Those words from a children's counting nursery rhyme provide the title of Ken Kesey's first novel. When he started his creative writing fellowship at Stanford, he was working on a book about San Francisco's North Beach scene called Zoo. However after volunteering for some experiments at a Menlo Park mental hospital (later through FOIA discovered to be the CIA MK-ULTRA project), Kesey began work on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
On a side note, that was an extremely talented creative writing class. Other students included Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman and Ken Babbs among others. If you're not familiar with their works, do yourself a favor and read some.
Eleven years ago this Saturday, Ken Kesey transcended our plane of existence. The image to the right shows his psychedelic casket being lowered into the grave on his farm in Oregon. The picture is courtesy of his son, Zane's website Key-Z Productions. Check it out. It's full of interesting works, t-shirts, and books.
One summer during my early teens, I read Hunter Thompson's The Hells Angels - A Strange and Terrible Saga, and Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. These led me to reading Kerouac, Kesey and others in the Beat pantheon. Actually, as Kesey put it himself, he was too young for the Beats and too old for the Hippies. In 1966 - he was 31 and technically shouldn't have be trusted, but then you should never trust a prankster.Did these books begin my trip into the weird and wild, or did my penchant for the offbeat attract me to these books? - my personal chicken or the egg conundrum.
After the promising young author phase, the heady acid tests' haze, the fugitive in Mexico days and the jail faze, Kesey settled down to concentrate on family and his Oregon farm. It's said that when the bus returned from Woodstock and the Dallas Pop Festival (where Hugh Romney received his sobriquet Wavy Gravy) a sign on the gate to the Kesey farm said "NO".
He continued to write, perform and instigate craziness from his farm for many years. He and the pranksters would show up at various Grateful Dead shows and other concerts, do impromptu performances of his children story, Little Trickster the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear, and his millennia play, Twister. In 1999, the intrepid group shipped a new bus to England, drove around England, watched the solar eclipse and searched for Merlin the Magician.
When technology advanced to the ether, Kesey and Babbs started and interesting website named IntrepidTrips.com. After his death, his son, Zane started Key-Z Productions and Babbs began skypilotclub.com. Both keep the lifeblood, spirit and creativity of the Merry Pranksters flowing.
After he died, the city of Eugene was graced with a statue of him telling a story to his three grandchildren. To quote his good friend and right hand man, Ken Babbs, Kesey's philosophy was "to treat others with kindness and if anyone does you dirt forgive that person right away. This goes beyond the art, the writing, the performances, even the bus. Right down to the bone." as ever - BB
"A man should have the right to be a big as he feels it's in him to be. " - Ken Kesey
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