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Kesey's Jail Journal: Cut the M************ Loose
Four years after the legendary 1964 bus trip immortalized in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , Ken Kesey began serving time in San Mateo County Jail for pot possession. Transferred to an experimental low-security "honor camp" in the redwood forest, he spent six months clearing brush and immersing himself in the life of the jail community, attempting to "bring light and color" to it. "This is crazier here than the nuthouse ever was," Kesey noted, and proceeded to record the scene in numerous notebooks, illustrated with intense and brilliantly colored artwork. Upon returning to Oregon, Kesey turned the raw notebook material into an illustrated collage that stretched across dozens of 18" x 23" boards. Upon realizing that publication of the elaborate, handwritten book was more than his publisher was willing to attempt, he put it aside. Almost thirty years later he returned to the project and brought it to completion during the final years of his life. Fans of Ken Kesey's singular American voice will rejoice to hear it again in this unique and long-overdue volume. Those unfamiliar with Kesey's artwork are in for a revelation.
160 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2003
1 person is currently reading
489 people want to read
About the author
Ken Kesey
74 books3,024 followersKen Kesey was American writer, who gained world fame with his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962, filmed 1975). In the 1960s, Kesey became a counterculture hero and a guru of psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary. Kesey has been called the Pied Piper, who changed the beat generation into the hippie movement.
Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, CO, and brought up in Eugene, OR. He spent his early years hunting, fishing, swimming; he learned to box and wrestle, and he was a star football player. He studied at the University of Oregon, where he acted in college plays. On graduating he won a scholarship to Stanford University. Kesey soon dropped out, joined the counterculture movement, and began experimenting with drugs. In 1956 he married his school sweetheart, Faye Haxby.
Kesey attended a creative writing course taught by the novelist Wallace Stegner. His first work was an unpublished novel, ZOO, about the beatniks of the North Beach community in San Francisco. Tom Wolfe described in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) Kesey and his friends, called the Merry Pranksters, as they traveled the country and used various hallucinogens. Their bus, called Furthur, was painted in Day-Glo colors. In California Kesey's friends served LSD-laced Kool-Aid to members of their parties.
At a Veterans' Administration hospital in Menlo Park, California, Kesey was paid as a volunteer experimental subject, taking mind-altering drugs and reporting their effects. These experiences as a part-time aide at a psychiatric hospital, LSD sessions - and a vision of an Indian sweeping there the floor - formed the background for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, set in a mental hospital. While writing the work, and continuing in the footsteps of such writers as Thomas De Quincy (Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1821), Aldous Huxley (The Doors of Perception, 1954), and William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch, 1959), Kesey took peyote. The story is narrated by Chief Bromden. Into his world enters the petty criminal and prankster Randall Patrick McMurphy with his efforts to change the bureaucratic system of the institution, ruled by Nurse Ratched.
The film adaptation of the book gained a huge success. When the film won five Academy Awards, Kesey was barely mentioned during the award ceremonies, and he made known his unhappiness with the film. He did not like Jack Nicholson, or the script, and sued the producers.
Kesey's next novel, Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), appeared two years later and was also made into a film, this time directed by Paul Newman. The story was set in a logging community and centered on two brothers and their bitter rivalry in the family. After the work, Kesey gave up publishing novels. He formed a band of "Merry Pranksters", set up a commune in La Honda, California, bought an old school bus, and toured America and Mexico with his friends, among them Neal Cassady, Kerouac's travel companion. Dressed in a jester's outfit, Kesey was the chief prankster.
In 1965 Kesey was arrested for possession of marijuana. He fled to Mexico, where he faked an unconvincing suicide and then returned to the United States, serving a five-month prison sentence at the San Mateo County Jail. After this tumultuous period he bought farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, settled down with his wife to raise their four children, and taught a graduate writing seminar at the University of Oregon. In the early 1970s Kesey returned to writing and published Kesey's Garage Sale (1973). His later works include the children's book Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear(1990) and Sailor Song (1992), a futuristic tale about an Alaskan fishing village and Hollywood film crew. Last Go Around (1994), Kesey's last book, was an account of a famous Oregon rodeo written in the form of pulp fiction. In 2001, Kesey died of complications after surgery for liver cance
Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, CO, and brought up in Eugene, OR. He spent his early years hunting, fishing, swimming; he learned to box and wrestle, and he was a star football player. He studied at the University of Oregon, where he acted in college plays. On graduating he won a scholarship to Stanford University. Kesey soon dropped out, joined the counterculture movement, and began experimenting with drugs. In 1956 he married his school sweetheart, Faye Haxby.
