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Invisiblemuistrue
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Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia
    #14114363 - 03/13/11 02:00 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

LOS ANGELES – Owsley “Bear” Stanley, a 1960s counterculture figure who flooded the flower power scene with LSD and was an early benefactor of the Grateful Dead, died in a car crash in his adopted home country of Australia on Sunday, his family said. He was believed to be 76.

The renegade grandson of a former governor of Kentucky, Stanley helped lay the foundation for the psychedelic era by producing more than a million doses of LSD at his labs in San Francisco’s Bay Area.

“He made acid so pure and wonderful that people like Jimi Hendrix wrote hit songs about it and others named their band in its honor,” former rock ‘n’ roll tour manager Sam Cutler wrote in his 2008 memoirs “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

Hendrix’s song “Purple Haze” was reputedly inspired by a batch of Stanley’s product, though the guitarist denied any drug link. The ear-splitting blues-psychedelic combo Blue Cheer took its named from another batch.

Stanley briefly managed the Grateful Dead, and oversaw every aspect of their live sound at a time when little thought was given to amplification in public venues. His tape recordings of Dead concerts were turned into live albums.

The Dead wrote about him in their song “Alice D. Millionaire” after a 1967 arrest prompted a newspaper to describe Stanley as an “LSD millionaire.” Steely Dan’s 1976 single “Kid Charlemagne” was loosely inspired by Stanley’s exploits.

According to a 2007 profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, Stanley started cooking LSD after discovering the recipe in a chemistry journal at the University of California, Berkeley.

The police raided his first lab in 1966, but Stanley successfully sued for the return of his equipment. After a marijuana bust in 1970, he went to prison for two years.

“I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for,” he told the Chronicle’s Joel Selvin. “What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different.”

He emigrated to the tropical Australian state of Queensland in the early 1980s, apparently fearful of a new ice age, and sold enamel sculptures on the Internet. He lost one of his vocal cords to cancer.

Stanley was born Augustus Owsley Stanley III in Kentucky, a state governed by his namesake grandfather from 1915 to 1919. He served in the U.S. Air Force for 18 months, studied ballet in Los Angeles, and then enrolled at UC Berkeley. In addition to being an LSD advocate, he adhered to an all-meat diet.

A statement released by Cutler on behalf of Stanley’s family said the car crash occurred near his home in far north Queensland. He is survived by his wife Sheila, four children, eight grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/03/13/psychedelic-icon-owsley-stanley-dies-in-australia/



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Offlinekosmic_charlie
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: muistrue]
    #14114376 - 03/13/11 02:02 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

R.I.P. Bear. Thank you for helping to change the world for the better. :gd_icon:


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Goin' where the water tastes like wine.


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Invisibleiamnotadream
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: kosmic_charlie]
    #14114481 - 03/13/11 02:28 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Quote:

kosmic_charlie said:
R.I.P. Bear. Thank you for helping to change the world for the better. :gd_icon:




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Invisibleindocult
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: muistrue]
    #14114554 - 03/13/11 02:50 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Quote:

FractalDust said:
According to a 2007 profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, Stanley started cooking LSD after discovering the recipe in a chemistry journal at the University of California, Berkeley.


.”http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/03/13/psychedelic-icon-owsley-stanley-dies-in-australia/





It'd be nice to get ahold of that journal...

Sad to hear of his passing, my boss (dude in his 60's from CA) tells me all the time about how  'purple owsley' was better than anything else around at the time.

I really like his statement about providing a community service and it just being a political thing.


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Invisiblewaves

Registered: 04/03/10
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: iamnotadream]
    #14114563 - 03/13/11 02:53 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

.


Edited by waves (04/21/11 11:38 PM)


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Offlinefrisky_
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: waves]
    #14114604 - 03/13/11 03:04 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

I was going to write him an email soon :frown:

:tripping: r.i.p.


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:piggy:your horse is too tall:piggy:
:piggie:and your brain is too small:piggie:


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OfflineDave Bowman
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: frisky_]
    #14114623 - 03/13/11 03:06 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

:feelsbadman:


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InvisibleSophistic Radiance
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: muistrue]
    #14114676 - 03/13/11 03:21 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

R.I.P. Bear, you were one of a kind.


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Enlil said:
You really are the worst kind of person.



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InvisibleWise Toad
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: Sophistic Radiance]
    #14114722 - 03/13/11 03:32 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

:flowerchild: The death of a 60 style hero:shakingfist:, hes supplying infinity now :lsd2:  :lsd:  :trippinballs:


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Offlineshivas.wisdom
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: Wise Toad]
    #14114791 - 03/13/11 03:48 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Your ripples will continue on...

:gd_icon:  :heart:


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InvisibleLe_Canard
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: muistrue]
    #14114830 - 03/13/11 03:57 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

R.I.P. Bear. His acid was before my time, but it was the stuff of legend, to be sure.


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Invisible4runner
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: Le_Canard]
    #14114956 - 03/13/11 04:31 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Bummer, not a great way to go.
R.I.P.


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InvisibleveggieM

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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: muistrue]
    #14114978 - 03/13/11 04:38 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Sad news indeed. He was one of the most interesting 60's era icons. RIP

Thanks for posting, FD.


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OfflineMoonraker
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: veggie] * 3
    #14115259 - 03/13/11 05:31 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

:mushroom2:



On behalf of the society that jailed you, sorry.
And,
On behalf of humanity, thank you.


:congrats:


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A human race with more highly developed spiritual capacities, with expanded consciousness of the depth and the incomprehensible wonder of being, would also have greater understanding of and better consideration for the biological and material foundation of life on this earth, Above all, for Western people with their hypertrophied rationality, the development and expansion of a direct, emotional experience of reality, unobstructed by words and concepts, would be of evolutionary significance.

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.

To fall in hell or soar angelic,
You need a pinch of psychedelic.


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OfflineTaco Chef
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: Moonraker]
    #14115340 - 03/13/11 05:45 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

:sad:


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OfflineSacred Haze
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: Taco Chef]
    #14115626 - 03/13/11 06:28 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

R.I.P. Brother ! You were truly part of something extraordinary.



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OfflineMoonraker
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: Moonraker]
    #14115686 - 03/13/11 06:38 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Damn. I want one of his pieces so badly.

You have a piece of history there my friend. I envy you.

"Any time the music on the radio starts to sound like rubbish, it's time to take some LSD" - Owsley Stanley


--------------------
A human race with more highly developed spiritual capacities, with expanded consciousness of the depth and the incomprehensible wonder of being, would also have greater understanding of and better consideration for the biological and material foundation of life on this earth, Above all, for Western people with their hypertrophied rationality, the development and expansion of a direct, emotional experience of reality, unobstructed by words and concepts, would be of evolutionary significance.

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.

To fall in hell or soar angelic,
You need a pinch of psychedelic.


Edited by Moonraker (03/13/11 07:02 PM)


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Offlineidunno
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: kosmic_charlie]
    #14115938 - 03/13/11 07:22 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

According to a 2007 profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, Stanley started cooking LSD after discovering the recipe in a chemistry journal at the University of California, Berkeley

Its not like its making Meth one pot method, its really hard to make. Most advanced chemist even say its difficult. Are they trying to say that ol Stan was stupid?Or are they trying to say Lsd is easy to make?
Neither is true-


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The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic..  Josef Stalin


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InvisibleSophistic Radiance
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: idunno]
    #14116027 - 03/13/11 07:40 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

AFAIK LSD used to be much easier to make than it is now because the precursors were readily available. These days you have to jump through a lot of chemical hoops to get the stuff you need because the precursors are closely watched and regulated by the government.

Meth will always be simple to make, it's a simple molecule. By comparison LSD is a big, weird, unstable molecule.


--------------------
Enlil said:
You really are the worst kind of person.



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Offlinesamspade
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: idunno]
    #14116028 - 03/13/11 07:41 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

I remember a tab of what was called "Purple Owsley" I took in 1970 or thereabouts. I have no idea whether it was produced by Owsley or not. But it did the job. RIP, Oz.


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Invisiblemuistrue
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: muistrue]
    #14116057 - 03/13/11 07:51 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

A Beautiful Mind

I received a text in the middle of last night that Bear Stanley has died in a car accident in Australia. Bear, for me, was a true kindred spirit; when we first met, it was as if I had met a long-lost brother from another lifetime. I am heartbroken and devastated at his passing.

He was a friend, a brother, an inspiration, and our patron at the very beginning of our creative lives. We owe him more than what can be counted or added up- his was a mind that refused to accept limits, and he reinforced in us that striving for the infinite, the refusal to accept the status quo, that has informed so much of our work.

He never gave up his quest for pushing the limits of whatever he was working on. We had just been discussing his concept of point-source sound reinforcement in relation to a new project of mine, and his vision incorporated the latest developments in technology and perceptual research.

My heart goes out to his family, for whom he had such love and pride- his wife Sheilah, his children, grand-children, and great-grandchildren- who have lost their patriarch.

A mind like Bear’s appears very rarely, and it’s been my privilege and honor to have known and loved two such minds- Jerry and Bear. I always laugh when I think about what Jerry once said about Bear: There’s nothing wrong with Bear that several billion fewer brain cells wouldn't fix.

I am eternally grateful for all of the gifts that Bear brought to the scene and to the music.
Fare you well; I love you more than words can tell.

- Phil


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OfflineDivinity
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: muistrue]
    #14116399 - 03/13/11 08:56 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

R.I.P Mr Owsley.
Due to your dedication, love was felt throughout the world.:heart:


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InvisibleToe_Jam
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: Divinity]
    #14116556 - 03/13/11 09:26 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

A sad, sad day. I can't help but remember him as I always have, even before this tragic event, a legend. He parachuted into an all human be-in in San Fran to give away 10,000 free hits. And these were Owsley hits (obviously) about twice the strength of a "strong" hit today.

Did you ever read about his "Bastille Trip" in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test"? Phucking epic.

Rest good sir, you deserve it. I hope to meet you in the next world.


--------------------
God lay his finger at the Mouth of the Serpent

March 1984


A pleasing land of drowsy head it was,
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye,
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
For ever flushing round a summer sky. -Castle of Indolence


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OfflineViveka
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: muistrue]
    #14116583 - 03/13/11 09:32 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)



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Invisiblebryguy27007
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: muistrue]
    #14116887 - 03/13/11 10:27 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Thank you for sharing that letter Fractaldust.

This is very sad news indeed. What else is there to say besides:

Rest in peace Bear.


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InvisibleSuperD
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: muistrue]
    #14117015 - 03/13/11 10:51 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

What a shame.  His legend and dedication to the cause will live on.


