"Intrepid Prankster" (Part Three)

"Babbs carried the Acid Tests into Los Angeles with an amazing determination." (Tom Wolfe)

May 24, 2023

Welcome to a new series on the Massé Musings Substack platform: EXTRAORDINARY LIVES. Some of these individuals are famous, but most are not. Their lives are extraordinary because of the challenges they have faced, the impact they have had, and the special qualities they possess. This new extended profile is of Ken Babbs, a member of the legendary 1960s Merry Pranksters, featured in Tom Wolfe’s bestselling classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I met Babbs via his son O.B., who was a student when I taught in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon in the early 1990s. Ken Babbs remains the most colorful individual I have ever encountered, and his life story is an American original. Hope you enjoy the third installment of this four-part series.

Author’s Note: This narrative contains both witnessed and recreated scenes, documented dialogue and facts gathered through extensive interviews and secondary research. But there is also material based on informed speculation. Ken Babbs is a real person, but the truth about him is often elusive.

"Intrepid Prankster" (Part Three)

"Babbs carried the Acid Tests into Los Angeles with an amazing determination." (Tom Wolfe)

In the summer of 1964, Babbs, Kesey and their band of Merry Pranksters were about to embark on a free-wheeling, free-loving, acid-dropping extravaganza that would celebrate the birth of a new counterculture—a revolution based on fun. It was Babbs, they say, who provided the jovial band of psychedelic renegades with constant merriment. He introduced the idea of supercharged public pranks as performance art.

The plan was to travel cross-country in a converted, Day-Glo-painted, wired-for-sound school bus. They were going to tootle their flutes, trumpets and trombones at an uptight America. They were going to have a blast and raise the nation’s consciousness in the process. They were going to record their experiences like a "living novel" on film and audio tape.

The Pranksters headed out to tour the U.S. in July 1964 with legendary Beat Generation “Holy Goof” Neal Cassady at the wheel. Their destination was New York City to commemorate the fall publication of Kesey's second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion..

One of the Pranksters was a "young, plump, ebullient and very sexy" girl Kesey knew from Oregon named Paula Sundsten, who would later be transformed into “Gretchen Fetchin the Slime Queen” in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. She and Babbs were destined for manic euphoria, their hearts pierced by Cupid's arrow dipped in a batch of super-spiked refreshment.

Babbs, in his Marine flight suit and Day-Glo mask, was a happy-go-lucky rebel, a 1960s Huck Finn. See handsome, strapping Ken Babbs rapping with his idol, Neal Cassady. See Babbs playing the Pied Piper. See Babbs directing the Prankster movie. See Babbs and Kesey "score again and again like the legendary Zen archers, for they no longer play their music at people but inside them."

When their odyssey ended months later, the Pranksters staged
”Acid Tests” throughout California—multimedia events with movies and tapes from the cross-country trip, music from a new band called The Grateful Dead, light shows and, of course, pitchers of LSD-laden Kool-Aid. But the "Acid Tests" were more than wild parties.

They were, as Tom Wolfe wrote, "more like rituals, spiritual quests, original spontaneous, religious experiences. They were the epoch of the psychedelic style—a risk-all balls-out plunge into the unknown." Can you pass the Acid Test? Do you have what it takes? Babbs would exhort all who would listen with missionary zeal: "We've got to learn how to function on acid."

The Pranksters held large and small gatherings up and down the West Coast. There was a surprise weekend-long bash with the Hell's Angels, which ended peacefully at Kesey's place in La Honda, California. Then there was a tense Acid Test at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, where a “tripping” Babbs was confronted by the police with orders to clear out. Author Tom Wolfe wrote it all down:

"I don't have to clear out," said Babbs. "I'm the boss here. They're all working for me."

“Yeah?” And one of the cops grabs Babbs by a luminous vest he has on, succeeding only in separating Babbs from the vest. Babbs is grinning manically, but suddenly looming most large and fierce.

"You're under arrest!"

"For what?"

"Resistin'."

"Resistin' what?"

"You gonna come quietly or do we have to take you?"

“Either way you want it," says Babbs, grinning in the most frightening manner now, like the next step is eight karate chops to the gizzards and giblets. Suddenly it is a Mexican standoff—with both sides glaring but nobody swinging a punch yet. It is a grand hassle, of course. At the last minute a couple of Kesey's lawyers arrive on the scene and cool everything down and talk the cops out of it and Babbs out of it and it all rumbles away.

By 1966 the party was over for the Pranksters. There were drug busts, a faked suicide by Kesey, his escape to Mexico, and his eventual arrest and six-month jail sentence. Babbs and the other Pranksters scattered for a time, only to resettle in Oregon.

"We blew it!"

"So much we can't keep score."

"We blew it!"

"...perfect!"

"We blew it!"

•••

Oregon’s Willamette Valley seemed like the perfect place for a new start. Babbs had loved this lush green land ever since Kesey first brought him here when they were Stanford grad students. Oregon was where he would put down roots and raise his growing family with second wife, Gretchen. He built a rough-hewn house and settled on a six-acre spread in a suitably named community of Pleasant Hills in the picturesque foothills of the Cascade mountains.

Babbs made a modest living as a farmer (crops, pigs, chickens), painter, musician, performer and freelance writer. He authored occasional magazine articles and edited a Beat anthology. “The Dream” of literary fame was a distant, fleeting memory, but at least he was writing again. He and best pal Kesey continued to travel the country, hitting the road when the Prankster spirit moved them.

When “Dad” Babbs was around, he roamed the drafty house barking orders like the jar-head Marine he had once been: There will be no drinking, drug taking or screwing until you're 21, and no damn cigarette smoking. You’ve got more important things to do with your lives than getting wasted. Comprende?

He believed in raising his kids like he had been brought up in post-WWII Middle America with fun, games and tough love. The proof was in the pudding he would later say: “All of my kids have their degrees or are well on their way.”

His towering scholar-athlete son, O.B., said succinctly, “My dad is a very complex guy.” After lecturing his kids, Ken could often be found with a joint or beer in hand. O.B. recalled the time his father caught him wearing one of his sisters’ earrings as a joke. He angrily rambled on about how “Jewelry and long hair are for girls not boys.” Back then, O.B. wondered how his dad had ever been cool.

Growing up in the Babbs’ household meant regular visits from Timothy Leary, Jerry Garcia, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter Thompson and “Uncle” Ken Kesey. Sometimes touring groups like “The Talking Heads” would drop by. But Ken Babbs was his own one-man show and an unpredictable performer within his family.

There were major mood swings and times when his ego and thick-headed opinions sucked all the air out of any room or encounter. His second marriage unraveled in the mid-1980s as family and friends grew increasingly concerned about his heavy drinking. Would he self-destruct? Was he destined to be just another casualty of the wild and crazy sixties? What was to become of the once promising young author from Mentor, Ohio?

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NOTE: To access more of my fiction and nonfiction, please visit my Authors Guild website: www.markmasse.com & https://www.amazon.com/author/mhmasse