Kesey attended a creative writing course taught by the novelist Wallace Stegner. His first work was an unpublished novel, ZOO, about the beatniks of the North Beach community in San Francisco. Tom Wolfe described in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) Kesey and his friends, called the Merry Pranksters, as they traveled the country and used various hallucinogens. Their bus, called Furthur, was painted in Day-Glo colors. In California Kesey's friends served LSD-laced Kool-Aid to members of their parties.
At a Veterans' Administration hospital in Menlo Park, California, Kesey was paid as a volunteer experimental subject, taking mind-altering drugs and reporting their effects. These experiences as a part-time aide at a psychiatric hospital, LSD sessions - and a vision of an Indian sweeping there the floor - formed the background for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, set in a mental hospital. While writing the work, and continuing in the footsteps of such writers as Thomas De Quincy (Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1821), Aldous Huxley (The Doors of Perception, 1954), and William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch, 1959), Kesey took peyote. The story is narrated by Chief Bromden. Into his world enters the petty criminal and prankster Randall Patrick McMurphy with his efforts to change the bureaucratic system of the institution, ruled by Nurse Ratched.
The film adaptation of the book gained a huge success. When the film won five Academy Awards, Kesey was barely mentioned during the award ceremonies, and he made known his unhappiness with the film. He did not like Jack Nicholson, or the script, and sued the producers.
Kesey's next novel, Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), appeared two years later and was also made into a film, this time directed by Paul Newman. The story was set in a logging community and centered on two brothers and their bitter rivalry in the family. After the work, Kesey gave up publishing novels. He formed a band of "Merry Pranksters", set up a commune in La Honda, California, bought an old school bus, and toured America and Mexico with his friends, among them Neal Cassady, Kerouac's travel companion. Dressed in a jester's outfit, Kesey was the chief prankster.
In 1965 Kesey was arrested for possession of marijuana. He fled to Mexico, where he faked an unconvincing suicide and then returned to the United States, serving a five-month prison sentence at the San Mateo County Jail. After this tumultuous period he bought farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, settled down with his wife to raise their four children, and taught a graduate writing seminar at the University of Oregon. In the early 1970s Kesey returned to writing and published Kesey's Garage Sale (1973). His later works include the children's book Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear(1990) and Sailor Song (1992), a futuristic tale about an Alaskan fishing village and Hollywood film crew. Last Go Around (1994), Kesey's last book, was an account of a famous Oregon rodeo written in the form of pulp fiction. In 2001, Kesey died of complications after surgery for liver cance
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 7, 2023
It was a treat to find this unique work, the (partial) journals of Ken Kesey while he was in jail for about half a year, beginning June 23, 1967. The story of how he came to be jailed is told brilliantly in the introduction from friend, author, and fellow Merry Prankster Ed McClanahan, and it’s quite a tale. Convicted in 1965 for possession of marijuana, Kesey faked suicide and hid out in Mexico for eight months in 1966, first in Puerto Vallarta and then, aware that the FBI knew he was alive, the more remote Manzanillo. In the fall of 1966 he returned to America, crossing the border on a borrowed horse, and made his way back to the Bay Area. After hiding out for a couple of weeks in the homes of friends, federal agents spotted him in stop and go traffic on 101 near the old Candlestick Park, and caught him after he attempted to flee on foot.
The fact that so much FBI time and energy was spent on a marijuana case, and that Kesey had to serve time, boggles the mind. Kesey spent some of his time in the San Mateo County Jail in downtown Redwood City before being transferred to the Sheriff’s Honor Camp near La Honda, a work facility in redwood country that closed in 2003, and is now part of Pescadero Creek County Park.
Part of the enjoyment of reading what he wrote while imprisoned was in looking up all these local Bay Area places he referenced – Perry Lane (now Perry Avenue in West Menlo Park) where had led a bohemian life and frequently run afoul of Wallace Stegner while at Stanford beginning in 1958, the VA hospital in Menlo Park where he had voluntarily taken psychedelic drugs in 1961 as a part of CIA-financed research (which of course led to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and the houses he frequented at 710 Ashbury in San Francisco (inhabited by the Grateful Dead) and the one across the street at 715 Ashbury (inhabited by the Hell’s Angels), where one time he was driving and his brakes gave out, causing him to crash into the latter.
