On December 11th, 1965, the Dead played at the Muir Beach Acid Test in a lodge by the sea in Marin County. . As the water boils, he packs up a Braun food mixer and the vast array of other gadgets he carries with him. For the Dead, the good news was that they now had nothing to do all day but jam. Augustus Owsley Stanley III (January 19, 1935 - March 12, 2011) was an American audio engineer and clandestine chemist. Forty-feet high, it was composed of 604 speakers using 26,400 watts of power supplied by 55 McIntosh 2300s. It is loud without being loud. At the time, Owsley was living with a Berkeley undergraduate chemistry major named Melissa Cargill. The Point Richmond lab turned out more than 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) of LSD, dubbed "White Lightning". All donations to the Owsley Stanley Foundation are fully tax deductible. Vandoliers Play Tennessee Concert in Dresses to Protest State's New Drag Bill The sound turns into something youve never heard before. Stanley also helped Robert Thomas design the band's trademark skull logo. The universe is a creation entirely within a being that is outside time and space, and dreaming what we are. Bear: The Owsley Stanley Story, Part Four - PS Audio He also came up with the concept for what eventually became the bands logo. 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. Augustus Owsley Stanley III (January 19, 1935 March 12, 2011) was an American-Australian audio engineer and clandestine chemist. Some of his other recorded works include Bears Choice; Big Brother and the Holding Company Live at the Carousel Ballroom, June 23, 1968; The Allman Brothers Band Fillmore East, February 1970; and the acoustic Jerry Garcia bluegrass-band albums Old & in the Way, That High Lonesome Sound and Breakdown. Owsley Stanley obituary | Drugs | The Guardian 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). 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 . 1st ever box set of live concert recordings from Doc & Merle Watson, 1st release of Bears Sonic Journals from the Owsley Stanley Foundation, Several rare songs Doc Watson never recorded live, The only known contemporaneous photographs of Doc & Merle Watson, Photos of Old Hoss, the Gallagher guitar Doc played from 1968 until the end of this tour in 1974, In depth interview with bassist T. Michael Coleman, An original essay by David Holt, 4-time Grammy winner and longtime Doc collaborator, Original cover art by Mike DuBois based on a drawing by Owsleys son, Starfinder. Available in both digital-to-digital and analog-to-analog separately mastered versions (CD, Downloads, 180g 45-RPM Vinyl, Reel-to-Reel Tape). 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. Although no man knows the exact time, we feel that time is very near! Without his technical innovations he was one of the first people to mix concerts live and in stereo the band might never have emerged from the San Francisco scene. The shelves werent even in there just these big hunks of meat. Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III Elected governor in 1915, he became a United States senator and served on the commission that oversaw construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The Bear. 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. 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. "Bear," as he came to be known, was a hoot and . But before Owsley came along, no one could be sure that what they were taking was really even LSD. Youre concentrating a lot of mental energy on one package. Augustus Owsley Stanley III was born on Jan. 19, 1935, to a patrician Kentucky family. Once he stopped exploring, the whole scene stopped exploring.. In July 1968, Owsley rejoined the Dead. The tools of the trade, belonging to the man "most responsible for psychedlicizing the United States" (Jarnow 16). 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. Stanley and Scully produced about 196grams of LSD in 1967, but 96grams of this was confiscated by the police. Just to show you. But there are areas on the planet that are safe, and I hope Im in one of them.. Suddenly, his eyes redden and he is nearly reduced to tears. 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. These are the most extensive files there are of our music from this time. I did it because I was into breeding, and I had some strains that were absolutely unbelievable. Cancers grow on glucose. 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 . Owsley "Bear" Stanley the Acid King is remembered by friends He married and divorced twice, fathered two children and got himself arrested on a variety of charges. [18] Along with his close friend Bob Thomas, Stanley designed the band's iconic 'Steal Your Face' lightning bolt-skull logo. [3][4][5] By his own account, between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced at least 500 grams of LSD, amounting to a little more than five million doses. [24] Stanley and Scully made trial batches of STP in 10mg tablets and then of STP mixed with LSD in a few hundred yellow tablets, but soon ceased production of STP. [32], Stanley believed a "thermal cataclysm" related to climate change would soon render the Northern Hemisphere largely uninhabitable, and moved to Australia in 1982. How many people can say that? Owsley also credits his all-meat diet for keeping him alive. For most people, Owsley says, the