Owsley Stanley (born
Augustus Owsley Stanley III), also known as
Bear, was a former underground
LSD cook, the first private individual to manufacture mass quantities of
LSD died from a traffic accident he was , 76.
( January 19, 1935 – March 13, 2011)
Between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced more than 1.25 million doses of LSD—a catalyst for the emergence of the
hippie movement during the
Summer of Love in the
Haight-Ashbury area,
[1] which one historian of that movement, Charles Perry, has described as "the biggest LSD party in history."
[4] He was also an accomplished
sound engineer and served as the longtime sound man and financier for
psychedelic rock band the
Grateful Dead.
Stanley designed some of the first high-fidelity sound systems for rock music, culminating in the "
Wall of Sound" electrical amplification system used by the Grateful Dead in their live shows, which, at the time, proved to be a highly innovative feat of engineering.
[5] He was involved with the founding of high-end musical instrument maker
Alembic Inc and concert sound equipment manufacturer
Meyer Sound.
[citation needed]
Stanley died in an automobile accident in Australia on March 13, 2011.
[3][6][7]
Ancestry
Stanley was the
scion of a political family from Kentucky. His father was a government attorney; his namesake and grandfather,
A. Owsley Stanley, who was a member of the
United States Senate after serving as
Governor of Kentucky and in the
U.S. House of Representatives, campaigned, amongst other issues, against
alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s. Another relative,
William Owsley, also served as Governor of Kentucky in the mid-19th century.
Biography
Early life
He was expelled from the
Charlotte Hall Military Academy for bringing alcoholic beverages onto campus, then self-committed to
St. Elizabeths Hospital in
Washington, D.C.[8] He studied engineering at the
University of Virginia before dropping out
[9]; in 1956, when Stanley was twenty-one, he enlisted in the
U.S. Air Force and served for eighteen months before being discharged in 1958. Later, inspired by a 1958 performance of the
Bolshoi Ballet, he began studying ballet in Los Angeles, supporting himself for a time as a professional dancer.
[10] 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, which was not illegal at the time.
Stanley moved to Los Angeles to pursue the production of LSD. He used his Berkeley lab proceeds to buy 500 grams of
lysergic acid monohydrate, the basis for LSD. His first shipment arrived on March 30, 1965. He produced 300,000 capsules
[citation needed] (270 micrograms each) of LSD by May 1965 and then returned to the
Bay Area.
In September 1965, Stanley became the primary LSD supplier to
Ken Kesey and the
Merry Pranksters; by this point
Sandoz LSD was hard to come by and "Owsley Acid" had become the new standard. He was featured (most prominently his freak-out at the
Muir Beach Acid Test in November 1965) in
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a book detailing the history of Kesey and the Merry Pranksters by
Tom Wolfe. 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.
[11]
Involvement with the Grateful Dead
Stanley met the members of the Grateful Dead during the acid tests in 1966
[12] and began working with them as their first soundman and helped finance them.
[13] Along with his close friend Bob Thomas, he designed the Lightning Bolt Skull Logo,
[14] often referred to by fans as "Steal Your Face", "Stealie" or SYF (after the name of the
1976 Grateful Dead album featuring only the lightning bolt skull on the cover, although the symbol predates the namesake album by eight years). The 13-point lightning bolt was derived from a stencil Stanley created to spray-paint on the Grateful Dead's equipment boxes—he wanted an easily identifiable mark to help the crew find the Dead's equipment in the jumble of multiple bands' identical black equipment boxes at festivals. 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."
[14] Stanley suggested to Thomas that the words "Grateful Dead" might be drawn beneath the red white and blue circled bolt in such a way that it looked like a skull; Thomas went off and returned with the now familiar Grateful Dead icon, having discarded the hidden word concept. The lightning-adorned skull logo made its first appearance on the 1973 release,
History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 1: Bear's Choice, an album put together by Stanley as his tribute to his dear friend, the recently deceased Grateful Dead co-founder
Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, from recordings Stanley had made in 1970. The iconic "Dancing Bears" also first appeared on the reverse cover of this album, painted by Thomas as an inside reference to Stanley; dubbed "Bear" as a young teen when he sprouted body hair before the rest of his friends, he had studied ballet in his early 20s and displayed a distinctive style of dancing while tripping on LSD at shows—becoming what his friends called "The Dancing Bear".
