BC Filmmaking Duo Passes the Acid Test

Matt Pidutti and Colby O'Neill weren't even born when, in the summer of 1964, novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters loaded themselves onto a psychedelic school bus and took their now-legendary journey from California to the New York World's Fair.

But that didn't stop the B.C. filmmaking duo and their company, Lotus Eaters Films, from beating out more than 50 others, including the Discovery Channel, for the rights to make a documentary in honour of the trip's 50th anniversary, a cross-country tour with a brand new batch of Pranksters spearheaded by none other than Kesey's son, Zane.

"It's been insane," explains O'Neill, a Denman Island native, over the phone. "We have an event or festival every day, and sometimes we drive five or six hundred miles in-between. We've been all over the place. We've basically been to a different town or city every day for the past four weeks."

The original tour, undertaken in a hand-painted 1939 Harvester School Bus dubbed "Further" and fuelled by copious amounts of LSD, has been credited with jump-starting 1960's acid culture, launching the career of the Grateful Dead, and was famously chronicled in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The original Pranksters were known for making art and music, searching for truth, and experimenting with acid (then legal in the U.S.) as they travelled the country.

The anniversary trip has been somewhat different. There are no drugs, at least not officially. And the route has changed, with the troupe covering roughly 32,000 kilometres over the past eight weeks, with stops in small towns, major cities and at dozens of American arts and music festivals.

Tootling the Multitudes

The Further Anniversary journey is Pidutti and O'Neill's most ambitious project to date. As well as boasting a new bus, there's also a bigger support crew on hand than on the original voyage: eight people in total, including a "Follow Bus," two drivers, and two other men in a U-Haul who are responsible for electrical and mechanical work. Much like the original 1964 trip, however, the cast of passengers changes on a regular basis.

"Each week, we get a new batch of Pranksters," O'Neill notes. "That's been one of the strangest parts of the trip so far. Each week, we have to say goodbye."

Back in May, potential passengers were invited to try-out for a spot by contributing $200 via a Kickstarter campaign orchestrated by Zane Kesey, and answering a series of offbeat questions, including: "Do you like Gladiator movies?" Those selected were invited to take part in a particular leg of the journey.

The Rusky-Dusky Neon Dust

While Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters would hardly seem out of place at any of today's music festivals, back in the sixties their antics -- dressing in outlandish red-white-and-blue-themed outfits, sporting made-up "Prankster" names, and bizarre, drug-fuelled behaviour -- would have seemed downright subversive.

Inspired by Kerouac and riding high from the success of Kesey's first book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the writer and his friends decided, in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, to take a trip to the 1964 World's Fair, and along the way to experience what Kesey called "the American landscape and heartscape."

The vehicle was hand-painted in psychedelic colours, outfitted with a speaker system and featured an open viewport on top, made from an old washing machine. At the wheel was beat legend Neal Cassady (Prankster Name: Sir Speed Limit), the fast-talking, hyperactive, real-life inspiration for On the Road's Dean Moriarty, and along for the ride was an ever-changing batch of Pranksters, among them Ken Babbs (Prankster Name: Intrepid Traveller) and Kathy Casamo (Prankster Name: Stark Naked).

Though the voyage was extraordinarily disorganized (the bus ran out of gas before they'd even left Kesey's property), the group visited a number of cities across the U.S., playing instruments, experimenting with sex and drugs, and doing their part to spread the word about LSD. The drug was still legal at the time, and Kesey had been introduced to its effects while a student at Stanford when he took part in a study conducted as part of the U.S. government's MKULTRA program, a then-classified attempt to use LSD for the purpose of mind control.

Over the course of their journey, the Pranksters met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac (who reportedly wasn't impressed), spent time at the Millbrook compound with acid guru Timothy Leary (also, reportedly, unimpressed), and lost Stark Naked when she overdosed on LSD and was picked-up by the police. They painted "A VOTE FOR BARRY IS A VOTE FOR FUN!" on one side of the bus, and drove it backward down the street in front of the headquarters of Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater. They also ran amok at the World's Fair. Disappointed by what they found, Kesey concluded in the pages of his journal: "The World's Fair Is Not A Cool Place."

Many of these antics were captured on film. Kesey had intended to turn the entire journey into a full-length movie; however, as a result of technical difficulties (sound and images were reproduced at slightly different speeds and couldn't be synchronized), it never materialized. The first finished version was more than 30 hours long, and Kesey subsequently edited and tinkered with the material for close to 40 years (although Kesey died in 2001, filmmakers Alex Gibney and Allison Ellwood finally turned the footage into the documentary, Magic Trip).

Following the conclusion of the bus journey, the Pranksters began to stage regular Saturday night "Acid Tests" -- LSD-fuelled musical happenings held in the San Francisco Bay area in 1965 and '66, often featuring Kesey's favourite band, the Grateful Dead. In spite of Kesey's arrest for possession of marijuana in 1965 and his subsequent attempt to fake his death and flee to Mexico, the events continued, culminating in what was perhaps the best-known Acid Test of its time, the 1966 San Francisco Trips Festival. (B.C. had its own Trips Festival in 1966, also featuring the Grateful Dead, and giving the Dead occasion to play the first in a long history of free outdoor shows.)

Kesey ultimately returned to the U.S. to serve time, but it wasn't long before Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid, drawn from Prankster tapes and film footage, immortalized the Further bus journey for an entire generation.

The Frozen Jug Band

For Pidutti and O'Neill (Prankster Names: Good Story and Best Ever, respectively), the original Further bus pales in comparison to its present incarnation. While on board, the pair has conducted interviews, shot music videos, taken photographs and recorded video of members of the Grateful Dead as part of their current incarnation, aptly named "Furthur."

They've been through Madison, Ohio, "somewhere in Michigan," Connecticut, New York, Pittsburgh, and Woodstock, in time for the festival's 45th anniversary, when they and the other Pranksters were invited onstage to play for the crowd.

"We'd jammed on acoustic instruments before, just for fun," Pidutti laughs, "but then eight or 10 of us got invited up onstage, up in front of all these people, and started jamming together as a band for the first time on the actual Woodstock stage. I got to scream into the microphone: 'Thank you, Woodstock!' It was a dream come true."

The bus is now heading westward, the trip due to wrap up with a party in San Francisco in October, and afterward O'Neill and Pidutti will be returning to Denman Island for the estimated eight to 10 months of editing required to produce the finished film. They're planning a release to the film festival circuit and a possible tour.

Despite the differences, in many ways both buses have the same goals: to entertain, illuminate, explore and inspire. And according to Pidutti, it appears to be working.

"We were driving in Nebraska, and there was a convoy of U.S. Army hummers driving down the side of the highway," he explains. "I looked out and all of a sudden there are four of these hummers beside the bus. I stuck my head out the window to try and get a picture of them with the bus, and the guy driving gave me the peace sign. It was such a total contradiction, and it was the last thing I would have expected. I was smiling for a couple of days after that one."