It is for this reason that Owsley and his wife, Sheilah, whom he first met at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley in 1985 while she was working in the ticket office for the Dead, now live in Australia forty-five minutes from anywhere on 120 acres of land he claimed by squatting on it like a pioneer. Although no man knows the exact time, we feel that time is very near! Over the course of the next fourteen years, Owsley known to his friends as Bear because of his prematurely hairy chest as a teenager enlisted in the Air Force, became a ham- radio operator, obtained a first-class radiotelephone operators license, worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and served as a summer-relief broadcast engineer at TV and radio stations in Los Angeles. Letting vegetable matter go through a carnivorous intestine scratches it up and scars it and causes mucus that interferes with nutrition., For the next six weeks, the Grateful Dead and their girlfriends ate meat and milk for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Night after night during the summer months, Owsley can be found stalking Bufo marinus, the species of poisonous toads (whose venom, Owsley insists, wont get you high) first introduced into Australia in 1935 in the mistaken belief that they would help control the cane beetle. I just wanted to know the dose and purity of what I took into my own body. [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. Wherever he goes, he carries an astonishing aluminum briefcase bedecked with wrinkled rock & roll stickers and ancient Grateful Dead backstage passes stuffed to the brim with precious scraps of platinum and gold from which he has fashioned his jewelry, a jewelers loup so his pieces can be viewed at close range on black felt jewelers boards, a small metric scale, a portable memory drive, numerous rolls of tape and a plethora of tiny plastic film containers. Robert Greenfield. I generally was not much of a consumer., Concerning much of what has been attributed to him during this period, Owsley says, The only thing I havent been associated with is walking on the moon, for Christs sake. Owsley did not parachute in to the Human Be-In in January 1967, as was widely reported, but he did provide 300,000 hits of acid called White Lightning for the event. Trending . Lexington was blown out from under Owsleys father during the Battle of the Coral Sea in World War II, he began drinking heavily and became a lifelong alcoholic. But manufacturing acid is not the only accomplishment on Owsleys rsum. Concerning Owsleys legacy to the Dead from this period, Dennis McNally, the bands biographer, says, Bear gave them a vision of quality that quite frankly influenced them for the next thirty years. During his service, he secured an amateur radio license and a general radiotelephone operator license. The key element was "turn on" and it was Owsley . Bear's website, thebear.org, is still accessible as well, where you can see his jewelry designs and read his stories and essays. Musicians plugged their instruments into amplifiers connected to single-channel speakers. He was a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area hippie movement during the 1960s and played a pivotal role in the decades counterculture. as Owsley acid." One of my friends who was a folkie brought it in and said, Man, you gotta listen to this! And I was off and running. Augustus Owsley Stanley III, 32, whose grandfather was a Kentucky governor, congressman and U.S. senator, was arrested by agents of the Federal Bureau of Drug Abuse Thursday in a raid on a fashionable two-story home in this residential community 40 miles east of San Francisco. All donations and proceeds from the development of the recordings flow back into the effort to preserve more of Bears Sonic Journals and perpetuate Owsleys legacy, including patronage of the arts in all of its forms. The Owsley Stanley Foundation is a 501c (3) non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of "Bear's Sonic Journals," Owsley's archive of more than 1,300 live concert soundboard recordings from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, including recordings by Miles Davis, Johnny Cash, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Fleetwood Mac . They contain lovely subtleties that dont normally happen Paddy Moloney, August 2021, after listening to Bears tapes. A high-school dropout of preternatural intelligence who was born from a Kentucky political dynasty and became the live sound-engineer for the Grateful Dead, his most notorious legacy is as the first Acid Millionaire. According to Rolling Stone,[25] 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. Incredibly, no one called the cops. Written by WL Woodward. The Owsley Stanley Foundations sixth release- Bears Sonic Journals: That Which Colors the Mind features sarod master, Ali Akbar Khan, accompanied by Indranil Bhattacharya (sitar) and Zakir Hussain (tabla). Once the systems set, you can walk away from the board. [7], Stanley and Scully built electronic equipment for the Grateful Dead until late spring 1966. Owsley wanted the Dead not only to be clearly heard but also in stereo, a concept so far ahead of its time that it would be ten years before such systems were