Kesey finds new source of mind-expanding euphoria:
the Internet

As the author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Kesey produced art the old fashioned way. Today, he uses a Mac

In this story: The man who wrote 'Cuckoo's Nest' Filming the 'far out' electric bus trip The greatest trip of all: IntrepidTrips.com RELATED STORIES, SITES

From CNNdotCOM Correspondent James Hattori

(CNN) -- Author and counterculture icon Ken Kesey has gone high-tech, using the Internet to sell videos that chronicle his mind-bending adventures in the 1960s.

A compilation drawn from 50 hours of raw footage, the new film documents the drug-enhanced exploits of Kesey, author of the best-selling "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," as well as those of other founding members of the Beat Generation, like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady.

They called themselves the Merry Pranksters, a loose gathering of friends in search of good times. Among them, Ken Babbs, an old graduate school buddy; Kesey's wife and high school sweetheart, Faye; Mike Hagen, a college fraternity brother; mountain girl Carolyn Adams; and George Walker, an old friend from Oregon.

Kesey said he has been trying to get the film out for 30 years, with no luck.

	VIDEO
CNNdotCOM's James Hattori covers Ken Kesey Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media)
	QUICKVOTE
Would you go back to the '60s if you could? Yes No View Results
	CNNdotCOM TOOLS
This week: Mind your netiquette
	RESOURCES
The Psychedelic '60s The University of Virginia draws on its special collections to examine this era. Timothy Leary LSD advocate Timothy Leary, who hung out with Kesey, calls computers "the new brain-change drug of the times." Tom Wolfe Author Tom Wolfe, who covered Kesey and friends in "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test," has a more conventional Web site -- selling books through B&N and Amazon.

"People come to this footage like they would come to a Dairy Queen with a spoon. And what they're looking at is Mount Everest," he said.

So the 65-year-old author is doing it on his own -- no studios or big budgets -- editing with a Macintosh computer. Sales come over the Internet.

"If Shakespeare were working right now, he wouldn't be working with a quill pen. He would be working with whatever the cutting edge of theatrical drama would be. And this is where literature is headed," Kesey said.

Like Shakespeare, Kesey made a name for himself at an early age. He was 27 when "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was published. He grew up in Oregon's lush Willamette Valley, went on to the University of Oregon and became a champion wrestler, even an Olympic hopeful.

Then he won a Woodrow Wilson fellowship and entered the prestigious graduate writing program at Stanford University. While at Stanford, Kesey found more than one way to expand his mind.

In 1959 he volunteered for a government funded drug study, receiving $75 a day to be a human guinea pig. He quickly discovered that among the mysterious capsules was an experimental psychedelic called LSD.

"They gave me something. They didn't tell me what. And they tested my reflexes and they tested my blood and how I was breathing. Just whether I could do motor skills. Then they left me in this little room with only one window," he said.

Kesey eventually took a job on the ward and wrote "Cuckoo's Nest," the story of a wise-cracking mental institution inmate who leads a rebellion against the oppressive staff.

"High on those drugs, in that little room and looking out through that window, I could see those nuts knew something that the doctors didn't," he said.

GALLERY   Kesey and The Merry Pranksters run IntrepidTrips.com, a site that sells videos of their beatnik exploits

Kesey and the Pranksters decided to do some experimenting on their own. In 1964 they embarked on a long, strange trip across America in a day-glo bus to share their mind-altering experiences. There were no laws against acid then. It was handed out freely. They rented halls, staging concerts with loud bands, including one started by his friend Jerry Garcia that would later be known as the Grateful Dead.

These were the early days of a significant new phenomenon in the 1960s, the hippie movement.

The Pranksters' film covers thousands of miles of the electric bus trip. Mike Hagen, an amateur photographer, was behind the camera most of the time, and never imagined what would become of the footage.

"It's far out, isn't," said Hagen, who now lives in Eugene, Oregon, and runs a popular restaurant.

"It's kind of amazing that the old geezers are out there playing on the Internet and selling stuff," he said.

The first chapter, a 55-minute installment, shows the ride from Southern California and an incident in New Orleans, where police officers stopped the Pranksters, thinking they were civil rights workers.

Not-yet-released footage includes a trip to New York to visit drug guru Timothy Leary, who had turned a socialite's mansion into an LSD research center.

The day-glo bus transported Kesey and the Merry Pranksters across the country to spread the word on LSD--a trip that's recorded on video

For several years afterward, Kesey remained a counterculture icon. But he eventually moved back to Oregon to his father's old farm where he and his family have lived the last 35 years, raising cows and a dog or two. Some of the original Pranksters are still around, but now they're helping run a business, complete with the Web site "intrepidtrips.com," through which the films are sold.

Babbs runs the office and opens mail from their devoted fans.

"One of the best things I love about this, is the way we touch personally, every person that gets this tape," Babbs said.

Other members of the now-aging Pranksters -- the former wife of Jerry Garcia, George Walker and Linda Kline, known as anonymous -- lend their artistic skills, decorating tape boxes in, naturally, psychedelic colors.

Kesey signs each box personally. As one might expect, it's not an amazon.com kind of operation. They get orders by e-mail, mail out the tapes, and only then do they ask customers to send a check for $29.95.

"It's been totally successful. Of course, we don't keep any records, so how do we know," quipped Kesey.

Bookkeeping aside, Kesey is convinced the Internet is good for business as well as for his fellow writers.

"It's cheaper to write a book on the Web site and send it out to people, if I can get them to bring the money back. Because it takes 10,000 books being sold before any appreciable amount of money makes it to the writer," he said.

As for the famous day-glo bus ... there are really two. The original, after traveling a million miles, sits in a swamp on Kesey's 70-acre farm, rusting comfortably. "Each little flake that comes off of it, I can remember the period that flake came from," Kesey said.

The second bus is alive and well and on display in Kesey's front yard. The Pranksters occasionally take it on the road, including a trip across England performing plays in seaside villages last summer.

These are quieter times for Kesey and his wife, who tends to the family and teaches Sunday school. The heady days of drugs and rock 'n' roll are memories, mostly.

"But as Garcia said, you know, the '60s ain't over till the fat lady gets high. And that means that whatever it takes to get you high: sometimes grief, sometimes it's prayer, fasting. I prefer a joint," Kesey said.

Visa, Sun, Cisco team up on universal commerce
July 20, 2000
Survey: A quarter of online-purchase efforts fail
March 9, 2000
BMC launches Internet-commerce assurance effort
January 25, 2000

IntrepidTrips.com

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.