Kesey Memorial

I attended HempFest 2009, and met Zane kesey and all I can say is that it was about time. After following The Grateful Dead around the country for years, I finally met the little boy on the bus that they called "Happy". I found out why. Zane Kesey has a smile and personallity that is infectious. If you get the chance to really talk to him you find that he is a good man with a good heart and I put this small shrine to Further and the memory of a man that changed the way the world looked at itself. Without the antics of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. I would not be the man I am today because I would not have found LSD.

With that I give you "The Story of Further" as assembled by David "Purple" West in memory of an idea, a dream, and a lifestyle. Rest in peace, Mr. Kesey, that sure was some swell Kool-Aid!

Prankster History Page: http://www.pranksterweb.org/index.htm

Further

Further was a 1939 International Harvester purchased by author Ken Kesey in 1964, for $1,500 from Andre Hobson in Atherton, California. The bus was stripped down and remodeled inside and out for a psychedelic excursion across the country with

Kesey and his Merry Pranksterson board. The bus was named by artist Roy Sebern who painted the word "Furthur" on the destination placard as a kind of one-word poem and inspiration to keep going whenever the bus broke down. It wasn’t until much later that he found out he had misspelled it. Just as the bus was constantly being repainted, somewhere along the line the Further sign was corrected.

Beat legend Neal Cassady was the driver of the famous bus on its original trip to New York for the opening of Kesey's new book, Sometimes a Great Notion. The trip was filmed by the Merry Pranksters. Other Furthur trips included an anti-Vietnam war rally in 1966 and Woodstock in 1969 (without Kesey). More can be read about the adventures of the Merry Pranksters on Further in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.

The Smithsonian Institution sought to acquire the bus, but Kesey refused to give or sell it to them. In true form, Kesey attempted to prank the venerable Smithsonian by passing off a phony bus. They didn't fall for it.

Ken Kesey parked the bus in a swamp on his farm in 1990 when he acquired a new bus.

In November 2005, Furthur was pulled out of the swamp by Zane Kesey and a group of the original Merry Pranksters with the intent of restoring it. The estimate was around $100,000 would be needed to fix the badly rusted body, re-do the interior, restore the flooded drivetrain, and repaint the famous exterior. However according to key-z.com, Zane Kesey's site, the project is stalled and looking for a new group of volunteers to take it over.

Both buses currently reside at Kesey's farm (where his widow still lives) in Pleasant Hill, Oregon.

This essay about the Beatles and the influence of Further on the Magical Mystery Tour was sent in by Steve Ellerhoff. Thanks Steve.

note from Purple:

I pulled this off of The Mary Pranksters History "Further" page. I consider Zane Kesey to be a good friend, even though we just met in person finally at Seattle HempFest 2009. ( Thanks for the love you showed me, your one in a trillion Zane!!! Purple)

"Dying to Take You Away"

Once upon a time, way back, you know, in the ‘60s, Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, led a group of "freaks" in an old converted 1939 International Harvester bus, psychedelically-painted and named "Furthur," across America. They enrolled many notable heroes of the counterculture, old and new, like Neal Cassady and Jerry Garcia, and filmed the whole shabang—Kesey saying, "Get them into your movie before they get you into theirs" (Lee 121)—all while taking internal trips through the use of LSD. Tom Wolfe immortalized it all in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and little did they know that their Technicolor dream-trek would spawn off countless trips for people in the decades to come; or maybe they did know. In the seventies, Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear traversed America in a psychedelically-painted Studebaker in The Muppet Movie and elsewhere in Muppethology you can see the Electric Mayhem Band driving around in a psychedelic bus. I also remember when I was a kid, there were commercials on TV for something called Sweet Pickles where you sent in money and got books about anthropomorphic animals. I wanted them because in the commercials a gang of animals would drive to your house in a giant green bus and deliver the books; I didn’t believe my mom when she insisted they wouldn’t visit me if we ordered their books. Even more recent than that has been a series of children’s books all about taking trips on a magic bus. But before all of those, the Merry Pranksters inspired the Beatles.

