Word: acidizing
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JEFFERSON AIRPLANE: BLESS ITS POINTED LITTLE HEAD (RCA). The Airplane may be coming down to earth. Recorded live for the first time, they change head music to body music as they repeat some old songs (Somebody to Lore, Plastic Fantastic Lover). Even so, acid rock is still the foundation of the Airplane, and the eleven-minute Bear Melt is a darkly mysterious throwback to their old surrealistic cerebrations...
...frustrated actor (Ron O'Neal), who is light enough to cross the color line but not dark enough to be hired as a token Negro in a Broadway show, delivers a bravura monologue on what whites expect of blacks that is hilarious, yet drenched in the acid insights of a people inured to pain. Gordone is too honest to lie about a bright brotherly tomorrow, but in thunder and in laughter he tells the racial truth about today...
OBLIVION. Not diffusion of the ego into a tinted bardo, as on acid; not greasy expansion of the superego into a slimy wet bladder, as with booze. It is the smothering of the self, the extinguishing of all that you have been, of everything that you are, of anything you could hope to be. Heroin, my heroine, the White Lady of Blackness, the ghost of electricity, no more problems with you, Sweet Marie, no more problems, no, no, no more...
...involvement and excitement--for Wolfe, writing parallels method acting. As a writer, he projects himself into the personalities of the characters he is describing, he records their sense of the world, trying to recapture "the trauma of the moment" as they experienced it. In this way, most of The Acid Test dips in and out of the consciousness of Kesey and his freaked-out disciples, and yet also manages to touch on many of the minds of the frightened and threatened in the old America--like the "unhip mama" with "the adrenal shriek: beat-nicks, bums, spades--dope...
...course Wolfe must pay a price for such dexterity. Since every character he recreates speaks with an equal force, the author's particular vantage point remains frustratingly ambiguous. In only one section of The Acid Test--a digression on the Rat aesthetic of the Southwest--does Wolfe permit himself to be unequivocally "satirical." Most of the time, he is simply too busy loving what he criticizes to be really vindictive...