Original Merry Prankster George “Hardly Visible” Walker drove the FURTHUR bus across America along with Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, Ken Babbs, and a handful of other Pranksters back in 1964. Upon their return, they held a 3-day experience called the Trips Festival at the Longshoremen’s Hall at Fisherman’s Wharf in SF in 1966. The following is excerpted from George’s wonderfully energized remarks at the Counterculture Museum on May 30, 2026 (where I had the immense joy and honor of meeting him) just after a screening of the Trips Festival, a film by Eric Christensen (2007).
The thing that is constant throughout the film, what people spoke about, is change. It changed everybody. And it went beyond the people who were [at the Trips Festival]. Change is the essence of everything. In fact, it is ubiquitous with existence. Anything that stops changing literally stops existing.
Kesey used to say when confronted about all of this, the way that we changed the society, was that good or bad, and all these conversations — Ken always said, “You know, we get a lot more credit and a lot more blame than we deserve.” He said, “You know, we didn’t really make it happen all this stuff that happened.”
He said it’s like waves, all this change, Everything happens in waves. Literally everything at every level. All of the energy in the universe is in wave form at every level. And at the level of not just physical change but societal change. Ken said that a great wave happened in the ‘60s and we were just there. We were present, and we were able to ride the wave like surfers.
When Ken started taking these drugs with the government experiments, it was like he was tossed in the water and learned to swim. And he came around to all of us and started saying, “Hey! Try this!” He would throw us in the water and we’d learn to swim! So we were all in the water when this wave finally approached the shore. The ‘60s was a time when a rogue wave suddenly focused, all of the social waves that had been building since world wars and all of this stuff happening. And the invention of television, the evolution of all the electronic stuff — this was all happening, all of these levels of change, they all converged in the ‘60s. It was a time of ENORMOUS surf! (Laughter) Enormous possibility of change. And we were just there with our psychic surfboards, “Oh wow! Here comes a big one!” And we rode that. Then we showed people, “Wow! Look at how you can ride this! This is not something like we saw last year or 10 years ago. This is a new thing and it’s more powerful than anything we’ve ever experienced.”
So we were just there at the right time with just enough preparation. We had learned to surf enough that when the waves hit we were able to ride them and we were able to show other people how.
We got a lot of credit, but we were just like all these other people. In this film, you see a lot of people who were ready to ride the wave. They knew how to experience stuff in a new way and how to live life in a new way.
What we’re doing now in the world is not sustainable. Humanity’s ways of dealing with the world are not sustainable. We’re not just living on the Earth. We’re eating it. We’re consuming our Home. It’s like … one time Mike Hagen rented a house and got cold in the winter and so he chopped up the floor to throw it in the fireplace to stay warm for one night. That’s a perfect metaphor for humanity today.
How do we fix that? We need to evolve individually and as a species. We need to evolve away from a greed-driven society. People selfishly trying to “Get more for me! More experience! More money! More stuff! More cars! More clothes! More food! More everything!” We have mistakenly thought that the way to do that is to keep somebody else from having it “so there’ll be more for me!” But that’s completely the wrong way.
We have to do it by sharing as much as we can, giving as much as we can, because the more we give, the more everybody is giving. And suddenly the more there is! It seems like almost impossible that in giving things away you have more, but it’s really the way the world works. I think we need to teach people the true laws of karma. That you don’t just gather as much shit as you can, use it up as fast as you can, eat as much as you can, gather as much wealth as you can, and then you die and that’s it, you’re done. However much you got, that’s what you did. Whoever dies with the most toys wins.
It ain’t like that. We have to learn to do this in a way that we work together not to consume the planet but to feed it. To look at the Earth as your garden. You’ve got to water it, you’ve got to till it, weed it, and deal with it in a way that you nourish it. And we have to nourish each other.
These kinds of experiences that we that we got from doing all this — the Acid Tests and the psychedelics and all the things that came from it, you start to learn about that. You start to lose that intense selfishness by sharing with people, by giving whatever it is that you have.
The Trips Festival was kind of like when it broke out of closet. We had done a few Acid Tests but we were kind of finding our way through this thing. And all of a sudden Ken and Stewart Brand and all these other people that participated in this decide, “Well, let’s do this on a bigger scale.” And suddenly it was out there and everybody was doing it.
Kesey was very conscious of wanting to eliminate that line between performers and audience. He wanted this to be a total participatory thing. The Dead were a unit, they were a thing. They would play but they couldn’t play all night long. They had to take breaks. And when they took a break, the Merry Pranksters would take the stage with musical instruments. And if you were deaf and maybe partly blind you might think we were playing music! [laughter] I maintained that we were possibly the worst band ever. Kesey used to say, “I would rather play music with the worst band in the world than go and listen to the best band in the world.” And he also proved it. [laughter]
When we were playing, if somebody wanted to come up out of the audience and walk up on the stage and grab an instrument and start playing, that was fine. Or just come up and do anything, not even playing music. They could just come up on the the stage and just start doing whatever they felt like doing. And Kesey encouraged that. Sometimes it was weird and sometimes it was really cool.
This is what Kesey wanted people to do: to come and just do what you feel like doing without the thing of ego and judgement. It was a way of getting free of judgement. Because that’s what is one of our biggest hangups: being judged for what we do because somebody else thinks we should do it differently.
In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in another time of great potential, of great change. The 2020s are a time of another huge set of social waves. The level of involvement that people have is growing. People are realizing there’s stuff going on. “Hold it! Wait! Stop! We’re on a runaway train and the bridge is out at the bottom of the hill. We’ve gotta change direction!” We’re seeing a time of tremendous potential. It’s happening now and it hasn’t peaked. It’s gonna continue to happen. There are bigger waves coming. More of them will happen and things are not going to be the same. If we pay attention — those of us who’ve experienced these kind of mind-opening and possibility-illuminating experiences — it’s on us to speak up, to act. If we do this right, we can surf this wave when it comes and we can all end up standing on the beach in the sun.