Kesey describes his experiences with his guards and fellow inmates with honesty, and his artwork on the original pages (and also transcribed) is beautiful and livens the work up. Always with an eye for playfulness and satire, he also shows an honest sense of humanity towards those he meets, like Joe Meeks, the “sex fiend” who had done something so heinous that he was on death row (though in looking him up, it appears he ultimately was not executed, instead getting sentenced to four consecutive life terms). Kesey is not judgmental, and includes some of the poetry Meeks wrote.
We also get a glimpse into the sometimes uneasy race relations and the evolution of Kesey’s own views, as he recounts Jerry Garcy telling him “Hey, Keez…the appellation ‘spade’ is permissible only if you’re a jazz musician.” It was nice that these things that were less flattering to Kesey weren’t edited out. One seriously cringe-worthy bit was when Kesey writes of talking to another prisoner in for a rape charge, and saying “I sympathize, telling him about various Hell’s Angels sex raps that are like this – ‘Some chick thinks she can do the whole Angel thing and about half-way through a chapter she gets scared or sore and freaks and hollers rape…’” Ugh.
These moments are mercifully few in number. Most of what Kesey describes are things like life around the camp, the work, listening to music, playing a game of pickup football, and visitations from his wife and friends that sometimes resulted in drugs being smuggled in. The journal entries and letters have a stream of consciousness, informal style, and yet the quality of the writing is high, and Kesey was able to paint a picture of his experience. As to one inmate’s baritone, he says it’s “a voice so heavy it’s beyond sardonic or bitter or cynical. It groans under a burden of sorrow so immense it sounds Biblical.” Of a time he expounds in a group therapy type session, he says he held forth on entropy thusly: “Entropy is the anarchy of sunshine off a chrome bumper. Entropy is Owsley’s story of the runaway train, highballing down a steep grade, overloaded with passengers without any knowledge of the tight turn coming up at the bottom of a hill…” Of the group being implored by a guard to watch the film Shane, he writes that a black inmate quips “Them westerns ain’t so great to this cat; the redskins never win.”
There is also an afterwards of sorts written by Kesey decades later, a poem references his son’s tragic death in 1984, and his explanation of how some (but not all) of his journals survived, given county officials wariness over the author creating a book out of them. All in all, this is a window into the life of a fascinating author, a guy who wrote two monumental books in the early 1960’s, and then chose to take the road less travelled. Certainly recommended if you’re a fan of his.
The fact that so much FBI time and energy was spent on a marijuana case, and that Kesey had to serve time, boggles the mind. Kesey spent some of his time in the San Mateo County Jail in downtown Redwood City before being transferred to the Sheriff’s Honor Camp near La Honda, a work facility in redwood country that closed in 2003, and is now part of Pescadero Creek County Park.
Part of the enjoyment of reading what he wrote while imprisoned was in looking up all these local Bay Area places he referenced – Perry Lane (now Perry Avenue in West Menlo Park) where had led a bohemian life and frequently run afoul of Wallace Stegner while at Stanford beginning in 1958, the VA hospital in Menlo Park where he had voluntarily taken psychedelic drugs in 1961 as a part of CIA-financed research (which of course led to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and the houses he frequented at 710 Ashbury in San Francisco (inhabited by the Grateful Dead) and the one across the street at 715 Ashbury (inhabited by the Hell’s Angels), where one time he was driving and his brakes gave out, causing him to crash into the latter.
Kesey describes his experiences with his guards and fellow inmates with honesty, and his artwork on the original pages (and also transcribed) is beautiful and livens the work up. Always with an eye for playfulness and satire, he also shows an honest sense of humanity towards those he meets, like Joe Meeks, the “sex fiend” who had done something so heinous that he was on death row (though in looking him up, it appears he ultimately was not executed, instead getting sentenced to four consecutive life terms). Kesey is not judgmental, and includes some of the poetry Meeks wrote.
We also get a glimpse into the sometimes uneasy race relations and the evolution of Kesey’s own views, as he recounts Jerry Garcy telling him “Hey, Keez…the appellation ‘spade’ is permissible only if you’re a jazz musician.” It was nice that these things that were less flattering to Kesey weren’t edited out. One seriously cringe-worthy bit was when Kesey writes of talking to another prisoner in for a rape charge, and saying “I sympathize, telling him about various Hell’s Angels sex raps that are like this – ‘Some chick thinks she can do the whole Angel thing and about half-way through a chapter she gets scared or sore and freaks and hollers rape…’” Ugh.
These moments are mercifully few in number. Most of what Kesey describes are things like life around the camp, the work, listening to music, playing a game of pickup football, and visitations from his wife and friends that sometimes resulted in drugs being smuggled in. The journal entries and letters have a stream of consciousness, informal style, and yet the quality of the writing is high, and Kesey was able to paint a picture of his experience. As to one inmate’s baritone, he says it’s “a voice so heavy it’s beyond sardonic or bitter or cynical. It groans under a burden of sorrow so immense it sounds Biblical.” Of a time he expounds in a group therapy type session, he says he held forth on entropy thusly: “Entropy is the anarchy of sunshine off a chrome bumper. Entropy is Owsley’s story of the runaway train, highballing down a steep grade, overloaded with passengers without any knowledge of the tight turn coming up at the bottom of a hill…” Of the group being implored by a guard to watch the film Shane, he writes that a black inmate quips “Them westerns ain’t so great to this cat; the redskins never win.”
There is also an afterwards of sorts written by Kesey decades later, a poem references his son’s tragic death in 1984, and his explanation of how some (but not all) of his journals survived, given county officials wariness over the author creating a book out of them. All in all, this is a window into the life of a fascinating author, a guy who wrote two monumental books in the early 1960’s, and then chose to take the road less travelled. Certainly recommended if you’re a fan of his.
April 23, 2022
This jail journal, published decades after Kesey’s incarceration and shortly after his unfortunate, early death, tells only a small portion of the tale of his time at a California honor work camp in the Santa Cruz mountains. The end of the book recounts the confiscation or theft and subsequent disappearance of his other notebooks. Readers will surely lament that they were not recovered to be included in this short work.
Kesey recounts his time and the cast of characters, including fellow inmates, their visiting friends and families and the guards who run the camp and weaves a colorful narrative that is engaging, both poignant and funny.
Kesey’s wry observations are consistent extensions of those he put on paper in his two most famous novels, published before his marijuana bust and flight into Mexico. The journals cast a light on the turbulent end of the sixties, the racial tension, the blurred lines between the law and the outlaw and the blossoming counterculture.
The journal was edited for clarity, but includes some scans of his original notebook pages. Readers will enjoy taking the time to reread those passages and delight in his colorful pen drawings and the spiral and staggered formatting of his narrative.
For fans of Kesey the author or Kesey the Prankster, this is a must-read. Similarly, Deadheads, counterculture freaks, or Beat Generation aficionados will find plenty to keep them turning pages.
Kesey recounts his time and the cast of characters, including fellow inmates, their visiting friends and families and the guards who run the camp and weaves a colorful narrative that is engaging, both poignant and funny.
Kesey’s wry observations are consistent extensions of those he put on paper in his two most famous novels, published before his marijuana bust and flight into Mexico. The journals cast a light on the turbulent end of the sixties, the racial tension, the blurred lines between the law and the outlaw and the blossoming counterculture.
The journal was edited for clarity, but includes some scans of his original notebook pages. Readers will enjoy taking the time to reread those passages and delight in his colorful pen drawings and the spiral and staggered formatting of his narrative.
For fans of Kesey the author or Kesey the Prankster, this is a must-read. Similarly, Deadheads, counterculture freaks, or Beat Generation aficionados will find plenty to keep them turning pages.
June 27, 2023
A real artifact of its time, Kesey wrote this in jail during his 6th month conviction for possession, complete with memoir, poems, paintings and collages. If you're sympathetic with the era you'll dig it.
February 18, 2013
Kesey, the author of Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, was a Merry Prankster, with Leary, a wild, creative guy, and these are his wild and funny journals that are also a sort of ethnographic study of the jail and those there wit him while he was in for pot possession. Multi-genre research, art and interview bits, journaling, poetry... I knew this existed but never read it until now!
January 17, 2009
This is Kesey, but not great Kesey like 'sometimes a great notion' or 'one flew over the cukoo's nest'. Still it is fun and revealing in its reporting/notebook style. Hardcore Kesey fans will love it just for that. Everyone else will give it three stars.
June 3, 2009
Read it enough times to realize that you will never get it and that is what there is to get. Also, if you have ever been in jail, you can appreciate the resourcefulness of the physicality of Kesey's journal as well as the invigorating content.
December 26, 2007
Posthumous release of Ken Kesey's journal he kept while incarcerated in a work camp. Both art and text are fascinating.
August 24, 2008
Mr. Toad's Wild Ride meets low security prison journal. Interesting and unsettling.
December 30, 2008
A great look into what happened to Kesey after being jailed on some bullshit pot charges. Great pictures and artwork included.
April 13, 2009
I bought it as a gift for somone but it was so good I never put it down everytime I went to his apartment.
Read
July 18, 2017A first-person narrative that introduces you to some zany characters and Kesey's way of dealing with them. a very fun read!
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews