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Owsley Stanley

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Owsley Stanley
Stanley in 1967 at his arraignment
Born
Augustus Owsley Stanley III

(1935-01-19)January 19, 1935
Kentucky, U.S.
DiedMarch 12, 2011(2011-03-12) (aged 76)
Queensland, Australia
NationalityAmerican
Other namesBear
CitizenshipNaturalised Australian
OccupationAudio engineer
Known forLSD, Wall of Sound
SpouseSheilah Stanley
Children4
RelativesAugustus O. Stanley, grandfather
Websitewww.thebear.org
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Augustus Owsley Stanley III (January 19, 1935 – March 12, 2011) was an American audio engineer and clandestine chemist. He was a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area hippie movement during the 1960s and played a pivotal role in the decade's counterculture. Under the professional name Bear, he was the soundman for the rock band the Grateful Dead, whom he met when Ken Kesey invited them to an Acid Test party. As their sound engineer, Stanley frequently recorded live tapes behind his mixing board and developed their Wall of Sound sound system, one of the largest mobile public address systems ever constructed. Stanley also helped Robert Thomas design the band's trademark skull logo.[1]

Stanley was the first known private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD.[2][3][4] By his own account, between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced no less than 500 grams of LSD, amounting to a little more than five million doses.[5]

He died in a car accident in Australia (where he had taken citizenship in 1996) on March 12, 2011.[4][6][7]

Ancestry

Stanley was the son of a political family from Kentucky. His father was a government attorney. His grandfather, A. Owsley Stanley, a member of the United States Senate after serving as Governor of Kentucky and in the U.S. House of Representatives, campaigned against Prohibition in the 1920s.[4]

Biography

Early life

At an early age, he committed himself to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C.[8] Without having graduated high school, he studied engineering at the University of Virginia for a year, maintaining a 3.4 grade point average with minimal effort before dropping out due to his disinclination for slide rules and mechanical drawing.[9][10] Despite his dearth of formal education, he secured a position as a test engineer with Rocketdyne in Los Angeles; in this capacity, he worked on the SM-64 Navaho supersonic cruise missile. In June 1956, he enlisted in the United States Air Force as an electronics specialist, serving for 18 months (including stints at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Edwards Air Force Base's Rocket Engine Test Facility) before being discharged in 1958. During his service, he secured an amateur radio license and a general radiotelephone operator license.

Later, inspired by a 1958 performance of the Bolshoi Ballet, he studied ballet in Los Angeles, supporting himself for a time as a professional dancer.[11] In 1963, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became involved in the psychoactive drug scene. He dropped out after a semester, took a technical job at KGO-TV, and began producing LSD in a small lab located in the bathroom of a house near campus; his makeshift laboratory was raided by police on February 21, 1965. He beat the charges and successfully sued for the return of his equipment. The police were looking for methamphetamine but found only LSD,[citation needed] which was not illegal at the time.

Stanley returned to Los Angeles to pursue the production of LSD. He used his Berkeley lab to buy 500 grams of lysergic acid monohydrate, the basis for LSD. His first shipment arrived on March 30, 1965 and he produced 300,000 hits (270 micrograms each) of LSD by May 1965; then he returned to the Bay Area.

In September 1965, Stanley became the primary LSD supplier to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. By this time, Sandoz LSD was hard to come by, and "Owsley Acid" had become the new standard.[citation needed] He was featured (most prominently his freak-out at the Muir Beach Acid Test in November 1965) in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Tom Wolfe's book detailing the history of Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Stanley attended the Watts Acid Test on February 12, 1966 with his new apprentice Tim Scully, and provided the LSD.

Stanley also provided LSD to the Beatles during filming of Magical Mystery Tour (1967),[12] and former Three Dog Night singer Chuck Negron has noted that Owsley and Leary gave Negron's band free LSD.[13]

Involvement with the Grateful Dead

Stanley met the members of the Grateful Dead during 1965.[14] He both financed them and worked with them as their first soundman.[15] Along with his close friend Bob Thomas, Stanley designed the band's iconic lightning bolt-skull logo.[1] The lightning bolt design came to him after seeing a similar design on a roadside advertisement: "One day in the rain, I looked out the side and saw a sign along the freeway which was a circle with a white bar across it. The top of the circle was orange, and the bottom blue. I couldn't read the name of the firm, and so was just looking at the shape. A thought occurred to me: if the orange were red and the bar across were a lightning bolt cutting across at an angle, then we would have a very nice, unique and highly identifiable mark to put on the equipment."[1]

