The Ken Babbs Interview Set IV

Never Eat When You’re Angry ​When we met at Stanford, right from the get-go, Kesey and I were making tapes together. We’d sit there in the dark, get high, and rap with microphones into a reel-to-reel tape recorder, doing these off-the-wall, off-the-cuff stories, plots, and situations. We were both good at making stuff up on the spot. Kesey was an absolute genius at it; I would fill in a lot. Actual novels, making up the characters and the dialogue. We’d pull out the tape recorder and we never knew how good it was when we were doing it. We first started doing it in relation to writing. Can this stuff be transposed into a book? Can it be sold; is it worth anything? So later we’d listen to it and see if we thought we had any ability in this direction. It actually was pretty good, but it was really raw. There were no cheerleaders singing “rah, rah, rah.” ​We realized we had a talent, but we were really not brought up to speed in that respect until we had Neal Cassady with us. He was the absolute master at talking. He didn’t always make stuff up, but he was able to talk about everything that had happened in his life and weave it into long convoluted stories that always had a moral to them. “Never eat when you’re angry; no one was ever happy angry.” Luckily on the bus trip in 1964 with Neal driving, we all had microphones set up and speakers going, so you would hear us all talking and rapping at the same time