As the proud owner of a plane ticket to Portland, before Jerry Garcia's brief collapse in August of 1992 to thirty years of excess, I felt I had but one honorable decision: 'Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride.' And so by 9:00 Friday evening, I had flown to Eugene and befriended a local bluegrass band with whom I hitched a ride the next morning to a rustic encampment in nearby Pleasant Hill.

By noon, I had videotaped the infamous Bus from every conceivable angle, as it rested in all its brokedown splendor between a pair of Douglas firs. By 4:00, I was bearing witness to tree-people emerging from the hollow--a gentle, pachouli-scented race, bound by dreadlocks and sweet sativa. By 10:45, Ken Kesey took the stage, towering over the crowd like a redwood in a bayou of scrag-oak, to read from one of his children's books against an eerie Northwest sunset--an actor who somehow never made it in Hollywood, and a living testament that "the Sixties aren't over; they won't be over until the Fat Lady gets high."

INTERVIEW (By phone, September 13, 1992):

Fahey: I interviewed Timothy Leary a couple weeks ago over dinner, and he had some very kind and heartfelt words to say about you; and he was also talking about what he saw as the future of information. He felt that the novel is a somewhat archaic art form, in that the brain can absorb so much information so rapidly. I was wondering what you might think about the future of the novel.

Kesey: Uhhm . . . I agree. I have been sayin' for the few years that I've been working on this novel [Sailor Song, Kesey's first novel since Sometimes a Great Notion, thirty years ago]: it's a flash in the pan, as far as history goes, I think. Because the storyteller was there to begin with. He used the fire, and he used his voice; he used shadows and monsters, and he used poetry and music. And all those things worked on the audience. When you just get into print, you reduce the input quite a bit. But it makes for a nice thing to package and distribute--like a box of tampons. But I think that for us to really deal with a young audience, we're going to have to pick up the pace.

Ol' Leary's been saying this forever, and I've always agreed with him. It's kind of like a compulsory in the Olympics: every so often you've got to write a novel to make people pay attention to the other stuff you're doin'.

I just came back from a book tour, in which I had Viking not just line me up with bookstores where I was just reading and signing my book, but also line me up with theaters where I could perform my children's stuff. It made a lot more sense; also, it was a lot more colorful. When you're up there with robes and masks and monsters and dance and drums, the story gets up off the page and moves around.

Fahey: [Grunts in agreement.]

Kesey: When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around. And I think that writers are going to have to face this; they were performers originally. That's what storytellers did--they told a story. And the better they were at telling it, the more famous it became.

The Chopes were writers that moved from castle to castle. The word 'Chope, C-H-O-P-E,' means 'see, too see, and be seen.' So you went from castle to castle and you told about the castle you just came from, and how beautiful the maidens were and how powerful and manly the knights were. You helped prop up a young civilization: They couldn't have done it without them.

Now, we've got electronic means to do that, so you wouldn't have to actually travel to castles. Come out of that box, there, and address the audience. The whole MTV audience, that is the new audience. And the people who are being purists and ignoring that, are those who are going to be left behind. As Dylan says, `it's a new road; if you don't like it, get out of the way.'

Fahey: Timothy felt that, in history, you'd be as famous for your computer book, the Caverns piece, as anything you've ever done.

Kesey: That's the only time it's ever been done like that. And it's a pretty good little potboiler novel. Tim was trying to have a thing where a person with a computer could plug into that [Caverns] and also add stuff, write stuff in. You've kind of got to have a love affair with computers that I've never had. He's always been plain infatuated with that techno stuff; where I'm more interested in gnomes and elves [laughs].

Fahey: Why did you decide to make a shift from the more obvious form of short stories to children's stories in the mid-Eighties?

Kesey: The audience was a whole lot better. You can put the same message in that kid's story and deliver it to quite a large audience, because it's the big folks who buy the books, and they always read the books before they pass them onto the kids. And so you're not only reaching a new, young audience, you're reaching your same old audience. And the messages in my kid's stories are the same message in my novels.

Fahey: Sure.

Kesey: Totalitarianism, and how you can overcome it. Which takes you back to a lot of old trickster stories and spider stories from Africa.