Its something that goes from being absolutely inert to so powerful that twenty-five micrograms will cause a change in your consciousness, he says. In June 1956, he enlisted in the United States Air Force as an electronics specialist, serving for 18 months (including stints at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Edwards Air Force Base's Rocket Engine Test Facility) before being discharged in 1958. We were officially granted 501(c)(3) nonprofit status by the IRS in December 2012. Lansing State Journal (MI.) How many people can say that? Owsley also credits his all-meat diet for keeping him alive. Just to show you. [17] He both financed them and worked with them as their first sound engineer. Concerning Owsleys legacy to the Dead from this period, Dennis McNally, the bands biographer, says, Bear gave them a vision of quality that quite frankly influenced them for the next thirty years. Because you were. The sound of Jerry Garcias guitar grabbed hold of Owsley, and he freaked out on acid for the first time. Owsley Stanley 1935-2011 'Bear' helped Grateful Dead, made LSD. Stanley was the Dead's audio engineer, longtime friend, and perhaps the most notable LSD chemist in the 1960s. 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. For him, this is just another day on the road. All donations to the Owsley Stanley Foundation are fully tax deductible. His friends just knew him as The Bear. Bob Matthews, who had been mixing since my departure, did not want to completely relinquish the mixing desk, which was a total pain in the ass for me, since he was basically a studio engineer and no match for my live mixing ability." It was the most dangerous, underpaid job I ever had in my life, he says.I was never a real grower. 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. Owsley Stanley. Based on past evidence, the sea will rise 300 meters, and life in some places will be entirely destroyed. Those were all allegories. Add to Favorites Dancing Bear patch, Grateful Dead patch, Owsley Stanley patch, Iron on patch, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Dead and Company, Shakedown . The police were looking for methamphetamine but found only LSD, which was not illegal at the time. Youre dealing with part of the unconscious mind that they used to define as angels and devils. Greenfield's book, which is full of anecdotes and insight, tracks Stanley's life from his early days in the South through his final years in Australia. He participated in a low carb forum where he shared his experience with and knowledge about eating a diet comprised entirely of animal foods. There were no greens or anything he called it rabbit food. , Nor was there any point in trying to argue with Owsley about it. Celebrating 50 years of New Riders of the Purple Sage, the Owsley Stanley Foundations fourth release takes you back in time to the early days when this band was just getting started. 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. The Wall of Sound fulfilled Owsley's desire for a distortion-free sound system that could also serve as its own monitoring system. As above, so below. We called it the microcosm and the macrocosm. [18] Along with his close friend Bob Thomas, Stanley designed the band's iconic 'Steal Your Face' lightning bolt-skull logo. If you wanted to be an idiot and do something any way but his, that was your decision. 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. He, Scully, and Melissa Cargill (a skilled chemist and Cargill family scion who became Stanley's girlfriend following an introduction by Susan Cowper, a former girlfriend) set up a lab in the basement. The reason is that Im a total carnivore. 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. Soil in Latest 'Bear's Sonic Journals' Release", "1960s LSD Figure Owsley Stanley Dies In Crash Entertainment News Story WISC Madison", "Jimi Hendrix inspiration and LSD producer Owsley Stanley dies", "Owsley Stanley Obituary - Owsley Stanley Funeral - Legacy.com", "Complete transcript of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker in a BBC-Online Chat, March 4, 2000", "Kid Charlemagne: A Close Reading Of Steely Dan's Ode to Haight Street's LSD King", "Producer Sujoy Sarkar Drops Enigmatic Debut Album 'Sitting At Strawberry Fields Cause I Met Owsley on the Way', Celebstoner.com report of Owsley Stanley's Death, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Owsley_Stanley&oldid=1142575554, Owsley's association with Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead is described in Tom Wolfe's, A newspaper headline identifying Stanley as an "LSD Millionaire" ran in the, Stanley is mentioned by his first name in the song ", Stanley is mentioned in the title of Sujoy Sarkar's debut album, This page was last edited on 3 March 2023, at 05:21. 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 February 21st, 1965, police raided the house and confiscated various chemicals, including a substance they wrongfully identified as speed. There are three septic systems on the property, a hot tub, three kitchens and a large gym where he works out regularly. Although no man knows the exact time, we feel that time is very near! This should set the Buckley-sphere on Fire! Augustus Owsley Stanley III, better known as "Bear," was the Grateful Dead's first live sound engineer, the group's benefactor in their early years, and arguably the most famous manufacturer and distributor of LSD the world has ever known. 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. Our planets 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. 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. 