Further (bus)

Ken Kesey's original "Further" in 1964
Further in disrepair
Inside Further, psychedelic and trippy paintings

Further, also known as Furthur, is a 1939 International Harvester school bus purchased by author Ken Kesey in 1964 to carry his "Merry Band of Pranksters" cross-country, filming their counterculture adventures as they went. Due to the chaos of the trip and editing difficulties, the footage of their journey was never released as a movie until the 2011 documentary film Magic Trip -- although the bus featured prominently in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

History

Kesey had flown to New York in November 1963 with his wife Faye and Prankster George Walker to attend the Broadway opening of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (play). He also managed to see the 1964 New York World's Fair site under construction. Kesey needed to return to New York the following year for the publication party for his novel Sometimes a Great Notion and hoped to use the occasion to visit the Fair after it opened. This plan gradually grew into an ambitious scheme to bring along a group of friends and turn their adventures into a road movie, taking inspiration from Jack Kerouac's On the Road. As more Pranksters volunteered for the trip they soon realized they had outgrown Kesey's station wagon, so Kesey bought a retired yellow school bus for $1,250 from Andre Hobson of Atherton, California. The license plates read "MAZ 804". Hobson had already added bunks, a bathroom, and a kitchen with refrigerator and stove for taking his 11 kids on vacation.

The Pranksters added many more customizations, including a generator, a sound system (with an interior and external intercom), a railing and seating platform on top of the bus, and an observation turret coming out the top made from a washing machine drum fitted into a hole cut in the roof. Another platform was welded to the rear to hold the generator and a motorcycle. The bus was painted by the various Pranksters in a variety of psychedelic colors and designs. The paint was not day-glo (which was not yet common in 1964) but primary colors, and the peace symbol wasn't yet evident. The word 'Sunshine' was written in blue, but it was too early to refer to orange sunshine LSD or Kesey's not-yet-conceived daughter Sunshine.

The bus was named by artist Roy Sebern, who first painted the word “Furthur” (with two U's, quickly corrected) on the destination placard as a kind of one-word poem and inspiration to keep going whenever the bus broke down. The misspelled name is still often used, as in Wolfe's book.

The original bus's last journey was a trip to the Woodstock Festival in 1969. Once its historic trips had come to an end it was parked in the swamp on Kesey's Farm in Oregon where it deteriorated over the decades.

Participants

The list of participants is not entirely well-documented. They took the general name "Merry Band of Pranksters" shortened to Merry Pranksters, but many people who considered themselves Pranksters chose not to go, and others became Pranksters only because they chose to go.

Chloe Scott (founder of the Dymaxion Dance Group in 1962, age about 39) only lasted a day, because the chaos was too much for her. Cathy Casamo was a friend of Mike Hagen's who joined at the last minute, hoping to star in the movie they were supposedly making, but she was left behind in Houston.[1] The legendary Neal Cassady showed up at the last minute and displaced Roy Sebern as driver, as far as New York. Ken Babbs may not have planned to venture past the stop at his San Juan Capistrano home. Merry Prankster and author Lee Quarnstrom documents events on the bus in his memoir, When I Was a Dynamiter!

Jane Burton, George Walker, Steve Lambrecht, Paula Sundsten, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt (sound engineer, younger brother of Christopher, and important source for Tom Wolfe's account [2]), Page Browning, Ron Bevirt (photographer and bookstore owner), and siblings Chuck Kesey, Dale Kesey, and John Babbs are also named as participants.

There was a conscious decision that everyone dress in red, white and blue stripes (so they could claim to be loyal patriots), maybe with distinctive patterns so they'd be easier for future film-goers to tell apart. They brought a Confederate flag too. Their haircuts were conservative too—long hair was only starting to come into fashion with the Beatles.

Tom Wolfe's book gives the misleading impression that he was a participant. (He only met Kesey the following year.) Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Adams Garcia (not present) has also been confused with Cathy Casamo. Kesey's wife Faye is sometimes mistakenly included, and Futhur-painter Roy Sebern. Robert Stone met them briefly in New York City.

Drugs

Kesey had a generous supply of the then-legal psychedelic drug LSD, and they reportedly also took 500 Benzedrine pills (speed), and a shoebox full of already-rolled marijuana joints. [3]

They were stopped several times by police and highway patrol, but explained they were filmmakers. In 1964 drug use hadn't yet gotten enough media attention for the authorities to be suspicious.

The first trip

Beat legend Neal Cassady was the driver on their maiden voyage from La Honda, California to New York (Sebern says he had been designated as driver before Cassady showed up). They left on June 17, 1964, but because of various vehicle problems it took them 24 hours to go the first 40 miles.

Their route took them first to San Jose, California and then Los Angeles. Chloe Scott bailed out in San Jose, but Cathy Casamo joined them there. They spent two days at Ken Babbs' home in San Juan Capistrano, painting his swimming pool. (One version claims he only joined at that point.)

Outside Wikieup, Arizona they got stuck in the sand by a pond, and had an intense LSD party while they waited for a tractor to pull them out. In Phoenix they confounded the Barry Goldwater presidential headquarters by painting "A VOTE FOR BARRY IS A VOTE FOR FUN!" above the bus windows on the left side, and driving backwards through the downtown. Casamo had apparently taken too much LSD in Wikieup, and spent much of the drive from Phoenix to Houston standing naked on the rear platform, confounding the truckers who followed Further down the highway.

In Houston, they visited the zoo, and then author Larry McMurtry's suburban home. Casamo's antics led to her being briefly institutionalized, so the Pranksters left her behind, and another friend had to pick her up and drive her back home. (Kesey's "Further inquiry" wrestles with his enduring guilt about these events.)

In New Orleans, Cassady showed them the nightlife, and then the Pranksters accidentally went swimming in a 'blacks only' area on Lake Ponchartrain.

Their next destination was Pensacola, Florida to visit a friend of Babbs', then up the east coast to New York City, arriving around June 29.

New York

In New York they picked up novelist Robert Stone (who recounted his viewpoint in "Prime Green"). They reunited with Chloe Scott and staged a party at her apartment, attended by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. They also visited the World's Fair. Ginsberg arranged a visit with LSD enthusiasts Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert in Millbrook, New York, but the West Coast style of partying was too wild for the Millbrook academics.

Their route home, without Cassady to drive, took them through Canada. They arrived back in La Honda in August.

Aftermath

Kesey and Babbs took on the frustrating challenge of editing over 100 hours of silent film footage and separate (unsynchronized) audio tapes.[4] They previewed their progress at regular, open parties every weekend at Kesey's place, which evolved into the 'Acid Tests' with live music from the Grateful Dead (known first as the Warlocks).

Tom Wolfe used the film and tapes as the basis of his book, but Kesey's edit was never officially finished or released, in part because Kesey was arrested in 1965 for marijuana possession (LSD would not become illegal until 1966). Director Alex Gibney finally publicly released a major new edit in 2011 as the documentary Magic Trip.

Other trips

Other Further trips included an anti-Vietnam war rally in 1966 and Woodstock in 1969 (without Kesey). A race between Further and three buses from Wavy Gravy's Hog Farm is recounted in the July 1969 Whole Earth Catalog. More can be read about the adventures of the Merry Pranksters on Further in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, for which a movie directed by Gus Van Sant is in development.[5]

Second bus

Front view of the second bus, acquired in 1990
Right rear view of second bus

In 1990 Kesey created a second Further/Furthur, this one from a 1947 International Harvester bus. The second bus is labeled Further on the front and Furthur on the back. It is not called Further 2, and is not meant as a replica, although confusion between the two buses is intentional. The bus was created to coincide with the publication of Kesey's memoirs about the 1964 trip, entitled "The Further Inquiry" (ISBN 0670831743).[6][7][8]

In November 2005 the original 1964 Further was dragged out of the swamp with a tractor and now resides in a warehouse at Kesey's farm in Oregon, alongside the 1990 Further.

Smithsonian prank

The "Great Smithsonian Prank" was a prank perpetrated on the media. The local TV station came to the farm where Kesey and friends were painting the new bus and later aired "Ken Kesey has restored the original Further and is taking it to the Smithsonian." The next morning, a variety of national media were asking to "come along on the trip to the Smithsonian." The media rode along on Further for about a week thinking it was the original bus and that it was going to be donated to the museum.[9][10][11]

Apple party

In 1993, Kesey drove the second bus to California to speak at a private party hosted by Apple Computer. The producers who had invited him apparently had no knowledge of his history or politics, and once he started making drug references they removed him from the stage. They then wouldn't let him get the bus out of the parking lot, forcing him to hang around the event until it ended.[12]

Restoration

The second Further bus (the 1947) toured the country as part of a "Further 50th Anniversary Trip" in early 2014.[13][14][15] Most media accounts at the time did not distinguish between the original Further bus and the restored 1990 bus.

Cultural significance

The cross-country trip of Further and the activities of the Merry Pranksters, with the success of Wolfe's book and other media accounts, led to a number of psychedelic buses appearing in popular media over the next few years, including in the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour (film) (1967), the Partridge Family TV show (1970), and later, The Magic School Bus books and TV series. In 1968 The Who released Magic Bus (song) with its lyric "Further further further further..." Both Kesey and original Prankster Ken Babbs released books in 1990 recounting their famous adventure (Kesey's was called The Further Inquiry ISBN 0670831743 and Babbs' was On The Bus ISBN 0938410911). In the 2007 film Across the Universe, a fictionalized version of the bus appears, this one a Chevrolet bearing the name "Beyond" in place of "Further". The bus also figures obliquely as a "technicolor motor home" in the Steely Dan song Kid Charlemagne (1976), which is actually about another LSD proponent, Owsley Stanley The G4 original television show Code Monkeys (2007) also references the bus in the first episode of the second season, where a character voiced by Tommy Chong tells the legend of Chester Hopperpot, a psychedelic pioneer who toured the country in a magical hippie bus called "Farther." Ken Kesey's quote "You're either on the bus or off the bus," as quoted by Tom Wolfe, is often repeated as a counter-culture slogan. In the Grateful Dead song 'The Other One' Bob Weir sings the lyric "the bus came by and I got on, that's when it all began, there was cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to never never land." an apparent reference to the original Furthur.

References

Further reading

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