Acid Tests Turn 50: Wavy Gravy, Merry Prankster Ken Babbs Look Back
This week in Santa Cruz, California, a concert, reading and site dedication will commemorate the 50th anniversary of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ first LSD-fueled Acid Test, held in the small neighborhood of Soquel on November 27th, 1965. More than a half-dozen Pranksters — plus the hammer Neal Cassady once juggled, recently found in storage — will be in attendance for a reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Thursday and a concert at Don Quixote’s International Music Hall on Friday. In addition to a marker near the now-demolished house once rented by Merry Prankster Ken Babbs, county supervisor John Leopold has announced plans to turn an adjacent bus shelter into a miniature museum, an unlikely but fitting symbol for the group that tripped their way cross-country (and back) on still-legal LSD in a garishly painted International Harvester school bus named Furthur.
The first Acid Test, a small semi-public event advertised only at the local Hip Pocket underground bookstore, kicked off a series of weekly psychedelic blowouts that provided a launching point for the Grateful Dead and a public turning point for the counterculture that followed. Lasting through early 1966, the Acid Tests provided a chaotic forum (and template) for experimental musicians, filmmakers, dancers, writers, comedians and more. Given that attendees consumed 250-microgram LSD capsules, it is perhaps unsurprising that accounts of the first Acid Test vary.
Ken Babbs, now 76, recalls the first Acid Test not as a post-Thanksgiving soiree but “a Halloween party with everyone in costumes and getting high and having a good time.” While no photos of the event (or even of the house that hosted it, known as the Spread) are known to exist, others have concluded the November 27th date to be most likely. “I remember the band, the guys who later became the Grateful Dead, showing up and playing on our instruments,” says Babbs, “and us playing on our instruments, and [On the Road hero Neal] Cassady being there and [Allen] Ginsberg and [novelist] Bob Stone and being up all night lying on the floor with microphones rapping stuff into tape machines until dawn.” The Pranksters showed pieces of their in-progress movie.
Getting ready to change their band’s name from the Warlocks to the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir all headed to Santa Cruz for the trip too, according to Dennis McNally’s authorized biography. But while they hung out and stargazed and jammed on the Pranksters’ gear, nearly all agree that the band didn’t play in any formal capacity and wouldn’t have been advertised, as a more recently surfaced poster implies. Nicholas Meriwether, the historian who oversees the Grateful Dead’s official archive at nearby UC Santa Cruz concurs. “I have never seen anything to suggest that the Dead actually performed at the first Acid Test,” says Meriwether, who will also speak at the dedication, “and that’s what set the stage for their first show as the Grateful Dead at the San Jose Acid Test the following week.”