Owsley Stanley, who died on March 13 aged 76, was the “outlaw-acid-chef” whose production of industrial quantities of LSD helped fuel California’s 1960s counterculture; his chemical wizardry was immortalised in song by Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead, and in prose by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Owsley 'Bear' Stanley at the sound desk on stage with the Grateful Dead Working from his basement laboratory in the Bay area of San Francisco, home of the “flower power” movement, Stanley was the drug’s single most prolific producer, manufacturing it to such a high standard that “Owsley” became a slang term for quality LSD.
Hendrix’s hit song Purple Haze (1967) was reputedly inspired by a batch of Stanley’s LSD. Steely Dan’s song Kid Charlemagne (1976) was a musical portrait of what the band’s co-founder, Walter Becker, described as the “outlaw-acid-chef of the Sixties”.
Formed in the San Francisco Bay area in 1965, the Grateful Dead also wrote about Stanley, in their song Alice D Millionaire (after a newspaper had described him as an “LSD millionaire”).
Such was the revenue from Stanley’s production of the drug that he was able to become the first financial backer of the psychedelic band, whose “dancing bear” icon derives from his nickname “the Bear”. Having trained in electronics during a spell in the US Air Force, he also developed and directed every aspect of the Dead’s live sound at a time when scant attention was paid to amplification in public arenas. His recordings of their concerts were turned into live albums, furnishing him with a steady income in later life.
His activities first attracted the attention of the authorities in 1966, the year LSD was made illegal in California. But after a substance police claimed was methedrine turned out to be something else, Stanley walked free and sued for the return of his laboratory equipment.
At that time he was midway through an intensive two-year period of LSD production that accounted for millions of doses of the drug taken by tripped-out devotees of the growing psychedelic movement. Stanley’s wares fuelled the celebrated “Summer of Love” in San Francisco in 1967, and a special batch of LSD called Monterey Purple was reportedly used by Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival. “Purple haze all in my brain/Lately things just don’t seem the same/Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why/’Scuse me while I kiss the sky,” sang Hendrix.
It was only after being arrested in 1970 on drugs charges, relating not to LSD but to marijuana, that Stanley’s narcotics career was derailed. Despite being sentenced to two years in prison, however, he remained defiant: “I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for,” he said. “What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different.”
The son of an American government attorney, Augustus Owsley Stanley III was born on January 19 1935 in Kentucky, a state governed between 1915 and 1919 by his grandfather, who represented it in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Owsley, who shed his first given name in 1967, grew up in Los Angeles and Virginia, and was expelled from school for drunkenness. He wangled a place at the University of Virginia to read Engineering, but after only a year joined the US Air Force, where he specialised in electronics and radar.
He left the military after 18 months and, having been mesmerised by a performance of the visiting Bolshoi company in 1958, studied ballet. He worked briefly as a professional dancer before returning to electronics, taking jobs in jet propulsion laboratories and at a television station. In 1963 he enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, lasting only a year. Before leaving, however, he discovered the recipe for LSD in the Journal of Organic Chemistry in the university library.
After teaming up with the Grateful Dead he soon graduated to the role of sound engineer with the band. He claimed that his recording genius dated from a swimming accident that damaged his right ear when he was 19 . “When stereo sounds good to me, it sounds fantastic to everyone else,” he said. “And when it sounds fantastic to me, well, you wouldn’t believe it.”
Stanley is credited with having devised the first public address system specifically designed for music, and created the group’s Wall Of Sound – a vast array of speakers used during concerts. With a graphic artist friend, Bob Thomas, Stanley also created the band’s logo showing a skull riven by a lightning bolt which became known as Steal Your Face.
But his efforts were not universally lauded by musicians. Frank Zappa (who styled himself a “freak” not a “hippie”) satirised the West Coast psychedelic scene in Who Needs The Peace Corps? (1968), which opens with the verse: “What’s there to live for?/Who needs the peace corps?/Think I’ll just drop out/I’ll go to 'Frisco/Buy a wig and sleep/On Owsley’s floor.”
Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test also emerged in 1968, but again Stanley was less than pleased, this time because the book portrayed him as a brilliant but eccentric acid “chemist”.
“I was never a chemist,” he complained, adding that he had just “followed the directions” to make LSD. “It was the adventure the thing created that was interesting. Making the thing was not. It was just something that somebody needed to do, so I did it.”
By the early 1980s Owsley had left San Francisco for the Australian state of Queensland, apparently to avoid a new ice age destined to engulf the northern hemisphere. There he established a business selling enamel sculptures and adhered to an all-meat diet. He also kept a low profile, rebuffing journalists.
Owsley Stanley, who died as the result of a road accident, is survived by his wife, Sheila, and their four children.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/8381945/Owsley-Stanley.html
It was only after being arrested in 1970 on drugs charges, relating not to LSD but to marijuana, that Stanley’s narcotics career was derailed. Despite being sentenced to two years in prison, however, he remained defiant: “I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for,” he said. “What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different.”
The son of an American government attorney, Augustus Owsley Stanley III was born on January 19 1935 in Kentucky, a state governed between 1915 and 1919 by his grandfather, who represented it in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Owsley, who shed his first given name in 1967, grew up in Los Angeles and Virginia, and was expelled from school for drunkenness. He wangled a place at the University of Virginia to read Engineering, but after only a year joined the US Air Force, where he specialised in electronics and radar.
He left the military after 18 months and, having been mesmerised by a performance of the visiting Bolshoi company in 1958, studied ballet. He worked briefly as a professional dancer before returning to electronics, taking jobs in jet propulsion laboratories and at a television station. In 1963 he enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, lasting only a year. Before leaving, however, he discovered the recipe for LSD in the Journal of Organic Chemistry in the university library.
After teaming up with the Grateful Dead he soon graduated to the role of sound engineer with the band. He claimed that his recording genius dated from a swimming accident that damaged his right ear when he was 19 . “When stereo sounds good to me, it sounds fantastic to everyone else,” he said. “And when it sounds fantastic to me, well, you wouldn’t believe it.”
Stanley is credited with having devised the first public address system specifically designed for music, and created the group’s Wall Of Sound – a vast array of speakers used during concerts. With a graphic artist friend, Bob Thomas, Stanley also created the band’s logo showing a skull riven by a lightning bolt which became known as Steal Your Face.
But his efforts were not universally lauded by musicians. Frank Zappa (who styled himself a “freak” not a “hippie”) satirised the West Coast psychedelic scene in Who Needs The Peace Corps? (1968), which opens with the verse: “What’s there to live for?/Who needs the peace corps?/Think I’ll just drop out/I’ll go to 'Frisco/Buy a wig and sleep/On Owsley’s floor.”
Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test also emerged in 1968, but again Stanley was less than pleased, this time because the book portrayed him as a brilliant but eccentric acid “chemist”.
“I was never a chemist,” he complained, adding that he had just “followed the directions” to make LSD. “It was the adventure the thing created that was interesting. Making the thing was not. It was just something that somebody needed to do, so I did it.”
By the early 1980s Owsley had left San Francisco for the Australian state of Queensland, apparently to avoid a new ice age destined to engulf the northern hemisphere. There he established a business selling enamel sculptures and adhered to an all-meat diet. He also kept a low profile, rebuffing journalists.
Owsley Stanley, who died as the result of a road accident, is survived by his wife, Sheila, and their four children.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/8381945/Owsley-Stanley.html
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