Even if you don’t know Don Fleming by name, chances are you own a ton of records he’s helped make. As a producer, he’s collaborated with the likes of Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Teenage Fanclub, Screaming Trees, the Posies and Hole, to name just a handful. He works for the Alan Lomax Archive and has done archival work for the estates of Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey and others. He’s fronted such groups as the Velvet Monkeys, B.A.L.L. and Gumball and was a member of the band that provided the music to 1994 Beatles biopic Backbeat. Fleming also runs the Instant Mayhem label, which recently reissued the Velvet Monkeys’ 1982 debut Everything Is Right and is about to release the solo Don Fleming 4, which features Kim Gordon, Julie Cafritz and R. Stevie Moore. If all that weren’t enough, Fleming is guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
Fleming: Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters paved the way for the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s. In the ’50s and early ’60s, there were many therapists using LSD with patients in what was considered, at least by them, to be a controlled, scientific manner. Even Timothy Leary carried on with this basic method of tripping in controlled environments, with observers making notes. Kesey had been a volunteer in a CIA-financed study of psychoactive drugs at Stanford in 1959. When he and the Merry Pranksters hit the road in 1964 in their painted bus, they took it to a new level. They were tripping, in public, just for fun. Even Leary looked down on this behavior, but after the Pranksters’ “acid tests” on the West Coast in ’65 and ’66, the cat was out of the bag for good and the LSD-fueled Summer of Love was soon in full heat. A new documentary, Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search For A Kool Place, chronicles that 1964 trip. The Pranksters filmed and made dozens of reel-to-reel tapes of the trip for a film that Kesey never quite pulled together. Directors Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood asked me to help with the archival materials that the Kesey estate made available for the film. I spent several days with Gibney at Kesey’s home choosing photos, letters and other ephemera that were scanned for use. And I then spend several months transferring reel-to-reel tapes, both from the trip and other Kesey and Prankster events. One of the big finds was an actual tape of Kesey recording himself and being interviewed at Stanford by a nurse while tripping. The bus tapes rarely synced with the 1964 film (hmm, I wonder why?), but they are fascinating, with the Pranksters hooting and howling and Neal Cassady speed-rapping while driving the bus. The film has premiered at Sundance and in Eugene, Ore.
Video after the jump.
—photo of Don Fleming with the newer and original Further buses by Alex Gibney
