The first name that popped into my head was Larry McMurtry, the prolific novelist, who was in the same Stanford creative writing program as Kesey and who the Pranksters stopped to see in Houston on their way east. Those bits of conversation left me wondering who could give PKM readers a look at what Westerns and their myths are all about. On the trio’s drive back to San Francisco, Walker remembers, “We had this feeling, this sense, that we were pioneers crossing the country and that carried into the flags we flew, our wearing flag costumes and the stuff we did.” That all played out in a much bigger way on the Prankster’s bus trip east to the 1964 World Fair and in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Watching the film high on peyote in New York City, Walker, Ken Kesey and Carl Lehmann-Haupt were taken in by the film’s five stories, each one being set farther west on America’s frontier as it shifted from 1840s Ohio to 1890s San Francisco. Babbs’ passion for those Westerns brought to mind fellow-Prankster George Walker citing the 1963 epic How the West Was Won as being an inspiration for the stripes the Pranksters wore and the spirit of their adventures. He soon came around to cowboy films, and his recalling there being one “big” movie each week that everyone went and saw. Merry Prankster Ken Babbs was recounting the origins of the Prankster nicknames when our interview turned to his influences growing up––what he read, the films he saw.

Tripping into places that are other than what they seem to be and meeting people who look at life differently.

PKM’s Benito Vila, in what may have been McMurtry’s last interview, asked the writer about Western films, then talked to others in the know about the Western ‘vortex’, and the sagebrush myths that have shaped (or misshaped or warped) Americans view of themselves as ‘rugged individualists’. The writer and bookseller Larry McMurtry, who died earlier this year at 84, was a Texas native best known for film adaptations of his novels The Last Picture Show, Horseman, Pass By ( Hud), Terms of Endearment and Lonesome Dove.

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