, speed-addled Neal Cassady, the rest of the Merry Pranksters, and the 400+ freaking pages Tom Wolfe decided to write about them. It’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) this week, and we’re wrapping up our convo on the New Journalism and talking the counterculture’s reactionary side, how saying “f*ck it” actually isn’t a politic, man, and the psychology of going through one’s professional life wearing an all-white three-piece suit.

We read the Picador USA edition. Wolfe thought he basically invented New Journalism, and he did coin the term in the 1973 anthology called The New Journalism. You can check that out for more from Wolfe and our old pals Didion, Capote, McGinniss, and other people we might get around to talking about on the show someday. If you don’t want to read Acid Test, or at least want a skimming aid, just watch Magic Trip, the 2011 (heavily edited) release of the film from the Pranksters’ 1964 escapades. Cassady is very high.

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