During his time as the sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, Stanley started what became the long-term practice of recording the Dead while they rehearsed and performed. His initial motivation for creating what he dubbed his "sonic journal" was to improve his ability to mix the sound,[citation needed] but the fortuitous result was an extensive trove of recordings from the heyday of the San Francisco concert/dance scene in the mid-1960s. (Another reason for the first recordings was that Stanley had hearing damage in one ear from a swimming-pool diving accident when he was 19, and wanted a way to check himself.[16][17])

In addition to his large archive of Dead performances, Stanley made numerous live recordings of other leading 1960s and 1970s artists appearing in San Francisco, including Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, early Jefferson Starship, Old & In the Way, Janis Joplin, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Taj Mahal, Santana, Miles Davis, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, and Blue Cheer.[6]

Richmond LSD lab

Stanley and Scully built electronic equipment for the Grateful Dead until late spring 1966. At this point, Stanley rented a house in Point Richmond, Richmond, California. He, Scully, and Melissa Cargill (Stanley's girlfriend and a skilled chemist, introduced to Stanley by Susan Cowper, a former girlfriend) set up a lab in the basement. The Point Richmond lab turned out more than 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) of LSD, dubbed "White Lightning". When LSD became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, Scully decided to set up a new lab in Denver, Colorado. The new lab was set up in the basement of a house across the street from the Denver Zoo in early 1967.[18]

In Denver, the trio was augmented by fellow Berkeley student Rhoney Gissen, who joined the manufacturing effort and began a relationship with Stanley (concurrent with Stanley's relationship with Cargill and Cargill's separate relationship with Jefferson Airplane bassist Jack Casady) that endured through the early 1970s; although they never married, Gissen would eventually take Stanley's surname. Stanley's scientific tutelage influenced Gissen's decision to return to her formal studies and pursue the profession of dentistry; their son, Starfinder, would go on to earn zoology and veterinary medicine degrees from Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania.[19]

A psychedelic known as STP was distributed in the summer of 1967 in 20 mg tablets and quickly acquired a bad reputation (later research in normal volunteers showed that 20 mg was over six times the dose required to produce hallucinogenic effects, and its slow onset of action may have caused street users to take even more than a single tablet).[20] Stanley and Scully made trial batches of STP in 10 mg tablets and then of STP mixed with LSD in a few hundred yellow tablets, but soon ceased production of STP. Stanley and Scully produced about 196 grams of LSD in 1967, but 96 grams of this was confiscated by the police.

In late 1967, Stanley's La Espiral, Orinda, lab was raided by police; he was found in possession of 350,000 doses of LSD and 1,500 doses of STP. His defense was that the illegal substances were for personal use, but he was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison. The same year, Stanley officially shortened his name to "Owsley Stanley". After he was released from prison, Stanley resumed working for the Grateful Dead as their live sound engineer. On January 31, 1970, at 3:00 am, 19 members of the Grateful Dead and crew were arrested for possession of a variety of drugs at a French Quarter hotel after returning from a concert at The Warehouse in New Orleans.

According to Rolling Stone,[21] everyone in the band except Ron "Pigpen" McKernan and Tom Constanten - neither of whom used psychedelic drugs - was included in the arrest, along with several members of their retinue, including Stanley and some locals. Stanley was charged with illegal possession of narcotics, dangerous non-narcotics, LSD, and barbiturates. Another West Coast–based rock band, Jefferson Airplane, had been arrested two weeks earlier in the same situation. According to an article in the Baton Rouge State Times, Stanley identified himself to the police as "The King of Acid" and technician of the band. The 1970 Grateful Dead song "Truckin'" is based on the incident ("Busted, down on Bourbon Street / Set up, like a bowling pin / Knocked down, it gets to wearing thin / They just won't let you be").[22]

Stanley was confined to federal prison from 1970 to 1972, after a federal judge intervened and revoked his release from the 1967 case. Stanley took advantage of the opportunity there to learn the trade of metalwork and jewelry-making.[4]