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:super:D
Manoa said:
I need to stop spending all my money on plants and take up a cheaper hobby, like heroin. :lol:

Looking for Rauhocereus riosaniensis seeds or live specimen(s), :pm: me if you have any for trade


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OfflineCactii
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: SuperD]
    #14117707 - 03/14/11 01:12 AM (12 years, 10 months ago)

RIP Bear


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T. Pachanoi cuttings for sale! PM me for more info.


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Offlinedemon66
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: Sophistic Radiance]
    #14117856 - 03/14/11 01:51 AM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Quote:

Tchan909 said:
AFAIK LSD used to be much easier to make than it is now because the precursors were readily available. These days you have to jump through a lot of chemical hoops to get the stuff you need because the precursors are closely watched and regulated by the government. END QUOTE



Yeah, I hear it might be easier to grow your own claviceps purpea fungus for it's ergot rather that try to find ergot, or ergotamine.



RIP Owsley


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OfflineBest
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: demon66]
    #14118219 - 03/14/11 06:18 AM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Aw man, pretty sad that he went out in a car accident :frown:

RIP Bear, you will be missed


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OfflineOdum
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: Best]
    #14118236 - 03/14/11 06:35 AM (12 years, 10 months ago)

sad to hear

So long to a very unique and special person


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Invisiblespock
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: muistrue]
    #14118269 - 03/14/11 07:00 AM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Damn.


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OfflineValafar
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: spock]
    #14118524 - 03/14/11 09:09 AM (12 years, 10 months ago)

:frown: r.i.p. you wonderful dancing bear


--------------------
"Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
And for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing"


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OfflineNwrainmaker
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: Valafar]
    #14118600 - 03/14/11 09:42 AM (12 years, 10 months ago)

The torch has been passed, and who among you you will rise to the occasion?
He threw a pebble into the ocean and it ripples throughout eternity. What a legend. What a long strange trip its been...

Happy Trails Brother Bear


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OfflinePsilocybinMike
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: muistrue]
    #14118784 - 03/14/11 10:48 AM (12 years, 10 months ago)

R.I.P to a true legend. May his consciousness float on eternally in a sea of never ending beauty and unconditional loving bliss. The seeds he planted through out his journey will continue to blossom and spread on this plane as his soul ventures on to the next.


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baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVZBTAYm3rw


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InvisibleveggieM

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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: PsilocybinMike] * 2
    #14119409 - 03/14/11 01:21 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Excellent article from Rolling Stone that originally appeared in the July 12-27, 2007 issue ...

Owsley Stanley: The King of LSD
March 14, 2011 - Rolling Stone
By Robert Greenfield

Would the Summer of Love have ever happened without Stanley, the reclusive acid impresario who turned on the world

No one did more to alter the consciousness of the generation that came of age in the 1960s than Augustus Owsley Stanley (who passed away March 13, 2011). Long before the Summer of Love drew thousands of hippies to Haight-Ashbury, Owsley was already an authentic underground folk hero, revered throughout the counterculture for making the purest form of LSD ever to hit the street. Yet today, at seventy-two, he is all but forgotten.

Almost forty years to the day after he blew minds at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, with a brand-new batch of "Monterey Purple," Owsley is checking out of a motel in nearby Carmel. Three years ago, he underwent extensive radiation for throat cancer, losing thirty pounds in the process. He is moving so slowly that someone from the front desk comes to the room to ask if he ever intends to leave. Ignoring the inquiry, Owsley roots through his bags for a large state-of-the-art conical burr grinder and a white funnel-shaped device to heat water so he can make coffee from beans he grew and roasted at home in Australia. As the water boils, he packs up a Braun food mixer and the vast array of other gadgets he carries with him.

He puts on a pair of old bluejeans that are now several sizes too big and places a brown Thinsulate stocking cap on his head. With his dark-brown goatee and a gold hoop dangling from his left ear, he looks like an older, careworn version of the Edge from U2. Unable to swallow solid food since the cancer treatments, he laments that he can no longer enjoy dining out with friends. Suddenly, his eyes redden and he is nearly reduced to tears. Quickly regaining control, he says, "But, hey, I'm alive, right?" Without waiting for an answer, he stalks out the motel-room door.

In the Oxford English dictionary, the word "Owsley" is listed as a noun describing a particularly pure form of LSD. But manufacturing acid is not the only accomplishment on Owsley's résumé. He was the Grateful Dead's original sound man and their initial financial benefactor. 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. And because he had the foresight to plug a tape recorder directly into the sound board during Dead shows, the music the band made at the peak of its power has been gloriously preserved in recordings still being issued in the series titled Dick's Picks, for which Owsley continues to receive royalties.

While doing two years in federal prison in the early Seventies for manufacturing acid, Owsley taught himself how to make jewelry. He has parlayed this talent into a career, crafting belt buckles and pendants for everyone from KeithRichards to Jackson Browne that sell for as much as $20,000.

For the past twenty years, Owsley has lived off the grid in a remote section of Australian rain forest. Until now, he has never been willing to speak extensively about his life. (He has also never willingly allowed his photograph to be taken.) "I'm not really interested in talking about myself," he says. "I don't want my life exposed publicly. I'm interested in the work I've done and the things I've discovered and in some of my philosophical stuff, because I think it's of value, but I'm not into being a celebrity, because I think celebrityhood has no value to anyone, least of all to the celebrity. I've watched wonderful people get destroyed by it."

From the time he was a child, what made Owsley unique was his extraordinary family background and the power of his mind. His grandfather, also named Augustus Owsley Stanley, was a trust-busting Democratic congressman from Kentucky who spent twelve years in the House of Representatives. Elected governor in 1915, he became a United States senator and served on the commission that oversaw construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Owsley adored his grandfather, but his relationship with his parents was difficult. "Neither one of them really wanted to be parents," he says. "They had no skills at it. If you feel you can't love someone and you are universally told that you must love, you become very guilty."

After the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Lexington was blown out from under Owsley's father during the Battle of the Coral Sea in World War II, he began drinking heavily and became a lifelong alcoholic. When Owsley was eight, his parents separated and his mother took him to Los Angeles. Three years later, she sent him back to Virginia to live with his father. 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. The headmaster later told High Times magazine that he remembered Owsley as "almost like a brainchild, a wunderkinder, tremendously interested in science." Even then, Owsley was possessed by what he calls "this rogue, get-high nature of mine" and was expelled in ninth grade for smuggling alcohol into school during homecoming weekend, getting virtually every student on campus "blasted out of their minds."

When he was fifteen, Owsley spent fifteen months as a voluntary patient in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where the poet Ezra Pound was also confined. "I was just a neurotic kid," he says. "My mother died a few months into the experience, but it was there I sorted out my guilt problems about not being able to love my parents, and I came out of it pretty clear." After leaving the public high school, where his physics teacher gave him a D for pointing out that she had contradicted the textbook, he attended the University of Virginia for a year. "I never took notes when I was in college," he says. "During the first week of the course, I'd buy my textbooks and read them all through. Then I'd sell them all back to the bookstore at full price as if I'd changed classes, because I never needed to look at them again."

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 operator's 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 married and divorced twice, fathered two children and got himself arrested on a variety of charges. He also studied ballet, Russian and French.

In 1963, Owsley moved to Berkeley so he could take classes at the university, where the student protest movement was growing. A year later, Mario Savio made his historic Free Speech Movement address from atop a police car to student protesters gathered outside Sproul Hall. In Berkeley, as well as across the bay in Palo Alto, young people seeking a new way to live had begun using LSD to break down conventional social barriers. Until then, the drug had been available in America only to those conducting serious medical research. In 1959, the poet Allen Ginsberg took LSD for the first time, at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto. 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. Taking acid soon became the watermark. Until you had tripped, you were not part of the new culture. But before Owsley came along, no one could be sure that what they were taking was really even LSD.

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. In April 1964, Owsley took LSD. "I remember the first time I took acid and walked outside," he says, "and the cars were kissing the parking meters." During the same week, he also heard the Beatles for the first time. "It was amazing," he told Jerry Garcia biographer Blair Jackson. "It all seemed to fit together. We had Meet the Beatles! within a few days of it coming out. One of my friends who was a folkie brought it in and said, 'Man, you gotta listen to this!' And I was off and running. I loved it."

Later that year, a friend gave Owsley 400 micrograms of pure LSD manufactured by Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland, where Dr. Albert Hofmann had first synthesized the drug in 1938. At the time, Owsley was living with a Berkeley undergraduate chemistry major named Melissa Cargill. They decided to try to make acid that was "at least as good or better than any pharmaceutical firm." It took Owsley just three weeks in the UC Berkeley library to learn everything he needed to know about the process.

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. Those were all allegories. The lead and the gold is the lead of the primitive nature into the gold of the enlightened man. Alchemy didn't talk about lead into gold until it had to deal with the church in the early Middle Ages."

For Owsley, The Kybalion "was perfect because it put into total context all the things I had experienced on acid. The universe is a creation entirely within a being that is outside time and space, and dreaming what we are. Everything is connected, because it's all being created by this one consciousness. And we are tiny reflections of the mind that is creating the universe. That's 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. On February 21st, 1965, police raided the house and confiscated various chemicals, including a substance they wrongfully identified as speed. 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."

After obtaining a court order that made the police return his lab equipment, Owsley and Cargill split for Los Angeles. Because the materials needed to synthesize LSD were still only available to serious researchers, he formed the Bear Research Group and paid $4,000 every three or four weeks to the Cyclo Chemical Corporation for bottles of lysergic monohydrate, the basis for LSD.

From the start, Owsley felt that his state of mind while he was making acid would affect the nature of the product. "It's something that goes from being absolutely inert to so powerful that twenty-five micrograms will cause a change in your consciousness," he says. "You're concentrating a lot of mental energy on one package. 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. So when you had something that affects the minds of thousands and thousands of people in the palm of your hand, how could you not believe that your state of mind mattered?"

By May 1965, he was back in the Bay Area with 3,600 capsules of extraordinarily pure LSD, dubbed "Owsley" by a pot-dealing folk guitarist friend. "I never set out to 'turn on the world,' as has been claimed by many," Owsley says. "And I certainly never made $1 million from drugs. I just wanted to know the dose and purity of what I took into my own body. Almost before I realized what was happening, the whole affair had gotten completely out of hand. I was riding a magic stallion. A Pegasus. I was not responsible for his wings, but they did carry me to all kinds of places."

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 Hell's Angels. When Owsley showed up one day during the fall, he walked over to Kesey and handed him a couple of hits of acid. Because Kesey had his own source (a Prankster known as "John the Chemist") and was suspicious of newcomers, he did not seem all that interested in the gift. After sampling it, he changed his mind.

