Today marks 50 years since Electric Kool Aid Acid Test published. This interview with Tom Wolfe was first published in November 2016

In 1964, when Ken Kesey, author and LSD evangelist, and a group of friends calling themselves the Merry Pranksters, set off across America in a bus daubed in psychedelic colours, they talked of being either on the bus or off the bus. It was a phrase both literal and metaphorical.

Not simply, were you there, physically – bumping and jolting across the great expanse, jagged on drugs and sleeplessness – but were you there, one might say, mystically? Were you attuned to the deeper, collective acid unconscious, “The Great Flow” as they called it, that, so it was believed, would presage a revolution in consciousness and turn the whole world Day-Glo?

Tom Wolfe was not, in any sense, on the bus. Yet in 1968 Wolfe wrote the definitive account of that journey and its aftermath, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, that would become one of the key texts of the psychedelic revolution that swept across America in the late Sixties.

The book is now being republished in abridged form by Taschen in a deluxe edition, featuring extraordinary pictures by the photographers Larry Schiller and Ted Streshinsky, who chronicled Kesey and the California LSD scene when it was in its infancy.