Immediately following his release, Stanley resumed working for the Grateful Dead as a roadie and sound engineer in the summer of 1972. As much of his portfolio had been delegated to as many as four sound engineers during his prison sentence, he struggled to regain his past influence among the band and support staff. In a later interview with Dennis McNally, he opined that he received "just a taste" of his previous position; according to Stanley, "I found on my release from jail that the crew, most of whom had been hired in my absence, did not want anything changed. No improvements for the sound, no new gear, nothing different on stage. They wanted to maintain the same old same old which under their limited abilities, they had memorized to the point where they could sleepwalk through shows. Bob Matthews, who had been mixing since my departure, did not want to completely relinquish the mixing desk, which was a total pain in the ass for me, since he was basically a studio engineer and no match for my live mixing ability." The situation was exacerbated by his disdain for the coarse language and deleterious drugs (most notably alcohol and cocaine) favored by the band's physically imposing roadies, many of whom perceived themselves as "macho cowboys" in contrast to Stanley's diminutive stature and erudite mien.

The tensions culminated in a logistical mishap at an October 1972 concert at Vanderbilt University when students recruited by Stanley to deputize for an absentee Matthews absconded with half of the band's PA system, resulting in a fellow employee throwing Stanley into a water cooler. The altercation led Stanley to request the formal codification of his perceived managerial power over the equipment staff, including unprecedented hire/fire privileges.[23]

Although Stanley stopped touring with the band following their refusal of his demands, he continued to be employed by the Grateful Dead through their 1975 hiatus in a more limited capacity. During this period, he served as lead designer of the band's Wall of Sound PA system and assisted Phil Lesh in salvaging the technically deficient recordings assembled for Steal Your Face (1976), a poorly-received live album culled from the final October 1974 pre-hiatus shows at Winterland Ballroom.[24]

Post–Grateful Dead career

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Stanley briefly served as the mixing engineer for Jefferson Starship, and also grew and sold marijuana from his Marin County garden. Stanley moved to Australia in 1982, and frequently returned to the United States to sell his jewelry (which commanded high prices) on Grateful Dead tours. He retained backstage access during this period, and his clientele included such notable figures such as Keith Richards.[2]

Stanley's level of access to the group's inner echelon (including complimentary food from the band's caterers) was somewhat controversial among the band's employees, with one staffer opining that "he had the sales tactics of a Mumbai street peddler"; on one occasion, Garcia and Weir were forced to intervene when Stanley provoked Chelsea Clinton's secret service agent as he attempted to conduct business with the then-First Daughter.[25]

Notwithstanding his tour activities, Stanley made his first public appearance in decades at the Australian ethnobotanical conference Entheogenesis Australis in 2009, giving three talks during his time in Melbourne.[26][permanent dead link‍]

Personal life and death

Wikinews has related news:

Stanley believed a "thermal cataclysm" related to climate change would soon render the Northern Hemisphere largely uninhabitable, and moved to Australia in 1982. He became a naturalized Australian citizen in 1996. Stanley lived with his wife Sheilah (a former clerk in the Grateful Dead's ticket office) in the bush of Tropical North Queensland, where he worked to create sculpture and wearable art.[3][27] From at least the mid 1960s until his death, Stanley practiced and advocated an all-meat diet, believing that humans are naturally carnivores.[3]

Stanley died after a car accident in Australia on Saturday, March 12, 2011,[4] not Sunday, March 13, as reported in most publications[6][7][8][28][29] (a widely propagated error stemming from the Monday release to the press of the initial family statement, which was written on Sunday, stating he "died yesterday"). The statement released on behalf of Stanley's family said the car crash occurred near his home, on a rural stretch of highway near Mareeba, Queensland.