"For most people," Owsley says, "the proper dose is about 150 to 200 micrograms. When you get to 400, you just totally lose it. I don't care who you are. Kesey liked 400. He wanted to lose it." Thanks to Owsley, the Pranksters now had enough LSD on hand to begin throwing parties at which everyone could get a dose. Kesey and the Pranksters called these gatherings the Acid Tests, a series of mind-blowing events at which people tripping on LSD were exposed to flashing strobe lights, tape loops and sometimes — if the band was not too stoned — even a set by the Grateful Dead.

On December 11th, 1965, the Dead played at the Muir Beach Acid Test in a lodge by the sea in Marin County. The sound of Jerry Garcia's guitar grabbed hold of Owsley, and he freaked out on acid for the first time. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe described how Owsley completely lost control of himself, dissolving into "gaseous nothingness" until he became nothing more than a single cell. "If he lost control of that one cell, there would be nothing left," Wolfe wrote. "The world would be, like, over." "I lost control of that cell as well," Owsley says. "They were all gone. That was the initiation. The price I had to pay to get through the gate. Ego death. I thought I was going to die, and I said, 'Fuck it.' And that was good."

Running out a side door during his freakout, Owsley leaped into his car, gunned the engine and promptly ran into a ditch. When he finally returned to his physical body and found it mostly intact, Owsley was horrified by the way Kesey and the Pranksters were messing with people's minds. "Kesey was playing with something he did not understand," Owsley says. "I said to him, 'You guys are fucking around with something that people have known about forever. It's sometimes called witchcraft, and it's extremely dangerous. You're dealing with part of the unconscious mind that they used to define as angels and devils. You have to be very careful, because there are all these warnings. 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. 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. Take out the sun, and the planets all go their own way. Garcia was the center. Once he stopped exploring, the whole scene stopped exploring."

Three weeks later, on January 8th, 1966, Owsley sashayed into the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco for another Acid Test. Barely recognizing him as the freaked-out dude from Muir Beach, Lesh would later write that Owsley looked like "some Robin Hood figure out of swashbuckling antiquity." By then, Lesh, like so many others in the burgeoning Bay Area scene, had been tripping on Owsley's product for more than a year.

"So you're Owsley," Lesh said. "I feel as if I've known you through many lifetimes."

"You have," Owsley replied, "and you will through many more to come."
When Owsley asked Lesh what he could do for the band, the bass player said they had no manager and offered him the job. Owsley declined. When Lesh said they also had no sound man, Owsley figured that, based on his audio-engineering experience in radio and television, this was something he could handle.

At the time, live sound at rock concerts was extremely primitive. Musicians plugged their instruments into amplifiers connected to single-channel speakers. There were no onstage monitors, so musicians couldn't hear one another. Owsley wanted the Dead not only to be clearly heard but also in stereo, a concept so far ahead of its time that it would be ten years before such systems were installed in movie theaters. Thanks to Owsley, the Dead were soon playing through four immense Altec Voice of the Theatre A7 speakers powered by four McIntosh 240 stereo tube amplifiers as delicate as they were huge.

In February 1966, Owsley and the Dead moved to Los Angeles for another series of Acid Tests. Owsley rented a pink stucco house in Watts, next door to a brothel, where they all lived together. For the Dead, the good news was that they now had nothing to do all day but jam. The bad news was that since Owsley was paying the rent, he expected them to adhere to his unconventional ideas and beliefs. He was convinced that human beings were natural carnivores, not meant to eat vegetables or fiber. "Roughage is the worst thing you can put through your body," he says. "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. "I'll never forget that when you'd open the refrigerator, there were big slabs of beef in there," Rosie McGee, Phil Lesh's girlfriend at the time, later told Garcia biographer Jackson. "The shelves weren't even in there — just these big hunks of meat. So of course behind his back, people were sneaking candy bars in. There were no greens or anything — he called it 'rabbit food.' "

Nor was there any point in trying to argue with Owsley about it. As Dead rhythm guitarist Bob Weir says, "Back then, if you got involved in a discussion with him, you kind of had to pack a lunch." Years later, Jerry Garcia would recall, "We'd met Owsley at the Acid Test and he got fixated on us. 'With this rock band, I can rule the world!' So we ended up living with Owsley while he was tabbing up the acid in the place we lived. We had enough acid to blow the world apart. And we were just musicians in this house, and we were guinea-pigging more or less continually. Tripping frequently if not constantly. That got good and weird."

By the time the Dead returned to San Francisco in April, Owsley had already made it plain to the band that as far as he was concerned, there was only one way to do everything: his way. "He was magnanimous about it," remembers former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow. "If you wanted to be an idiot and do something any way but his, that was your decision. And he was not surprised you would choose to be an idiot. Because you were. And he was probably right." Years later, Lesh would write that Garcia once told him, "There's nothing wrong with Bear that a few billion less brain cells wouldn't cure."

The band's impatience with how long it took Owsley to set up its equipment and then take it back down again soon led to a parting of the ways. Even though Owsley had already put about $50,000 into the band and would no longer be working for them, he told the Dead to pick out new equipment and send him the bill. After selling his Voice of the Theatre speakers and McIntosh amps to Bill Graham, who installed them in the Fillmore, Owsley donated most of the band's other gear to the Straight Theater, a hippie venue on Haight Street. Concerning Owsley's legacy to the Dead from this period, Dennis McNally, the band's biographer, says, "Bear gave them a vision of quality that quite frankly influenced them for the next thirty years. And that alone gives him credibility for that scene."

By the time lsd became illegal in California on October 6th, 1966, Owsley had become a mythic figure. He lived in a picturesque Berkeley cottage filled with high-end stereo equipment where he kept an owl to which he fed live mice. An article in The Los Angeles Times described him rolling up to a Sunset Strip bank on a red motorcycle with crumpled bills stashed in his helmet, pockets and boots. "The money flow was very embarrassing," he recalls. "I did not feel it was mine, since what I was doing was in my mind a service to my community. I did not buy expensive things. 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 haven't been associated with is walking on the moon, for Christ's 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. Five months later at Monterey Pop, Owsley passed out his "Monterey Purple" backstage to Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend and the Stones' Brian Jones, not to mention much of the festival's staff and crew. 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. "The thing about Owsley," Townshend said, "is that when he gave you something, he would take it too. Just to show you. He must have had the most extraordinary liver."

During this period, the Dead wrote "Alice D. Millionaire," a play on words from a headline about Owsley in The San Francisco Chronicle that read, "LSD Millionaire Arrested." In concert, the band regularly dedicated "The Other One" to him from the stage. At the end of Hendrix's live version of the Beatles' "Day Tripper," recorded at the BBC studios in 1967, he can be heard calling out, "Oh, Owsley, can you hear me now?" In 1976, Steely Dan burnished Owsley's myth by recording "Kid Charlemagne": "While the music played/You worked by candlelight/ Those San Francisco nights/You were the best in town. . . ."

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. A year earlier in Los Angeles, narcotics agents had begun picking through their garbage. 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.

Although people speculated for years about how Owsley managed to conceal his stash, no one ever figured it out. He says his method was simple. He kept the LSD in an inexpensive footlocker that traveled constantly on Greyhound buses between Oakland, San Jose and San Francisco. "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. It was always in a safe place, and nobody had a clue, because I never told anyone I did that."

Despite his precautions, thirteen agents broke into a house in the East Bay that Owsley had rented for the express purpose of making tabs. 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. Owsley had gotten the recipe for STP from a former Dow chemist named Alexander Shulgin (who would later reintroduce Ecstasy to the rave generation). "He had this stuff, and we thought it might be good," Owsley says. "It turned out that it wasn't."

The senior arresting officer, aware of Owsley's status, noted that the bust would probably cause "panic in the streets" because "to a lot of hippies, their idol has fallen." He added that Owsley was "actually a psychedelic missionary" who "gives the impression that he feels the average person can never actually know himself without turning on with LSD."

As Owsley's case dragged through the courts for the next two years, he stopped making acid and worked as the sound man at the Carousel Ballroom for three months before it was bought by Bill Graham and renamed the Fillmore West. In July 1968, Owsley rejoined the Dead. By then, the band was being managed by Lenny Hart, the father of drummer Mickey Hart and a minister who believed God had called upon him to save the Dead from their never-ending financial woes. Lenny Hart and Owsley, who had "never trusted preachers anyway," got on like oil and water. In his classic account of the Grateful Dead on the road in May 1969, Michael Lydon noted the ongoing tension between Hart and Owsley by writing that they were "like two selves of the Dead at war, with the Dead themselves sitting as judges. . . . 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. He is a prince of inefficiency, the essence at its most perverse of what the Dead refuse to give up."

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. By doing so, he compiled a historic collection of live performances. He also came up with the concept for what eventually became the band's logo. 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.

While driving to work one day in his MG, Owsley saw an orange and blue logo with a white bar across it on a building. He thought it would look cool if the logo was red and blue with a white lightning bolt through it, so he had someone spray-paint a basic version of it on the Dead's equipment. He then talked to his friend Bob Thomas about putting the lightning bolt through the words "Grateful Dead" in lettering, which from a distance would look like a skull. Together, they devised the "Steal Your Face" logo (a.k.a. "the stealie"). Thomas, who died in 1993, sold it to the band as a letterhead for $250, meaning that neither he nor Owsley ever saw a dime from all those Deadhead stickers on the rear bumpers of Volkswagen buses.
On January 30th, 1970, after a Dead show in New Orleans, police walked into the band's Bourbon Street hotel with search warrants and busted the Dead, along with Owsley. 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 Owsley's bail on the 1967 LSD bust after he was arrested again in Oakland. Owsley was sent to Terminal Island Federal Prison, a medium-security lockup in San Pedro where Charles Manson had also done time.

In prison, Owsley got himself assigned to the kitchen. "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.

By the time Owsley returned to the Dead in August 1972, Dennis McNally says, "It was a different world. 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. That was his strength and his flaw. And the band had a bunch of macho cowboys as a crew who were snorting blow and drinking a whole lot of beer, and Bear was offended by their language and by their beer."

After being thrown across the room by one of the roadies during an argument, Owsley asked the band to give him the power to hire and fire the crew so they would know they were working for him. 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. "Phil Lesh and I would talk about this," Owsley says. "We would liken it to alchemy. 'As above, so below.' We called it the microcosm and the macrocosm. 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. Forty-feet high, it was composed of 604 speakers using 26,400 watts of power supplied by 55 McIntosh 2300s. With nine independent channels, the system was so powerful that the amps only needed to be turned up to two. Because the Dead controlled everything from onstage, no one had to mix from the house. Lesh likened the experience of playing through the system to "piloting a flying saucer. 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 sound turns into something you've never heard before. It's absolutely clear. It is loud without being loud. It is articulate. Every single note is separately placed in space as well as in time. Once the system's set, you can walk away from the board. Musicians can adjust it. 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. At a time when the Dead were trying to keep ticket prices down, the wall cost about $350,000. "It was brilliant and it worked," McNally says. "But they had to double the size of the crew and, in the process, the crew took over the band." Because the Dead were unwilling to fire any members of their large and sometimes dysfunctional family, the band decided in 1974 to instead take a break from touring, not going on the road again until the summer of 1976.

