In his classic account of the Grateful Dead on the road in May 1969, Michael Lydon noted the ongoing tension between Hart and Owsley by writing that they were like two selves of the Dead at war, with the Dead themselves sitting as judges. From 1974 to 1981, he also grew and sold cannabis from his garden in Fairfax, California, but the profits from this endeavor proved to be far less remunerative than his earlier work in clandestine chemistry. Stanley, born Augustus Owsley Stanley III in 1935, was known to nearly all his many friends and customers as "Bear." But in a single released by Steely Dan from the 1976 album The Royal Scam . At the time, Owsley was living with a Berkeley undergraduate chemistry major named Melissa Cargill. Berkeley Troll House, where the 'psychedelic elite' partied, has sold for $1.4 million. TOP 16 QUOTES BY OWSLEY STANLEY | A-Z Quotes sulver buckle. Under the professional name Bear, he was the soundman for the rock band the Grateful Dead, whom he met when Ken Kesey invited them . In the Oxford English dictionary, the word Owsley is listed as a noun describing a particularly pure form of LSD. He was the Grateful Deads original sound man and their initial financial benefactor. 94tracks reflecting a broad cross-section of musical forms, including bluegrass, blues, folk, country, swing jazz, and rockabilly, among others. When you find a new live Tim Buckley recording, it's like finding a whole new Tim Buckley! These performances have not been heard since the nights they were played more than 40 years ago ! 8 Copy quote. When Owsley asked Lesh what he could do for the band, the bass player said they had no manager and offered him the job. Stanley, known as Bear, earned the moniker "King of Acid . Stanley was the first known private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD. In a new biography, find out more about the life of this LSD preacher than ever before. 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. The headline in the New Orleans Times-Picayune the next day read Rock Musicians, King of Acid, Arrested. Although all charges were eventually dropped, a fucking judge who wanted to make sure I did time revoked Owsleys bail on the 1967 LSD bust after he was arrested again in Oakland. 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. All in all, I was making about a dollar fifty an hour. His agricultural career came to an abrupt end when some local junkies intent on ripping off his crop put a pistol under his chin and pointed a .22-caliber rifle at his chest. Theyre extremely glucose-avid. 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. A legend recording a legend T. Michael Coleman, Bass. Concise Comments. Ignoring the inquiry, Owsley roots through his bags for a large state-of-the-art conical burr grinder and a white funnel-shaped device to heat water so he can make coffee from beans he grew and roasted at home in Australia. The effort to preserve these historically vital recordings is estimated to cost between $300,000 $400,000. Owsley Stanley, Artisan of Acid, Is Dead at 76 - The New York Times Bear's website, thebear.org, is still accessible as well, where you can see his jewelry designs and read his stories and essays. In Berkeley, as well as across the bay in Palo Alto, young people seeking a new way to live had begun using LSD to break down conventional social barriers. [22], 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. Bear Stanley: Reflections on Life, LSD and DMTPlease subscribe to our channel and like our videos to support EGA!If you enjoy EGA's content, we invite you to. Three years later, she sent him back to Virginia to live with his father. Donations are much appreciated, and are in fact essential to our ability to preserve and release future recordings! SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. - Millionare Augustus Owsley Stanley III, revered among hippies as the "King of Acid," finally has run into big, big trouble with the federal narcotics boys. Your body gets old but your mind can always accept that. Along with other recognition of your generous contribution, if the recording you select is viable for future release by OSF, you will receive a liner note credit. In other words, this cancer was living in a desert.. If you wanted to be an idiot and do something any way but his, that was your decision. N o one did more to alter the consciousness of the generation that came of age in the 1960s than Augustus Owsley Stanley (who passed away March 13 . In 1973, he served as lead designer of the band's Wall of Sound, collaborating with Dan Healy and Mark Raizene, as well as Rick Turner and John Curl of Alembic to design the groundbreaking sound reinforcement system. .. Lesh likened the experience of playing through the system to piloting a flying saucer. Living in Marin County, he supported himself doing sound for Jefferson Starship and Phil Lesh and selling his jewelry backstage, in arena parking lots and in hotel bars after shows whenever the Grateful Dead toured. I love them both! The alchemist Owsley "Bear" Stanley, who transformed not only the Dead's sound, but American consciousness. 