His ashes were placed on the soundboard at the celebration of the Grateful Dead's 50th anniversary at the Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead shows in Chicago, on July 3–5, 2015.[30]

Owsley Stanley Foundation

After Stanley's death in 2011, his family and some close friends created a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization called the Owsley Stanley Foundation. The foundation is dedicated to restoring and preserving the archive of Stanley's recordings, which he called his "sonic journals".[31][32][33][34]

As part of this work, several of the recordings have been released commercially on CD:

In literature

In music

References

  1. ^ a b c "GD Logo". thebear.org. Retrieved December 31, 2015.
  2. ^ a b Selvin, J. "For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD, long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area". San Francisco Chronicle, July 12, 2007.
  3. ^ a b c Greenfield, Robert (July 12–27, 2007). "Owsley Stanley: The King of LSD". Rolling Stone.
  4. ^ a b c d e Margalit Fox (March 15, 2011). "Owsley Stanley, Artisan of Acid, Is Dead at 76". The New York Times. p. B18.
  5. ^ Forte, Robert (1999). Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In. Park Street Press. p. 276. ISBN 0892817860.
  6. ^ a b c "Owsley Stanley obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved November 25, 2014.
  7. ^ a b "Owsley 'Bear' Stanley Dies in Car Accident", jambands.com, March 13, 2011
  8. ^ a b Brown, Emma (March 15, 2011). "'Bear' Stanley, who made the LSD on which Haight-Ashbury tripped, dies at 76". The Washington Post. Washington, D.C. Retrieved March 16, 2011.
  9. ^ Owsley Stanley, counterculture producer of LSD, dies at 76 – KansasCity.com
  10. ^ Clark, Charlie (November 22, 2016). "Our Man in Arlington".
  11. ^ Owsley Stanley blog posting. 17 March 2006.
  12. ^ Fraser, Andrew (March 14, 2011). "Owsley 'Bear' Stanley dies in North Queensland car crash". The Australian. News Limited. Retrieved March 14, 2011.
  13. ^ Freeman, Paul (August 15, 2012). "The dark, one-dog night of Chuck Negron". San Jose Mercury News.
  14. ^ a b Troy, Sandy, Captain Trips: A Biography of Jerry Garcia (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1994). Acid Tests pp. 70–1, 76, 85; LSD Millionaire p. 99.
  15. ^ Pareles, Jon (August 10, 1995). "Jerry Garcia of Grateful Dead, Icon of 60's Spirit, Dies at 53". The New York Times. Retrieved March 11, 2009.
  16. ^ https://www.barnesandnoble.com/readouts/bear-the-life-and-times-of-augustus-owsley-stanley-iii/
  17. ^ https://archive.org/post/417094/owsley-question
  18. ^ Tim Scully Scully's Denver Lab(s)
  19. ^ "About Dr. Starfinder Stanley". January 15, 2017.
  20. ^ Snyder, Solomon; Faillace, Louis; Hollister, Leo (October 6, 1967). "2,5-Dimethoxy-4-methyl-amphetamine (STP): A New Hallucinogenic Drug". Science. 158 (3801). American Association for the Advancement of Science: 669–670. Bibcode:1967Sci...158..669S. doi:10.1126/science.158.3801.669. PMID 4860952. S2CID 24065654. Archived from the original on April 30, 2018. Retrieved September 10, 2016.
  21. ^ "New Orleans Cops & the Dead Bust". Rolling Stone. No. 53. March 6, 1970.
  22. ^ Lifton, Dave (January 31, 2015). "45 Years Ago: The Grateful Dead's Infamous 'Truckin' Drug Bust". Ultimate Classic Rock. Retrieved April 16, 2017.
  23. ^ Greenfield, Robert (November 15, 2016). Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III. Macmillan. ISBN 9781466893115 – via Google Books.
  24. ^ Ashes, Light Into (July 1, 2010). "Grateful Dead Guide: Bear at the Board".
  25. ^ Greenfield, Robert (November 15, 2016). Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III. Macmillan. ISBN 9781466893115 – via Google Books.
  26. ^ "Entheogenesis Australis" (PDF). Retrieved March 14, 2011. In 2009, around 500 participants were addressed by…the legendary – but reclusive – Owsley 'Bear' Stanley, in his first public appearance in decades.
