It was just another Saturday on Ken Kesey’s farm, but it felt like Shangri-La. Some shaven-headed freak stood staring down from the rough-hewn stage, glassy-eyed and grinning through a musky amalgam of marijuana and pine, slapping a pair of spoons against his chest and thigh–a demented rhythm section in an unknown band, one of the dozens to play in the moss-draped south-40 of a man uniformly known as America’s First Hippie. While every cop in Eugene stood poised on the roadside overlooking a commercial replacement for the Grateful Dead’s aborted late-August doubleheader, the Cuckoo strode around his own eight acres, miles away, in a striped referee’s shirt, signing autographs and posing reticently for the cameras–an icon who, in the words of Hunter Thompson, “has found out a way to live out there where the real winds blow.”
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