In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test when the Pranksters head out to see the Beatles in concert on September 2, 1965, they display a special sign to welcome the Fab Four: THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES. They had successfully welcomed the Hell’s Angels so why not try the Beatles, too? Well, the concert, as Wolfe records it, is a disaster for the Pranksters. The mass hysteria of Beatlemania is too much for them to handle and, as they’re all tripping, they see the concert to be the cancerous offspring of immense power ignorantly controlled by the Beatles. It’s appropriate that the Pranksters has been listening to "Help!" on the way to the concert because they need it, and God knows the Beatles need it, too. On top of the fear and confusion, as if that wasn’t enough, four or five hundred people were waiting for the Beatles at Kesey’s house once the Pranksters returned—and John, Paul, George, and Ringo didn’t show up (Of course, in 1968, Ken Kesey and twelve others, including some Hell’s Angels, were welcomed to Apple in London by the Beatles. Kesey admits to going so he could avoid some of the attention he’d received since The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was published. Derek Taylor, an Apple employee, says, "Ken Kesey was in, borrowing a typewriter and tape recorder and doing poetry readings in my office in the morning. I would arrive and find the Hell’s Angels sitting around…scratching and farting…and saying, ‘Hey Ken, read some more, man’" (Beatles 312). The whole story, how an unnamed Apple employee got punched by a Hell’s Angel, and how he first met John Lennon dressed up as Santa Claus is told wonderfully by Kesey in his short story "Now We Know How Many Holes it Takes to Fill the Albert Hall" in his book Demon Box). However, the legendary LSD manufacturer, Owsley, is there and gets everyone high but he turns out to be an asshole… Wolfe goes on to explain that Owsley was the guy who’d made the acid that the Beatles eventually came to trip on:

…after Owsley hooked up with Kesey and the Pranksters, he began a musical group called the Grateful Dead. Through the Dead’s experience with the Pranksters was born the sound known as "acid rock." And it was that sound that the Beatles picked up on, after they started taking acid, to do a famous series of acid-rock record albums, Revolver, Rubber Soul, and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band (Wolfe 189).

What Wolfe didn’t know when he wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is that in August of 1965, when the Beatles were at a party in Los Angeles, they took their first deliberate acid trips—all except Paul. Incidentally, it was at that party where Lennon ran into Peter Fonda, who was actively telling a story about a near-death operation he’d undergone at the age of ten. As Fonda later put it, "John was passing at the time and heard me saying, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead.’ He looked at me and said, ‘You’re making me feel I’ve never been born. Who put all that shit in your head?’" (Turner 111). Unknowingly, Fonda had inspired a Lennon song that would turn up the next year on the Beatles’ album Revolver: "She Said She Said." The point here is that on September 2, 1965, unbeknownst to the Merry Pranksters at that Beatles concert, John, George, and Ringo had already taken LSD and were just starting down the path of psychedelia.

Once on that path, an interesting evolution took place in the Beatles’ music and before getting into what happens in their Magical Mystery Tour, I think it’s important to look at their psychedelic progression. The obvious change is that their songs became more introverted and insightful and they demanded closer inspection; within their rhetoric, among other observations, was a repeated study on loneliness. Scholars have picked up on their views of loneliness and written extensively on the subject. In 1972, David R. Pichaske explored the Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP entirely in terms on loneliness, for his book Beowulf to Beatles & Beyond, and makes a strong point. "Two things are important: the band is lonely, and it is performing [the Beatles are pretending not to be the Beatles]. Perhaps the two are interrelated: performers are generally lonely people, lonely people perform when they pretend not to be lonely and in an attempt to escape their loneliness" (Pichaske 522). He says that through the repeated line in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (reprise) that goes, "Sgt. Pepper’s lonely," the crucial word is "Pepper’s"—"Pepper is"—all together, "Sgt. Pepper is lonely." Once you break that code, practically every line in the album can be examined in terms of loneliness.

More recently though, a much stronger case has been made by historian Nick Bromell in his compelling study on psychedelia, Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s.

We hunger for songs about loneliness not just because they express what we dread but because they offer what we need: a space, a place to go…When in 1966 the Beatles asked where all the lonely came from, I already knew the answer: they came from the way life is, from the way things have been set up. We are Eleanor Rigby…We needed a form that could represent this vision to ourselves, that could express our second sight and our fear of, and need for, loneliness. Rock was the form we found, and for good reason (Bromell 44-45, 48).

