The Ken Babbs Interview

The Wave Just Happened ​In 1966 acid had really come on in San Francisco. It was different from anywhere else, as we found out. San Francisco people weren’t tied into the big LA money, record business, movie business. People were doing on their own all kinds of things we were doing during the Acid Tests in terms of dance and filmmaking and music and art. ​We’d rent these halls and bring people together. It got so big that in January 1966 we had the Trips Festival in San Francisco at The Longshoremen’s Hall. All these disparate groups together for a three-day Acid Test. They might as well call it that: it was all psychedelic. It was a really wonderful thing to all of us to realize “Hey, there a bunch of us doing this.” ​Ken Kesey would say, “We didn’t create the wave, the wave just happened. We were lucky to ride the crest of the wave, but there were thousands of other people riding that wave, and it’s still going. It’s all the way to Kansas by now.”