Kesey: No, it's pretty much the same all of the time [soft chuckle]. It's nothing that you have to try to keep alive; it'll live on its own. I think you have to kill it. That kind of spirit doesn't die naturally; you have to lock it up in shackles and feed it lots of red meat and browbeat it into death. It doesn't die of its own accord.

Children keep it alive. The way the birds have been drunk today. All the grapes hanging out there fermenting. All the birds--a beautiful, sunny day--the birds have been eating those grapes and they're drunk and teetering around and the robins are falling off the branches and reeling around on the lawn, and the children are parading around with their fall garb, and it's always there. It's always anywhere. All you have to do is let it live. There's no effort that needs to be made to let it live; there's effort that needs to be made to keep it from dying.

Fahey: [Stunned] OK . . . What are your creative plans after Sailor Song, besides the videotaping of Cuckoo's Nest? Can you let us in on some secrets?

Kesey: Last night we got out there and we set off our big bonfire, and I had all my sea monsters dance and cavort around the fire. This is part of the movie that Gus Van Sant shot, The Sea Lion. Gus is, right now, involved in doing Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.

Fahey: Oh yeah, Tom Robbins.

Kesey: Uh-huh. And as soon as he's done with that, we'll get into editing the footage that he shot of The Sea Lion. And then I'll try to bring the Dead in to do the soundtrack for this, like they promised ten years ago. This is the thing I'm most interested in--to move a kind of Wagnerian drama into these rock and roll venues, so that it's not just playing "Uncle John's Band" [laughs] over and over again.

And whenever I get together and talk with the guys [the Dead] about it, oh, they're just so eager. But they go vehement that they have to move to do it. It's so cumbersome; it's hard for them to do it. They're almost run by their machinery.

But that's the thing I'm most interested in: performing a big rock and roll opera, where we move those ol' scrabbly-lookin' musicians down there in the pit where they belong, and put dancers and singers and magicians on the stage, and have that broadcast to large numbers of people, ten-, twenty-, thirty-thousand people. And do it with video enhancements, so that you are able to see faces up there.

The people who have this equipment, they keep making the mistake of thinking that you can endlessly watch Garcia's hand run up and down that keyboard [sic], but that isn't anymore interesting than watching Rachmaninoff's hand run up and down the keyboard. People want to see drama; they want to have a story told to them. They want to be part of some kind of beginning, middle and end that they can relate to, the same way as the tribe can relate the story about going out and killing the deer and evoking the deer spirit, and raising the spirits of the tribe with the blood of the deer. That stuff still has great potency.

And when you're around the whole Dead scene, like I was on Halloween, and you see out there in the parking lot as many people as are inside, they're there as a tribal thing; they're there as part of a rendezvous and a pow-wow. And all it lacks is that story. The only thing that has happened like it, that I've ever seen, is Tommy. I guess The Wall was something on the order of this, but I didn't see The Wall. And I know the Dead are capable of it, and I know the audience is ready for it. And it's what I'm most interested in.

Fahey: One last question: I saw the interview with you and Bob Costas, and he was asking why you did certain things that you've done throughout your life, and you said because you're an American; and that as Americans, we're searchers and pioneers. And I was wondering what frontiers are there left for Ken Kesey to explore?

Kesey: Uhhm . . . the frontiers that we broke into in the Sixties are still largely unexplored. When I was doing those experiments at the Vet's Hospital, they gave us an enormous array of drugs, and they gave us an enormous array of tests. They tested our motor skills, our memories, our ability to create, to imagine, they tested our urine and our blood--all the results of those tests still exist somewhere. For those to be valid experiments, we need to follow up on that--to see if our brains have deteriorated, to see if there's been any damage like they claimed.

When we first broke into that forbidden box in the other dimension, we knew that we had discovered something as surprising and powerful as the New World when Columbus came stumbling onto it. It is still largely unexplored and uncharted. People like Leary have done the best they can to chart it sort of underground, but the government and the powers do not want this world charted, because it threatens established powers. It always has.

People don't want other people to get high, because if you get high, you might see the falsity of the fabric of the society we live in. [pause] We thought that by this time that there would be LSD given in classes in college. And you would study for it and prepare for it, you would have somebody there who help you through it; you would know what to sing, where to be, how to stand out among the trees. We were naive. We thought that we had come to a new place, a new, exciting, free place; and that it was going to be available to all America. And they shut it down.

People ask, 'what happen to you guys?' And I always tell them, `we got arrested.' Just everybody I know got arrested and had to serve time.

Fahey: But you got arrested for pot though; it wasn't LSD.

Kesey: Yeah, but it doesn't make any difference once you're arrested. The fact that they're beating on Rodney King--it didn't matter what they were beating on him for; they were beating on him.

And it meant that a lot of this stuff had to go way underground. And other drugs sprung up. I've never seen crack or a lot of these new drugs. Don't know anything about them. I don't know what they do for you, or whether they do anything good for you or not. But I do still have a lot of faith in the spiritual purity of LSD and pot. And I think that if grass were legalized, it would help our drug problem enormously. As John Madden said, 'There've been a lot more people hurt on astro-turf than grass.'

[Laughter on both sides]

Fahey: Do you think that as long as LSD is illegal, the youth today will experience any of the same modicum of freedom that you had in the early Sixties?

Kesey: No, I don't. For one thing, all these people that were taking these drugs back then were college age; and we had all read a certain amount of Oriental literature, and we had read Hesse, and we had a spiritual underpinning of knowing The Bible and knowing the Bhagavad Gita, knowing the Judeo traditions. And that gives you stars to sail by. And without those stars, just thrown into chaos, a lot of people are lost.