By then, most of the money Owsley had amassed during his days as the world's reigning acid chemist was gone. 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. He also grew weed in a garden outside his house. "It was the most dangerous, underpaid job I ever had in my life," he says."I was never a real grower. I did it because I was into breeding, and I had some strains that were absolutely unbelievable. 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. 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. Incredibly, no one called the cops. "I later learned who every one of them was," Owsley says, "but I did not feel I could do anything about it. A year after that, I moved to Australia."
In 1984, Owsley appeared at Phil Lesh's house with a map of the world showing the mean temperatures at the height of the last ice age. Long before global warming became an international hot-button issue, he delivered what writer David Gans described as "a ninety-minute lecture on a thermal cataclysm that he said would begin with a six-week rainstorm and leave the entire Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable." Passing around Australian visa applications, Owsley then urged all those present to join him in the Southern Hemisphere.

Much like his theory that human beings are meant to eat only meat, Owsley's concept of climate change is at odds with most current scientific thought on global warming. 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. 'Global warming: the panic,' is based exclusively on temperate-zone land measurements and ignores the fact that the planet is seventy percent ocean. The Arctic and Antarctic are soaking up the moving heat and the ice caps are melting, but the cause of the heat's movement is a buildup of energy as the prelude to a massive, planetary-scale cyclonic storm, which will build the new ice age glaciers."

Because this is a natural cycle, Owsley believes that carbon and methane emissions from human activity have little effect on the process and do not cause the greenhouse effect. "Our planet's heat balance and temperature are buffered and controlled by water and water vapor, which also washes CO2 out of the air and not minuscule fractions of a couple of gases, one of which is very soluble and the other unstable. Not a single atmospheric scientist subscribes to the concept of greenhouse gases or global warming — they all know the truth."

Owsley contends there is nothing people can do to prevent the coming of an ice age storm that he describes as "a kind of a gigantic hurricane, a cyclone thousands of miles in diameter, turning with winds of ultrasonic speeds that is one-half the planet in size." This is the Biblical 'flood of Noah,' and the entire portion of the planet underneath the storm will be blown flat and buried under water. "Based on past evidence, the sea will rise 300 meters, and life in some places will be entirely destroyed. I don't see how anyone in the Northern Hemisphere could survive the storm. But there are areas on the planet that are safe, and I hope I'm in one of them."

It is for this reason that Owsley and his wife, Sheilah, whom he first met at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley in 1985 while she was working in the ticket office for the Dead, now live in Australia forty-five minutes from anywhere on 120 acres of land he claimed by squatting on it like a pioneer. Together, they dwell in a complex of sheds, caravans, large canvas tents, modified shipping containers and corrugated-iron structures designed and built by Owsley. John Perry Barlow, who has been there, describes the enclave as "something out of Lord Jim, but the main living area is rather Victorian, handsomely carpeted, lots of books around, nice furniture and no walls." Owsley generates all his own power through a solar and wind system he built himself and collects rainwater he stores in two large tanks. There are three septic systems on the property, a hot tub, three kitchens and a large gym where he works out regularly. Once a year by invitation only, he throws a party attended by friends, family and musicians from all over Australia who play all night long. Needless to say, the party is electric.

After experiencing chest pains seven years ago, Owsley underwent surgery to correct a ninety percent blockage in an artery in his heart that dated back to his teenage years. Although he never smoked tobacco as an adult, Owsley learned in 2004 that he was suffering from stage-four throat cancer. Had it not been for Sheilah, he says, "I don't think I would have survived. We are truly soulmates after twenty-two years together, and our love is as strong today as it was in the beginning. How many people can say that?" Owsley also credits his all-meat diet for keeping him alive. "This is one of the most aggressive cancers you can get," he adds. "Normally, within six months or a year, it has metastasized throughout your body. I had it for at least three years, but it never left the left side of my neck. The reason is that I'm a total carnivore. I don't eat carbs. Cancers grow on glucose. They're extremely glucose-avid. Especially this one. In other words, this cancer was living in a desert."

Unlike his own father, Owsley has made every effort to be an active parent to his son Starfinder and daughter Redbird (whose mother is Cargill), born three weeks apart to two different mothers who remain good friends and raised their children as brother and sister. Owsley lives by selling his art through his Web site (thebear.org) and royalties from Dead recordings. Some of his other recorded works include Bear's 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.

Night after night during the summer months, Owsley can be found stalking Bufo marinus, the species of poisonous toads (whose venom, Owsley insists, won't get you high) first introduced into Australia in 1935 in the mistaken belief that they would help control the cane beetle. Breeding so rapidly that they soon became a national nightmare, the giant toads (some of which weigh as much as two pounds and have come to be considered an environmental menace in both Hawaii and Australia) are now poisoning the baby fish in the acre-and-a-half lake Owsley created on his property. Shining an LED light on them, he sprays each one with Detsol, a liquid disinfectant much like Lysol that is highly toxic to them, throws each one into a bucket, and then dumps their corpses into the woods the next day. On a good night, Owsley will catch as many as 225 toads. During the past month, he has dispensed with 1,400 of them.

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. Wherever he goes, he carries an astonishing aluminum briefcase bedecked with wrinkled rock & roll stickers and ancient Grateful Dead backstage passes stuffed to the brim with precious scraps of platinum and gold from which he has fashioned his jewelry, a jeweler's loup so his pieces can be viewed at close range on black felt jeweler's boards, a small metric scale, a portable memory drive, numerous rolls of tape and a plethora of tiny plastic film containers. In every way, the briefcase reflects his mind.

As he cooks up the protein-rich soupy mixture that sustains him (composed, in part, of a thick gelatinous paste he makes by boiling down countless chicken legs), Owsley scrolls through digital photographs of his work on his laptop, burns a CD of his live mix of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and fills a tiny baggie with the Australian peppercorns he considers the finest in the world. 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. 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. For him, this is just another day on the road.


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Offlinefapjack
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: veggie]
    #14119819 - 03/14/11 02:59 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Saw Furthur yesterday and they were talking about Owsley's death.  He did a lot for the scene, RIP.


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OfflineWorld Seed SupplyV
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: fapjack]
    #14120654 - 03/14/11 05:37 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Just got a text about this from my friend. One of his friends was personal friends with Owsley and had spent time with him on his last visit to the U.S.  Very sad to hear this.


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InvisibleButtFace
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia *DELETED* [Re: World Seed Supply]
    #14121249 - 03/14/11 07:18 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Post deleted by TieACable2aTree

Reason for deletion: f



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Invisible4runner
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: ButtFace]
    #14122627 - 03/14/11 10:50 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Finally posted this on facebook, friends and family....

teared up.


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Offlinelucydforme
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: 4runner]
    #14122699 - 03/14/11 11:04 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

A sad death, but with each death comes a new beginning, and another will take his place @_@


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Funny story, this whole "world" that we know everything about, well, that's all good and well, but we know nothing about the rest of that vast everything we call the universe.

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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: ButtFace] * 1
    #14124234 - 03/15/11 09:14 AM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Quote:

TieACable2aTree said:




WOW.  Incredible. And it's so funny how he keeps turning so the camera can't see his face.


--------------------
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A pleasing land of drowsy head it was,
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye,
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Invisibledwpineal
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: Toe_Jam]
    #14129295 - 03/16/11 06:38 AM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Here's another video I just found online...

Acid King: Psychedelic Icon Owsley 'Bear' Stanley, Dead at 76.


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Invisibledwpineal
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: dwpineal]
    #14130668 - 03/16/11 12:54 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

This one's really interesting too...

http://chanceofrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Owsley-Me%C2%A0.htm

Owsley and Me

By Charles Perry (Rolling Stone, Nov. 25, 1982)

In 1967, he was world-famous, as famous as you can get while refusing all contact with the news media. The Grateful Dead wrote a song about him. People who’d never met him talked about what a beautiful cat he was and wore buttons with his name on them.

It was a name to conjure with: Owsley. Owsley, the psychedelic guerrilla the narcs couldn’t catch, the heroic chemist whose LSD was the world standard of quality; Owsley, the Acid Millionaire. The newspapers called him “Mr. LSD.” Timothy Leary wrote of him as “the Alchemist.” Between 1965 and 1967 he made several million doses of LSD.

He was an astonishing phenomenon of the times, and nobody was more astonished than I was, because I’d known him long before he was a chemist. In fact, his career sort of started at my commune. It was while he was living with us in 1964 that he first took acid.

When I say “commune,” I’m calling it that in retrospect, because in 1964 nobody was using the word. It was just a crummy Berkeley rooming house where everybody turned out to be very simpatico and we started eating all our dinners together. But it actually did turn into a commune that fall, because I introduced everybody to LSD and it got too hard to keep track of who was chipping in on dinner and who wasn’t.

Dopers were a tiny minority in those days, even in college towns where drugs were becoming a sneaky fashion. Dope was hard to get – we were still buying grass by the half or even the quarter ounce, and psychedelics were in very short supply – so it was a paranoid, conspiratorial scene. Acidheads were nervous about walking around in public stoned, which didn’t make much sense, since LSD was still legal. Most dopers wasted a lot of energy worrying about whether their neighbors were suspicious of them, but we were fortunate to live in a house where everybody turned on.

Just how fortunate, we realized in January, 1964, when somebody moved out and all sorts of pensioners and bag ladies started answering the room for rent sign.  Suddenly it looked as if our mellow scene was doomed, so when this guy in his late twenties checked out the room and started talking drugs within three minutes, we begged him to move in.

Forty-five minutes later, when he hadn’t stopped talking about drugs, we weren’t so sure he was cool. Not really tall, he had a sort of hulking manner anyhow, and a wary look, as if constantly planning an end run. We gathered that he was descended from an illustrious southern family – his full name, which he disliked and would legally shorten to “Owsley Stanley” in 1967, was Augustus Owsley Stanley III – and that he’d decided to go back to school after the breakup of his second marriage (and a subsequent legal scrape when he vengefully stole some credit cards from his ex-wife’s new boyfriend). But he had a more exotic perspective on himself. Sometimes he claimed to be a throwback to the carnivorous ape. Sometimes he boasted that, as a kid, he’d been at the same insane asylum as Ezra Pound.

Sometimes, in fact, our new roommate could be a little hard to take. His conversation was like a series of lectures: on the radar electronics he’d learned in the Air Force, the Russian grammar he’d studied when he was thinking of becoming a Russian Orthodox monk, the automotive technology he’d mastered while redesigning the engine of his MG. There were other obsessions too. When he moved into his room, he brought whole boxes full of weird stuff: ballet shoes, a complete beekeeper’s outfit, a painting in progress showing the arm of Christ on the cross, portrayed more or less from the Christ’s-eye viewpoint.

