On the bus #1: Further adventures of the Cassady kid
John Allen's Kesey escapades
In recent times, we’ve tapped into some warm memories and experienced some vivid anecdotes from the pen of JOHN ALLEN CASSADY, the only son and youngest child of Neal and Carolyn, in the pages of Rock and the Beat Generation.
A man full of wild tales, not to say adventurous spirit, in this new sequence of stories he takes us back to the end of the last millennium as he recalls a number of rich encounters with Ken Kesey and his crowd on the bus justifiably christened Further…
So Kesey called me from his home in Oregon when I was living in Santa Cruz, CA, in May 1997. He said, ‘Johnny, I just got a call from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. They want to induct the Bus into the Rock Hall, and I want YOU to drive it into Cleveland, because your Dad can't make it!’ I said, ‘OK’ (Like, d’uh!) It was their first major exhibit, and it was called I Want to Take You Higher. It opened on May 10th, 1997, twenty-seven years ago already!
This was the second bus, called ‘Further’. The first bus, named ‘Furthur’, he rolled into the swamp behind his house, and corrected the spelling for the second one. Zane, Ken’s son, eventually pulled Furthur out of the swamp with a tractor and restored it after Ken passed.
I think it's still in the barn at the Kesey farm in Springfield, OR. The Smithsonian wanted to park Furthur under the Spirit of St Louis in their museum in DC. Kesey threw their letter out the bus window. He was a hard man to predict. I thought that it should have belonged there.
They shipped the bus to Chicago on a truck with a ‘lowboy’ trailer, because the bus had windshields and stuff on the roof which made it too high to clear the overpasses. Ken had set up a whole tour of bookstores, I forget if it was the Borders or Barnes and Noble chain now, so he, George Walker and Mountain Girl could sign books, and pay for the whole trip, and then some! Kesey was good at self promotion. I flew from San Jose to O'Hare to meet them.
Before I run out of room here, I'll continue the story in Part II, so stay tuned, thanks.
JAC
Coming soon: ‘On the bus #2’, in which John misses a plane gets caught in a mighty Chicago rainstorm