What's Ken Kesey On These Days?

I meant to do a proper interview with Ken Kesey, honest I did. I arrived at Dublin s Vicar St. where the writer, LSD guru and counter-culture revolutionary, and his group of Merry Pranksters, were performing their Where s Merlin? show, armed with dozens of questions about the 60s, the writing of One Flew Over The Cuckoo s Nest and the bus tour (registration FURTHR) that has taken them all over the British Isles in search of the elusive magician. Unfortunately, getting the man before the show was an impossibility. And by the time it was over, I was in no fit state to do a decent interview. Which was fair enough, because neither was he (when I asked him when was the last time he had dropped acid, he looked at his watch!).
The show itself was an amateurish mish-mash of music, storytelling and bad mock-Shakespearean theatre. What saved it, though, was that it was infused with so much honesty and goodwill that even the most hardened of cynics was brimming with peace, love and a healthy dose of radicalism by the end. Most of my allocated interview time was taken up by the interruptions of autograph hunters and well-wishers. I was in such a good mood, however, that I let it all pass. The following quotes are taken from a rambling but highly entertaining late night conversation between myself, Kesey and the Evening Herald s Dermott Hayes . . .

ON BEING A REVOLUTIONARY
I ve learned a lot of things over the years about being a revolutionary. One of the most important things is to pretend to go along with everything. Then figure it out as you re going! People who are taking mind-altering drugs but aren t involved in revolution are missing a wonderful ride. People who are just out there to seek experience and playing with their minds they re missing the drama of this revolution. And the drama s what s important. And the people who are in on that drama are having a better time than the people that aren t. Everything else is just rag-tag.
Me and Babs and all of these people who are here we re college graduates. We ve got families. All of us have read Herman Hesse. All of us know Ulysses. We had an education. We also had the best drugs in the world. The government made them! So maybe we had an advantage. But the important thing is to use your drug experiences positively.

ON RAVES
I ve never been to one. How the hell am I going to go to one of these parties at 63 years of age?

ON HIS CURRENT LSD INTAKE
Usually I wouldn t take a big bunch of anything except at Easter. We always climb this big hill near our house and there s something about Easter and the whole feeling about resurrection and spring coming back that harmonises with LSD. But I ve also learned that you don t need a huge tuning fork to tune your guitar. You can tune your guitar with an itty-bitty tuning fork.
No longer am I going to do 1,800 mics and spend 12 hours without knowing if I m human or fluid. In fact, there s been a lot of grass on this trip but we haven t really had the time or inclination to do it. Because you have to try to remember those goddam lines. You can t smoke a bunch of dope and remember your lines. You have to modify yourself. And when it comes down to it, none of us old guys are that interested in it anymore. We ve found other things that have the same effect. But we re not finished with it!

ON COCAINE
The whole thing is about spirit. One of the reasons cocaine is such a bad drug is that the people who deal it and sell it, their spirit is a bad, bad spirit. It s violence, crazed, kinky sex. A lot of things you don t want to expose your children to. The spirit of marijuana is almost always good. Anyone who s growing their own dope and they let you have it, their spirit goes out on that. They re not trying to bleed you for money. They re being friends.
I think that what s happened spiritually in the last 40 years or so will be looked back on by history as either a failure or a success. But it gave us a shot at enlightenment without having to do 40 years of meditation, or fasting. Grief can bring enlightenment to you, but I prefer to take acid than grief.

ON MEDICINAL MARIJUANA
In Oregon this year we passed the legalisation for medical marijuana. Mainly for people with MS and for people who are undergoing chemotherapy. Grass helps them. They feel better.
There s this guy in our local Elks club who s about 70. He fell out of a tree with his log unit 30 years ago and drove his hips up into his shoulders. So he s had like 80 operations and finally after going through all this stuff he found out, not through any hippy or Grateful Dead stuff, that smoking the stuff made him feel better, gave him a sense of well-being and brought his appetite back.
And my mum, who s as anti-drug as anybody I know, was so pissed at this she ended up collecting signatures for the guy who was kicked out of the Elks because he was using marijuana. And even my 8-year-old granddaughter said that s not right .
People know what s right and isn t right. If you grow your own as our law now permits you to do, there s no problems really. If you ve got a medical marijuana prescription you can grow six plants. And if you grow them and take care of them, that s good. They re afraid to turn it loose because it s really not a war on drugs, it s a war on our drugs. Their drugs are all right. All the stuff that they sell, the tobacco and the mood-elevators and the Viagra that s drugs. But what they re saying is these are good drugs and these are bad drugs . And we re bombarded by it continually. Imagine how many billions of dollars have been spent trying to make kids believe marijuana is bad for them. And yet they continue to smoke it.

ON AMERICAN GUN CONTROL
Fay and I come from Springfield and Springfield High School was one of the schools last year where a pupil went crazy and shot a bunch of people. And this is happening in my high school, in our home town, in our neighbourhood, to our people. And when that happens it s like there s a red check put over the side saying pay attention to this .
I hadn t been really active in the anti-gun lobby until then. But I got to thinking a bit. If you re a schoolkid in Oregon and you get caught in school, they put you in jail. If you get caught with a gun they send you home and give you your gun back. That s upside-down!
But there was a time when they were talking about LSD, saying it was going to damage the chromosomes. What a dirty trick! What a thing to say when you ve got kids this big. They had no evidence of this at all. There s no evidence of anybody ever overdosing on LSD or grass. They know that. Last year in America there were 9,060 deaths by gun. In Britain there were like 13 and in Japan there were 20. We are addicted to that gun and that s the problem.
It s not kids taking drugs, it s kids taking guns. And everywhere you go, every chance you get to talk about it, suddenly there s some crazed gun nut who rises from the crowd who wants to shove his philosophy down your throat.

ON THE RIOTING AT WOODSTOCK 99
I wasn t surprised. I would have bet money on it happening. When you re charging that much for tickets and this much for stuff like food and drink, you re brewing a problem like that. I get scared to run around more than 500, 800 people. When you get a huge crowd scene it s frightening. And it s one of the reasons I like being on this bus. You keep moving all along and you don t get caught in that.

ON CLINTON
He inhaled. He just inhaled (laughs). And as for Bush Jnr., I think everyone who s connected in politics and law has dipped into cocaine and probably still are dipping into it. You check this group here with us. These aren t coke heads, speed heads or smack heads. You can look at us to see that. We re having to drive this bus on the wrong side of the road through a foreign country with a lot of people following us and a lot of attention on us. If we were not on top of it and taking care of it, by now we would be wrapped around a damn fence post somewhere. We do our best all the time and when we see it happen with a bunch of people out there tonight, we get a charge that comes back from it. n