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She got straight LSDs on her report card: Mountain Girl’s ‘Acid Test’ diploma

Mountain Girl
 
A graduation is something to be proud of, a milestone, and the sometimes very expensive piece of paper you get in return for graduating, while clearly not the one-way ticket to paid employment that everyone told you it would be, is at least a tangible reminder of all that effort you put in and the money you spent. Rarely, however, does the signifying document itself hold any actual monetary value, unless of course your diploma stands as testament to your Acid Test graduation. Something to be proud of, indeed!

In 2012, a rare diploma granted to “Mountain Girl” went up for auction in San Francisco and ultimately took in $24,255. The diploma was of interest to collectors for two reasons. For one thing Mountain Girl, born Carolyn Adams, was a one-time Merry Prankster and significant other to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey. She had a daughter with Kesey and later married Jerry Garcia with whom she had two more girls. The diplomas, illustrated by fellow Merry Prankster and cartoonist Paul Foster were also a rarity, having been given out to only a handful of people by beat hero Neal Cassady himself at what turned out to be an unintentionally small gathering of heads. According to the auction house that sold the artifact, they have almost never shown up for sale for obvious reasons.
 
Mountain Girl and Jerry Garcia
Mountain Girl and Jerry Garcia
 
Anybody familiar with Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (or basically anybody who knows anything at all about the history of United States counterculture) knows that the Acid Tests were wild LSD-fueled parties thrown at Ken Kesey’s LaHonda ranch in the mid 60’s and I’m not going to get into any more description here. If you don’t already know about the whole trippy phenomena, use whatever device you’re currently on and look it up

The graduation ceremony was originally scheduled to be held on Halloween night, 1966 at Bill Graham’s Winterland in San Francisco with the Grateful Dead headlining, but the event was canceled when Graham caught wind of Kesey’s supposed plan to covertly dose every single person who showed up, either through the water supply or by coating all the surfaces in the building with LSD. The Dead took another gig at California Hall, which trumped the actual Acid Test Graduation that ended up taking place in a San Francisco warehouse with no running water. Mountain Girl was at the California Hall gig with the Dead and crew when the diplomas were handed out and she unceremoniously received hers after the fact. 

Here it is in all its glory. Click on the image to see it close up.
 
Mountain Girl Diploma
Mountain Girl’s Acid Test Diploma
 
Below, you’ll find footage of the Acid Test Graduation Ceremony from 1966. You can see the diplomas being handed out by Neal Cassady towards the beginning.
 

 
via Collector’s Weekly

Posted by Jason Schafer
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02.13.2015
04:29 pm
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Ken Kesey: On the Bus in old England, 1996

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Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters traveled to England on their bus ‘Further’ in 1996, where they were interviewed by Rene Akker for this short video, in which Kesey explained part of The Pranksters’ philosophy:

“We stumble along and bumble along, and pretty soon, more and more stuff begins to stumble along and bumble along with us, until we’ve got a great group of stumble-bummers…

...You just don’t want to be entertained. If you want to be entertained, you’ve got MTV. But people want to feel part of a ritual, they want to be out there doing something with people. They want to sing and dance and make dance and they feel their input has some effect.”

Beautiful to see and hear the wonderful Mr. Kesey again.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.24.2012
06:34 pm
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Ken Kesey: A brief interview

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Ken Kesey died 10 years ago this month, on the 10th November. In memory of the great man who was “too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie”, here is a brief film interview with the Merry Prankster, where he discusses the characters he met through the Acid Test; the Grateful Dead and The Beatles and the Power of Music; looking for the crack that brings the magic and the Deadheads - what Fame meant and their Legacy.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Ken Kesey: The Merry Pranksters’ Magic Trip

Ken Kesey hits back at critics of ‘One Flew Over the Cucloo’s Nest’


 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.07.2011
07:01 pm
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Roll up for the mystery tour: Ken Kesey & the Merry Prankster’s ‘Magic Trip’


 
Variety called Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place “the counter-cultural equivalent of an archaeological dig—or maybe an acid flashback.” Sound about right. The documentary utilizes the legendary 16mm color footage shot by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they rode across America during their infamous 1964 cross-country trip in the psychedelically painted bus dubbed “Further” (a “trip” vividly described in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test). Opening this Friday in New York and on August 12 in Los Angeles, Magic Trip was co-directed by Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney and his long-time collaborator, Alison Ellwood. (It’s also currently available on Pay-Per-View)

This film footage is something that we’ve always read about, but that we’ve have seen very little of, usually just snatches here and there in various documentaries over the years. I always thought it was silent footage, but apparently not, so now we can actually hear the non-stop speedfreak jive of Neal Cassidy, captured for posterity and not merely described on the page. What’s sounds so cool about this movie (which I haven’t seen myself yet) is that the filmmakers opted not forego the route of having elderly burnouts repeating rote anecdotes about events they probably have little memory of in actual fact (especially this crew, they were tripping balls!). Instead they’ve made what they are describing as an “immersive” experience that tries to recreate, to the extent possible, what it was like to BE there when it happened. Along the way, aside from Kesey and motormouth Cassidy, the audience meets Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, Ken Babbs and the other Merry Pranksters.

There is an interesting article about the making and history behind Magic Trip that appeared in the New York Times over the weekend. Charles McGrath writes:

In all Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, as his crew called themselves, shot some 40 hours of 16-millimeter film, but the project was never really finished. As Mr. Wolfe wrote, “Plunging in on those miles of bouncing, ricocheting, blazing film with a splicer was like entering a jungle where the greeny vines grew faster than you could chop them down in front of you.” Kesey showed all 40 hours unedited a couple of times and also hacked the footage up into various shorter versions before stowing the film cans in his barn, near Eugene, Ore., where they rusted away — until Mr. Gibney and Ms. Ellwood showed up.

Kesey was onto something similar to what we would now call reality television: scenes of people with odd names (Mal Function, Gretchen Fetchin, Generally Famished) getting stoned and behaving weirdly. After publishing the novels “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Sometimes a Great Notion,” he had by 1964 wearied of writing or so fried his brain with hallucinogens that he embraced what he saw as a brand new art form: a drug-enabled psychic quest that would document itself as it was happening. The famous bus — a psychedelic-painted International Harvester with a sign in front that said “Furthur” and one in back that warned “Weird Load” — was wired for sound, and there was a movie camera on board. With Kesey sometimes directing and sometimes just standing back and watching, the Merry Pranksters filmed one another and also their interactions with an uncomprehending public when, for example, Neal Cassady drove the bus backward down a Phoenix street as the Pranksters, stoned on LSD, pretended to campaign for Barry Goldwater for president.

This is an major-league, important part of American history that’s been unearthed here. I can’t wait to see this!
 

 
Thank you Shana Ting Lipton!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.03.2011
05:23 pm
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