Highbrow Magazine - ken kesey https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/ken-kesey en Remembering the Grateful Dead https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/5900-remembering-grateful-dead <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/music" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Music</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Sun, 07/03/2016 - 16:50</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1gratefuldead_0.jpg?itok=2JLk2kk3"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1gratefuldead_0.jpg?itok=2JLk2kk3" width="480" height="345" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> </p> <p>In 1965, Jerry Garcia, a Californian native, formed the band that would later become known as the Grateful Dead. He, along with a group of eccentric misfits, would go on to enjoy one of the most enduring, tumultuous, and unlikely reigns of any rock band in modern musical history. What is it about their music that has captured the attention of young people from the 1960s to the present? The answer lies in the unique live shows for which they are known and the community they created through these shared experiences.</p> <p> </p> <p>The band was forged in the crucible of the Acid Tests. These were parties, held in and around the San Francisco area in the mid 1960s, thrown by noted American novelist Ken Kesey and his group of Merry Pranksters. The band had the unique opportunity to play to an audience more open to experimentation than perhaps any other up until that point in time. Kesey and the Pranksters served LSD from a large punch bowl to all comers. The lights and sensations from those parties were forever immortalized in the movie <em>Across the Universe</em> with Bono of U2 fame playing Ken Kesey. These parties gave the band the creative license to experiment with psychedelia and all it had to offer. The result has been a 50-year psychic roller coaster spanning many band variations and millions in profits.</p> <p> </p> <p>Rock critic Greil Marcus  likened Grateful Dead concerts to the pace of life itself: brief periods of excitement separated by long stretches of boredom. That's fine with the band and fine with the fans, because aside from surface similarities a Grateful Dead gig has very little in common with a typical rock concert, said American songwriter, musician, and music journalist, David Gans in his essay <em>Dawn of the DeadHeads.</em></p> <p><em> </em></p> <p>Marcus is hitting on the secret sauce of the whole Grateful Dead movement. He is talking about the uniqueness of the experience that goes along with the Grateful Dead's music. The music has its own ebbs and flows just like life itself. It is not uncommon for a concert to feature a 20-minute drums solo punctuated with Garcia’s psychedelic noodling on the guitar.</p> <p> </p> <p> Something about this experience was powerful enough to  convince countless members of the upper- and middle-class stratums of our society to drop out of traditional life paths and blindly follow the Grateful Dead, as they toured the country throughout the 1970s and ‘80s until Garcia’s untimely death on August 9<sup>, </sup>1995. These young kids found something in the community of the band that they couldn't find elsewhere. They found a sense of community and belonging that didn't exist elsewhere. The communal feeling present at the live shows was the secret element that had people coming back again and again until their devotion to the band and music took on a religious quality.</p> <p> </p> <p><br /> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/2gratefuldead.jpg" style="height:625px; width:460px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>I get the chance to listen to the Grateful Dead all day long I get paid to do what other people pay to do, said Andy, a bartender at Quixotes: True Blue: a Grateful Dead-themed bar and music venue in downtown Denver.</p> <p> </p> <p>Andy’s story is a common one among those devoted to the band. From the age of 2, his parents brought him on tour. It is the community that keeps him going back for more.</p> <p> </p> <p>“I have friends all over the country, people I might not see for six or eight months and then I go to a show and it's a big hug. A giant cocktail party. The music itself is ever changing; you never hear a song the same way twice. It’s constantly evolving. The community is just as important as the music itself, traveling with your friends, running around the country, and visiting new places having that music right behind me was something I always loved.”</p> <p> </p> <p>The singular devotion to the Grateful Dead led to economic success, as fans became repeat customers eager for their products. The sense of belonging that fans felt grew to include lawyers, stock brokers, and medical doctors, people from all walks of life.</p> <p>"There is deep ego satisfaction and pleasure in belonging," said Benson P. Shapiro, a marketing professor at the Harvard Business School in Strategy and Business magazines  article titled <em>“How to Truck: Lessons from the Grateful Dead.”</em></p> <p> </p> <p>According to Shapiro, the key to creating a brand is the good feeling a buyer gets in acquiring and owning a product. Much of that feeling is tied to joining a group.</p> <p>The band’s philosophy of eschewing the consumer society in favor of lofty ideals such as love, community, and art for art’s sake in fact lead to economic success of gargantuan proportions. The band grossed as much $95 million a year in its heyday.