Revisiting Ken Kesey's Drugged Out "Magic Trip"

The Atlantic chats with the filmmakers of a new documentary on Ken Kesey and his merry pranksters.



From the piece...



What can we stand to learn from Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters? What makes them relevant today?



AG: This is a tough question. In some ways, Kesey and the Pranksters are hard to remove from their time. The year the bus trip was taken — 1964 — was a year with one foot in the ’50s and one foot in the ’60s to come. Kesey himself felt that the trip might be a kind of agent provocateur for those along the side of the road who were consumed by fear (the shadow of the bomb, the McCarthy era and the recent assassination of John F. Kennedy). He believed in magic and in a definitively American yearning for freedom. That's part of what the bus trip was about: a siren's song to those strapped to the mast to come out and play. Of course, in Greek mythology, the sweet sound of the sirens caused many ships to run aground on the rocks. So too, the freedoms of the ’60s can seem a kind of lunacy today. Indeed, they ran aground at Altamont as early as 1969.



But as easy as it is to dismiss the bus trip (and when you look at the loony antics on film it's even easier) there is also something to admire. Kesey was an explorer — with writing, performance art and hallucinogens. In retrospect, explorers can look silly as we can see, with the benefit of maps written later, all their false starts, wrong turns and bumbling into dead ends. But they also help to blaze trails. The ’50s and the early ’60s (look at Mad Men) were a pretty rigid time. The country was rich but the weight of conformity was heavy. It's hard to even imagine how structured that world was. Today, we are the beneficiaries of cultural freedoms and expanded thinking … that wouldn't be possible without the explorers. (Even Lee Atwater ended up playing the electric guitar!)