And he had all his theories to explain. Owsley was like the character in Naked Lunch who has “a theory on everything, like what kind of underwear is healthy.” He never ate dinner with us because he was an anti-vegetarian. He argued that since the human race is descended from carnivorous apes, our digestive system is designed for meat alone, and vegetables are slow poison. (He’d come to this theory after a vegetarian period, during which he’d started to lose his hair; it came back when he started staying away from veg.) Once, when he and I had smoked some hashish and developed a case of the blind munchies, all I had in my refrigerator was apple pie, and he accused me of trying to poison him. “I haven’t had any plant food in my system for years,” he groused between mouthfuls. “My digestion will be fucked up for a month.” (When you are in perfect health, he once explained, you pass “one firm, odorless stool every ten days.”)

Soap bubbles on the rooftop . . . events leading up to the powwow circle . . . eviction’s ugly face

The most surprising thing about Owsley was that this flagrant advocate for drugs had only been smoking grass for a couple of weeks when he moved in. He was making up for lost time, though. If you walked through the University of California campus with him, he’d be grabbing leaves and flowers and confiding in a paranoid hiss, “Horse chestnut leaves – they’ll get you high. Mullein leaves – get you high.” He had a huge stash of Heavenly Blue morning glory seeds, which contain an organic form of LSD along with some other organic stuff that gives you a million-year stomach ache. It ranked as a treasure trove, because the authorities had just gotten hip to the possibility of getting stoned on Heavenly Blues, and the seeds currently available in garden stores had all been denatured with something that made you even sicker. One of the first things Owsley did on moving into the commune was to order a rubber stamp reading “250 morning glory seeds . . . enough . . . $1,” and giving my phone number, because I was the only one in the commune with a phone. By the time he gleefully showed me this boss robber stamp he’d had made, he’d already stamped that message on every bulletin board on the Cal campus. Nobody ever called, though.

We were all novice acidheads, just entering the phase where you go questing for that world of vast, timeless reality-energy-bliss that LSD suggests is . . . well, here and now, actually, only at the same time it’s just around some indescribable corner. So we were listening to sitar records and reading about Zen and blowing soap bubbles on the rooftop and in general keeping an eye peeled for indescribable corners.

Owsley was furiously trying every mind-affecting drug he could find mentioned in the chemical literature. He tried LSD along the line, of course. We didn’t happen to have any, so he scored some through a crazy little waif we knew as the Speed Freak Heiress. But though he was enthusiastic about LSD, his reaction was curiously mild in light of what was to come.

One day he asked me, “Charlie, what do you think about spikes?”

I had to think for a second to recall that a spike was a hypodermic needle. “Uh, they’re wrong,” I said. “If God had meant you to take that drug, he’d have given you an orifice for it.”

“Thanks,” said Owsley. “I’m glad I could talk with you about it. I was wondering because I saw some people shooting methedrine today.”

Uh-oh, I thought, he’s still hanging out with the Speed Freak Heiress. Legend had it that her parents had once given her a mink coat in an attempt to reawaken her true sense of values, but she’d proceeded to wear it inside out so she could feel the fur against her skin. That was the squalid sort of life I associated with methedrine use, and I was glad I’d steered Owsley away from it.

The next day he had some more ideas about methedrine. He’d observed that meth freaks, whether out of greed or foolhardiness, seemed to make a point of keeping the needle in their veins until the last possible drop of geeze was punched in, even though that meant a repeated risk of embolism, that very dangerous situation of having a bubble of air in your bloodstream. Owsley’s theory was that speed freaks were probably giving themselves embolisms all the time – tiny ones, not big enough to cause heart failure, but big enough to make for little spots of brain damage.

And that’s why speed freaks had such spotty memories. That was why they were so freaky. Speed itself wasn’t at fault. No! Speed was . . . a tool!

So now, on top of all the other difficulties of having Owsley for a roommate, we had to put up with Owsley the amphetamine enthusiast, running around the commune at all hours, racing downstairs to ride his motorcycle at 3:30 a.m. Wherever you turned, there he’d be, trying to cajole you into a taste of dimethyl amphetamine or his favorite cocktail of dimeth and methedrine.

It got so bad we held secret meetings to consider how to get rid of him. After all, we had a groovy little scene here. Lots of people wanted to room with us, particularly this math student we knew. Somehow Owsley got wind of the plans and came tearfully pleading with us to let him stay and making out the other guy to be a bigger speed dealer than himself (which turned out to be true). We were kind of ashamed of ourselves and dropped the plans.

But there was still a lot of disapproval in the air, so to heal the philosophical breach with his friends, inside the commune and out, Owsley proposed that everybody give methedrine an honest trial. So one day a big powwow circle of 15 or 20 people gathered in his room and geezed up in a spirit of fair play.

It so happened that our landlord was a lonely Chinese bachelor who used to wander upstairs from time to time and make painful attempts at conversation. He chose this particular afternoon to stand in Owsley’s doorway and try one of his great conversational gambits – “Ah, nice weather we been having, ah?” was the one, I believe – on the powwow circle, which instantly turned into a huddle of teeth-grinding paranoids with eyes pingponging back and forth between the landlord and the damning pile of hypodermic needles in the middle of the floor.

After nobody would even agree that the weather had been nice, the landlord awkwardly excused himself and went back downstairs. Now the powwow circle was really paranoid, but Owsley was on top of things. “No,” he said, the light of inspiration in his eyes. “No, he’s not calling the police. He just realized we had something . . . beautiful here . . . and he was too shy to ask in! I’ll go offer to turn him on!” So we didn’t have to get rid of Owsley after all. The landlord evicted him on the spot.

By this time, Owsley had already dropped out of college and taken a job as a technician at KGO-TV in San Francisco. His conversational obsessions had narrowed to chemistry and particularly the synthesis of alkaloids. He’d also picked up a new girlfriend, a better class of chick in my opinion than he’d been getting with his motorcycle stud routine. She was a chemistry grad student named Melissa Cargill, a cute little honeybee with tender intellectual eyes whom he’d met one day while doing some unauthorized messing around in the Cal chem labs. In three days flat he pried her away from a boyfriend who smoked a pipe and wore tweed jackets with leather elbow patches and changed her mind about going on in grad school.

Bear Research Group founded . . . Owsley sues the state of California . . .

first LSD and freakout

I didn’t see Owsley for a couple of weeks after he moved out. I graduated from Cal and moved out of the commune myself. When I next ran into him, he showed me some stationery he’d had printed up for a fictitious Bear Research Group, through which he was going to order chemicals from the supply houses. It turned out I was part of his plan, because I’d just taken a job tending rats in the Psychology Department’s animal labs. In case some chemical company decided to inspect the Bear Research Group, where this research on “the effect of methedrine on the cortisone metabolism of rats” was supposedly going on, he wanted me to bring a dozen rat cages over to his place and stand around in my white lab coat.

Frankly, I hoped he’d never test our palship by calling on that favor. I didn’t want anything to do with his current scene, which consisted of hanging around with some truly sordid speed freaks, such as a guy who’d stand around all evening jerkily leafing through nudist magazines – front to back, back to front, front to back again – muttering, “Process. It’s all process,” while the other speed freaks in the room argued about who was alerting the police they imagined to be watching their every move by casting a shadow on the window shade.

I did drop by once in a while, though. I liked Owsley. He could be overbearing, sure, but it wasn’t ill-inspired – he wasn’t a bully. There was always something disinterested and nobly intentioned in his relentless enthusiasms.

And his ideas were never boring. For instance: Einstein’s theories imply that gravity is a function of matter, right? And it has been proposed, on a principle of symmetry, that there is an antiuniverse parallel to our own, made up of antimatter, right? What would happen if you transported some antimatter to this universe – and instantly sent it back, of course, before there was a cataclysmic explosion – many times a second? Why, gravity would be annulled in the area! Who knows what kind of machine could do this transporting of antimatter to our universe and back? Who knows, indeed, what strange circuits are locked away in the 90% of the human brain that is ordinarily unused?

And what could be the key to this antigravity machine in our minds? Might it be something as simple as the mandala-like pattern in a Persian rug . . . or flying carpet?

Owsley and Melissa were practically neighbors of mine at this time. I was living about three blocks from the “Green Factory,” the sprawling green house at Virginia and McGee streets where he said he was making methedrine. One night a friend of Owsley’s who’d been crashing there knocked at my door. On his way home from a folk music coffee house, he’d noticed that something looked wrong about the Green Factory. He thought it might have been busted.

We walked by the place. No sign of Billy, the guy who was supposed to be minding the place for Owsley while he was out of town. We picked up another of Owsley’s friends and debated what to do. As the only respectably employed member of the group, I was elected to call the police and find out whether Billy had been arrested – a dimwit ordeal of the time which involved asking the cops whether they’d arrested somebody while strenuously trying to give the impression that the very idea was unthinkable. Yes indeed, Billy was in jail, and the Green Factory had been raided.

We got hold of Melissa, who reflected for about a minute and a half before pouring a pound or so of methedrine down a Berkeley storm drain with the cheerful resignation she could always summon in a pinch. Owsley, however, would not prove resigned at all. When he got back to town, he had to face charges of operating a drug laboratory, but he was openly defiant during the trial. And once he got the case thrown out – though it was clearly a meth lab, couldn’t be described as anything else, in fact, the cops hadn’t found any actual methedrine there – he sued the state of California for the return of his lab equipment. It was his, and he meant to use it.

Owsley was through fooling around, by God. He and Melissa disappeared to Los Angeles for a few weeks to set up a new lab. It was not another meth lab. As a matter of fact, speed was becoming a matter of boredom and irritation with Owsley, and he was to become a vocal disparager of amphetamines. No, when he came back to Berkeley in April, 1965, what he claimed to have made was, to everybody’s surprise, LSD. I was skeptical. But what the hell – in those days, we’d take any damn pill; once I dropped three tabs I later found out were penicillin. Sure, I said, I’d try the “LSD”-dosed vitamin pill he handed me with one of his conspiratorial dope smiles.

I casually dropped it the next Sunday, and godalmighty it was LSD. In about 40 minutes I was two-dimensional, fading into the wall of the World Womb, which turned into the wall of an Egyptian tomb, and I was a painting of an ancient Egyptian on a tomb wall with hieroglyphics sprouting from my elbows and knees and disappearing down the wall too fast for my two-dimensional eyes to read. Now I had to face the basic question of the Sixties: “OK, I’m high – is it fun?” On some trips, that could be a tough call, but this time . . . no, it was clearly not fun. It was panicky. I walked a mile and a half to find a friend from the old commune to talk me down.