</p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/2gratefuldead_0.jpg" style="height:323px; width:672px" typeof="foaf:Image" /></p> <p> </p> <p>In 2015, in honor of the band's 50<sup>th</sup> anniversary, the remaining band members enlisted the help of Phish’s lead guitarist Trey Anastasio for one last reunion tour. The original 210,000 tickets for the three shows over July 4<sup>th</sup> weekend sold out in minutes. In response to the growing demand, the band added 130,000 tickets for three more shows in Santa Cruz, California.</p> <p> </p> <p>The five-date tour grossed $50 million in ticket sales along with $8-$10 million in merchandising revenue. Interest in the band is higher than ever. Bands covering the Grateful Dead’s music dot the country and are present in every major city. Denver Colorado,a city some consider to be the country's jam scene mecca, features four music venue/bars devoted to the Grateful Dead and the musical genre it’s spawned: Jam Rock.</p> <p> </p> <p>The Jam Rock movement began to truly blossom in the waning years of the Grateful Dead hegemony. Bands such as Phish, Widespread Panic, Umphrey's Mcgee, among other notable names in this now expansive music scene, now sell out concert and music festival tickets by the hundreds of thousands.</p> <p> </p> <p>Phish, a band originating in the dorms and surrounding music scene of the University of Vermont-Burlington, currently wears the crown of Jam kings. Their bi-yearly tours regularly gross up to $18 million each putting them in second place in touring revenue behind the Dave Matthews Band. DMB, as it is known, is a band some would also consider an offspring of the improvisational style of the Grateful Dead, albeit a more pop-oriented version. Obviously, the successful business model of community-creating live shows with unique performances nightly is not an anomaly, but rather a formula -- one that continues to bring economic success to all those who try their hand at it.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Author Bio:</strong></p> <p><strong> </strong></p> <p><strong><em>Aryeh Gelfand is a contributing writer at</em> Highbrow Magazine.          </strong></p> <p><strong> </strong></p> <p><strong>For Highbrow Magazine</strong></p> <p> </p> <p><em><strong>Photo Credits: Chris Stone (<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/cjstone707/8308660087">Flickr</a>, Creative Commons); Naleck (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fare_Thee_Well_-_Celebrating_50_Years_of_the_Grateful_Dead_-_stage.PNG">Wikipedia</a>, Creative Commons)</strong></em></p> <p> </p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/grateful-dead" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">grateful dead</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/jerry-garcia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">jerry garcia</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/music" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Music</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/deadheads" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">deadheads</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/ken-kesey" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">ken kesey</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Aryeh Gelfand</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Sun, 03 Jul 2016 20:50:10 +0000 tara 7035 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/5900-remembering-grateful-dead#comments Weird Load: Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters 50 Years On https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/3988-weird-load-ken-kesey-and-merry-pranksters-years <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/news-features" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">News &amp; Features</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Fri, 05/16/2014 - 09:53</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1pranksters%20%28wiki%29.jpg?itok=fz_Kt6LF"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1pranksters%20%28wiki%29.jpg?itok=fz_Kt6LF" width="480" height="270" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> </p> <p>July 1964. And 50 years ago a bus - a 1939 school bus, furnished with bunk beds, basic kitchen facilities and wired-up audio equipment - sets out from a house 15 miles from the Californian town of Palo Alto to journey across America. Painted in bright psychedelic colors with the destination sign of `Further` at the front and the words `Caution: Weird Load` at the rear, and carrying on board ten or so 60s` drop-outs from various walks of life, the bus makes its erratic way towards Route 60 and the road to New York.</p> <p>At the driving wheel is Neal Cassidy, friend of Jack Kerouac and star of the 1950s` cult novel, <em>On the Road,</em> and inspiring and leading the mixed gang of academics, artists, musician and writers, is Ken Kesey, author of the cult 1962 novel, <em>One Flew Over the Cuckoo`s Nest</em>, who, near the start of the journey, states the group`s mission statement:</p> <p><em>What I hope will continue to happen, because it`s already starting to happen. All of us are beginning to do our thing, and we`re going to keep doing it, right out front, and none of us are going to deny what other people are doing.