Bromell’s interpretation goes right along with Lennon’s vision of his own music. When describing "Strawberry Fields Forever," one of the earlier psychedelic songs that was released, Lennon said, "Strawberry Fields is anywhere you want to go…It’s just about me really, or anybody else, who’s thinking like that. It’s pretty straightforward…I saw loneliness" (Badman 264). No wonder Elizabeth Wurtzel in Prozac Nation finds some suicidal comfort in "Strawberry Fields Forever." "Those are the words I want to leave the world with. Let me take you down. Down as low as I am. Yes, that’s it, that’s the plan, to die with John Lennon’s voice seems just right" (Wurtzel 318).

Thus the desire to take a trip. I know when I’m lonely I want to get away from where I am at the time. And though it may be a mistake on my part, I’m assuming that many other people feel the same way and that, to quote "Imagine," "I’m not the only one." Therefore, after the Beatles’ exploration of loneliness through Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it’s only natural that they would want to take a trip. The trip that ensued was a thoroughly British road trip that followed a strange mix of people across the English countryside. What’s great for us is that they filmed everything and edited it into a movie.

Not an ordinary movie, but a totally spontaneous movie, using hand-held cameras, shooting the experience as it happened—off the top of the head!—cavorting, rapping on, soaring in the moment, visionary chaos—a daydream! a black art! a chaos! They finished up with miles and miles of film, a monster, a veritable morass of it, all shaky and out of focus—blissful Zonk!—which they saw as a total breakthrough in terms of expression but also as a commercial display—shown on British TV it was—that might be appreciated even outside the esoteric world of the heads—THE MOVIE—called Magical Mystery Tour (Wolfe 189).

As Wolfe shows, the Merry Pranksters were the initial influence for the Beatles’ own road trip, but they also applied the idea to their own culture. A tradition in Britain is the Mystery Tour, where a bunch of people hop on a bus without knowing where they’re headed, and they just go. I’m familiar with the idea here in America because my grandmother goes on trips similar to these that are sponsored by her bank. The use of a Mystery Tour is perfect because it includes all the lonely people, not just counterculture "freaks"—the Beatles are taking all types of people on their trip, from children to midgets to the elderly.

Songs are interspersed all through the film, six in total, alluding extensively to movement and travel, or sadness and melancholy. The ordering of the songs is intersting in itself, too. "Magical Mystery Tour" is the commercial-like intro to the trip, begging people to "roll up" and come along for the ride. "The Fool on the Hill" is all about a sophomoric (a wise yet foolish) guy who is completely ignored by the people around him.

"Flying" is a melancholic instrumental that plays during a fluorescent-neon plane ride over various landscapes (which was footage borrowed from Stanley Kubrick that was left out of his own road trip through space: 2001: A Space Odyssey [Turner 144]).

"I am the Walrus," one of the most famous psychedelic compositions, deals with both movement and sadness through its Jabberwockian gobbledygook. It’s full of running, flying, climbing, and kicking; but the song also has a melancholy sort of two-note structure, which Lennon based on the sound of British police sirens, and besides doing a lot of waiting, the voice in the song keeps returning to, "Crying." The song is very complex, and was deliberately written to be impossible to analyze and confusing, but nevertheless these themes of movement and loneliness shine through the nonsense.

"Blue Jay Way," the only song written completely by George Harrison in the film, is actually named after a road that can be found high in the Hollywood Hills. Harrison wrote the song when he was staying at a rented house, belonging to Peggy Lee, that was on Blue Jay Way. Apparently it is very tricky to get onto that road because of the way the narrow canyons affect the roadways, and some of George’s friends got lost on their way to the house. While he was waiting, he sat in the corner and wrote this song about it, and the song ended up in the film, complete with a sequence of George playing an organ drawn with chalk on the pavement in front of some cars. "One critic thought the line in which George urged his guest not to ‘be long’ was advice to young people telling them not to ‘belong’ (to society, that is). Another acclaimed musicologist believed that, when George said that his friends had ‘lost their way,’ he meant that a whole generation had lost direction" (Turner 145). In any case, the song, which establishes itself in L.A., is a mellow exercise in what it is to wait and wonder about people who may have become lost along the way and is full of overt references to streets.

