Ken Kesey’s First LSD Trip Animated

Back in 1959, Ken Kesey, then a grad stu­dent in Stan­ford’s cre­ative writ­ing pro­gram, start­ed par­tic­i­pat­ing in gov­ern­ment-spon­sored med­ical research that test­ed a range of hal­lu­cino­gens — LSD, psilo­cy­bin, mesca­line, and the rest. As part of the research project, Kesey spoke into a tapere­corder and recount­ed the ins-and-outs of his hal­lu­ci­na­tions. These tapes were even­tu­al­ly stored away, and Kesey went on to write One Flew Over the Cuck­oo’s Nest, a book that now sits on TIME’s list of the 100 Best Eng­lish-Lan­guage Nov­els since 1923.

A half cen­tu­ry lat­er (and ten years after Kesey’s own death), the LSD tapes live again. This week, the film­mak­er Alex Gib­ney will release Mag­ic Trip, a new doc­u­men­tary that revis­its Kesey’s fabled road trip across Amer­i­ca with the Mer­ry Pranksters and their psy­che­del­ic “Fur­ther” bus. (Tom Wolfe, you might recall, famous­ly cov­ered this trip with The Elec­tric Kool-Aid Acid Test, pub­lished in 1968.) Tak­en from the new film, the sequence above mix­es the redis­cov­ered tapes with some art­ful ani­ma­tion, and it cap­tures the whole mood of Kesey’s first trip …

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Beyond Tim­o­thy Leary: 2002 Film Revis­its His­to­ry of LSD

Tim­o­thy Leary’s Wild Ride and the Fol­som Prison Inter­view

via Wired