installed in movie theaters. A legend recording a legend T. Michael Coleman, Bass. He participated in a low carb forum where he shared his experience with and knowledge about eating a diet comprised entirely of animal foods. The Owsley Stanley Foundation is dedicated to the preservation of Bears Sonic Journals, Owsleys archive of more than 1,300 live concert soundboard recordings from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, including recordings by Miles Davis, Johnny Cash, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, and more than 80 other artists across nearly every musical idiom. Kesey and the Pranksters called these gatherings the Acid Tests, a series of mind-blowing events at which people tripping on LSD were exposed to flashing strobe lights, tape loops and sometimes if the band was not too stoned even a set by the Grateful Dead. Kesey liked 400. Augustus Bear Owsley Stanley 1967 Gathering of the Tribes. He beat the charges and successfully sued for the return of his equipment. Because the materials needed to synthesize LSD were still only available to serious researchers, he formed the Bear Research Group and paid $4,000 every three or four weeks to the Cyclo Chemical Corporation for bottles of lysergic monohydrate, the basis for LSD. Just to show you. By this time, Sandoz LSD sold under the trade-name Delysid was hard to come by, as Sandoz halted LSD production in August 1965 after growing governmental protests at its proliferation among the general populace, which meant that "Owsley Acid" had become the new standard. I loved it.. And I certainly never made $1 million from drugs. . Amongst his outrageous success from the sale of his acid, Stanley also worked for a time as the Grateful Dead's sound engineer. Grateful Dead Artist Page: Photos, Videos and More, For the past twenty years, Owsley has lived off the grid in a remote section of Australian rain forest. Though Owsley seemed to be living the life of a counterculture superstar, Cargill remembers their time together back then as not so much an adventure as constantly looking over your shoulder. The feeling was more than just paranoia. Youre concentrating a lot of mental energy on one package. Ego death. His paternal grandfather, for whom he was named, was a congressman, governor of Kentucky and United States . He lived in a picturesque Berkeley cottage filled with high-end stereo equipment where he kept an owl to which he fed live mice. 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. Kesey was playing with something he did not understand, Owsley says. Details. Lansing State Journal (MI.) He has parlayed this talent into a career, crafting belt buckles and pendants for everyone from KeithRichards to Jackson Browne that sell for as much as $20,000. [13][14] 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. Together, they dwell in a complex of sheds, caravans, large canvas tents, modified shipping containers and corrugated-iron structures designed and built by Owsley. Augustus Owsley Stanley III was infamous in the 60s counterculture scene and his legacy reaches further than most. Adopt-A-Reel Program:For donations of $400 or more, we will work with you to select one of Bears Sonic Journals for priority preservation. Owsley acid was named for its creator, Owsley Stanley, who was the first person in the United States to mass produce high-quality LSD.In the 1960s, after he had served 18 months in the U.S. Air . Stanley was charged with illegal possession of narcotics, dangerous non-narcotics, LSD, and barbiturates. The foundation is dedicated to restoring and preserving the archive of Stanley's recordings, which he called his "sonic journals".[37][38][39][40][41]. The same year, Stanley officially shortened his name to "Owsley Stanley". 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When he finally returned to his physical body and found it mostly intact, Owsley was horrified by the way Kesey and the Pranksters were messing with peoples minds. Available in both digital-to-digital and analog-to-analog separately mastered versions (CD, Downloads, 180g 45-RPM Vinyl, Reel-to-Reel Tape). 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 at the time. Celebrating 50 years of New Riders of the Purple Sage, the Owsley Stanley Foundations fourth release takes you back in time to the early days when this band was just getting started. campaign seeks to raise money to enable the digitization, preservation, and release of Bear's Sonic Journals, a trove of over a thousand live concert recordings from the heart of the psychedelic era. He, Scully, and Melissa Cargill (a skilled chemist and Cargill family scion who became Stanley's girlfriend following an introduction by Susan Cowper, a former girlfriend) set up a lab in the basement. The top of the circle was orange, and the bottom blue. ALWAYS enter lists of addressses (greater than 2) in the Bcc: line. . The Arctic and Antarctic are soaking up the moving heat and the ice caps are melting, but the cause of the heats movement is a buildup of energy as the prelude to a massive, planetary-scale cyclonic storm, which will build the new ice age glaciers., Because this is a natural cycle, Owsley believes that carbon and methane emissions from human activity have little