The last song, and the one to pretty much wrap up the film, is "Your Mother Should Know." There’s something delightful about the song and yet at the same time, there are those spooky wavering "Oooh" sounds that fill up the backing vocals on the track. To push it further, or as the Pranksters would spell it, "furthur," Paul sings the majority of one verse by scatting at first with the sound "Die," which eventually changes to "Dah." Why are these spooky "Ooohs" and Paul singing "Die" there? The result is a song that’s kind of fun and optimistic, but rooted in a strange sort of melancholy.

The songs aren’t the only psychedelic aspects of the film. The live action in the film, made up of bizarre segments, makes up a plotless whole. How can you have a film without a plot? Well, you can’t if you’re an old schooler. But if you’re a psychedelic artist you can produce a narrative where nothing really happens. For example, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (which incidentally, Lennon loved. According to biographer Robert Rosen, "He was so taken by it, he imagined himself playing Thompson in the movie" [Rosen 53]. Apparently Lennon found it humorous or didn’t take much issue with Thompson writing, " ‘That poor fool [Lennon] should have stayed where he was,’ said my attorney. ‘Punks like that just get in the way when they try to be serious’" [Thompson 21].). The book is an excellent example of yet another psychedelic road trip that follows no real plot and conflict. Of course, it was published four years after Magical Mystery Tour was screened, but it still fits, doesn’t it?

So what goes on in those confusing segments in Magical Mystery Tour might be worth looking at individually. Upon inspection, it is clear that the Beatles are being completely subversive, and that they’re doing it in the genre of madcap British humor. Sure, this was several years before Monty Python, but utter madness has been a part of British culture for a long time. The Beatles themselves, especially Lennon, had been greatly influenced by a group of wacky radio characters who called themselves the Goons, of which Peter Sellers was a member. The Goons would do skits where they would play all sorts of silly characters who spoke funny and satirized society around them. This subversive style of British humor is the tradition that the Beatles are working through, albeit in a psychedelic way, in Magical Mystery Tour.

In one segment, the Beatles attend a strip show. The Beatles? At a strip show? Shots of Lennon and Harrison clapping with anticipation before the stripper comes out, and then a shot of Lennon sprawled across the table and watching the show with unflinching eyes wasn’t what people would expect from their lovable Beatles. John, Paul, George, and Ringo have grown; they're perverts—or are at least showing the world where lonely people go when their hormones are raging. Still…the Beatles are that desperate???

Another rule they break, and with this one I say more power to ‘em, is that they show a couple in love that is neither young nor physically fit. An instrumental version of their earlier hit "All My Loving" plays while Buster Bloodvessel, a senile old man who thinks he runs the tour, and Ringo’s aunt Jessica, an obese woman, frolic around at the beach. They hug. They kiss. Mr. Bloodvessel even draws a heart around Jessica in the sand at her feet and kneels before her. What the hell are the Beatles doing? Why aren’t they showing all the hot groupies we all know they had and, you know, like, putting them in skimpy swimsuits so we can have a good vicarious romp at the beach? The Beatles choice to show the "unbeautiful" people in love is in itself a very beautiful segment, and it lends a refreshing and unexpected view of love itself. Because after all, aren’t people who look like this, the old and the fat, supposed to be lonely?

Possibly the most subversive of all acts in the film is the way the Beatles mock the military. It’s important to remember that the year is 1967 and that the war in Viet Nam is raging away. In one segment, Paul plays a General seated behind a desk while an Army Sergeant (played by Victor Spinetti, who co-starred with the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night and Help!) leads people on the tour through military headquarters. As Paul sits quietly, the Army Sergeant (Pepper?) barks his lines at length incoherently at all the tour members. Finally, Ringo simply asks, "Why?" The Sergeant is confused so Ringo asks again. The Sergeant’s response is to bark with more conviction, the only intelligible words out of his mouth being, "Get your bloody hair cut!" Suddenly, the tour is teleported to the countryside and the Army Sergeant begins giving a presentation concerning a stuffed cow that is set beside him. After the Sergeant has yelled a bit and danced by the stuffed cow a bit, the tour members are bored and they file away before he finishes his presentation. If that isn’t mockery of the military, I don’t know what is. Also, it’s interesting to see how the Sarge is left behind so he is all alone. Once everyone is gone, he pets the dead cow on the head and begins a conversation with it—definitely an act of a lonely man. This especially makes sense if this Sergeant really is Sgt. Pepper, who we’ve already found to be a lonely man, according to the Beatles.

