The New Journalism of the Sixties
63
This technique of psychological interpretation is further refined in
Wolfe’s portrait of record producer Phil Spector, '•‘The First Tycoon of Teen/’ In
this essay, Wolfe describes Spector as a walking contradiction: on the one hand,
the 23-year-old Spector identifies with the teen-age netherworld of rock and roll;
on the other hand, Spector is the millionaire business genius, living in a New
York penthouse and having a staff consisting of a bodyguard and a limousine
chauffeur. He is a man who wants to maintain “the kids’ style of life,” yet have
the adult’s money. Wolfe concluded that no matter how much Spector covertly
identifies with his teen-age fans, the producer has crossed over into “the
universe of arteriosclerotic, hypocritical, cigar-chewing, hopeless, larded adults,
infarcted vultures, one meets in the music business.”42 In this piece, social
commentary and psychological analysis are as much the domain of the reporter
as it is the novelist.
The techniques experimented with in The Kandv-Kolored TangerineFlake Streamline Baby are later perfected in his book-length account of the
psychedelic/counterculture movement in the Sixties, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test. Along with telling the story of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters from the
point of view of the characters portrayed, Wolfe also experiments with a stream
of consciousness narrative. This is best illustrated in the scenes showing Kesey
in hiding in Mexico after he had been arrested in California for the second time
for possession of marijuana and faced a mandatoiy five-year jail sentence with
no chance of parole. In a paranoic, stream-of-consciousness style, Wolfe depicts
Kesey sitting in his hideaway convinced that Mexican federates or FBI agents
are about to arrest him.43 Wolfe reconstructs the scene based on Kesey’s letter to
fellow writer Larry McMurtry, tapes made by Kesey, and interviews with
Kesey’s fugitive companions.44 Wolfe writes:
Haul ass, Kesey. Scram. Split flee hide vanish disintegrate.
Like run.
RnTrrmTrrrrrrrrrrrev revrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrev or are we
gonna have just a late Mexican re-run o f the scene on the
rooftop in San Francisco and sit here with the motor spinning
and watch with fascination while the cops they climb up once
again to come git you— 45
This stream-of-consciousness style also is employed in the "gonzo
journalism”46 of Hunter S. Thompson, who, like Wolfe, examines the
counterculture experience in the Sixties. For example, in Fea "