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]. And he was probably right. Years later, Lesh would write that Garcia once told him, Theres nothing wrong with Bear that a few billion less brain cells wouldnt cure., The bands impatience with how long it took Owsley to set up its equipment and then take it back down again soon led to a parting of the ways. 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. The key element was "turn on" and it was Owsley . Owsley Stanley | Military Wiki | Fandom "Bear," as he came to be known, was a hoot and . Stanley was the first known private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD. Take out the sun, and the planets all go their own way. After obtaining a court order that made the police return his lab equipment, Owsley and Cargill split for Los Angeles. [27], Although Stanley stopped touring with the band following their refusal of his demands, he continued to be employed by the Grateful Dead. In prison, Owsley got himself assigned to the kitchen. Joel Selvin also wrote an extensive note on Owsley back in 2007 on the occasion of his . Owsley Stanley Belt Buckles - Etsy Stanley's lab in Berkeley was raided in 1966 and he was arrested. With his dark-brown goatee and a gold hoop dangling from his left ear, he looks like an older, careworn version of the Edge from U2. Lenny Hart and Owsley, who had never trusted preachers anyway, got on like oil and water. Last note: In 2005 Bear found out The Oxford English Dictionary had added a word: "owsley, N. An extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD; a tablet of this. 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. He was the key supplier of LSD during the 60s Hippie movem. Because he wanted to keep a sonic journal of his work, Owsley began plugging a suitcase-size Ampex 602 tape recorder into the sound board each night as the Dead played in 1966. When I build a sound system, Owsley says, I do it in a single cluster, because everything in the hall must come from one spot in the room. 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. Bcc: this option will retain the list of addresses on the server, placing only one address per copy as it sends to each name on the list. 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. 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. The insane life of Owsley Stanley, the famous LSD producer of the 60s That amount of protein equals about 14-20 oz of meat (lean portion) per day. 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. Because the Dead controlled everything from onstage, no one had to mix from the house. The Owsley Stanley Foundation presents its third chapter: Bears Sonic Journals: Before We Were Them, Jorma Kaukonen & Jack Casady, Veterans Memorial Building, June 28, 1969, available now on CD. Owsley Stanley. No one did more to alter the consciousness of the generation that came of age in the 1960s than Augustus Owsley Stanley (who passed away March 13, 2011). 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. At the end of Hendrixs live version of the Beatles Day Tripper, recorded at the BBC studios in 1967, he can be heard calling out, Oh, Owsley, can you hear me now? In 1976, Steely Dan burnished Owsleys myth by recording Kid Charlemagne: While the music played/You worked by candlelight/ Those San Francisco nights/You were the best in town. Served 2 years in prison at one point in his early life. But he also inspired another famed rock band, Steely . And I certainly never made $1 million from drugs. And if you believe, as I did, that the universe is a creation in the mind of a being that is creating time and space, then everything is mental. They decided to try to make acid that was at least as good or better than any pharmaceutical firm. It took Owsley just three weeks in the UCBerkeley library to learn everything he needed to know about the process. [18] Along with his close friend Bob Thomas, Stanley designed the band's iconic 'Steal Your Face' lightning bolt-skull logo. Owsley Stanley: The King of LSD - Rolling Stone He retained backstage access during this period, and his clientele included such notable figures as Keith Richards. In April, Owsley visited Timothy Leary, the east coast figurehead of LSD, at the Hitchcock Estate in Millbrook, NY.Stanley and Leary had met in LA in the spring of 1966, but . Details Details. Owsley Stanley (born Augustus Owsley Stanley III, January 19, 1935 - March 12, 2011) also known as Bear, was a figure of the San Francisco Bay counter-culture. Source: medium.com. Forty-feet high, it was composed of 604 speakers using 26,400 watts of power supplied by 55 McIntosh 2300s. Long before global warming became an international hot-button issue, he delivered what writer David Gans described as a ninety-minute lecture on a thermal cataclysm that he said would begin with a six-week rainstorm and leave the entire Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable. Passing around Australian visa applications, Owsley then urged all those present to join him in the Southern Hemisphere. Stanley returned to Los Angeles to pursue the production of LSD. Almost before I realized what was happening, the whole affair had gotten completely out of hand. the stealie). Owsley Stanley - Wikipedia 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. Owsley Stanley (a.k.a. This is one of the most aggressive cancers you can get, he adds. 