The other act of parody of the military within the film comes during the song sequence for "Your Mother Should Know." After the Beatles, clad in white tuxedoes with roses in their lapels, descend a staircase, they salute a stream of girl cadets who pass by, all dressed in uniforms. What’s most important here is the fact that the Beatles are saluting them. Why would the Beatles salute the girl cadets, who are really just Britain’s version of the girl scouts, which was set up by the Royal Navy? Is this a comment on the Viet Nam War, the one that sucked in thousands of young men (including my uncle I'm named for)? If so, the Beatles are saying that the only uniforms young women have to worry about wearing are those of the girl cadets, a non-militaristic organization maintained by the militaristic Royal Navy, because women couldn't be drafted or even properly enlist like men could. The Beatles are pointing out the fishiness of having youth organizations led by the military, especially when the reality of the military was that thousands of young men were being killed in Viet Nam.

Well, when Magical Mystery Tour was first aired on December 8, 1967, on the BBC, a lot of viewers were utterly confused by the whole thing. Not helping matters, the film was shown in black and white—a big mistake considering the fact that this was a technicolorful psychedelic adventure. The reviews weren’t good. James Thomas of the Daily Express said, "The bigger they are, the harder they fall. And what a fall it was" (Badman 332). The Sun reported, "The BBC switchboard was overwhelmed last night by people complaining about The Beatles’ film Magical Mystery Tour. Some People protested that the BBC1 programme was incomprehensible" (Badman 333). The Daily Mirror: "Rubbish…Piffle…Nonsense!" (Badman 333).

Lennon defended the film saying, "I loved it, because it was a trip, you know. Everyone was down on it, but it was all right. But there was too much ‘nothing happening’" (Badman 333). Paul said, "We thought we would not underestimate people and would do something new. It is better being controversial than being boring" [my italics] (Badman 333). Aha! So they were definitely aiming at creating a controversial trip.

I believe the whole key to the film is actually a small shot within it where Lennon is walking through a field with the rest of the tour members. Talking to no one in particular, and in a deep and silly Liverpudlian voice, he says, "There’s no business like show business. There’s no business I know. Everything about it’s so appealing." Well, if Magical Mystery Tour is show business, then it’s an awfully confusing business to be in. The Beatles themselves have cracked their own fame wide open. At a time when they were riding high on the wave of success, the deliberately produced a film that would confuse people.

The music was great, and indeed sold well (and continues to). Released on two EPs in the UK, it went to #1 on the charts; and released as an LP in the US, with extra tracks that had originally been released as singles, it also went to #1. Still, the film remains problematic, even for fans. In Chris Bruton’s short story "Beatles 4ever," some friends looking back on the Beatles’ career frown upon Magical Mystery Tour. One character says, "Just look at it: the fat lady wolfing down a mountain of spaghetti, the Beatles in white tuxes dancing a two-step, and all of these cosmic ‘special effects’—where’s the great meaning? It’s just stupid, man. It was stupid then, it’s stupid now" (Cording 280). I have to admit, when I first rented the film at the video store, and sat down to watch it one summer afternoon during my adolescence, I fell asleep. I thought it was horrible, boring, self-indulgent. I was even embarrassed that my beloved Beatles had done such a crappy movie; I believed I could have done something better with my friend in my backyard. After some years though, and some thought, I’m convinced that Magical Mystery Tour, though not even an hour long, is actually a very controversial and subversive film.

Works Cited

Badman, Keith. The Beatles Off the Record: Outrageous Opinions & Unrehearsed

Interviews. London: Omnibus, 2000.

Beatles. The Beatles Anthology. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2000.

- - - . Magical Mystery Tour. LP. EMI Records, 1967.

Bromell, Nick. Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Bruton, Chris. "Beatles 4ever." In My Life: Encounters with the Beatles. Ed. Robert

Cording, Shelli Jankowski-Smith, and E.J. Miller Laino. New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1998. 274.

Harry, Bill. The Ultimate Beatles Encyclopedia. New York: MJF Books, 1992.