</em></p> <p>Kesey wants to be in New York for the publication of his new book - and has some ideas about using the trip to say something to and about 60s` America. If Beat author, Jack Kerouac made one journey across America from East to West in the previous decade, he would make another in the reverse direction.  Homage would be paid - the two authors would meet up (although there would be no meeting of minds)- but this trip would be on a larger and louder scale. With music blaring, lights flashing and LSD (still a legal substance) in plentiful supply, this bunch of raucously stoned and oddly dressed travellers - these self-styled Merry Pranksters  - want to offer straight suburban and corporate America a glimpse of an alternative re-configured reality - subversive and surreal in equal measure. There are no speeches or banners but there is an invitation to experience something new and strange, even if it`s only watching Neal Cassady drive the `Further` bus backwards at speed down Phoenix`s main street.</p> <p>Although the `64 journey is Kesey`s most well-known pranks, he had started his project to startle and disturb America earlier and would continue it after the wheels of the bus had stopped turning. There is his decision to participate 1960, as a 25 year old Creative Writing student, in a  CIA-funded research programme at Menlo Park Hospital to investigate the effects of mind-control drugs, thus ensuring, with a comic irony that he surely appreciated, that his first experience of  LSD and similar substances is provided by the US Government itself.  If Communist North Korea can employ brain-washing techniques to undermine American democracy, the US also wants its own Manchurian Candidate. And fresh-faced Ken Kesey, trying to bridge the unlikely gulf between his budding career as a wrestler and his wished-for career as an author, is signed up at $75 a day to report back on the impact of his drug consumption.</p> <p>Not known for his willingness to follow orders, it isn`t long before Kesey is stamping his own imprint on the hospital`s experiments. Asked by one doctor, interested in testing the way LSD affects the mind`s sense of time, to indicate when a minute has passed, Kesey simply measures his pulse. And required by Medical Science to have hallucinations, it isn`t perhaps surprising that he wants others to share the experience - to bridge the short distance between the Hospital and the semi-bohemian suburb of Perry Lane where he lives - by carrying LSD and mescaline and other psychedelic mixtures from the one to the other. Not everybody is keen to take up Kesey`s invitation but there are enough curious residents to ensure that his first prank - to turn-on a group of university students and academics with the Government`s own chemicals - is a success.</p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/2merrypranksters%20%28Wiki%29.jpg" style="height:625px; width:599px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>From then on, pranksterism  is at the centre of Kesey youthful life. Tested-out fictionally I<em>n One Flew Over the Cuckoo`s Nest</em> through McMurphy`s various attempts to upstage Nurse Ratchett and challenge her authority, `pranking` becomes a way of creating events that disrupt conventional routines and forms of hierarchical control in a highly conformist society.</p> <p>One kind of event is the Acid Trip. Beginning in 1965, after the disillusioning experience of the Cow Palace Beatles` concert, where the Pranksters watch teenage girls turn into robotic zombies, the Pranksters put together events in which a combination of drugs - especially LSD -sound, strobe lights and dancing create a totally immersive and liberating world - a world that, in the words of Jerry Garcia (leader of The Grateful Dead) is `meant to do away with old forms, old ideas`. Although, as word about the Tests spreads across the San Francisco area and they become larger and larger in size, with increasingly sophisticated and imposing technology, tensions develop between the purist Pranksters and more commercial influences and although there are growing concerns that Kesey - proponent of democratic freedom -  is taking too dominant a role, and although a number of people suffer a series of  bad trips, for a time in the mid-sixties, the Tests do offer spaces in which new forms of individual and collective identity and experience can emerge.</p> <p> Inside the Test, you are able to forget your old self, life and relationships, forget your old dependence on reason and habit and achieve a type of transformation, even transcendence.  However, as LSD is made illegal in the state of California in 1966, it isn`t the desire for transcendence that inspires the idea to smear the walls of the Winterland Ballroom, the intended site of the Acid Test Graduation of Halloween, October 1966, with DMSO, laced with LSD. Rather, it is the prospect of turning-on the 6000 members of the Californian Democratic Party due to intend a huge rally on the following night. Whilst the decision of the leading promoter to pull-out, causes a change of  plan, just the thought of it is enough to suggest the extent and nature of Kesey`s ambitions; he may not be a politician but his pranks certainly have a political dimension.