Evening Standard May 1969
You don’t meet too many men with the Stars and Stripes painted in enamel on their false teeth. Truth to tell Ken Kesey is the only one I know. Every time he smiles, which is pretty frequently on a good sunny day, the zip in his mouth breaks apart and his upper right incisor says a pepperminted ‘God Bless America’ in red, white and blue.
We’re rolling and waltzing, and power jerking and swanking and feeling good behind the blue, anti-glare windscreen of his maltreated Cadillac – Kesey and me and a New York girl disciple, all doe eyes and sweeping adoration; round we go along the edges of Hampstead Heath, down the lanes and under the blossom, and Kesey’s telling us how he came to be the one guy we know with an American flag printed on his tooth. And he’s talking in that down-home cowboy way that he does:
‘You see, I was running from the FBI when I crashed into my lawyer and wrecked my car. And somehow I caught my head, so that my tooth was hanging out by the nerves. But I had to keep hiding. So I waited in a Laundromat for a while. It’s funny how you can just sit in a Laundromat and no one ever thinks of looking for you there. But the pain was terrible, so I finally made it over to a dentist I know. But he also happened to be an acid-head. And while he was fixing me he said “Hey, d’you want a tooth with the Stars and Stripes on it?” and I said “Yeh, that’d be nice” and so here it is. You never think these things can really happen.’ And he unplugs his plate with its garish token and waves it around for all to see.
Ken Kesey, the man who began the LSD fascination of hippy California, who believes he invented the word ‘trip’, to describe the sensation, and then introduced psychedelia to provide a form of it; who turned on Hell’s Angels, and went on the first Magical Mystery Tour ever – years before the Beatles, is here in London, in a borrowed flat, en route for Stonehenge, the Wailing Wall and the Great Pyramid.
Here in London with his three children, his wife Faye, his friend Spider, and now some new followers like Dilly Disciple from New York who’s sitting here with us saying how we ought to stop and get some of Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne on account of how it has some opium extract, and rabbiting on about his trip and that trip and whatever kind of trip a man can imagine.
And then there’s this other girl, too, who’s staying with the Kesey’s, ‘like she’s a Wasp,’ says Dilly Disciple, ‘with the hair and the turned up nose, and she’s very virginal and all that.’ And I get the idea that there’s no love lost between the Wasp and Dilly Disciple. But what a household it must be.
Kesey is thirty-three, and was born in Oregon. Faye, who is a woman of remarkable yet passive, tranquil beauty, was his childhood sweetheart, and they married in their first year of college. After college they graduated to a beat generation community, where Kesey wrote his first two novels one of which (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) was considered brilliant by some reviewers, and sold his body to a local clinic for their experiments into a drug called lysergic acid diethylamide – LSD. Under the surveillance of the white-coated clinic staff Ken Kesey had become the world’s first acid-head guinea pig.
Soon he was turning-on everyone in his community. But when the bulldozers came to remove the community they fixed up ‘an old 1939 International Harvester yellow school bus,’ wired it for the thousands of watts needed to play their rock and roll music, aerosolled it in Day-Glo mandalas, and took themselves off on a long cross-continent acid trek of the United States.
Back in California on various narcotic charges, he faked a suicide to give the FBI the slip, slipped over the border into Mexico, and was eventually captured when, with a degree of contempt bordering on the foolhardy, he went back to San Francisco and appeared on television.
Considering the mischief he and his followers had created in the eyes of the police he was lucky to get off with six months on a work farm. But by this time he was beyond acid.
‘No, I haven’t taken acid in quite some time. We’re now into other things. There’s not a great deal of energy in dope. It’s move now to the occult or militancy,’ he says in his Hampstead flat, pulling on his socks, one bright red, one brighter orange, and snorting up his cold. He had come to the door just in his trousers, big as a bear, chest coated with blond curls, hair almost gone on the top but thick as a rug down the sides and round his ears. He puts on a T-shirt and the inevitable Indian token around his neck and finds a leather jacket: ‘I shot this elk with a bow and arrow myself. And had Mountain Girl make it up into this jacket for me,’ he says.
Since he first came to Britain last December with The Grateful Dead and Hell’s Angels and those Harley Davidsons and egg-nog, he has become quite an Anglophile. England is the holiest place he’s ever been, and Stonehenge is the ‘heaviest’, he says.
‘We’ve traced our way back right from the West Coast to the New England colonies and then back here, and Stonehenge is the oldest place we can find. We’re going down there for the summer solstice, to see the sun come up between those great pillars that are as big as two Buicks.
‘And then we’ll get my bus over here and go off to the cathedral at Chartes and Dachau and the Wailing Wall and the Great Pyramids. I haven’t seen those places but I figure that any place that took so much in human endeavour to build must be a very heavy place to be.’
He goes on rapping: ‘One of the troubles with all that drop-out scene was that at the same time as throwing away all of the bad things of the past and the environment, they also turned loose a lot of the good stuff too.
‘But right now I think that a lot of young people are just sitting around and waiting and waiting and watching. Most people think that whatever’s going to happen will be a bad thing, but I don’t believe that, I think something is going to happen and it will be a good thing.’
Something like the millennium, or cargo cults?
‘Maybe a cataclysm that will sink California and New York by earthquakes and blow out all the old tubes,’ he answers.
He’s also here to make a record in a spoken word series for Apple. But since their economy measures he’s found himself without an office or co-operation. He’s a little bitter about it, but he’s carrying on with making the tapes anyway.
‘I write a lot. I just haven’t written anything that pleases me for a long time. Nothing I’ve done communicates as well as tape does for me.’
He’s a great Peter Pan of a fellow, quick witted and very funny, and driving around London in his cowboy hat and windcheater he looks like some leftover from Bonanza.
And later when Dilly Disciple is still on about her Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne we go to find a chemist’s. Down Finchley Road into a side street, and there’s nowhere to park. Without a moment’s hesitation Kesey charges the pavement. The great Cadillac bucks and jumps on its hydraulics and down the pavement we go between shops and lamp-posts, coming to rest half on and half off the road and lodged at a forty-five degree angle to the kerb.
A little old butcher carrying a meat chopper rushes from his shop and makes insane motioning gestures towards the Cadillac’s twin wafer-thin fins. ‘Shall I chop a bit off?’ he says. And Kesey laughs. He always laughs.
