TRIPS FESTIVAL 1966

TRIPS FESTIVAL 1966

EXTRACT:

|...| Tom Wolfe, 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 1968

Tom Wolfe: "It was actually Stewart Brand who thought up the great Trips Festival of January 1966. Brand and a San Francisco artist, Ramon Sender. Brand was 27 and an ex-biologist who had run across the Indian peyote cults in Arizona and New Mexico. Brand founded an organization called America Needs Indians. And then one day he took some LSD, right after an Explorer satellite went up to photograph the earth, and as the old synapses began rapping around inside his skull at 5,000 thoughts per second, he was struck with one of those questions that inflame men's brains: Why Haven't We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?—and he drove across America from Berkeley, California, to 116th Street, New York City, selling buttons with that legend on them to Leftists, Rightists, Fundamentalists, Theosophists, malcontents, anyone with the health or stealth of paranoia or the put-on in their souls ...

He and his friend Sender got the idea of pulling together all the new forms of expression that were kicking around in the hip world at that moment and having a Super Acid Test out in the open. Hire a hall and call in the multitudes. They found an impresario for the thing, Bill Graham, a New Yorker who had a lot of cachet in the hip world of San Francisco as a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which used to get busted for putting on political dumb shows in the park, that kind of thing. The Trips Festival was set for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, January 21—23, at the Longshoremen's Hall in San Francisco. The Trips Festival was billed as a big celebration that was going to simulate an LSD experience, minus the LSD, using light effects and music, mainly. The big night, Saturday night, was going to be called The Acid Test, featuring Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters."