Not surprisingly, Owsley never bonded with Kesey or the Pranksters, whom he considered to be “a bunch of people who were goofing off and getting high on acid once a week and playing around with what it did to their heads. There was a lot of pretension, and it was almost impossible to get Kesey to listen to anybody else and understand or accept what they had to say. You just couldn’t give him any kind of advice or anything. It was always all about Kesey.” With the possible exception of his father, Owsley had finally come into contact with someone he could not control.
