"We weren't old enough to be beatniks and we were a little too old to be hippies. Everybody I knew had read On The Road and it stirred us up. So we decided to go travel across the country. Because there was so many of us, we decided we'd buy a bus... Ken really believed things could be changed, he saw himself as a kind of liberator... people didn't think that we were hippies or that we were drug freaks, because it wasn't in the news yet".
"Once Pandora's Box is open, you can't regulate who gets to use the stuff that flies out of it".
I can't wait to see the story of Ken Kesey's trip through America on his peace bus with the Beats and a whole merry band of pranksters. It's a psychedelic road movie adventure - the promo called it "an acid trip on wheels". "It was like a troupe of minstrels... it looked like a travelling pleasure palace - it was big, and room, and spacious, until we got all the people in it". Kesey is the author of the classic novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and on this now legendary psychedelic road trip across 1960's America in a converted school bus took in the geography of place and people, witnessing firsthand the changes sweeping across the American psyche. Ken is quoted saying: "I thought this was American as you could get, because we were exploring a new territory". From the civil rights movement to the birth of free love and the hippie and flower power groundswell - they witnessed, and perhaps in many ways catalysed, the cultural revolution of 1960's USA which still reverberates around the world. "What it meant was that everyone had to consider a new way for things to be"...
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