proper dose is about 150 to 200 micrograms. The Japanese don't write in alphabetic writing; they write in pictographs. Especially this one. Stanley's lab in Berkeley was raided in 1966 and he was arrested. The Grateful Dead were not just good they were magic personified. Then and there, he decided to work for the most amazing group ever, have a fabulous time of it and try to make a positive contribution. Though Grateful Dead bass player Phil Lesh was the band member with whom Owsley would forge the closest ties, he saw Jerry Garcia as the sun in the center of the solar system. Im not really interested in talking about myself, he says. Owsley Stanley (born Augustus Owsley Stanley III, January 19, 1935 - March 12, 2011) also known as Bear, was a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s, and played a pivotal role in the counterculture of the 1960's.As a crafts-person, Under the professional name of "Bear", he worked with the psychedelic rock band the Grateful . He is moving so slowly that someone from the front desk comes to the room to ask if he ever intends to leave. 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. While doing two years in federal prison in the early Seventies for manufacturing acid, Owsley taught himself how to make jewelry. For him, this is just another day on the road. We are truly soulmates after twenty-two years together, and our love is as strong today as it was in the beginning. A legend recording a legend T. Michael Coleman, Bass. 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. This guy made the best LSD of the '60s - New York Post Owsley Stanley Foundation Merch Mountain Store Neither one of them really wanted to be parents, he says. How did the court musician of the Maharaja, a man called the "Bach of India," and "perhaps the greatest musician in the world" find himself playing to a psychedelic crowd at the Family Dog, a countercultural beacon on the edge of Western civilization, with Owsley mixing the sound? Picture of the Day - Caveman Circus Owsley Stanley Shirt - Etsy 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. He's also related to William Owsley, the 16th governor of Kentucky, for . Owsley Stanley, famed Grateful Dead soundman and the first person to privately manufacture LSD, lived in the Poet's Corner cottage during the Summer of Love. 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. Owsley Stanley, better known as the Bear, was the acid hero the 60s never knew it had. owsleystanleyfoundation.org Traffic Analytics & Market Share | Similarweb 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. 3.83. He also studied ballet, Russian and French. The same year, Stanley officially shortened his name to "Owsley Stanley". The Owsley Stanley Foundations ninth release ofBears Sonic Journals: The Foxhuntfeatures the Chieftains performing live in San Francisco in 1973 (CD & vinyl) and 1976 (CD & digital only). Bear wanted to be the sound man, and he was not the sound man, and he just never got it, because he had a single vision. "The Bear," best known for the sound system he created for The Grateful Dead and manufacturing a very high quality LSD, was a Zero Carb Carnivore for 50 years. He became a naturalized Australian citizen in 1996. He died in a car accident in Australia (where he had taken citizenship in 1996) on March 12, 2011. Written by WL Woodward. Courtesy Legacy. Almost before I realized what was happening, the whole affair had gotten completely out of hand. 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. I had it for at least three years, but it never left the left side of my neck. 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 reason is that Im a total carnivore. In 1963, Owsley moved to Berkeley so he could take classes at the university, where the student protest movement was growing. October 1966: Owsley Stanley, LSD Millionaire - Blogger 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. At this point, Stanley rented a house in Point Richmond, Richmond, California. Owsley says that psychological problems made him unmanageable in the public-school system, so his father enrolled him in Charlotte Hall, a military prep school in Maryland. . A year later, the novelist Ken Kesey was given acid at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park as part of a federally funded program in which volunteers were paid twenty dollars a session to ingest hallucinogens. The photo to the right shows the source of the design of the bear motif on Bear's Choice. Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III The effort to preserve these historically vital recordings is estimated to cost between $300,000 $400,000. They were all gone. Add to Favorites Dancing Bear patch, Grateful Dead patch, Owsley Stanley patch, Iron on patch, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Dead and Company, Shakedown . [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. After sampling it, he changed his mind. Berkeley Troll House, where the 'psychedelic elite' partied, has sold for $1.4 million. Garcia was the center. 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. Spirited. - Commander Cody, "Sociologically, you know, this all represents a big switch in the whole rock 'n' roll trip" - Jerry Garcia, A legend recording a legend T. Michael Coleman, Bass, Its not just the energy of youth that shakes me when I listen to these tracks its the musical dialogue that Jack and I shared in these amazing moments. Lenny Hart and Owsley, who had never trusted preachers anyway, got on like oil and water. 