iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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jesse jarnow @bourgwick.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

60 years ago tonight, the merry pranksters' 1st informal acid test, held at ken babbs's place outside santa cruz, where the grateful dead did not play (& all purported flyers are almost certainly fake). below text from dennis mcnally's bio.

he larger world. The first of those special parties was at Ken
Babbs’s place in Soquel, near Santa Cruz, on the coast south
of Palo Alto, on November 27, 1965. Such public notice as
there was of the event came through a posting at Lee Quarn-
strom and Peter Dema’s Hip Pocket Bookstore in Soquel. The
Pranksters were joined by Allen Ginsberg and his lover, Peter
Orlovsky, and Garcia, Lesh, Weir, Sue Swanson, and Connie
Bonner among others, and the night basically involved hang-
ing out and tripping together.

Lesh would always recall the capsules they took that night,
completely transparent except for the tiniest of scratches on
the inner surface that marked the LSD that was their trans-
port to another world. He spent much of the evening staring
at the stars with Swanson, but at length decided that he’d
like to play the electric guitar that Kesey was banging on.

Kesey didn’t want to give it up, but Phil was not dissuaded,
and learned one of his early lessons in the subtleties of trip-
ping. He proceeded to gluehiseyesonKesey, and in a while
Ken got up and shoved the guitar at him. “Here.” Weir, on
the other hand, had another sort of adventure. Although he
had read “Howl,” he did not recognize Allen Ginsberg, and
saw only that he “was pretty damned amazing, the stuff he
would say and do. So I figure, okay, I'm gonna sit next to this
guy. Which was okay with him”—if not with Peter Orlovsky,
who would be cautiously jealous of the utterly hetero Weir in
the future.

A day or two later there was a Prankster meeting at La
Honda attended by Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, representing the
Dead. They sat around Kesey’s kitchen table and planned a
somewhat larger party for the following Saturday in San Jose,
one that would include the music of the Grateful Dead. They

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TallIrishOne @tallirishone.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

Truly special trips ❤️⚡️🙏🏻

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