Kesey, Ken. Demon Box. New York: Viking, 1986.

Lee, Martin A., and Bruce Shlain. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD:

The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond. New York: Grove Press, 1985.

Magical Mystery Tour. Dir. The Beatles. Perf. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George

Harrison, Ringo Starr. Apple Films Ltd., 1967.

Pichaske, David R. Beowulf to Beatles & Beyond. New York: Macmillan, 1981.

Rosen, Robert. Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon. New York: Soft Skull

Publishing, 2000.

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of

the American Dream. New York: Vintage Books, 1971.

Turner, Steve. A Hard Day’s Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Song. New York:

Harper Perennial, 1999.

Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Bantam, 1968.

Wurtzel, Elizabeth. Prozac Nation: A Memoir. New York: Riverhead Books, 1994.

Ken Kesey’s original magic bus being restored

Rainbow-painted ‘Further’ may yet run again

The 1939 International Harvester bus that author Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters drove into psychedelic history in 1964 sits on the Kesey family farm in Pleasant Hill, Ore. Stored in a swamp for 15 years, the bus has been hauled out for restoration.

updated 11:09 a.m. PT, Fri., Jan. 20, 2006 Jeff Barnard / AP

PLEASANT HILL, Ore. - Zane Kesey picks at clumps of moss and swirls of brightly colored paint and patches of rust covering the school bus that his father, the late author Ken Kesey, rode cross-country with a refrigerator stocked with LSD-laced drinks in pursuit of a new art form.

“This comes off pretty easy,” Kesey says, a smile playing over his face. “It’s amazing, some of the things that are coming out — things I remember.”

He continues tidying the keepsake. “It’s going to take a lot of bubble gum,” he says. For some 15 years, the 1939 International bus dubbed “Further” has rusted away in a swamp on the Kesey family’s Willamette Valley farm, out of sight if not out of mind, more memory than monument.

That is where Ken Kesey — author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and hero of a generation that vowed to drop out and tune in with the help of LSD — intended it to stay after firing up a new bus in 1990.

But four years after his death, a Hollywood restaurateur has persuaded the family to resurrect the old bus so it can help tell the story of Kesey, the Merry Pranksters and the psychedelic 1960s.

“I read his books back in high school and through college,” says David Houston, owner of the historic roadhouse Barney’s Beanery in Los Angeles. “I just always thought he was a fascinating and brilliant man. The story of the bus was always very compelling. To find out it had been just left to go — I really wanted to restore the bus and tell its story to the world.”

Houston hopes to raise the $100,000 he figures it will cost to get the bus running and looking good. The Kesey family will maintain control of the bus, though, taking it to special events.

“People think of a bus as transportation,” Zane Kesey says. “No. It’s a platform, a way to get your messages across.”

Tough job ahead
Last fall, a group of old Pranksters hauled the bus out of the swamp and parked it next to a barn to await restoration.

“One of the things that is really optimistic for me is it’s got full air in the tires from Cassady,” says Kesey, referring to Neal Cassady, who was the wheelman in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and drove Further on that first trip. “Honestly, if the tires had been flat, I would have said, ‘Just leave it there.”’

The restoration will be a tough job. On a cold misty day, Houston, Zane Kesey and former Green Turtle bus mechanic Mike Cobiskey climb on ladders, peer under the hood, pick at paint and crawl underneath to look it over.

What they see is daunting. The body is badly rusted. The paint is peeled. The roof leaks. The engine, not original, and transmission have both been underwater. The original bunk beds and refrigerator are gone, but the driver’s seat remains.

“The most important thing is the paint,” Cobiskey says to Kesey. “I’m sure you have a thousand pictures of it.”

“And no two are alike,” Kesey replies.

“It’s gonna go,” says Houston. “It can definitely run. It shouldn’t drive across country. But certainly it should be a living, healthy, valuable piece once we are done with it.”

Bob Santelli, artistic director of the Experience Music Project in Seattle, tried to raise money to restore Further in 1996 when he was at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, but couldn’t swing it. He did get Kesey to bring the newer incarnation to the museum.