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! They had no skills at it. At a time when the Dead were trying to keep ticket prices down, the wall cost about $350,000. Owsley had gotten the recipe for STP from a former Dow chemist named Alexander Shulgin(who would later reintroduce Ecstasy to the rave generation). [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. After a year-long investigations, agents raided a two-story home in suburban Orinda, picked up Stanley, his girl friend, and three others. The Fresno Bee (CA.) These . 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 Idol: How HBOs Next Euphoria Became Twisted Torture Porn. The pot vessel was made by LSD pioneer Owsley Stanley for the Grateful Dead frontman. 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. 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. [3], 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 detail as he attempted to conduct business with the then-First Daughter. Amongst his outrageous success from the sale of his acid, Stanley also worked for a time as the Grateful Dead's sound engineer. After a tumultuous 1967 for Johnny Cash, the year 1968 was bookended by what would become his two iconic, highest-grossing albums, At Folsom Prison and At San Quentin. 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. Until you had tripped, you were not part of the new culture. [17] He both financed them and worked with them as their first sound engineer. Had it not been for Sheilah, he says, I dont think I would have survived. The bad news was that since Owsley was paying the rent, he expected them to adhere to his unconventional ideas and beliefs. Youre dealing with part of the unconscious mind that they used to define as angels and devils. Once the systems set, you can walk away from the board. 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. 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. Owsley Stanley, a.k.a. Bear's website, thebear.org, is still accessible as well, where you can see his jewelry designs and read his stories and essays. The effort to preserve these historically vital recordings is estimated to cost between $300,000 $400,000. Wall Street Journal. Another West Coastbased rock band, Jefferson Airplane, had been arrested two weeks earlier in the same situation. Owsley Stanley - YouTube He lived in a picturesque Berkeley cottage filled with high-end stereo equipment where he kept an owl to which he fed live mice. Bear: The Owsley Stanley Story, Part One - PS Audio 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. But he was also an exacting pioneer of live concert sound, a man who helped invent both monitor systems and high . 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. 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. If he lost control of that one cell, there would be nothing left, Wolfe wrote. 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. Send us a tip using our anonymous form. 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. The world would be, like, over. I lost control of that cell as well, Owsley says. Get the full owsleystanleyfoundation.org Analytics and market share drilldown here 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. Throughout the summer of 1965, in a big house down in La Honda, about forty miles south of San Francisco, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters hosted wild parties with guests that included Hunter S. Thompson, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and various Hells Angels. Around this time Owsley also began studying The Kybalion, a book of purported ancient wisdom that elucidates the seven basic principles of alchemy, which he describes as mental transformation, explaining,It was never about transforming substances. . All the occult literature about ceremonial magic warns about being very careful when you start exploring these areas in the mind. And they laughed at me., Even as he was freaking out that night, Owsley experienced the single insight that would shape his life for years to come. ALWAYS enter lists of addressses (greater than 2) in the Bcc: line. Donations are much appreciated, and are in fact essential to our ability to preserve and release future recordings! [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. The price I had to pay to get through the gate. The Denver Post (CO.) Press & Sun . Together, they devised the Steal Your Face logo (a.k.a. Owsley Stanley. Although people speculated for years about how Owsley managed to conceal his stash, no one ever figured it out. When he was fifteen, Owsley spent fifteen months as a voluntary psychiatric patient in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C.[9] Without having graduated high school, he was admitted to the University of Virginia, where he studied engineering for a year. From the start, Owsley felt that his state of mind while he was making acid would affect the nature of the product. Illustration by Jody Hewgill. The new lab was set up in the basement of a house across the street from the Denver Zoo in early 1967. 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. As above, so below. We called it the microcosm and the macrocosm.