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. For the Dead, the good news was that they now had nothing to do all day but jam. By accounts, in early 1967 Owsley "Bear" Stanley (click on the links for Part One and Part Two of this series) had stashed away $225,000 in a safe deposit box at Manufacturers Hanover Trust, $320,000 in various accounts around San Francisco, and an unspecified amount at a bank in London. He kept the LSD in an inexpensive footlocker that traveled constantly on Greyhound buses between Oakland, San Jose and San Francisco. According to Rolling Stone,[25] everyone in the band except Ron "Pigpen" McKernan and Tom Constanten - neither of whom used psychedelic drugs - was included in the arrest, along with several members of their retinue, including Stanley and some locals. . Im not really interested in talking about myself, he says. It was amazing, he told Jerry Garcia biographer Blair Jackson. Signed & Numbered Augustus Owsley Stanley III Mark Serlo Psychedelic LSD Blotter Art Psychedelic Acid Free Paper Ad vertisement by PremiumBlotter. Get the full owsleystanleyfoundation.org Analytics and market share drilldown here As the water boils, he packs up a Braun food mixer and the vast array of other gadgets he carries with him. Lexington was blown out from under Owsleys father during the Battle of the Coral Sea in World War II, he began drinking heavily and became a lifelong alcoholic. You have to be very careful, because there are all these warnings. All donations and proceeds from the development of the recordings flow back into the effort to preserve more of Bears Sonic Journals and perpetuate Owsleys legacy, including patronage of the arts in all of its forms. This article appeared in the July 12-27, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone. . It is a 36 point lead type-slug of a . Global warming: the panic, is based exclusively on temperate-zone land measurements and ignores the fact that the planet is seventy percent ocean. March 14, 2011. A year later, Mario Savio made his historic Free Speech Movement address from atop a police car to student protesters gathered outside Sproul Hall. The Owsley Stanley Foundation is a 501c(3) non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of Bears Sonic Journals, Owsleys archive of more than 1,300 live concert soundboard recordings from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, including recordings by Miles Davis, Johnny Cash, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, and more than 80 other artists across nearly every musical idiom. That was his strength and his flaw. In prison, Owsley got himself assigned to the kitchen. The new lab was set up in the basement of a house across the street from the Denver Zoo in early 1967. The Denver Post (CO.) Press & Sun . Theyre extremely glucose-avid. Link to comments by the Bear on a low carb forum back in 2006. His nickname, Bear, reputedly was inspired by the profuse . His ashes were placed on the soundboard at the celebration of the Grateful Dead's 50th anniversary at the Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead shows in Chicago, on July 35, 2015. February 11, 13, & 14, 1970, The Boarding House, May 1 May 4, 1974Seven CD Set. Ifeel as if Ive known you through many lifetimes., You have, Owsley replied, and you will through many more to come.. 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. Courtesy Legacy. sulver buckle. The Japanese don't write in alphabetic writing; they write in pictographs. He lived in a picturesque Berkeley cottage filled with high-end stereo equipment where he kept an owl to which he fed live mice. This live concert recording features recently discovered and previously unreleased music from Jefferson Airplanes fabled guitar and bass players before they became known as Hot Tuna. Although people speculated for years about how Owsley managed to conceal his stash, no one ever figured it out. It is historically important. 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. Stanley was the first known private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD. Every single note is separately placed in space as well as in time. A psychedelic known as STP was distributed in the summer of 1967 in 20mg tablets and quickly acquired a bad reputation (later research in normal volunteers showed that 20mg was over six times the dose required to produce hallucinogenic effects, and its slow onset of action may have caused street users to take even more than a single tablet). Together, they devised the Steal Your Face logo (a.k.a. Stanley died after a car accident in Australia on Saturday, March 12, 2011,[5] not Sunday, March 13, as reported in most publications[7][8][9][34][35] (a widely propagated error stemming from the Monday release to the press of the initial family statement, which was written on Sunday, stating he "died yesterday"). Reach out if you have questions, or to see how you can support the Owsley Stanley Foundation. Until then, the drug had been available in America only to those conducting serious medical research. These . Send us a tip using our anonymous form. Country * Augustus Owsley Stanley III, 32, whose grandfather was a Kentucky governor, congressman and U.S. senator, was arrested by agents of the Federal Bureau of Drug Abuse Thursday in a raid on a fashionable two-story home in this residential community 40 miles east of San Francisco. $30.00. Ive 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. He also grew weed in a garden outside his house. Owsley and Scully finally met a few weeks before the Trips Festival in the fall of 1965. "[1], During his time as the sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, Stanley started what became the long-term practice of recording the Dead while they rehearsed and performed. They wanted to maintain the same old same old which under their limited abilities, they had memorized to the point where they could sleepwalk through shows. [7], Stanley and Scully built electronic equipment for the Grateful Dead until late spring 1966. His grandfather, Augustus Owsley Stanley, had been a US senator and the governor of Kentucky. We would liken it to alchemy. Stanley was charged with illegal possession of narcotics, dangerous non-narcotics, LSD, and barbiturates. The 1970 Grateful Dead song "Truckin'" is based on the incident ("Busted, down on Bourbon Street / Set up, like a bowling pin / Knocked