The next day I told Owsley I’d turned into a wall painting. “Oh, that’s right,” he said. “You had one of those first ones. Hey, they were too heavy. You should have only taken half.”

Owsley’s Valley Forge . . . the Sun King of Berkeley . . . Owsley as Obi-Wan

There was already a lot of psychedelic or proto-psychedelic ferment in the San Francisco area. Folk musicians, who were soon to prove so adept at writing music of, by and for acidheads, were following Bob Dylan’s lead in abandoning the acoustic guitar for the electric. The first local folk-rock band made its debut at a kind of hippie nightclub in Virginia City, Nevada; Owsley’s acid was there on opening night. His LSD showed up in all the Bay Area coffeehouses and all of San Francisco’s hip neighborhoods, where the coolest dudes were walking around in three-piece Edwardian suits from the secondhand stores, wearing rimless glasses with yellow-tinted lenses the size of quarters. They started having rock dances at the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom; Owsley was there, too. The novelist Ken Kesey started putting on public LSD parties called Acid Tests – LSD was still legal – and Owsley got himself instated as official donor of acid.

He started flying back to New York for strategy sessions with Timothy Leary at Leary’s home in Millbrook. “Leary may be the king in this little chess game,” he confided to me one day, “but what nobody realizes is that I’m the rogue queen.” His personal style – maverick, purist, aggressive – started having an impact on the psychedelic scene. LSD chemists had always been cautious, small-thinking men content to make a little acid and stay out of sight. Owsley, by contrast, had big plans: to make the strongest LSD and to make it in unprecedented quantities. By the summer of 1965 he already had the raw materials to make 1.5 million doses. When his strong, consistent LSD flooded the market, it had the effect of a munitions factory opening at Valley Forge. Not only did it get a lot of people high, it encouraged the idea of big projects. It gave a big shot in the arm to the boldness, the public outrageousness, that distinguished San Francisco acidheads from the yoga-studying, indoor-tripping acids in other parts of the country.

Owsley had a personal campaign to turn on musicians, whom he considered the key element of the psychedelic revolution. He was always backstage at the Fillmore and the Avalon trying to get them on his psychedelic wavelength. I even heard about a time when he chatted with Earl Scruggs, the bluegrass banjoist, using his best good-old-boy Southern manner, and then startled Scruggs by offering him LSD. On another occasion he returned from New York crowing that he’d met “Bobby Dylan,” and that Dylan hadn’t gotten upset “until I mentioned acid.” Somebody who was there at the time later told me how it went: He introduced himself by saying, “Hi, Bob, I’m Owsley. Want some acid?” and Dylan responded, “Who is this freak? Get him out of here!”

Characteristically, he got involved in rock and roll on the technical level. He gave $10,000 worth of electronic equipment to the Acid Test house band, which had just taken the name Grateful Dead. It was an unheard-of thing to do at the time, treating that low-class rock music as if it deserved hi-fi speakers and amps. He also started recording every Grateful Dead performance using inscrutable techniques of his own, such as mixing the sound with the aid of an oscilloscope.

For some months in 1965 and early 1966, Owsley was shuttling back and forth between his L.A. lab (where the Grateful Dead lived for a while) and Berkeley. As for me, after my near freak-out on Owsley’s first acid I’d decided I didn’t want to live alone anymore, so I started to room with some friends from the old Berkeley Way commune, including the chick who’d talked me down. When we moved out of her barn-like cottage on Berkeley Way, Owsley – who’d crashed there off and on himself – rented the cottage and settled there.

It was then that I started getting and idea of how much money he was making. Every afternoon, after he had arisen and taken an hour-long shower, a regular retinue of petitioners would present themselves like serfs pleading for boons from the king. I can still see Owsley there, listening warily but regally to their requests, enthroned in the nude on a huge fur-covered chair, drying his hair with the royal hairdryer.

One of his favorite pastimes was to take his indigent old friends out to dinner – to places, of course, that wouldn’t clutter up his plate with poisonous vegetables – and pay with the roll of $20 and $100 bills he kept in his boot. His favorite restaurant was Original Joe’s in San Francisco, where the steak was so good Owsley was convinced the chef had to be an acidhead. If Joe’s was closed, he’d take everybody to a Doggie Diner stand, order a double burger, extract the meat patties and eat them. Then he’d crumple up the bun, drop it on the table with a dull thud and announce to the world at large, “That’s what you’ve just put in you stomachs.”

Or he’d take us to a fancy seafood place in Berkeley. Once he assembled such a weird group there – I remember a huge black guy who ran with the Hell’s Angels and a hyper-intense guitarist who was showing everybody how his fingertips were bleeding after eight hours of sitar practice – that a lady came over to get our autographs for her daughter, convinced that we had to be a rock band, she couldn’t think of our name but her daughter would kill her if she didn’t get the autographs.

One time, it happened that I was the only one going along with Owsley to dinner. We couldn’t get into his regular seafood place, so we went to a marginally less fancy one up the block. When his order of oysters came, though, Owsley declared them inedible --the “gizzards” had been sliced into when they’d been opened. He lectured the waiter on the correct way to open an oyster and the general disregard for quality in our age. The waiter got the maitre d’, and they brought out the chef. The owner even came out, and all four of them stood in a row to be lectured. The problem, Owsley told them, was that they evidently didn’t have the right kind of oyster knife. “My business often takes me to New York,” he said (I momentarily blanched, since LSD had just become illegal), “and I’d be glad to get you a proper knife.”

A new plate of oysters was brought out, but Owsley declared that the gizzards had again been cut. Again he returned it, repeating his lecture to the waiter, and a third plate was brought. Again the gizzards had been cut. When a fourth plate of oysters was sent to the table, he pronounced that only a few of the gizzards had been cut this time, and he would eat the oysters lest he be thought a troublesome customer. There was also a problem with the pot of tea, something having to do with Owsley’s instruction that it be served “Russian style.”

A year later, Owsley and I happened to go for dinner again and wound up in the same place. “Mister Stanley,” said the maitre d’, his eyes narrowing as he smiled. “I remember you.” Owsley again ordered oysters and again sent them back.

One thing about Owsley: He was never afraid to be conspicuous. He had already adopted the turquoise-belt finery that border patrolmen would later call “the dealer look.” His theory was that cops don’t register outrageousness, only the furtive attempt to be inconspicuous, so if you don’t give paranoia an inch, you’ll never get busted. Of course, it helps to have nerves of steel, which Owsley certainly had. More than once I saw him hypnotize a suspicious Highway Patrolman with his absolute confidence that the officer couldn’t possibly be looking for him. It was like the scene in Star Wars where Obi-Wan Kenobi bollixes an Imperial Stormtrooper. (“These aren’t the acidheads you want. They can go.”)

Manufacturing and marketing practices of the Bear Research Group . . .

Troll House days

One day he told me, with justifiable pride, “My name is a household word in London and New York.” It was true. LSD was all over the avant-garde circuit by late 1966, and Owsley’s acid was the undisputed standard of the industry. For a while, he ran around with two little vials of crystalline LSD, one a pale straw color and the other, as he put it, “pure fluffy white”; guess which LSD was made by the Sandoz chemical company and which came from the Bear Research Group. Early on, rival dealers were claiming to sell “genuine Owsley,” and Owsley took some interesting steps to deal with this.

In the beginning, he had sold acid in powdered form, ready for packing in gelatin capsules or, if you preferred, already capped. He also sold it in liquid form suitable for dosing sugar cubes with an eyedropper. The liquid form was tinted pale blue, the exact shade of Wisk laundry detergent, so you could keep it in a carefully cleaned out Wisk bottle. If you were a prudent acid dealer, you always had a duffel bag full of dirty laundry in your back seat to legitimize your Wisk bottle containing 4000 hits of acid. (“Yes, officer, have you tried new, improved Wisk?”)

In 1966, Owsley stole a march on his competition by buying a pill press and making the first illicitly manufactured LSD tablets in history. That first press made irregular-looking pills that were sort of like the tubes of paper that build up in a paper punch (they were nicknamed “barrels”), but then he got a professional pill press that made pharmaceutical-style pills with a hairline crack so you could split them in half.

And finally, to keep the counterfeiters off his trail for good, he began injecting each new batch with food coloring. I distinctly remember pink, green, purple, orange and brown as well as white tabs (the famous White Lightnings that were handed out by the thousands at the Human Be-In celebration in January, 1967). At one point, when he was on the outs with the Grateful Dead, he started hanging around with a band called Blue Cheer and helped publicize them by putting out a line of blue-tinted LSD.

Some writers have described LSD tablets with Batman or Marvel Comics characters on him, but I never saw any, and frankly, considering Owsley’s equipment, I can’t imagine how he could have made them; I suspect some hippies were just having a little fun with the reporters. I would not put the idea of Spider-Man acid beyond Owsley, though. He was heavily into Marvel Comics and insisted that we call his hulking old red truck “the Dreaded Dormammu,” after the megalomaniacal villain of Dr. Strange comics.

I never worked in any of Owsley’s labs. I didn’t have the time, because I was still holding down my animal caretaking job, and working in an acid lab could take a week or ten days out of your life. LSD is an incredibly powerful substance. A single gram of the pure drug can supply 4000 trips, and a little white speck you could barely see is enough to kill you. Once the LSD is synthesized, the most important job is to grind it exceedingly fine and then disperse it evenly in an inert medium such as dextrose. (Fortunately – or naturally, as it seemed to us -- LSD fluoresces under ultra-violet light, making even dispersal easy). After it’s dispersed, you can put it in capsules or make it into tablets.

The problem with all these jobs – grinding, dispersing, capping and tabbing – is that LSD would always get on your skin and into your lungs, and inevitably you’d be stoned. Nothing seemed to prevent it, not even scuba suits. Eventually, the people who worked in the labs decided not to bother with any precautions and just worked until they couldn’t concentrate any longer. Then they’d go wait out the eight or ten hours of the acid trip in a “cooling-off chamber,” get some sleep and go to work again. After a week or so of working on and off around the clock, half-gooned most of the time, the job would be done and Owsley would pay each worker with a couple of hundred tabs of acid apiece.

He once outlined his distribution plans to me. He would have one principal dealer in every market, who would only sell the acid to street dealers on the condition that they would resell it at no more than $2 per hit. Eventually he planned to make LSD available at 25 cents a hit. I don’t know how this marketing plan worked out in practice, but at least in rough outline it did seem to work that way in California and some East Coast cities. In Los Angeles, he had two dealers. One was for the Hollywood-Beverly Hills-Sunset Strip crowd. According to rumor, the other dealer – a black guy who was living with a Unitarian minister’s daughter – was chosen because Owsley hoped he would get LSD into the black community. Actually, I don’t think he ever dealt to anybody but Pasadena hippies, but he was a heck of a nice guy.

