A Podcast from 1995? When I Interviewed Ken Kesey

A few days ago, I released an episode for The Drunken Taoist podcast that was recorded in… 1995.

If you are scratching your head, you are not alone. In 1995, podcasts didn’t exist. Hell… in 1995 the internet wasn’t even a reality in the daily lives of people around the world. So, how the hell did I record a podcast back then?

The simple answer is that, of course, I didn’t know that what I recorded back then would end up as a podcast. Just thinking about how the world changed in less than thirty years is mind-boggling. Scratch everything you know associated with internet and cell phones, and you begin to get a sense of what things were like in 1995. Bill Clinton was barely starting his second term. There had been no 9/11, no Patriot Act, no Iraq War. So many of the things that shape our reality today simply didn’t exist. So, for me finding this recording was like opening a time capsule. I had even forgotten the recording existed. I discovered it only thanks to my friend Andrea Zingoni, who was like a brother to my father, and who spent a bunch of hours digging through my father’s videotapes recorded on long-outdated technologies and turning them into digital files.

It was right around the time when I turned twenty-one years old. A lifetime ago. My father had asked me if I could interview 1960s icon Ken Kesey for a festival he was organizing in Italy. Kesey was the author of the classic “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (later adapted into a famous film starring Jack Nicholson) and a whole bunch of other books. He was also the leader of the group of psychedelic adventurers known as The Merry Pranksters. I can’t remember how we went about it. Did we write Kesey a letter? How did we contact him? What I do remember is that along with my mother, Gloria Mattioni, I traveled up to Oregon where Kesey lived. We flew into Portland, rented a car and drove up to a farm outside of Eugene. The drive itself was epic. It must have been during a particularly brutal winter storm since people around us clearly had no idea how to drive their cars through it. On the drive from Portland to Eugene and back, we saw at least five or six cars speeding past us, only for their tires to lose contact with the ground and ending up crashing against the guard rail or other cars.

Somehow, we survived the ordeal, and made it to Kesey’s house. Kesey was everything I had imagined: charismatic, wearing a tie-dye shirt, and appearing larger-than-life. It was a bit surreal to be sitting in the living room of a guy I had heard so much about. It felt like being in the presence of a piece of American history in the flesh. His wife, instead, was very mellow and soft-spoken. When we got around to recording, I really didn’t have to do much ‘interviewing.’ Kesey just jumped into a monologue about stuff that was on his mind, and I only stepped in a few times to ask questions or volunteer some comments.

It's so bizarre to listen to that dialogue today. The little of my voice you can hear sounds (at least to me) like it comes from someone who has next to nothing to do with who I am today. Almost a different person altogether. Bizarre or not, I’m glad to have the opportunity to share this recording from the time capsule almost 30 years later.

If you’d like to check this out, please be advised the intro begins around the 6 min mark and the interview itself begins around the 15 minutes mark.

https://thedrunkentaoist.com/episodes/episode-258-ken-kesey