“I consider the bus to be one of the most important icons of the ’60s Counter Culture,” says Santelli. “Inside that bus occurred many of the things the counter culture was all about, from a revolutionary perspective. That is mobility, freedom to be on the move, and to react to situations and create situations to react to, drug use and experimenting with drugs, and the importance of music in a cultural revolution.”

Fresh from the stunning success of “Cuckoo’s Nest,” Kesey wanted to drive to New York City for the 1964 World’s Fair and a coming-out party for his new book, “Sometimes a Great Notion,” making a movie along the way.

“At first, a bunch of us were going to go in a station wagon,” says Ken Babbs, one of the original Pranksters. “Then it was getting too big for that.”

Fresh from the stunning success of “Cuckoo’s Nest,” Ken Kesey bought the bus for $1,250 from Andre Hobson in Atherton, Calif., a sales engineer who had outfitted it with bunks, a bathroom and a kitchen to take his 11 kids on vacation.

Hobson, who never saw the bus again, says he had no idea who Kesey was. “But I do know his check was good,” he says.

At La Honda, Kesey’s home in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco, they installed a sound system, a generator on the back and went wild with the paint. Artist Roy Sebern painted the word “Furthur” on the destination placard as a kind of one-word poem and inspiration to keep going whenever the bus broke down. It wasn’t until much later that he found out he had misspelled it. Just as the bus was constantly being repainted, somewhere along the line the Further sign was corrected.

The day they were ready to go, Ken Kesey recruited Cassady from a bookstore where he was working, Babbs recalls. The bus pulled out of the driveway with Ray Charles singing “Hit the Road Jack,” and ran out of gas. That was quickly remedied, and down the road they went, Cassady spewing the speed-talking rap-babble that inspired Kerouac’s writing style.

“For me and Kesey, too, we were trying to move into a new creative expression which was movie making, and being part of the movie,” Babbs says. “This was all a tremendous experiment in the arts. We always figured we would be totally successful and make a lot of money out of it.”

The wildly painted bus got stopped by the police, but with their short haircuts and preppy clothes, the Pranksters were never arrested. They carried orange juice laced with LSD, which was legal at the time. Kesey had been a guinea pig in government-sponsored LSD tests and was trying to turn the entire country on to it through events known as the Acid Tests.

The bus got stuck in an Arizona river. It stopped in Houston for a visit with author Larry McMurtry, who was with Kesey at the Wallace Stegner writing seminar at Stanford University when he wrote “Coockoo’s Nest” in the early 1960s. The Pranksters jammed with a piano player in New Orleans and were ejected from a blacks-only beach on Lake Ponchartrain.

As they rolled through New York City, the Pranksters tootled saxophones and blew soap bubbles from the roof, and later stopped at Timothy Leary’s Millbrook meditation center in upstate New York, where Kerouac sang a sad rendition of “Ain’t We Got Fun.”

The film and tape rolled constantly, but when they got back to La Honda, they could never get the two to synchronize. Author Tom Wolfe used the material for his book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” but the movie lay dormant until 2000, when a digital editing machine made it possible and Kesey issued, “Intrepid Traveler and His Merry Band of Pranksters Look for A Kool Place.”

“When people ask what my best work is, it’s the bus,” Ken Kesey said in 2000. “Those books made it possible for the bus to become.

“I thought you ought to be living your art, rather than stepping back and describing it,” he said. The bus is “a metaphor that’s instantly comprehensible. Every kid understands it. It’s like John Ford‘s ‘Stagecoach’ with John Wayne in the driver’s seat just like Cowboy Neal.”

After one last trip, to Woodstock, N.Y., in 1969, Kesey put the bus out to pasture, where it served as a dugout for softball games. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., expressed some interest in restoring the bus, but Kesey would never let it go. He towed it to the swamp in 1990 when he bought a 1947 bus for a whole new series of trips.

“People were always saying, ‘Is this the real bus?”’ Babbs says. “And he would say, ‘Yes, there’s only one bus, just like there’s only one Starship Enterprise.”’

Kesey’s widow, Faye, had reservations about restoring the old bus, but did not try to stop it.

“I kind of liked it in the swamp covered with moss and becoming part of the swamp,” she said. “But I talked to everybody who had been on it. To a man they all wanted to see it restored.

“If not, it can always go back to the swamp. Nature does a pretty good paint job, too.”