</p> <p>Stoning the Democratic Party is one way of forcing an encounter between different worlds. Another is to make friends with the Hells Angels. Invited over to Kesey`s Californian  home,  La Honda,  in early August 1965, their black leather gear, massive bikes and deserved reputation for violence sharply contrasts with the colourful, laid-back and arty Pranksters. Anything might kick-off - a wrong word there, a miscalculated action there - but nothing does; they seem tamed, even sitting quietly whilst gay, Jewish poet, Allen Ginsberg, does his chants. Used to fear and shock, here the Angels are just accepted and made part of the scene. They drink their beer and take the LSD that they are offered, willing, at least temporarily, to go with the flow. Outside La Honda, the police might be waiting to invade but for a few weeks Kesey has constructed a weird, comic and risky cultural experiment in which a new community, composed of unlikely elements, is formed - another prank to test and re-shape social reality.</p> <p>There may be little similarity between the Hells Angels and the Unitarian Church but the latter also provides the Chief Prankster with an opportunity to stir together an unusual mix. After an invitation to attend their annual California conference, Kesey arrives with his fellow pranksters in the by-now famous bus. Whilst, from the start, there is certainly tension, even hostility, between the two groups, there are also moments of collusion, even harmony - as when Kesey`s burning of the American flag is followed by the congregation singing <em>America the Beautiful</em> or when the Pranksters and Unitarians wash each others` feet in the Pacific to show humility or when some of the latter share a night on the bus listening to and making music. The older generation might want Kesey out but he has made his contribution, created happenings that have cut across differences. The strange clothes, the weird behaviour, the loud music, the drugs - all de-stabilise settled assumptions and practices - turning an institution on its head – at least for a week. The prank has worked.          </p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/3merrypranksters%20%28wiki%29.jpg" style="height:431px; width:625px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>Rather lower-key and more personal is Kesey`s attempt to evade capture by the police for drug-possession by faking his own death. Creative and fun to prepare and theatrically disorientating in its effect - the poetic suicide note, the drive to a cliff near Eureka, California by a Kesey look-alike, the smashed-up car and the boots left forlornly on the beach - it`s not difficult to appreciate why the prank would appeal.  The police soon catch on to the trick but for a while at least reality is suspended.</p> <p>Soon after Kesey`s return from Mexico, to which he has absconded, he is arguing that the Pranksters need to go beyond LSD to find a new ways of challenging the status quo. The nature of these new ways remains rather vague but the effect is to further intensify the movement`s decline. By 196  Kesey is back farming and writing in Oregon and the Trips, and similar events, are in the hands of others.</p> <p>Yet, although the psychedelic moment doesn`t last that long, there is a legacy. The Yippies of the late 1960s certainly recognise the potential of real-life theatre to wake people up to the actuality of their world, creating, for example, semi-comic chaos in New York`s Macy`s Department store when they take on the role of shop-assistants. And more recently, the anti-globalization movement and a range of protest groups in the UK, Turkey and Russia have made use of different forms of performance art to gain publicity for their cause. Think Pussy Riot.  Kesey`s brand of Pranksterism may have died but its spirit is still alive and well.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Highbrow Magazine</strong></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/ken-kesey" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">ken kesey</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/weird-load" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">weird load</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/neil-cassady" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">neil cassady</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/drugs" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">drugs</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/1960s-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">the 1960s</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/jack-kerouac" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">jack kerouac</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/lsd" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">lsd</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/one-flew-over-cukoos-nest" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">one flew over the cukoo&#039;s nest</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/beatniks" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">beatniks</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/beat-generation" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">beat generation</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/merry-pranksters" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">merry pranksters</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Mike Peters</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photographer field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Photographer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Wikipedia Commons</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Fri, 16 May 2014 13:53:46 +0000 tara 4725 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/3988-weird-load-ken-kesey-and-merry-pranksters-years#comments