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. I couldn't read the name of the firm, and so was just looking at the shape. Stanley also developed the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound, one of the largest mobile sound reinforcement systems ever constructed. In July 1968, Owsley rejoined the Dead. Owsley lives by selling his art through his Web site (thebear.org) and royalties from Dead recordings. Unreleased Live Johnny Cash Album From 1968 Due in September Much like his theory that human beings are meant to eat only meat, Owsleys concept of climate change is at odds with most current scientific thought on global warming. I could leave it for up to thirty days in the bus station and I would go to it wherever it was, take out whatever I needed, take it back in, and send it to myself in the next city. You can donate via our secure form, or send checks made out to the Owsley Stanley Foundation to: Owsley Stanley Foundation PO Box 625 Occidental, Ca 95465. Phil Lesh and I would talk about this, Owsley says. Together, they devised the Steal Your Face logo (a.k.a. On January 30th, 1970, after a Dead show in New Orleans, police walked into the bands Bourbon Street hotel with search warrants and busted the Dead, along with Owsley. Signed & Numbered Augustus Owsley Stanley III Mark Serlo Psychedelic LSD Blotter Art Psychedelic Acid Free Paper Ad vertisement by PremiumBlotter. The Fresno Bee (CA.) No improvements for the sound, no new gear, nothing different on stage. Normally, within six months or a year, it has metastasized throughout your body. He participated in a low carb forum where he shared his experience with and knowledge about eating a diet comprised entirely of animal foods. 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. Owsley Stanley Shirt - Etsy Wall Street Journal. I later learned who every one of them was, Owsley says, but I did not feel I could do anything about it. The world would be, like, over. I lost control of that cell as well, Owsley says. 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. A year later, Mario Savio made his historic Free Speech Movement address from atop a police car to student protesters gathered outside Sproul Hall. This article appeared in the July 12-27, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone. 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. It was always in a safe place, and nobody had a clue, because I never told anyone I did that., Despite his precautions, thirteen agents broke into a house in the East Bay that Owsley had rented for the express purpose of making tabs. The Wall of Sound fulfilled Owsley's desire for a distortion-free sound system that could also serve as its own monitoring system. Bear: The Owsley Stanley Story, Part Four - PS Audio They were all gone. The bad news was that since Owsley was paying the rent, he expected them to adhere to his unconventional ideas and beliefs. Born Augustus Owsley Stanley III in Kentucky on Jan. 19, 1935, he was the grandson of a Kentucky governor and son of a naval commander. A year earlier in Los Angeles, narcotics agents had begun picking through their garbage. You can donate via our secure form, or send checks made out to the Owsley Stanley Foundation to: Owsley Stanley Foundation PO Box 625 Occidental, Ca 95465. He says his method was simple. He used his Berkeley lab to buy 500grams of lysergic acid monohydrate, the basis for LSD. The Grateful Dead's "Wall of Sound" was a massive sound system designed by LSD chemist, Owsley Stanley. 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. Because the Dead then began playing a lot of festival-style shows where the equipment would all wind up at the back of the stage in a muddle, Owsley says, he decided to mark their gear so the roadies could easily locate it. Tue 15 Mar 2011 14.49 EDT. He was convinced that human beings were natural carnivores, not meant to eat vegetables or fiber. Reach out if you have questions, or to see how you can support the Owsley Stanley Foundation. Copyright 2023 Penske Business Media, LLC. Jr. In highly abridged form, what Owsley believes is that the phenomenon is real but that it comes from the steadily increasing movement of large amounts of heat from the tropics across the temperate zones to the poles. 