I’ve heard it said that Owsley was a master at calculating when the market could use more product and, conversely, that he would have had a lot more acid on the market if his manufacturing or distribution had been better organized. For what it’s worth, Owsley has told me that he released a new batch of acid whenever he was curious about what the result would be, as one might water a strange plant at different intervals to see how it grows: “I would sit back and wait, and sure enough, ten days or two weeks after a batch went out, there would be a whole rash of new developments in the Haight-Ashbury.”

He ascribed this reaction to the psychic effect of LSD, which I don’t doubt, but there was an economic effect as well. Acid was now big business. Owsley demanded to be paid in $100 bills, nothing larger or smaller. Sometimes when a new batch came out, there wouldn’t be a $100 bill to be found in any bank within 60 miles of San Francisco. When a new batch arrived, the dealers would have lots of money, and since everybody figured the money would keep rolling in like this forever, they were throwing some of their profit into shops, theaters, rock bands, publications and so on. Owsley himself contributed money or quantities of acid to Haight-Ashbury institutions such as the psychedelic newspaper The Oracle, the anarchist theater group known as the Diggers (who were famous for giving out free food in Golden Gate Park) and the free publishing company called the Communication Company, which placed its mimeographs at the disposal of anybody who wanted to print something and pass it out on Haight Street.

Sometime in the spring of 1967, Owsley moved into an ultra-quaint cottage on Valley Street in Berkeley and filled it with Persian rugs, hi-fi equipment, Indian fabrics, Tibetan wall hangings, pillows, hash pipes, musical instruments made by his personal guitar maker and all sorts of electronic toys, such as ultraviolet lamps and strobe lights. He’d decided that Melissa’s totem animal was the owl, so he got her a pet owl that was always escaping from its cage. My supposed professional skills as an animal caretaker were often called on to lure the bird back to its cage.

The Troll House, as some people called it, was a regular stopover for the transcontinental psychedelic elite, from Richard Alpert (later known as Baba Ram Dass) to out-of-town rock musicians. There was usually somebody trying to sleep on the pillow-strewn floor while the 24-hour-a-day party lurched along. I dropped by every week or so to see the latest wrinkle: ether-extracted THC, the advance copy of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or whatever.

A whole raft of new psychedelics

and several trips up Butterscotch Creek without a mind

It was the summer of 1967. I had quit my animal-caretaking job to devote all my time to playing oboe with the Tampai Gyentsen (Banner of the Faith) Tibetan Liturgical Orchestra. Owsley was changing his personal style every couple of weeks: sailorish garb, the Prince Valiant and so on. LSD had been illegal since October, 1966, and the raw materials were getting scarce. One day Owsley had showed me a letter from the Cyclo Chemical Company, which apologized that it wouldn’t be able to sell him any more raw lysergic acid. I remember laughing when I saw the name of the CEO who signed the letter: Dr. Milan Panic. Curiously, this was the same Milan Panic who would return to his home country of Serbia in the 1990s and become its president under prime minister Slobodan Milosevic.

But Owsley confided to me that the new laws against LSD wouldn’t make any difference. “We’ve got a whole raft of new psychedelics,” he crowed in his peculiarly cagey way, “and they’re gonna have to make each one illegal separately. We’re gonna keep ’em running for years, and by that time, everybody will have been turned on!” Once everybody had been turned on, as all acidheads knew, history would be a whole new ball game.

These new drugs were chemically related to both methedrine and mescaline, the psychedelic found in peyote cactus. The first one Owsley marketed was 2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine, which picked up the nickname STP. I took an STP tab one Saturday and got so stoned that for three days it made no difference whether my eyes were opened or closed, I was seeing the same things. In fact, there was no difference between anything and anything else, except that sounds were like wood shavings curling in freeze-frame motion, while smells were more like subtly different levels of vibration with smoke coming out of them.

I told Owsley that this stuff had turned the world into a river of butterscotch for three days running. “Oh, that’s right,” he said, in almost the same words I’d heard after guinea-pigging his first LSD. “You had one of those pink ones. Hey, they were too heavy. You should have only taken half.”

STP flopped in the market. Not many people, it seemed, had three days at a time to spend in the butterscotch dimension, and there were a lot of freak-outs. Alas, it never got publicized that Owsley had a second purpose in mind for STP. In the Haight-Ashbury, by then a teeming Calcutta of hippie dopers, methedrine was making a resurgence to the detriment of the psychedelic mood. As a reformed speeder who had totally turned against amphetamines, Owsley hoped STP would wean speeders toward a more spiritual trip. His theory was that if you took only 1/16 of a tab, you would get something like an amphetamine lift without the ugly speediness.

I tried it once when I needed to stay awake driving back from Los Angeles to Berkeley. Around Gorman, about an hour out of L.A., I started feeling funny and stopped off at a gas station. When I looked in the bathroom mirror, I saw that my right pupil was huge and my left one was tiny; then the right pupil contracted and the left pupil dilated. They were alternating size like that every five or ten seconds.

Owsley falls at last . . . How to cope with prison . . . Of stereo & a vexed mix

Owsley had somehow managed to avoid the police since the Green Factory bust. They seemed to realize that here was no ordinary dope chemist. In fact, when I got busted for grass with an old friend of his, I discovered that Owsley had the vice-mayor of Berkeley on retainer as his attorney. In the late spring of 1967, Owsley had gotten busted while driving away from Leary’s place in Millbrook, but that was just a blunder-bust, a case of some New York highway cops stumbling onto a trunk full of dope, and the charge didn’t stick.

But there was no denying that the narcs were on his trail. One day a bunch of us dropped by the workshop of Owsley’s favorite glass blower, who was about to retire and literally sail around the world on the money Owsley was paying him for some highly specialized lab equipment, and the guy casually remarked, “Oh, Owsley, some federal agents were by here the other day showing me photos of you and asking whether I’d ever seen this person. They were rather good likenesses. You were in them too,” he added, nodding toward one of my roommates.

Finally, in December of 1967, with the Haight-Ashbury experiment collapsed into a monstrous stew of methedrine, heroin and strong-arm crime, the narcs finally got Owsley. The guy I’d gotten busted for grass with was living with a chick from the old commune who was dancing topless in a San Francisco bar. Convention seemed to decree that a topless dancer’s boyfriend should be a dealer; he got a job in Owsley’s lab and started dealing the LSD he got paid in.

Unfortunately, he dealt to one of the narcs who’d had Owsley under surveillance for the preceding 14 months. On December 21, 1967, federal narcotics agents entered Owsley’s current lab and arrested him along with Melissa, this hapless dealer and two other friends of mine. Owsley was in a spitting rage. He was making all his drugs to FDA standards of purity, he protested; why weren’t the cops out arresting criminals? The San Francisco Chronicle ran a fine dramatic photo of the police leading Owsley away in handcuffs, defiant and resentful.

Everything had started to change. My Tibetan orchestra had fallen apart. The psychedelic revolution wasn’t panning out. I gravitated toward a pitifully small but energetic newspaper called Rolling Stone, which occupied an unused corner of a San Francisco printer’s loft. After a couple of months, I realized, to my surprise, that I was now a journalist.

Owsley was just beginning a five-year legal ordeal. While his LSD lab case was dragging through the courts, he got busted for marijuana a couple of times, once in New Orleans with the Grateful Dead and once in Oakland when a landlord finked on him while he was sluggishly vacating an apartment he’d been evicted from. Eventually, he was sent to prison for two years, serving part of his sentence at Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution in Los Angeles and part at Lompoc Federal Penitentiary near Santa Barbara.

Lompoc isn’t so bad, as prisons go. It’s a white-collar jail; some of the Watergate conspirators served time there. It reminded me of my high school campus, except that you couldn’t go home after sixth period.

The first time I visited Owsley there, I had to wait almost to the end of the visitors’ hour. The guards weren’t surprised; they were accustomed to inmate Stanley’s peculiarities. Finally he arrived, out of breath, with a belt buckle he’d started making for me when my name was announced over the loudspeakers. It was quite striking: a lion’s head (since I’m a Leo, I’m told) boldly composed of drops of molten brass.

Owsley not only had a jewelry lab in prison but all sorts of hi-fi and electronic equipment as well. The prison authorities were too damnably narrow-minded to provide such things, so he had been obliged to have them all smuggled in – out on the visitors’ lawn for the smaller things and under a pew in the chapel for big stuff like tape decks. The joke around Lompoc was that when Owsley was released, he’d have to leave in a Bekins van.

The second time I visited him, I actually brought him some little piece of electronic equipment he needed, I forget what it was. But this time my visit was business. Rolling Stone wanted an interview with Owsley. Owsley, however, had always fought shy of reporters, and the proposal needed a lot of discussing.

It seemed that while Owsley was in jail, Janis Joplin had died and a memorial album of her live performances had been put together, including three tracks recorded by Owsley. He had been paid – no complaint on that score. But he had recorded Janis according to his own theories about stereo (voices in one channel, instruments in the other), and Columbia Records had remixed the three tracks into conventional stereo for the Joplin in Concert album. He wasn’t after more money, he emphasized. He simply wanted the record company to recall the albums and reissue them with his original mix of the three tracks. Columbia, however, was ignoring all his letters.

So before Owsley could consider granting Rolling Stone an interview, the paper would have to show its bona fides by planting a news item suggesting that “word was out on the street” that there was “something funny” about the stereo separation on some tracks of Joplin in Concert. We found a DJ who was willing to say there was something funny about anything that exists, and I put together an item that fit the bill. But after I had thus sullied my journalistic karma, Owsley reneged – he charged that we were only interested in his drug career and any interview would caricature him as a mere chemist and has-been. Under the circumstances, he said, the best he could do for us would be to write an essay on Marshall McLuhan. Which he would sign “Publius.”

Well, so much for that.

Some men are not born to be components

It was toward the beginning of 1973 that I next saw Owsley. He was out of jail, and I ran across him at the Grateful Dead’s recording studio in San Francisco. There was a wild light in his eye. “Have you seen Joplin in Concert on the charts lately?” he asked. The album had been on the best-seller charts for the better part of a year at that point. “It’s slipping,” he said significantly. “Sales are down.”

Uh-oh. He actually believed “word had gotten out” about the funny stereo mix on three tracks of Joplin in Concert and people were swearing off buying extra copies of it.

Owsley’s life had changed a lot since 1967. He couldn’t afford his old flamboyance after the LSD factory bust; the money wasn’t coming in any longer. In 1974 he told a federal judge he had lost most of his savings in bad investments, to say nothing of legal fees, gifts and toys and a solid diet of flank steak. Of course, there was no question of returning to his old business, not the way he has been watched since 1966. His once-consuming interest in drugs had dwindled anyway, gone along with motorcycles and beekeeping into the conflagration of burned bridges he leaves behind him.