effect on the process and do not cause the greenhouse effect. A psychedelic known as STP was distributed in the summer of 1967 in 20mg tablets and quickly acquired a bad reputation (later research in normal volunteers showed that 20mg 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). An article in The Los Angeles Times described him rolling up to a Sunset Strip bank on a red motorcycle with crumpled bills stashed in his helmet, pockets and boots. That got good and weird., By the time the Dead returned to San Francisco in April, Owsley had already made it plain to the band that as far as he was concerned, there was only one way to do everything: his way. The sound of Jerry Garcias guitar grabbed hold of Owsley, and he freaked out on acid for the first time. His grandfather, also named Augustus Owsley Stanley, was a trust-busting Democratic congressman from Kentucky who spent twelve years in the House of Representatives. Link to comments by the Bear on a low carb forum back in 2006. For the Dead, the good news was that they now had nothing to do all day but jam. Thats what alchemy says., To generate enough cash to purchase the raw materials to make LSD, Owsley and Cargill began making and selling methedrine in a makeshift bathroom lab in Berkeley. In February 1966, Owsley and the Dead moved to Los Angeles for another series of Acid Tests. Owsley rented a pink stucco house in Watts, next door to a brothel, where they all lived together. It was amazing, he told Jerry Garcia biographer Blair Jackson. Thomas, who died in 1993, sold it to the band as a letterhead for $250, meaning that neither he nor Owsley ever saw a dime from all those Deadhead stickers on the rear bumpers of Volkswagen buses. When Owsley showed up one day during the fall, he walked over to Kesey and handed him a couple of hits of acid. Believing there is no past and no future because everything exists only in present time, it never occurs to him to drive five minutes out of his way to the Monterey Fairgrounds where, forty years ago, his high-powered rocket fuel helped launch the Summer of Love. For most people, Owsley says, the proper dose is about 150 to 200 micrograms. The price I had to pay to get through the gate. How many people can say that? Owsley also credits his all-meat diet for keeping him alive. Owsley Stanley was a counterculture transformer famous for the purity of two things: the LSD he cooked up and the rock 'n' roll sound system he created. When LSD became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, Scully decided to set up a new lab in Denver, Colorado. The lead and the gold is the lead of the primitive nature into the gold of the enlightened man. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe described how Owsley completely lost control of himself, dissolving into gaseous nothingness until he became nothing more than a single cell. In Berkeley, Owsley began smoking pot and selling Heavenly Blue morning-glory seeds (250 for a dollar), which served to get people not high but weird when taken in great quantity. We were officially granted 501 (c) (3) nonprofit status by the IRS in December 2012. The pot vessel was made by LSD pioneer Owsley Stanley for the Grateful Dead frontman. Donations are much appreciated, and are in fact essential to our ability to preserve and release future recordings! .. And the band had a bunch of macho cowboys as a crew who were snorting blow and drinking a whole lot of beer, and Bear was offended by their language and by their beer., After being thrown across the room by one of the roadies during an argument, Owsley asked the band to give him the power to hire and fire the crew so they would know they were working for him. Augustus Owsley Stanley III was born on Jan. 19, 1935, to a patrician Kentucky family. The "Save The Music!" We had Meet the Beatles! If you feel you cant love someone and you are universally told that you must love, you become very guilty., After the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Owsley also sent a photographer back to England with a telephoto lens packed with tabs of purple acid on the condition that he share them with the Beatles. The Grateful Dead's "Wall of Sound" was a massive sound system designed by LSD chemist, Owsley Stanley. Normally, within six months or a year, it has metastasized throughout your body. The following excerpt explores the onset . His friends just knew him as The Bear. While doing two years in federal prison in the early Seventies for manufacturing acid, Owsley taught himself how to make jewelry. Im not really interested in talking about myself, he says. Those were all allegories. And we were just musicians in this house, and we were guinea-pigging more or less continually. Owsley declined. Every single note is separately placed in space as well as in time. Would the Summer of Love have ever happened without Stanley, the reclusive acid impresario who turned on the world? By his own account, between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced no less than 500 grams of LSD, amounting to a little more . His paternal grandfather, Augustus 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.