[18] Along with his close friend Bob Thomas, Stanley designed the band's iconic 'Steal Your Face' lightning bolt-skull logo. . Stanley returned to Los Angeles to pursue the production of LSD. Born in 1935, Owsley was "authentic Bluegrass political royalty." His father was a prominent government attorney and his grandfather, Augustus Owsley Stanley, was elected governor of Kentucky in 1919 and served in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Berkeley Troll House, where the 'psychedelic elite' partied, has sold for $1.4 million. Maddeningly methodical and impossible to control, he has come back to America to take care of business matters while visiting family members and old friends he has not seen in years. When Owsley was eight, his parents separated and his mother took him to Los Angeles. [29] Following the hiatus, Stanley returned as Lesh's personal roadie for "a couple of tours" in the late 1970s, although personality conflicts with other crew members once again precipitated his departure. Another West Coastbased rock band, Jefferson Airplane, had been arrested two weeks earlier in the same situation. 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. The Bear. I dont eat carbs. These . From the start, Owsley felt that his state of mind while he was making acid would affect the nature of the product. In every way, the briefcase reflects his mind. The reason is that Im a total carnivore. I did not feel it was mine, since what I was doing was in my mind a service to my community. Or riding your own sound wave. He also noted that the music made during the forty-odd shows when the system was used is still regarded by Deadheads as the pinnacle of live performance.. 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. The money flow was very embarrassing, he recalls. 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. For the Dead, the good news was that they now had nothing to do all day but jam. Your body gets old but your mind can always accept that. [4][33] From at least the mid-1960s until his death, Stanley practiced and advocated an all-meat diet, believing that humans are naturally carnivorous.[4]. [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. By Nate Todd Jan 19, 2023 6:14 am PST. The key element was "turn on" and it was Owsley . From all three shows, as played on Owsley, who would only ever deal with one person at a time to distribute his product, had already gone through three or four intermediaries, dropping them as soon as he felt they were getting hot. [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 . . . The same year, Stanley officially shortened his name to "Owsley Stanley". [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. -Jorma Kaukonen, A wicked blend of rock, jazz and R&B that created a dynamic, groundbreaking sound. John Lynskey , Hittin The Note. It was brilliant and it worked, McNally says. Although people speculated for years about how Owsley managed to conceal his stash, no one ever figured it out. Despite maintaining a 3.4 grade point average with minimal effort, he dropped out because of his disinclination for slide rules and mechanical drawing. It all seemed to fit together. 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. It all comes from what the musicians do, and that was my goal from the beginning. The problem was that the system was so huge and required so much setup time that the Dead had to use two separate stages and two crews so the next show could be put up while the last was still being taken down. For decades, a . 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. So youre Owsley,Lesh said. Owsley hired the vice mayor of Berkeley as his attorney, who forced them in court to furnish us with a sample, which we submitted to an independent laboratory that proved them wrong, leading to the dismissal of all charges.. Picture of the Day - Caveman Circus 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. 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]. He is a prince of inefficiency, the essence at its most perverse of what the Dead refuse to give up.. After obtaining a court order that made the police return his lab equipment, Owsley and Cargill split for Los Angeles. 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. The pot vessel was made by LSD pioneer Owsley Stanley for the Grateful Dead frontman. The Wall of Sound fulfilled Owsley's desire for a distortion-free sound system that could also serve as its own monitoring system. Elected governor in 1915, he became a United States senator and served on the commission that oversaw construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. 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. Owsley Foundation The shelves werent even in there just these big hunks of meat. On December 20th, 1967, the agents seized nearly 100 grams of crystalline LSD as well as a quantity of STP, a very powerful long-acting hallucinogen that caused many bad trips in the Haight. The Owsley Foundation places full page ads in major newspapers that proclaim Christ's Second Coming. There are titles here never heard before [on a release] and seldom played. Donations are much appreciated, and are in fact essential to our ability to preserve and release future recordings! See Tom Taylor's account of his life and times published late last year in Far Out magazine. 