Furthur (bus)


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 not 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. 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, 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 but primary colors, and the peace symbol wasn't yet evident. The word 'Sunshine' was written in blue, but it was too early to have referred 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" 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 the bus was gutted and used around the Kesey's farm in Oregon until at least 1983, when it was mentioned and pictured in an article in the May–June Saturday Review. It was eventually parked in the swamp on Kesey's Farm, where it deteriorated over the years.

Participants

The list of participants is not 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 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. 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, Page Browning, Ron Bevirt, 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, 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. Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Adams Garcia has also been confused with Cathy Casamo. Kesey's wife Faye is sometimes mistakenly included, and Furthur-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, and a shoebox full of pre-rolled marijuana joints.
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 at the wheel on their maiden voyage from La Honda, California to New York. They left on June 17, 1964, but because of various vehicle problems it took them 24 hours to go the first. George Walker recalls, "We left La Honda on June 14, 1964, about 3 PM First stop, on Kesey's bridge, out of gas! Made it about 100 feet."
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.
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 Furthur down the highway.
In Houston, they visited the Houston 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.
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. 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 audio tapes. 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.
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. Director Alex Gibney finally publicly released a major new edit in 2011 as the documentary Magic Trip.

Other trips

Other Furthur trips included an anti-Vietnam war rally in 1966 and Woodstock and Texas International Pop Festivals, both in 1969. A race between Furthur 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 Furthur in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, for which a movie directed by Gus Van Sant is in development.

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 Furthur 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.
In November 2005 the original 1964 Furthur 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 Furthur 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 Furthur for about a week thinking it was the original bus and that it was going to be donated to the museum.

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.

Restoration

The 1947 Furthur bus was refurbished and toured the country as part of a "Furthur 50th Anniversary Trip" in the summer of 2014. Most media accounts at the time did not distinguish between the original Furthur bus and the restored 1990 bus.

Cultural significance

The cross-country trip of Furthur 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, the Partridge Family TV show, The Muppet Movie, and later, The Magic School Bus books and TV series. Both Kesey and original Prankster Ken Babbs released books in 1990 recounting their famous adventure.
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 "Furthur". The bus also figures obliquely as a "technicolor motor home" in the Steely Dan song Kid Charlemagne, which is actually about another LSD proponent, Owsley Stanley. The G4 original television show Code Monkeys 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.