The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [84]
Well, I actually did it once during the writing of the book; I’d started writing the book, and then I thought, well, this is one little piece of reporting I haven’t done. So I did do it; it scared the hell out of me. It was like tying yourself to a railroad track to see how big the train is. It was pretty big. I would never do it again. Although at several places I went to lecture in the years that followed, people would put things in the pie that was cooked for dinner—not LSD, but a lot of hashish, marijuana baked into things, or methedrine. People would pop poppers under my nose, things of this sort. They thought they were doing me a favor. But one of the reasons I wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, one of the reasons I thought it was important enough to write about, was that it was a religion; Kesey’s group was a primary religious group.
And you could see how just such a group developed, as if you’d been able to have been a reporter when the early Christians were forming and then again, running into students who would tell me they had formed communes, and who were very frankly religious and would call themselves Jesus people. They said they didn’t use dope, but they all had. In the beginning the whole Jesus movement was made up of former acidheads, and when they said they didn’t use dope, in most cases they really meant they didn’t use chemical dope. Anything you could grow was quite all right. That mean that marijuana was okay, peyote was okay . . .
. . . mescaline was all right, mushrooms, etc.
Yeah, if you would go to the trouble of making it. Those things were all okay. The people in the psychedelic world had been religious but had always covered it up. There was such a bad odor about being frankly religious. I mean Kesey would refer to Cosmo, meaning God; someone in the group used the word “manager.” Hugh Romney [a.k.a. Wavy Gravy] used to say, “I’m in the pudding and I’ve met the manager.” Or they’d say, if they were getting into a very religious frame of mind and began to notice a lot of—what’s the word when two people pick up the same thought at the same time? Probably “coincidence” is the right word, but they had another name for it—they would begin to say, “Well, there’s some real weird shit going down,” or “Brothers, this is the holy moment,” or anything like that.
In the early Seventies, the mood of all this began to get more and more frankly religious, and the idea that this was the third great awakening popped into my head. Because I had remembered from graduate-school days the first awakening and second great awakening, out of which came Mormonism. Then I began to read about it. I saw that the Mormons, for example, had been just like hippies and had been seen as such. Just wild kids. They were young when they started. You think of Mormons as being old and having big beards. They were children. They were in their early twenties. Joseph Smith was twenty-four years old—he was the leader of the band. And they were just hated, more than the hippies were hated. And Smith was lynched. He wasn’t hanged, but he was in jail in Carthage, Illinois, and it was invaded by vigilantes and they shot him to death. That’s why Brigham Young took the group out to the woods of Utah.
And I think that movement is growing bigger and bigger. There’s such a . . . yearning in everybody—there always has been—for blind faith. There’s no such thing, I think, as rational faith. It isn’t faith. And people always want it, one way or another, me included, although I hide it from myself, as do most people who think they are really sophisticated and learned. But this is something people really want, because blind faith is a way of assuring yourself that the kind of life that you’re either leading or intend to lead is inherently and absolutely the best. That’s really what it’s all about.
Now is a great time for new religions to pop up. There are people who get religious about jogging, they get religious about sex, and you talk to some of these people who are avowed swingers