As bohemias go, Perry Lane was Arcadia, Arcadia just off the Stanford golf course. It was a cluster of two room cottages with weathery wood shingles in an oak forest, only not just amid trees and greenery, but amid vines, honeysuckle tendrils, all buds and shoots and swooping tendrils and twitterings like the best of Arthur Rackham and Honey Bear. Not only that, it had true cultural cachet. Thorstein Veblen had lived there. So had two Nobel Prize winners everybody knew about though the names escaped them. The cottages rented for just $60 a month. Getting into Perry Lane was like getting into a club. Everybody who lived there had known somebody else who lived there, or they would never have gotten in, and naturally they got to know each other very closely too, and there was always something of an atmosphere of communal living. Nobody’s door was ever shut on Perry Lane, except when they were pissed off.
It was sweet. Perry Lane was a typical 1950s bohemia. Everybody sat around shaking their heads over America’s tailfin, housing-development civilization, and Christ, in Europe, so what if the plumbing didn’t work, they had mastered the art of living. Occasionally somebody would suggest an orgy or a three-day wine binge, but the model was always that old Zorba the Greek romanticism of sandals and simplicity and back to first principles. aWolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Ferrar Straus and Giroux, 1968. p.34
Ken Kesey lived at #9 Perry Lane (just to the right of the telephone pole) while enrolled in the non-degree program at Stanford University’s Creative Writing Center from 1959 through 1963. At the invitation of Perry Lane neighbor and Stanford psychology graduate student Vik Lovell, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study under the aegis of Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans’ Hospital, where he later worked as a night aide. The project studied the effects of psychoactive drugs (LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, aMT, and DMT) on human subjects. During this time, while living on Perry Lane, Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, published in 1962. Perry Lane was notorious for street parties and Hawaiian-style cookouts. Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh often performed at these street parties.bLesh, Phil Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005. Often these parties were broken up by police on account on account of the attendees being racially mixed.cPaul De Carli: Hanging out with Ken Kesey on Perry Lane Probably the most famous of those parties was the Perry Lane Olympics which opened with a naked woman holding a toilet plunger with a burning rag stuffed in the cup as she was driven up and down the lane while sitting on the back of a convertible.
In August of 1963, Perry Lane #9 as well as some of the other cottages were torn down by developers and replaced with ranch style homes, forcing Kesey and the Merry Pranksters to relocate to 7940 La Honda Road in La Honda, CA.
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