‘Furthur’ gets new lease on life

PLEASANT HILL, Ore. – Zane Kesey picked at moss competing with swirls of brightly colored paint and patches of rust to cover the 1939 International school bus that his father, the late author Ken Kesey, rode cross-country with a refrigerator stocked with LSD-laced drinks in pursuit of a new art form.

“This comes off pretty easy,” he said, a fond smile playing over his face. “It’s amazing, some of the things that are coming out – things I remember.

“It’s going to take a lot of bubblegum.”

For some 15 years, the bus dubbed “Furthur” has rusted away in a swamp on the Kesey family’s Willamette Valley farm, out of sight if not out of mind, more memory than monument.

That is where Ken Kesey – the author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and hero of a generation that vowed to drop out and tune in with the help of LSD – intended it to stay after firing up a new version.

But four years after his death, a Hollywood restaurateur has persuaded the family to resurrect the old bus so it can help tell the story of Kesey, the Merry Pranksters and the psychedelic 1960s.

“I read his books back in high school and through college,” said David Houston, owner of the historic roadhouse Barney’s Beanery in Hollywood, Calif. “I just always thought he was a fascinating and brilliant man. The story of the bus was always very compelling. To find out it had been just left to go – I really wanted to restore the bus and tell its story to the world.”

Houston hopes to raise some $100,000 he figures it will cost to get the bus running and looking good. The Kesey family will maintain control of the bus, taking it to special events.

“People think of a bus as transportation,” said Zane Kesey. “No. It’s a platform, a way to get your messages across.”

Last fall, a group of old Pranksters hauled the bus out of the swamp and parked it next to a barn to await restoration.

“One of the things that is really optimistic for me is it’s got full air in the tires from Cassady,” said Zane Kesey, referring to Neal Cassady, who was the wheelman in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and drove Furthur on that first trip. “Honestly, if the tires had been flat, I would have said, ‘Just leave it there.’ “

The restoration will be a tough job. On a cold misty day, Houston, Zane Kesey and former Green Tortoise bus mechanic Mike Cobiskey climbed on ladders, peered under the hood, picked at paint, and crawled underneath to look it over, and what they saw was daunting. The body is badly rusted. The paint is peeled. The roof leaks. The engine, not original, and transmission have both been underwater. The original bunk beds and refrigerator are gone, though the driver’s seat remains.

“The most important thing is the paint,” Cobiskey said to Zane Kesey. “I’m sure you have a thousand pictures of it.”

“And no two are alike,” said Zane Kesey.

Fresh from the stunning success of “Cuckoo’s Nest,” Ken Kesey bought the bus in 1964 from a family in San Francisco that had fitted it out with bunks as a motorhome. The plan was to drive it to New York for the World’s Fair and a party for his new book, “Sometimes A Great Notion.”

“At first a bunch of us were going to go in a station wagon,” said Ken Babbs, one of the original Pranksters. “Then it was getting too big for that.

“Kesey went up and bought it. I think it was around $1,500.”

At La Honda, Kesey’s home in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco, they installed a sound system, a generator on the back, and went wild with the paint. Artist Roy Sebern 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. It wasn’t until much later he found out he had misspelled it. Just as the bus was constantly being repainted, somewhere along the line the Further sign was corrected.

The day they were ready to go, Kesey recruited Cassady from a bookstore where he was working, Babbs recalled. Pulling out of the driveway with Ray Charles singing “Hit The Road Jack,” the bus ran out of gas. That was quickly remedied, and down the road they went, Cassady spewing the speed-talking rap-babble that inspired Kerouac’s writing style.

“For me and Kesey, too, we were trying to move into a new creative expression which was movie making, and being part of the movie,” said Babbs. “This was all a tremendous experiment in the arts. We always figured we would be totally successful and make a lot of money out of it.”

With short haircuts, and preppy clothes, they got stopped by cops, but never arrested, though they were carrying orange juice laced with LSD, which was still legal at the time. Kesey had been a guinea pig in government- sponsored LSD tests and was trying to turn the country on to it through events known as the Acid Tests.

The bus got stuck in an Arizona river. It stopped in Houston for a visit with author Larry McMurtry, who was with Kesey at the Wallace Stegner writing seminar at Stanford. The Pranksters jammed with a piano player in New Orleans and were ejected from a blacks-only beach on Lake Ponchartrain. Rolling through New York City, the Pranksters tootled saxophones and blew soap bubbles from the roof.

The film and tape rolled constantly, but when they got back to La Honda, they could never get the two to synchronize. Author Tom Wolfe used the material for his book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” but the movie lay dormant until 2000, when a digital editing machine made it possible and Kesey issued, “Intrepid Traveler and his Merry Band of Pranksters Look for A Kool Place.”

“When people ask what my best work is, it’s the bus,” Kesey said in 2000. “Those books made it possible for the bus to become.”

After one last trip, to Woodstock in 1969, Kesey put the bus out to pasture, where it served as a dugout for softball games. The Smithsonian Institution expressed some interest in restoring the bus, but Kesey would never let it go. He towed it to the swamp in 1990 when he bought a 1947 bus for a whole new series of trips.

Kesey’s widow, Faye, had reservations about restoring the old bus but did not try to stop it.

“I kind of liked it in the swamp covered with moss and becoming part of the swamp,” she said. “But I talked to everybody who had been on it. To a man, they all wanted to see it restored.

“If not, it can always go back to the swamp. Nature does a pretty good paint job, too.”