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. But they had to double the size of the crew and, in the process, the crew took over the band. Because the Dead were unwilling to fire any members of their large and sometimes dysfunctional family, the band decided in 1974 to instead take a break from touring, not going on the road again until the summer of 1976. The issue is available in the online archive. In this new three-part series, you and I will explore the life and times of Owsley Stanley, who early on financed the Grateful Dead with money he made as a "cosmic chemist" and was instrumental in the design of the band's legendary "Wall of Sound" stage system. The same year, Stanley officially shortened his name to "Owsley Stanley". There are titles here never heard before [on a release] and seldom played. Owsley "Bear" Stanley | The alchemist's tools | From the Vault 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. He is a prince of inefficiency, the essence at its most perverse of what the Dead refuse to give up.. Owsley Stanly Tribute Page Until then, the drug had been available in America only to those conducting serious medical research. Our planets heat balance and temperature are buffered and controlled by water and water vapor, which also washes CO2 out of the air and not minuscule fractions of a couple of gases, one of which is very soluble and the other unstable. So they never became visual, they stayed in the oral world, which is, everything is part of reality. It was the most dangerous, underpaid job I ever had in my life, he says.I was never a real grower. Check out our owsley stanley shirt selection for the very best in unique or custom, handmade pieces from our shops. Stanley was the Dead's audio engineer, longtime friend, and perhaps the most notable LSD chemist in the 1960s. These analog reel-to-reel recordings are nearing the end of their expected shelf lives and will deteriorate and be lost forever if they are not preserved. Greenfield's book, which is full of anecdotes and insight, tracks Stanley's life from his early days in the South through his final years in Australia. The tools of the trade, belonging to the man "most responsible for psychedlicizing the United States" (Jarnow 16). After a year-long investigations, agents raided a two-story home in suburban Orinda, picked up Stanley, his girl friend, and three others. pate88. An Amazon Best Book of November 2016: Most people with passing knowledge of San Francisco and the 60s are familiar with the main players: the Grateful Dead, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, the Hells Angels, et al, but how many know of August Owsley Stanley III, aka Owsley, aka Bear? 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. 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. At a time when the Dead were trying to keep ticket prices down, the wall cost about $350,000. On February 21st, 1965, police raided the house and confiscated various chemicals, including a substance they wrongfully identified as speed. Masterpieces Unearthed from Owsleys Famed Archive, Family Dog at the Great HighwayMay 29, 19702 CD set, The Family Dog at the Great HighwayMarch 28, 19702 CD set, 3 CD release with extended material Check out our owsley stanley jewelry selection for the very best in unique or custom, handmade pieces from our shops. Especially this one. The effort to preserve these historically vital recordings is estimated to cost between $300,000 $400,000. But before Owsley came along, no one could be sure that what they were taking was really even LSD. When LSD became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, Scully decided to set up a new lab in Denver, Colorado. Breeding so rapidly that they soon became a national nightmare, the giant toads (some of which weigh as much as two pounds and have come to be considered an environmental menace in both Hawaii and Australia) are now poisoning the baby fish in the acre-and-a-half lake Owsley created on his property. I was riding a magic stallion. Tim Scully - Wikipedia Tom Sizemore, Heat and Saving Private Ryan Actor, Dead at 61 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. Augustus Owsley Stanley III aka Bear was an American audio engineer and an underground drug maker. It was amazing, he told Jerry Garcia biographer Blair Jackson. In September 1965, Stanley became the primary LSD supplier to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Needless to say, the party is electric. The Owsley Stanley Foundation is pleased to present an audiophile release of incendiary performances by the incomparable Doc and Merle Watson, from Bears Sonic Journals -Owsleys storied trove of live concert recordings. All donations to the Owsley Stanley Foundation are fully tax deductible. Owsley and Scully finally met a few weeks before the Trips Festival in the fall of 1965. The American psychologist Timothy Leary's famous invitation to "tune in, turn on and drop out" changed a generation. Augustus Owsley Stanley III, better known as Owsley, in 1967. 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. Owsley Stanley, a.k.a. You have to be very careful, because there are all these warnings. Stanley died after a car accident in Australia on Saturday, March 12, 2011,[5] not Sunday, March 13, as reported in most publications[7][8][9][34][35] (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"). And because he had the foresight to plug a tape recorder directly into the sound board during Dead shows, the music the band made at the peak of its power has been gloriously preserved in recordings still being issued in the series titled Dicks Picks, for which Owsley continues to receive royalties. Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III - Goodreads