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. [28] During this period, he also assisted Phil Lesh in salvaging the technically deficient recordings assembled for Steal Your Face (1976), a poorly-received live album culled from the final October 1974 pre-hiatus shows at Winterland Ballroom. Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III Owsley Stanley was known as the foremost underground LSD chemist of the 1960s. Add to Favorites Dancing Bear patch, Grateful Dead patch, Owsley Stanley patch, Iron on patch, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Dead and Company, Shakedown . Stanley also developed the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound, one of the largest mobile sound reinforcement systems ever constructed. 3.83. In February 1966, Owsley and the Dead moved to Los Angeles for another series of Acid Tests. Link to comments by the Bear on a low carb forum back in 2006. The universe is a creation entirely within a being that is outside time and space, and dreaming what we are. 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. Details. Although he never smoked tobacco as an adult, Owsley learned in 2004 that he was suffering from stage-four throat cancer. 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. 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. [7], Stanley and Scully built electronic equipment for the Grateful Dead until late spring 1966. In a new biography, find out more about the life of this LSD preacher than ever before. Since 1965 he and Melissa Cargill had distributed an . Augustus Owsley Stanley III (January 19, 1935 March 12, 2011) was an American audio engineer and clandestine chemist. Would the Summer of Love have ever happened without Stanley, the reclusive acid impresario who turned on the world? There were no greens or anything he called it rabbit food. , Nor was there any point in trying to argue with Owsley about it. 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. He was convinced that human beings were natural carnivores, not meant to eat vegetables or fiber. They contain lovely subtleties that dont normally happen Paddy Moloney, August 2021, after listening to Bears tapes. Source: medium.com. Owsley Stanley: The King of LSD - Rolling Stone 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. The Bear - Owsley Stanley. At this point, Stanley rented a house in Point Richmond, Richmond, California. [10][11] Despite his dearth of formal education, he secured a position as a test engineer with Rocketdyne in Los Angeles; in this capacity, he worked on the SM-64 Navaho supersonic cruise missile. Three years later, she sent him back to Virginia to live with his father. 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 From Owsley's '60s to Today: A Long, Strange Intergenerational Trip Before We Were Them - Owsley Stanley Foundation As much of his portfolio had been delegated to as many as four sound engineers during his prison sentence, he struggled to regain his past influence among the band and support staff. 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 Point Richmond lab turned out more than 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) of LSD, dubbed "White Lightning". 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. Pretty Sure this is a Bronze? Stealie Owsley Buckle '83 series "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. Augustus Owsley Stanley III, better known as "Bear," was the Grateful Dead's first live sound engineer, the group's benefactor in their early years, and arguably the most famous manufacturer and distributor of LSD the world has ever known. Custom Owsely Buckle - Ramstar Designs All donations to the Owsley Stanley Foundation are fully tax deductible. Every single note is separately placed in space as well as in time. [32], Stanley believed a "thermal cataclysm" related to climate change would soon render the Northern Hemisphere largely uninhabitable, and moved to Australia in 1982. 5 out of 5 stars (955) $ 29.95. It's made of solid bronze, It's made of solid bronze, there were also some made in the mid 90's that were solid silver. I dont want my life exposed publicly. Under the professional name Bear, he was the soundman for the rock band the Grateful Dead, whom he met when Ken Kesey invited them to an Acid Test party. Technician for Grateful Dead and an LSD cook. Stanley's lab in Berkeley was raided in 1966 and he was arrested. 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. 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. UPDATE: Owsley "Bear" Stanley's Son Starfinder Disputes Origin Of Jerry He was the Grateful Deads original sound man and their initial financial benefactor. Copyright 2023 Penske Business Media, LLC. 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. It was amazing, he told Jerry Garcia biographer Blair Jackson. He says his method was simple. 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. 9 were here. 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. 