down, it gets to wearing thin / They just won't let you be"). On September 24, an previously unreleased 1968 live album by Johnny Cash that was recorded by Owsley "Bear" Stanley, the Grateful Dead's legendary concert documentarian (and . So they never became visual, they stayed in the oral world, which is, everything is part of reality. By the time Owsley returned to the Dead in August 1972, Dennis McNally says, It was a different world. The Owsley Stanley Foundation and the Allman Brothers Band are pleased to present the latest chapter in, The Great American Music Hall, May 5, 1976, 2021 Owsley Stanley Foundation | Web Partner, The Family Dog at the Great HighwayMarch 28, 1970, Merry-Go-Round at the Carousel, Tim Buckley at the Carousel Ballroom, Ali Akbar Khan, That Which Colors the Mind, Found in the Ozone, Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen, Dawn of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Allman Brothers Fillmore East February 1970, Doc & Merle Watson Never The Same Way Once, A masterpiece. [32], Stanley believed a "thermal cataclysm" related to climate change would soon render the Northern Hemisphere largely uninhabitable, and moved to Australia in 1982. Three years later, she sent him back to Virginia to live with his father. The universe is a creation entirely within a being that is outside time and space, and dreaming what we are. .. The Owsley Stanley Foundations Seventh release of Bears Sonic Journals: Merry-Go-Round at the Carousel features Tim Buckley at his jazzy, improvisational best, including the only known recordings of several Buckley originals and a stunning medley showcasing a version of Fred Neils, Merry-Go-Round.. In a later interview with Dennis McNally, he opined that he received "just a taste" of his previous position; according to Stanley, "I found on my release from jail that the crew, most of whom had been hired in my absence, did not want anything changed. And I certainly never made $1 million from drugs. Owsley was sent to Terminal Island Federal Prison, a medium-security lockup in San Pedro where Charles Manson had also done time. At the end of Hendrixs 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 Owsleys myth by recording Kid Charlemagne: While the music played/You worked by candlelight/ Those San Francisco nights/You were the best in town. An Amazon Best Book of November 2016: Most people with passing knowledge of San Francisco and the 60s are familiar with the main players: the Grateful Dead, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, the Hells Angels, et al, but how many know of August Owsley Stanley III, aka Owsley, aka Bear? Bear Stanley: Reflections on Life, LSD and DMTPlease subscribe to our channel and like our videos to support EGA!If you enjoy EGA's content, we invite you to. 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. Garcia was the center. [3], Stanley's level of access to the group's inner echelon (including complimentary food from the band's caterers) was somewhat controversial among the band's employees, with one staffer opining that "he had the sales tactics of a Mumbai street peddler"; on one occasion, Garcia and Weir were forced to intervene when Stanley provoked Chelsea Clinton's Secret Service detail as he attempted to conduct business with the then-First Daughter. Born in 1935, Owsley was "authentic Bluegrass political royalty." His father was a prominent government attorney and his grandfather, Augustus Owsley Stanley, was elected governor of Kentucky in 1919 and served in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. I did not buy expensive things. The Owsley Stanley Foundation is a 501c(3) non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of Bears Sonic Journals, Owsleys archive of more than 1,300 live concert soundboard recordings from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, including recordings by Miles Davis, Johnny Cash, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, and more than 80 other artists across nearly every musical idiom. The photo to the right shows the source of the design of the bear motif on Bear's Choice. Concise Comments. Its sometimes called witchcraft, and its extremely dangerous. He married and divorced twice, fathered two children and got himself arrested on a variety of charges. I dont eat carbs. As reclusive and protective of his identity as Owsley "Bear" Stanley had been, one can't manufacture the purest LSD on the planet and personally turn on half of the state of California and parts of Nevada and remain unknown. Served 2 years in prison at one point in his early life. He dropped out after a semester, took a technical job at KGO-TV, and began producing LSD in a small lab located in the bathroom of a house near campus; his makeshift laboratory was raided by police on February 21, 1965. There were no onstage monitors, so musicians couldnt hear one another. Stanley and Scully produced about 196grams of LSD in 1967, but 96grams of this was confiscated by the police. I couldn't read the name of the firm, and so was just looking at the shape. But he was also an exacting pioneer of live concert sound, a man who helped invent both monitor systems and high . [4][33] From at least the mid-1960s until his death, Stanley practiced and advocated an all-meat diet, believing that humans are naturally carnivorous.[4]. owsleystanleyfoundation.org is ranked #24747 in the Arts & Entertainment > Music category and #5781650 Globally according to December 2022 data. 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. 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. Youre concentrating a lot of mental energy on one package. As part of the work of the Owsley Stanley Foundation, some of the concert recordings have been released as albums: Legal trouble and continued involvement with the Grateful Dead. Robert Greenfield. [36], After Stanley's death in 2011, his family and some close friends created a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization called the Owsley Stanley Foundation.