BR: I already know this is a doomed question: do you have a favorite Neal story? Something that sums him up?

MG: Oh … how do you sum up Neal? He was such a character – and he always had a sidekick. He always had some young guy that he was teaching how to be a character. That’s it: he was in charge of character development for young men. (laughter) What really is the key to Neal’s character is in the new version of On The Road that came out a couple of years ago – the unedited version. It tells Neal’s story much more clearly than the original book that came out in the late 50s.

BR: Really? You know, I haven’t read it.

MG: Oh, it was so much better of a story before they cleaned it up. Neal was the most amazing womanizer in America at the time and Kerouac tells the story beautifully. I really recommend it. It’s a wonderful read – I couldn’t put it down.

BR: Great – I’ll tell my wife you said that. There’s my Christmas present. Thank you. Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if Kerouac had been bitten by the film bug the way Kesey was …

MG: (laughs) Imagine it! Kesey had this lightning flash that words weren’t enough any more. I think the LSD experiments convinced him that words fail to convey imagery properly. What he really wanted to do is have all this colorful imagery on the screen and he only partially succeeded in making that work. It was so complicated …

BR: They really did quite a job of syncing up the audio and video in the actual footage that’s used in Magic Trip though, didn’t they?

MG: Oh, yes – an amazing job. They found these beautiful scenes, cleaned up that film, and made it look all fresh – an incredible job. They did some creative scenes to put it all together, too, which people will eventually notice – it helps the story flow. Like Ken’s first acid trip in the hospital: they created this wonderful animated sequence. They did such a marvelous job.

BR: So, the bus itself was a machine, of course – but mystical at the same time –

MG: Exactly!

BR: And you’d be driving around in this … well … almost like a being that could magically put a smile on people’s faces when you drove by, right? But then a little while later, it’s just a cranky old bus, broken down alongside the road with a bad wheel bearing or a pooched water pump. (laughter) Is there an easy way to describe what the bus meant to you?

MG: Well … to me, the bus was the beginning of realizing that art didn’t have to hang in a museum. Art could be an ongoing project. When I first put my hand on the bus and felt it already had layers of paint and bubbles of stuff stuck on it, it seemed like it had been worked over several times already. I was so excited, because it meant that people had touched it and walked on it and fiddled with it and gone back and repainted stuff and it just … it was exciting.

The bus was a liberation from that whole old attitude of [deep voice] “Make a painting and then it goes on the wall.” (laughter) This wasn’t an “old master”; this was a new creation that was being renewed all the time – and that was really exciting to me. I didn’t know how to put that into words then; all I knew was the thing felt alive to me and this group of wonderful, funny people.

BR: And then, sadly, you watched first-hand the disintegration of the bus over the years. The scenes in the movie of the original bus all gutted out were sad to watch.

MG: Well, but come on – it was a 1930-something-or-other! It was real antique and it just kind of fell apart after a while … it couldn’t be fixed after a certain point, and Ken parked it. But then he found another one that looked just like it – only newer – and he painted that and it’s still running.

Ken’s son Zane takes that bus all over the place: various festivals and Furthur shows … and it’s gorgeous. It’s going to be at the theater in Portland [Oregon] next week for the opening of the movie. You’ve got to come out here and see it to believe it, Brian. It’s just beautiful.

BR: I suppose if anybody has a glimmer of belief in reincarnation of the human soul, then maybe it’s fair to say that the old bus’ soul …

MG: Absolutely! Absolutely! Come on out and we’ll take a ride. (laughter)

Pages:« Previous Page