  27. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on September 18, 2018. Retrieved May 30, 2017.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  28. ^ "Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia". Thomson Reuters. March 13, 2011.
  29. ^ "Owsley Stanley". The Daily Telegraph. 19 March 2011.
  30. ^ "Music News - Concert Reviews - JamBase". JamBase. July 8, 2015. Retrieved December 31, 2015.
  31. ^ "About the Owsley Stanley Foundation". Owsley Stanley Foundation. Retrieved May 31, 2020.
  32. ^ Bannerman, Mark (March 23, 2019). "Owsley Stanley's Acid Trips Helped Define the Sound of the 1960s, but His Recordings Are Just as Important". ABC News. Retrieved May 31, 2020.
  33. ^ Jarnow, Jesse (December 5, 2019). "Owsley Stanley's 'Sonic Journals': Inside the Tape Vault of a Psychedelic Legend". Rolling Stone. Retrieved May 31, 2020.
  34. ^ "Bear at the Board". Grateful Dead Guide. July 1, 2010. Retrieved May 31, 2020.
  35. ^ Moses, Desiré (July 26, 2017). "Doc & Merle Watson: Play 'Never the Same Way Once' on New Box Set". The Bluegrass Situation. Retrieved May 31, 2020.
  36. ^ "First Doc & Merle Watson Box Set Released". Cybergrass. May 23, 2017. Retrieved May 31, 2020.
  37. ^ Kahn, Andy (May 23, 2017). "Owsley Stanley Foundation Announces Doc & Merle Watson Live Box Set". JamBase. Retrieved May 31, 2020.
  38. ^ Bernstein, Scott (July 19, 2018). "Previously Unreleased Allman Brothers Band Recordings from February 1970 Fillmore East Run Coming". JamBase. Retrieved May 31, 2020.
  39. ^ "Before We Were Them". Owsley Stanley Foundation. Retrieved May 31, 2020.
  40. ^ Collette, Doug (February 17, 2020). "Bear's Sonic Journals: Dawn of the New Riders of the Purple Sage". Glide Magazine. Retrieved May 31, 2020.
  41. ^ "Found in the Ozone". Owsley Stanley Foundation. Retrieved June 27, 2020.
  42. ^ "That Which Colors the Mind". Owsley Stanley Foundation. Retrieved November 27, 2020.
  43. ^ Patel, Madhu (October 29, 2020). "Owsley Stanley Foundation to Release Rare Performance by Ali Akbar Khan from 1970". India Post. Retrieved December 11, 2020.
  44. ^ Kureshi, Anisa (December 8, 2020). "Smoke in a Bottle: That Which Colors the Mind". India Currents. Retrieved December 11, 2020.
  45. ^ Collette, Doug (December 14, 2020). "Bear's Sonic Journals: That Which Colors the Mind – Ali Akbar Khan / Indranil Bhattacharya / Zakir Hussain". Glide Magazine. Retrieved December 24, 2020.
  46. ^ Tamarkin, Jeff (January 25, 2021). "Global Beat: Zakir Hussain Revisits a Historic Family Dog Summit". Relix. Retrieved January 27, 2021.
  47. ^ Thompson, Hunter S. (November 6, 2003). The great shark hunt: strange tales from a strange time. ISBN 9780743250450. Retrieved April 21, 2011. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  48. ^ "Frank Zappa - Who Needs The Peace Corps? Lyrics - MetroLyrics". metrolyrics.com. Retrieved December 31, 2015.
  49. ^ "1960s LSD Figure Owsley Stanley Dies In Crash – Entertainment News Story – WISC Madison". Archived from the original on March 17, 2011.
  50. ^ "millionaire". chetanmohakar.com. Archived from the original on January 30, 2019.
  51. ^ "R.I.P. Owsley – Viceland Today". Archived from the original on July 17, 2011.
  52. ^ NME.COM. "Jimi Hendrix inspiration and LSD producer Owsley Stanley dies". NME.COM. Retrieved December 31, 2015.
  53. ^ "Owsley Stanley Obituary - Owsley Stanley Funeral - Legacy.com". Legacy.com. Retrieved December 31, 2015.
  54. ^ "Complete transcript of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker in a BBC-Online Chat, March 4, 2000". BBC. March 4, 2000. Archived from the original on April 13, 2009. Retrieved May 26, 2010.
  55. ^ Kamiya, Gary (March 14, 2000). "Sophisticated skank". Salon. Retrieved January 6, 2013.
  56. ^ Marcus Singletary. "Steely Dan: Kid Charlemagne". Jazz.com. Archived from the original on June 10, 2012. Retrieved May 26, 2010.
  57. ^ Pershan, C., "Kid Charlemagne: A Close Reading Of Steely Dan's Ode to Haight Street's LSD King" Archived 2016-03-17 at the Wayback Machine, SFist, July 20, 2015.

Sources

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