The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [83]
I realized that not only did I not fit in, but because I thought I was fitting in in some way, I was afraid to ask such very basic questions as, what’s the difference between an eight-gauge and seven-gauge tire, or, what’s a gum ball, because if you’re supposed to be hip, you can’t ask those questions. I also found that people really don’t want you to try to fit in. They’d much rather fill you in. People like to have someone to tell their stories to. So if you’re willing to be the village information gatherer, they’ll often just pile material on you. My one contribution to the discipline of psychology is my theory of information compulsion. Part of the nature of the human beast is a feeling of scoring a few status points by telling other people things they don’t know. So this does work in your favor.
After that, when I did The Pump House Gang, I scarcely could have been in a more alien world. I did the whole story in my seersucker rig. I think they enjoyed that hugely. They thought of me as very old. I was thirty-odd years old, and they thought of me as very stuffy. They kind of liked all that—this guy in a straw boater coming around asking them questions. Then it even became more extreme when I was working on Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I began to understand that it would really be a major mistake to try to fit into that world. There was a kind of creature that Kesey and the Pranksters, practically everybody in the psychedelic world, detested more than anything else, and that was the so-called weekend hipster, who was the journalist or teacher or lawyer, or somebody who was hip on the weekends but went back to his straight job during the week. Kesey had a habit of doing what he called testing people’s cool. If he detected the weekend hipster, he would dream up some test of hipness, like saying, “Okay, let’s everybody jump on our bikes and ride naked up Route 1.” They would do that, and usually at that point the lawyer, who didn’t want an indecent exposure charge on his life’s score sheet, would drop out. Kesey explained this theory of testing people’s cool, his notion that there’re lots of people who want to be amoral, but very few who are up to it. And he was right.
How did you come across the third great awakening and the Me Decade? Was that originally a lecture that you were doing?
I think I did it for The Critic; I used “the third great awakening” in that.
One of the few things I learned on the lecture circuit, which I have abandoned for the most part, was the existence of these new religious movements and some insight into what they were like. I would begin to meet members of religious communes who had come to my talks in hopes of hearing about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, whom I was not talking about any longer. I would talk about art, and the first question would be, “What’s Ken Kesey doing now?” And I can’t tell you how many times that happened. I began to see that I was perceived as a medium who could put them in touch with the other world. And all these people were patiently listening just to get to the question period, or to get me alone to ask, “What’s Ken Kesey doing now? What’s he really like? Where can I find a commune? Are we running our commune correctly?” God, I used to get all these letters —I could have started a column like “Dr. Hip Pocrates, Advice for Heads.”
Well, the other question that everyone asks, I recall, is how many times you’d taken acid in order to do ‘Kool-Aid Acid Test,’ and you said you hadn’t, which disappointed everyone greatly.
Yeah, I think they really wanted me to be on the bus. In fact, I never was.
You went off in