[5]. I couldn't read the name of the firm, and so was just looking at the shape. His nickname, Bear, reputedly was inspired by the profuse . These . The police were looking for methamphetamine but found only LSD, which was not illegal at the time. Immediately following his release, Stanley resumed working for the Grateful Dead as a roadie and sound engineer in the summer of 1972. Two nights later, the junkies returned only to discover that Owsley had fortified the place, hired some people and armed ourselves to the teeth. A running gun battle ensued, with one of the junkies taking a bullet through his arm. He died Sunday in a car accident in Australia. Grateful Dead Archivist Discusses Dicks Picks Series. 9 were here. The Bear. When you find a new live Tim Buckley recording, it's like finding a whole new Tim Buckley! The Owsley Stanley Foundations 8th release ofBears Sonic Journals: Johnny Cash At the Carousel Ballroomfeatures Cash playing songs of outsiders, outlaws, and in-laws, exquisitely captured by Bear. To see Owsley in action now is to understand that forty years after the Summer of Love, the man has not really changed very much at all. Augustus Owsley Stanley III (later nicknamed Bear) was born on Jan. 19, 1935. Reach out if you have questions, or to see how you can support the Owsley Stanley Foundation. And he was not surprised you would choose to be an idiot. Three weeks later, on January 8th, 1966, Owsley sashayed into the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco for another Acid Test. I was just a neurotic kid, he says. I love them both! All donations to the Owsley Stanley Foundation are fully tax deductible. [19] (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. 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. That was the initiation. While driving to work one day in his MG, Owsley saw an orange and blue logo with a white bar across it on a building. I worked my way up to the top job, he recalls, which was as a line backer for the steam tables, and I traded my two cartons of cigarettes a week for a steak a day from the butcher, and I got all the meat and eggs I needed, and I cooked my own food and had a great time. Transferred to Lompoc, where his job was to wax the dining-room floor, Owsley soon moved on to the maintenance shop, where he used the tools to begin doing exquisitely detailed carvings in wood and stone. By then, most of the money Owsley had amassed during his days as the worlds reigning acid chemist was gone. The Idol: How HBOs Next Euphoria Became Twisted Torture Porn. OSF Doc & Merle Watson: Never the Same Way Once - Live at the Boarding House - May 1974 Double Vinyl Set. [31], 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. From all three shows, as played on Taking acid soon became the watermark. At this point, Stanley rented a house in Point Richmond, Richmond, California. Lesh likened the experience of playing through the system to piloting a flying saucer. * The Japanese don't write in alphabetic writing; they write in pictographs. February 11, 13, & 14, 1970, The Boarding House, May 1 May 4, 1974Seven CD Set. His initial motivation for creating what he dubbed his "sonic journal" was to improve his ability to mix the sound, but the fortuitous result was an extensive trove of recordings from the heyday of the San Francisco concert/dance scene in the mid-1960s. Im interested in the work Ive done and the things Ive discovered and in some of my philosophical stuff, because I think its of value, but Im not into being a celebrity, because I think celebrityhood has no value to anyone, least of all to the celebrity. This is one of the most aggressive cancers you can get, he adds. Soil in Latest 'Bear's Sonic Journals' Release", "1960s LSD Figure Owsley Stanley Dies In Crash Entertainment News Story WISC Madison", "Jimi Hendrix inspiration and LSD producer Owsley Stanley dies", "Owsley Stanley Obituary - Owsley Stanley Funeral - Legacy.com", "Complete transcript of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker in a BBC-Online Chat, March 4, 2000", "Kid Charlemagne: A Close Reading Of Steely Dan's Ode to Haight Street's LSD King", "Producer Sujoy Sarkar Drops Enigmatic Debut Album 'Sitting At Strawberry Fields Cause I Met Owsley on the Way', Celebstoner.com report of Owsley Stanley's Death, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Owsley_Stanley&oldid=1142575554, Owsley's association with Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead is described in Tom Wolfe's, A newspaper headline identifying Stanley as an "LSD Millionaire" ran in the, Stanley is mentioned by his first name in the song ", Stanley is mentioned in the title of Sujoy Sarkar's debut album, This page was last edited on 3 March 2023, at 05:21. Later that year, a friend gave Owsley 400 micrograms of pure LSD manufactured by Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland, where Dr. Albert Hofmann had first synthesized the drug in 1938. Stanley also helped Robert Thomas design the band's trademark skull logo. Ifeel as if Ive known you through many lifetimes., You have, Owsley replied, and you will through many more to come.. Stanley also designed the band's trademark skull logo. Adopt-A-Reel Program: The Owsley Stanley Foundations fifth release of Bears Sonic Journals finds lost treasures in the ozone with the launch of Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen! On a good night, Owsley will catch as many as 225 toads. [UPDATE 11/21/22]: In an effort to refute claims made by Steve Cabella about the origins of a pipe allegedly gifted to Jerry Garcia by Owsley "Bear" Stanley, Bear's son Starfinder Stanley . AlabamaAlaskaArizonaArkansasCaliforniaColoradoConnecticutDelawareDistrict of ColumbiaFloridaGeorgiaHawaiiIdahoIllinoisIndianaIowaKansasKentuckyLouisianaMaineMarylandMassachusettsMichiganMinnesotaMississippiMissouriMontanaNebraskaNevadaNew HampshireNew JerseyNew MexicoNew YorkNorth CarolinaNorth DakotaOhioOklahomaOregonPennsylvaniaRhode IslandSouth CarolinaSouth DakotaTennesseeTexasUtahVermontVirginiaWashingtonWest VirginiaWisconsinWyomingAmerican SamoaCanal ZoneCommonwealth of the Northern Mariana IslandsFederated States of MicronesiaGuamMarshall IslandsNorthern Mariana IslandsPalauPhilippine IslandsPuerto RicoTrust Territory of the Pacific IslandsVirgin IslandsArmed Forces - AmericasArmed Forces - Europe, Canada, Middle East, AfricaArmed Forces - Pacific. That was his strength and his flaw. The Bear, says Jerry [Garcia], is Satan in our midst, friend, chemist, psychedelic legend, and electronic genius; not a leader, but a moon with a gravitational pull. He says his method was simple. But before Owsley came along, no one could be sure that what they were taking was really even LSD. Unlike his own father, Owsley has made every effort to be an active parent to his son Starfinder and daughter Redbird (whose mother is Cargill), born three weeks apart to two different mothers who remain good friends and raised their children as brother and sister. Jerry Garcia's Lost Pipe Has Been Found After 30 Years and It Still Smells Like Weed. I had it for at least three years, but it never left the left side of my neck. After a year-long investigations, agents raided a two-story home in suburban Orinda, picked up Stanley, his girl friend, and three others. Country * 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. Owsley lives by selling his art through his Web site (thebear.org) and royalties from Dead recordings. The sound turns into something youve never heard before. For him, this is just another day on the road. Augustus Owsley Stanley III (January 19, 1935 March 12, 2011) was an American audio engineer and clandestine chemist. He also came up with the concept for what eventually became the bands logo. In the Oxford English dictionary, the word Owsley is listed as a noun describing a particularly pure form of LSD. It all seemed to fit together. After sampling it, he changed his mind. Augustus Owsley Stanley III, better known by his nickname, Bear, was one of the most iconic figures in the cultural revolution that changed both America and the world during the 1960s. I am often asked about the origin of the so-called "dancing bears" which were commonly seen around GD shows. campaign seeks to raise money to enable the digitization, preservation, and release of Bear's Sonic Journals, a trove of over a thousand live concert recordings from the heart of the psychedelic era. Owsley had gotten the recipe for STP from a former Dow chemist named Alexander Shulgin(who would later reintroduce Ecstasy to the rave generation). His grandfather, Augustus Owsley Stanley, had been a US senator and the governor of Kentucky. Thanks to Owsley, the Dead were soon playing through four immense Altec Voice of the Theatre A7 speakers powered by four McIntosh 240 stereo tube amplifiers as delicate as they were huge. Augustus Owsley Stanley III (January 19, 1935 March 12, 2011) was an American-Australian audio engineer and clandestine chemist. After experiencing chest pains seven years ago, Owsley underwent surgery to correct a ninety percent blockage in an artery in his heart that dated back to his teenage years. [1], Called the Acid King by the media,[2] Stanley was the first known private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD. Keith Richards: The Rolling Stone Interview, SST Records Producer Glen Spot Lockett Dead at 72, Glastonbury Co-Organizer Promises Female Headliners in 2024 After All-Male Top Billing This Year, There Were Sidemen. The photo to the right shows the source of the design of the bear motif on Bear's Choice. Owsley Stanley, an icon of Bay Area counterculture in the 1960s and a longtime associate of the Grateful Dead, died Sunday in a car . Ive watched wonderful people get destroyed by it., From the time he was a child, what made Owsley unique was his extraordinary family background and the power of his mind. In July 1968, Owsley rejoined the Dead. As reclusive and protective of his identity as Owsley "Bear" Stanley had been, one can't manufacture the purest LSD on the planet and personally turn on half of the state of California and parts of Nevada and remain unknown. Our staff is entirely comprised of volunteers, and many of the support services necessary to run the organization have been donated by generous contributors that believe in the mission to save this music before it is lost forever. By then, the band was being managed by Lenny Hart, the father of drummer Mickey Hart and a minister who believed God had called upon him to save the Dead from their never-ending financial woes. The Denver Post (CO.) Press & Sun .