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. Tom Sizemore, Heat and Saving Private Ryan Actor, Dead at 61 This guy made the best LSD of the '60s - New York Post The tensions culminated in a logistical mishap at an October 1972 concert at Vanderbilt University when students recruited by Stanley to deputize for an absentee Matthews absconded with half of the band's PA system, resulting in a fellow employee throwing Stanley into a water cooler. 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. Augustus Bear Owsley Stanley - The Woodstock Whisperer We were officially granted 501(c)(3) nonprofit status by the IRS in December 2012. 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. [12] In 1963, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became involved in the psychoactive drug scene. 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. 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 Dead's international fan "family". 'Kid Charlemagne': A Close Reading Of Steely Dan's Ode To - SFist Owsley Stanley (a.k.a. Owsley Stanley | Eat Meat. Drink Water. If you wanted to be an idiot and do something any way but his, that was your decision. But before Owsley came along, no one could be sure that what they were taking was really even LSD. He is moving so slowly that someone from the front desk comes to the room to ask if he ever intends to leave. Signed & Numbered Augustus Owsley Stanley III Mark Serlo Psychedelic LSD Blotter Art Psychedelic Acid Free Paper Ad vertisement by PremiumBlotter. Because you were. Available in both digital-to-digital and analog-to-analog separately mastered versions (CD, Downloads, 180g 45-RPM Vinyl, Reel-to-Reel Tape). The Denver Post (CO.) Press & Sun . 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. Forty-feet high, it was composed of 604 speakers using 26,400 watts of power supplied by 55 McIntosh 2300s. Youre concentrating a lot of mental energy on one package. Owsley Stanley - The Allen Ginsberg Project I love them both! When you find a new live Tim Buckley recording, it's like finding a whole new Tim Buckley! Stanley's scientific tutelage influenced Gissen's decision to return to her formal studies and pursue the profession of dentistry; their son, Starfinder, would go on to earn zoology and veterinary medicine degrees from Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania.[23]. Owsley rented a pink stucco house in Watts, next door to a brothel, where they all lived together. They had no skills at it. Jr. I did not buy expensive things. 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. He became a naturalized Australian citizen in 1996. 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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). Augustus Owsley Stanley III aka Bear was an American audio engineer and an underground drug maker. The sound turns into something youve never heard before. Those were all allegories. Scully soon learned that Owsley Stanley possessed a large amount (440 grams) of lysergic acid monohydrate. 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. The "Save The Music!" By then, most of the money Owsley had amassed during his days as the worlds reigning acid chemist was gone. TOP 16 QUOTES BY OWSLEY STANLEY | A-Z Quotes Augustus Owsley Stanley III (January 19, 1935 - March 12, 2011) was an American audio engineer and clandestine chemist. 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. The new lab was set up in the basement of a house across the street from the Denver Zoo in early 1967. In September 1965, Stanley became the primary LSD supplier to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. We were officially granted 501 (c) (3) nonprofit status by the IRS in December 2012. When the Dead declined to do so, Owsley found himself in what McNally calls limbo. Shifting his focus to what he knew best, the science of sound, Owsley began working on a revolutionary new system that would deliver crystal-clear audio in the big hockey arenas and indoor stadiums the Dead were now selling out. But now, fifty-three years later, a lost chapter has emerged to enrich and complement the story of that very good year. And Then There Was David Lindley, See the Beths Deliver Refreshing 'Expert in a Dying Field' Mini-Set on 'CBS Mornings', The YSL Case Is Stretching Fulton County's Justice System to Its Breaking Point, NBA 'Investigating,' Team Suspends Ja Morant After Allegedly Flashing Gun on Social Media. 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. Owsley Stanley Shirt - Etsy If what happens onstage is perfect, you put it out there to the audience., After two years of planning and problem-solving, the wall of sound made its debut on March 23rd, 1974, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. The American psychologist Timothy Leary's famous invitation to "tune in, turn on and drop out" changed a generation. 11 years 9 months ago. 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. Owsley Stanley, Artisan of Acid, Is Dead at 76 - The New York Times 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. (He has also never willingly allowed his photograph to be taken.) Gallery: Random Notes, Rocks Hottest Photos. [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. Owsley Stanley Foundation | Occidental CA - Facebook