Even before going to prison, Owsley had been working for the Grateful Dead, which is a huge extended family and always manages to find a place for everybody. For the most part, he worked their sound equipment and consulted with their hi-fi lab and recording studio – all perfectly logical, since the Dead’s hi-fi interests are something Owsley infected them with in the first place. He continued doing this sort of thing for the Dead off and on after leaving prison, and he also worked with other San Francisco bands, even road-managing some tours.

He engineered a number of recording sessions and even produced some albums. On rare occasion, he did ultra-low-profile promo work for advanced studio sound equipment that met his obsessive standards. It seems his approval has some weight in hi-fi circles.

The jewelry shop he put together in jail also opened up a new range of activity for him. He became a sometime artist, turning out jewelry and small sculptures that combine a sort of blunt occult humor with minimalist refinements of technique. It’s led him to new quests, such as the perfect bell metal, with the aim of making bells that would ring for minutes on end when struck.

In the early ’80s, he had moved to a rustic home up the coast from San Francisco. He was living a very private life, but apart from no longer being a drug manufacturer, he was living as he always has. Surrounded by audio equipment, oriental rugs, occult books, African masks and welding tools, he continued to puzzle out the mysteries of the universe. He’d pace around the living room, drawing unexpected parallels: A biochemistry text illustrates the same philosophical principle made in his latest sculpture, which in turn bears out his theory on the historical ramifications of the development of ultra hi-fi.

Strangely, he wouldn’t talk much about the old days or what it all meant. He’s never been much of a reminiscer; he’s always engrossed in current projects. Sometimes he’d speak of what he’d done as a chemist as a humble attempt to “raise the level of bossness,” but he’d quickly lose interest in the subject.

Back in the ’60s, I always had the impression that he was not committed to any particular theory of what was going on but only riding this dragon to see where it led. Certainly he used to entertain theories about it that nobody else was willing to contemplate. For instance, it was a commonplace in 1967 that LSD was causing a sort of accelerated evolution of the human race, but only Owsley came up with this twist: “What if LSD was not discovered by Albert Hoffman in the 1940s, but revealed to him by beings from another planet who want us to evolve because they can use evolved intelligences as components in some immense, inconceivable machine of theirs? And when we’ve taken enough LSD, when we’re ripe, they’ll . . . harvest us?”

Actually, I think about that theory sometimes when I come across somebody I haven’t seen since 1968 or so. Some of them look distinctly harvested.

Not Owsley, though. In fact, if I were to give advice to any alien intelligences, it would be this: “Nix. Don’t try to harvest this one. You don’t know what you’re in for.”


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Invisiblebryguy27007
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: veggie]
    #14130942 - 03/16/11 01:29 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Quote:

veggie said:
Excellent article from Rolling Stone that originally appeared in the July 12-27, 2007 issue ...





Thank you for posting that article. It was a great read.


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OfflineMoonraker
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: dwpineal]
    #14133915 - 03/16/11 09:56 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Great article dwpineal. I really enjoyed reading that.


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A human race with more highly developed spiritual capacities, with expanded consciousness of the depth and the incomprehensible wonder of being, would also have greater understanding of and better consideration for the biological and material foundation of life on this earth, Above all, for Western people with their hypertrophied rationality, the development and expansion of a direct, emotional experience of reality, unobstructed by words and concepts, would be of evolutionary significance.

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.

To fall in hell or soar angelic,
You need a pinch of psychedelic.


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Invisiblemuistrue
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: Moonraker]
    #14134010 - 03/16/11 10:14 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Quote:

Moonraker said:
Great article dwpineal. I really enjoyed reading that.




Agreed. Both of those Rolling Stone articles were really great reads.


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InvisibleMasonsChild
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: muistrue]
    #14135009 - 03/17/11 02:17 AM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Only met you once, but miss you brother.
...Singin' THANK YOU!, for a real good time.


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Truckin' ain't for Sally's


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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: MasonsChild]
    #14135171 - 03/17/11 03:22 AM (12 years, 10 months ago)

I'd love to hear that story. What was Owsley like?


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Offlinesaxx
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: waves]
    #14140841 - 03/18/11 12:19 AM (12 years, 10 months ago)

Car crash :tinfoil:


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sucking dick for drink tickets
at the free bar at my cousin's bat mitzvah

zappateer said:
I'm not wasting time at school. I'm gaining hella knowledge and life experience, not trying to use my degree for financial gain.


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OfflineLearyfanS
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: muistrue]
    #14144539 - 03/18/11 05:55 PM (12 years, 10 months ago)

WTF, I JUST heard about this. 

:heartpump:  :sad:  :heartpump:












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--------------------------------


Mp3 of the month:  The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday



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Invisibledwpineal
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: Learyfan]
    #14180711 - 03/25/11 07:27 AM (12 years, 10 months ago)



Found this poem that was written by Robert Hunter as a memorial for Owsley and read at his funeral;

http://www.philzone.org/discus/messages/439459/637346.html?1300939178

An Anthem for The Bear

Augustus Owsley Stanley the Third
being less a name than a designation,
the bearer of the appellation became,
of his own inspiration, The Bear.

Thus he became and thus remained
and every old timer worth salt has
a tale or two to tell regarding same:
of the time The Bear did this or that
incredibly singular, utterly apposite
action without apology or shame
to his own particular undying fame.

Unreachable, unteachable, aflame
in the light of his own magnificence
reflected in deeds dwarfing the achievements
of the run-of-the-mill creative sort
by a factor of ten or more,
King of Many Things was he
of mortal physiology,
the soul’s chemistry,
geography, geology,
not to mention the
applied physics of sound,
regarding which, deaf in one ear,
he pronounced stereo to be
a distraction affording only
one perfect seat in the house
upon which to work its elusive illusion
setting himself to design the world’s
most powerful hi-fi system to prove it!

One suspects that, had he but one leg
he’d have seen the advantage in that
and invented accordingly, ingeniously
and, it goes without saying, successfully.

Lovable and loving in the abstract
effusiveness was not his hold card;
his judgments swift, certain and irrevocable
the last word was his personal property.
For the few times he was wrong
there is no accounting.

Was there ever a man who changed so many
while, himself, changing so little?
A Cardinal Sign, were there ever one,
fixed like a bright white star in dark-blue heaven.



Save sentimental eulogies for lesser men
and leave it that he was King of Many Things,
of perfected personal taste and detailed opinion,
first and last a scientist and propounder
of a brand new species of reason.

No bucolic Heaven for such as Bear,
rather a Rock of Ages from where
an eagle in full flight might dare
a sudden detour into endless dawn.
Sail on, dear brother Bear, sail on

Robert Hunter
March 20, 2011


Edited by dwpineal (03/25/11 07:32 AM)


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Offlinenotapillow
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: dwpineal] * 1
    #15847668 - 02/22/12 02:20 PM (11 years, 11 months ago)

Resurrecting a post here, but its an important one

i have not been around much, and never got a chance to be a part of this thread. Bear meant alot to me, not just cus of what he stood for in the world of phychedelica, or for his contributions to the grateful Dead

Bear represented a true direct current, someone able to tune in beyond all the bullshit, and see what others could not. In the months leading up to his death i found myself thinking of him alot. readin any interviews i could find, researching story's, and just kinda soaking up the man as best i could. i felt obsessed

The night before his passing i was in tahoe, i spent the night walking around in the snow with a close friend. She, as a young girl, had actually met bear with her parents. both of us wandered along under the stars. sharing our fears our dreams and our company. the moon shimmering down on snowy mountains creating a glowing rainbow effect.. a beautiful night
that night i lay down to sleep outside in the snow. I created a little den, not unlike a bear. and curled up in the covers and went to bed. my dreams where invested with snakes and with blood. with a feeling off loss and tragedy, uncomfortable feelings flowed though me all night. in the morning we packed up, got in the car and headed down the mountain. as we where driving i looked at my phone, saw a text. i read it...and then dumbfounded turned to my friend and sayed "bear died"...
hard to convey the way it felt. a great teacher. a person i felt protected us by just being on the planet was gone....

in the weeks preceding this i had been really interested in bears obsession with earthquakes and storms... cataclysmic earth changing events.. such as nuclear meltdowns
this was why he moved to australia.

as soon as he was gone, the earthquake came, hitting japan, causing the melt down he sooo feared, that for all we know is still going....
the earth shall cry without bear

the way all these things lined up was too much for me, it may all seem coincidental to most. but where my head and heart was at those few months made bears death left a huge smoking crater in my spirit


these events have shaped me, they where key in me becoming who i am today, and going where i am now going.


i love you all
bless


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OfflineLightShedder
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: notapillow] * 1
    #15847718 - 02/22/12 02:33 PM (11 years, 11 months ago)

I'm glad to hear a story like that about what you were doing the night he passed. I too have a very sentimental memory of the time.... the night was march 12th (my first son's 3rd birthday), and I was very close to my house at the first bank center in broomfield, colorado at a string cheese incident. That night, I was looking for mushrooms in the lot, but surprisingly, for the first time ever, there were absolutely NO mushrooms to be found. Interestingly, with the lack of mushrooms, literally every other person was offering doses. Seriously, while not being able to find any mushrooms that night, I was honestly offered doses from over 50 people at least. A buddy of mine also got hooked up with some super good L from a friend of his who owed him money... he literally got 40 hits for 40 bucks... and it was super super strong good L. Anyways, that night in the show, string cheese did this crazy theatrical performance for the winter carnival, you can check it out on youtube. Basically, they had this crazy peak experience during the second set that was sycnhed up with go-go dancers up on big levitating dance platforms throughout the audience, then aerial acrobats started hanging around dangerously on cloths all over the arena, all the while there were these string cheese faimly cats parading throughout the crowd in winter/spring attire, then it finally peaked with people bungi-jumping from hidden locations all throughout the crowd from the ceiling... basically, I didn't end up eating any psychedelic that night but that peak experience was the most intense moment I've ever had in a show, and I felt exactly like I was on LSD.... so there are more things I could share, but I wanna get to the end point which is that, Owsley died that night, and immediately after this, I noticed a change in my personality and, without going too much into detail, I want to say that God placed a certain magical culture in my possession immediately after he passed through miraculous circumstances which will allow me to pursue my dreams/destiny....

Owsley holds a special place in my heart and I also had mystical events occurring in my life around the time of his death...

peace be with you bear:heart:


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OfflineMoondanceDan
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Re: Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia [Re: LightShedder]
    #15930774 - 03/10/12 07:49 PM (11 years, 10 months ago)

Pillow- great story man. It truely is a shame that such an icon passed. He will be greatly remembered by many. In my book Owsley was a member of the dead


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“You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.”
Terrence Mckenna


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