Stewart Brand - Merry Pranksters

Merry Pranksters

By the mid-1960s, he was associated with author Ken Kesey and the "Merry Pranksters", and in San Francisco, with his partner Zach Stewart, Brand produced the Trips Festival, an early effort involving rock music and light shows. This was one of the first venues at which the Grateful Dead performed in San Francisco. About 10,000 hippies attended and Haight-Ashbury emerged as a community. Tom Wolfe describes Brand in the beginning of his 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.