Description
Jake Feinberg, The Bus to Never Ever Land: Musical Tales from the Original Merry Pranksters, a Hog Farmer, and the Grateful Dead’s Side Projects (published 2020).
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A revolution in consciousness was fueled in the United States in the 1960s by a small group of people who used the tools of psychedelic drugs, story-telling, improvisational theater, communal living, sharing, kindness, humor, and pranks to release people from the confines of society, and get them to think for themselves as well as make deep connections with others. The clown, comedian, and political activist Wavy Gravy led the way. Not only did he found the Hog Farm, the country’s longest-running commune. He became loosely affiliated with the Merry Pranksters, led by Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, George Walker, and Ken Babbs, who famously rode the bus FURTHUR from California to New York in 1964, spreading theater, music, rubber balls, and laughter among unsuspecting citizens along the way. In the mid-60s, The Pranksters organized Acid Tests along the West Coast—parties to promote the then-legal drug LSD. To perform at the parties they hired The Warlocks, soon renamed the Grateful Dead, whose improvisational jams, drug-explorations, and unprecedented ability to attract legions of loyal fans (Deadheads) became a movement and a community that reflected the same revolutionary spirit of life outside the mainstream. Beyond the tours and albums of the Grateful Dead, its singularly talented principal members, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Billy Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart, had their own bands, a kind of Dead on the Side.
The Bus to Never Ever Land explores this territory—from Wavy to the Merry Pranksters to the Grateful Dead’s origins, poets, and side projects—through pointed excerpts from dozens of radio interviews that Jake Feinberg conducted with the protagonists and others who were there at the time. “We won’t be bought, we won’t be sold, we’ll move in the inner circles, we’ll move in the outer circles, we’ll be what we’ll be, and what we’ll be is be free” (Ken Babbs).
