Owsley Stanley, 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 1960s. He was best known simply as "Owsley" – the LSD "cook". Under the
professional name of "Bear", he worked with the international fan "family" of
the psychedelic rock band, the Grateful Dead.
Stanley was an early soundman for the Grateful Dead, a band 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.
Stanley was the first private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD.
By his own account, between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced no less than 500
grams of LSD, amounting to a little over a million doses at the time.
Stanley died in a car accident in Australia, on March 12, 2011.
Ancestry Stanley was the scion 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. Biography
= Early life = At an early age, he self-committed to
St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. He studied engineering at the
University of Virginia before dropping out. In 1956, when Stanley was 21, he
enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and served for 18 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. 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 to buy 500 grams of
lysergic acid monohydrate, the basis for LSD. His first shipment arrived on March
30, 1965, he produced 300,000 hits 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 time,
Sandoz LSD was hard to come by, and "Owsley Acid" had become the new
standard. He was featured in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 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, and former Three Dog Night singer Chuck
Negron has noted that Owsley and Leary gave Negron's band free LSD.
= Involvement with the Grateful Dead = Stanley met the members of the Grateful
Dead during 1965; he both financed them and worked with them as their first
soundman. Along with his close friend Bob Thomas, Stanley designed the
Lightning Bolt Skull Logo, often referred to by fans as "Steal Your
Face", "Stealie", or SYF 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. 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." 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 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
release, History of the Grateful Dead, Volume One, 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", created by Thomas, also first appeared
on the reverse cover of this album. 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 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-1960s.
Focusing on quality and clarity of sound, he favored simplicity in his
mixing, and his tapes are widely touted as unrivaled live recordings. 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 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, 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, Richmond, California. He, Scully, and
Melissa Cargill set up a lab in the basement. The Point Richmond lab turned
out more than 300,000 tabs 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. Scully made the LSD in the Denver
lab while Stanley tableted the product in Orinda, California. Here, the
psychedelic DOM, better known under its street name STP, was also produced.
= 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 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 went on to do more sound work
for the Grateful Dead and would later work as a broadcast television 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, everybody in the band, except Pigpen and Tom
Constanten, was included in the bust, 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.
Apparently another West Coast-based rock band, Jefferson Airplane, had been
arrested two weeks prior in the same situation. According to an article in
the Baton Rouge State Times, Stanley had identified himself to the police as "The
King of Acid" and technician of the band. Based on this incident, the
Grateful Dead wrote the song "Truckin'". Stanley was confined to federal prison
from 1970 to 1972, after a federal judge intervened by revoking his release from
the 1967 case. Stanley took advantage of the opportunity there to learn metalwork
and jewelry-making. = Post-Grateful Dead career =
A naturalized Australian citizen since 1996, Stanley lived with his wife
Sheilah in the bush of Tropical North Queensland, where he worked to create
sculpture, much of it wearable art. 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.
Diet and health Stanley believed that the natural human
diet is totally carnivorous and that all vegetables are toxic, thus he embraced a
no-carbohydrate diet. 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, 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 a car accident in Australia, on Saturday, March 12, 2011,
not Sunday, March 13, as reported in most publications. 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. He is survived by
his wife Sheilah, four children, eight grandchildren, and two
great-grandchildren. Stanley's ashes were placed on the
soundboard at the Grateful Dead 50th anniversary shows in Chicago, on July
3–5, 2015. Cultural references
= In literature = Owsley's association with Ken Kesey and
the Grateful dead is described in Tom Wolfe's novel The Electric Kool Aid Acid
Test. 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 1960s. In Steve Hillard's novel Mirkwood: A
Novel About JRR Tolkien, a fictional character named Osley modeled loosely
after Stanley is described as a fugitive from the 1960s and the "Henry Ford of
Psychedelics". = In music =
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". 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 album We're Only in It for the
Money. Stanley is referred to in Jefferson
Airplane's song "Mexico" on the Early Flight album.
Jimi Hendrix mentioned Stanley during the former's BBC sessions, at the top of
the guitar solo on "Day Tripper", saying: "Oh Owsley, can you hear me
now". Stanley is mentioned in Justin
Warfield's song "B Boys On Acid" on the album My Field Trip To Planet 9.
The Spectrum's song "Owsley", from the Songs for Owsley EP, is an obvious
reference to Owsley. Midway through the song, the lead singer howls, "Augustus
Owsley Stanley, where are you now?!" The Steely Dan song "Kid Charlemagne",
from the album The Royal Scam, was loosely inspired by Stanley.
= In television = In the Mystery Science Theater 3000
episode "Santa Claus", Stanley is referenced when Santa sends a
mind-altering drug under the door of some children.
References Sources
Lee, Martin A; Bruce Shlain. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of
LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond. Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-3062-3.
McCleary, John Bassett. The Hippie Dictionary: A Cultural Encyclopedia of
the 1960s and 1970s. Berkeley, California: Ten Speed Press. ISBN
1-58008-547-4. Perry, Charles. The Haight-Ashbury: A
History. Random House. ISBN 0-394-41098-X. Retrieved 2011-03-24.
Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Forte, Robert. Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In. Park Street Press. pp.
270–278. ISBN 0892817860. External links
Owsley's website "For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD,
long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area" San Francisco Chronicle July 12,
2007 Obituary from Reuters.com
Celebstoner.com report of Owsley Stanley's Death