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Kesey taking magic bus and Pranksters to Britain

They'll celebrate last solar eclipse of millennium

Monday, July 12, 1999

PLEASANT HILL, Ore. -- A smile of dreamy delight plays over Ken Kesey's face as he clicks a computer mouse to play home movies of his 1964 bus trip across America, chronicled in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."

Feeling dropped off in the dust by his publisher with no new best seller in sight, the author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion" is undaunted.

He's hitting the road again with his band of pals, the Merry Pranksters, taking the latest incarnation of his magic bus on a "Search for Merlin" tour of Great Britain to celebrate the last solar eclipse of the millennium. Along the way, he's creating an ending and a wider audience for these old home movies.

"It's like (Jerry) Garcia said, 'The '60s ain't over 'til the fat lady gets high,'" Kesey laughed.

Sitting before a pair of video monitors where he edits the reel-upon-reel of film transferred to tape from the bus trip that became an icon of the '60s, Kesey, 63, still gets a kick out of watching the stream-of-consciousness rap-babble of "On The Road" wheelman Neal Cassidy.

"There's something about Cassidy that keeps this nation moving and meeting itself," Kesey marveled as he watched the man immortalized in Jack Kerouac's novel of another cross-country ramble get up from the wheel, leaving the bus to find its own path through the desert for a while.

"He's an avatar," the embodiment of those bygone times, he said.

For Kesey, the "Search for Merlin" tour continues the same journey, though in a different light.

In 1964, the nation was mourning the death of President Kennedy. Kesey was a literary lion fresh from the blockbuster success of "Cuckoo's Nest," and had just finished "Notion." Filled with hope despite the demise of Camelot, Kesey and pals painted an old school bus with psychedelic swirls of color. The destination sign on the front of the bus was inscribed with the word "Further."

They headed east to the New York World's Fair with jugs of LSD punch to light the way. Using these same home movies, Tom Wolfe chronicled the trip in his book "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."

In the now, the nation mourns President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. Kesey hasn't produced a solo novel since "Sailor Song" in 1992, and the only publisher he has ever known turned loose his longtime editor. Camelot died with Kennedy and Kesey and his pals are looking for the lost wizard. A documentary crew is wrapping the old home movies in with the "Merlin" tour for a piece for British television.

Viking Penguin still has most of Kesey's titles in print, and plans to bring out his jail journals from a 1965 drug bust in the fall of 2000, said Paul Slovak, the vice president for publicity who has taken over as Kesey's editor.

But the author feels alienated by the loss of editor David Stanford.

"It's like getting a divorce or buying a new tractor," said Kesey, taking a break from mowing hay at his farm.

Stanford is still working on Kesey's manuscript for "Seven Prayers by Grandma Whittier," a fictional encounter with his grandmother as she slides into Alzheimer's disease. An agent is shopping the manuscript around. Kesey also wants to write an autobiography told through the voices of animals.

But there is no new novel growing inside his head or his heart.

"I am a homeless author since they fired my editor," he said. "They continue to want me to do another 'Cuckoo's Nest.' It will just be another 'Cuckoo's Nest."'

With the subversive mind of "Cuckoo's Nest" hero R.P. McMurphy, Kesey likes the idea of publishing on the Internet, bypassing the publishing houses, and broadcasting smaller pieces of performance art on pirate radio and television.

"It's just going to wash the foundation out from under L.A. and New York and what they say," he said. "If Shakespeare were writing today, he wouldn't use a quill pen, he would use the best tool he could find. Right now, the best tool is the video camera, and these pirate stations."

On bus trips, Kesey uses a little portable transmitter to broadcast songs and commentary to passing motorists, letting them in on the gig by flashing a sign telling them to tune to KBUZ radio.

"It won't be long before, from this little place, we will be able to broadcast pirate TV," he said as he sat before the video monitors in the cluttered former motel room that serves as headquarters of the "Search for Merlin." "We've already got the big antenna out there. The stuff we need to do doesn't stand up under too close a scrutiny."

For those interested in closer scrutiny, Cafe Productions Limited of London, which specializes in anthropological subjects, is wrapping together the 1964 bus trip and the 1999 "Search for Merlin" tour in a documentary for British independent television Channel 4.

The original Further lies a-mouldering in the swamp on Kesey's farm, replaced by a newer model that couldn't fool the Smithsonian when Kesey tried to give it to the nation's attic.

When California Highway Patrol pulled his bus over 35 years ago, they didn't bother to look for drugs, never suspecting the bunch of giggling college kids on vacation. But before shipping the new Further to England, Kesey hired a drug-sniffing dog to go through it to be sure there would be no surprises at customs.

The Pranksters don't need drugs, anyway.

"It's like somebody said, all you have to do is start the bus and a Prankster hallucinates like Pavlov's dog," Kesey said.

The merry crew -- most of them still live near Kesey's farm -- is scheduled to board the bus in Brighton, England, on Aug. 6. The next day they visit Stonehenge and give their first performances in the village of Podimore. Then its on the road for 17 more gigs around England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland before returning home Aug. 31.

The highlight will be Aug. 11, when the final solar eclipse of the millennium occurs over Great Britain. Kesey and the Pranksters, dressed in onion sacks for chain mail, will do their "Search for Merlin" thing portraying knights of the Not-So-Round Table in the dramatic outdoor setting of the Minack Theater, on the rocky coast near Land's End.

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