During his time as the sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, he started what became a long-term practice of recording the Dead while they rehearsed and performed. His initial motivation for creating what he dubs 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-sixties. Focusing on quality and clarity of sound, he favored simplicity in his miking, and his tapes are widely touted as being unrivaled live recordings. In addition to his large archive of Dead performances, Stanley made numerous live recordings of other leading 1960s and 70s artists appearing in San Francisco, including
Quicksilver Messenger Service,
Jefferson Airplane, early
Jefferson Starship,
Old and In The Way,
Janis Joplin,
Big Brother and the Holding Company,
Taj Mahal,
Santana,
Miles Davis,
The Flying Burrito Brothers,
Jimi Hendrix,
Johnny Cash,
Blue Cheer (a band that took its name from the nickname of Stanley's LSD),
[6] and many others. While many Stanley recordings have been released, many more remain unissued.
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, California, and he, Scully, and Melissa Cargill (Stanley's girlfriend who was a skilled chemist introduced to Stanley by a former girlfriend, Susan Cowper) set up a lab in the basement. Stanley developed a method of LSD synthesis which left the LSD 99.9 percent free of impurities. The Point Richmond lab turned out more than 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) of LSD they dubbed "White Lightning". LSD became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, and Scully wanted to set up a new lab in Denver, Colorado.
Scully set up the new lab in the basement of a house across the street from the Denver zoo in early 1967. Scully made the LSD in the Denver lab while Stanley tableted the product in
Orinda, California. However, Stanley and Scully did not produce the psychedelic
DOM, better known under its
street name STP.
Legal trouble
STP was distributed in the summer of 1967 in 20 mg tablets and quickly acquired a bad reputation. Stanley and Scully made trial batches of 10 mg tablets and then 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 authorities.
In late 1967, Stanley's 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 went on to do more sound work for the Grateful Dead. Later, he would work as a broadcast television engineer.
Post-Dead career
A naturalized Australian citizen since 1996, Stanley and his wife Sheilah lived in the bush of
Far Northern Tropical Queensland where he worked to create sculpture, much of it wearable art.
[1]
Stanley made his first public appearance in decades at the Australian ethnobotanical conference Entheogenesis Australis in 2009, giving three talks over his time in Melbourne.
[15]
Diet and health
Stanley believed that the natural human diet is a totally carnivorous one, thus making it a
no-carbohydrate diet, and that all vegetables are toxic.
[16] He claimed to have eaten almost nothing but
meat,
eggs,
butter and
cheese since 1959 and that he believed his body had not aged as much as the bodies of those who eat a more "normal" diet. He was convinced that
insulin, released by the
pancreas when
carbohydrates are ingested, is the cause of much damage to human tissue and that
diabetes mellitus is caused by the ingestion of carbohydrates.
Stanley received
radiation therapy in 2004 for
throat cancer, which he first attributed to passive exposure to cigarette smoke at concerts,
[17] but which he later discovered was almost certainly caused by the infection of his tonsil with
HPV. He credited his low carb diet with starving the tumor of glucose, slowing its growth and preventing its spread enough that it could be successfully treated despite its advanced state at diagnosis.
Death
Stanley died after an automobile accident in Australia on March 13, 2011.
[3][8][6][7][18][19] A statement released on behalf of Stanley's family said the car crash occurred near his home in
Mareeba, Queensland. He is survived by his wife Sheila, four children, eight grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
Cultural references
A newspaper headline identifying Stanley as an "LSD Millionaire" ran in the
Los Angeles Times the day before the state of California, on October 6, 1966, criminalized the drug. The headline inspired the Grateful Dead song "Alice D. Millionaire."
[12]
Stanley is mentioned by his first name in the song "
Who Needs the Peace Corps?" by
Frank Zappa and
The Mothers of Invention, which first appeared on the band's 1968 album
We're Only In It For The Money ("I'll go to Frisco, buy a wig and sleep on Owsley's floor.").
[20][21][22][23][24][25] In "Mirkwood, A Novel About JRR Tolkien" a fictional character named “Osley” is modeled loosely after Owsley Stanley and is described as a fugitive from the 1960’s and the “Henry Ford of Psychedelics.”
The
Steely Dan song "
Kid Charlemagne" from the 1976 album
The Royal Scam was loosely inspired by Stanley.
[26][27][28]
Stanley's incarceration is lamented in
Hunter S. Thompson's "
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" as one of the many signs of the death of the '60s.
[29]
To see more of who died in 2010
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Ritchie Pickett was a New Zealand country music singer-songwriter who was born in Morrinsville, in the province of Waikato. Pickett has been described as one of New Zealand's "kings of country/rock".
Think relocated to Sydney, Australia, where they broke up and Pickett formed his own band called Snuff. In 1981, Pickett was transported back to Waikato Hospital in New Zealand.
