Owsley Stanley

Owsley Stanley (born Augustus Owsley Stanley III, January 19, 1935 – March 12, 2011), also known as Bear, was an American audio engineer and chemist. He was a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area hippie movement during the 1960s and played a pivotal role in the counterculture of the 1960s.
Under the professional name, "Bear", he was the soundman for the rock band the Grateful Dead, whom he met when Ken Kesey invited them to an Acid Test party. As their sound engineer, Stanley frequently recorded live tapes behind his mixing board.
Stanley was the first private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD. By his own account, between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced no less than 500 grams of LSD, amounting to a little more than ten million doses at the time.
Stanley died in a car accident in Australia, on March 12, 2011.

Stanley was the son of a political family from Kentucky. His father was a government attorney. His grandfather, A. Owsley Stanley, a member of the United States Senate after serving as Governor of Kentucky and in the U.S. House of Representatives, campaigned against Prohibition in the 1920s.

Early life

At an early age, he committed himself to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. He studied engineering at the University of Virginia before dropping out. In 1956 when Stanley was 21, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and served for 18 months before being discharged in 1958. Later, inspired by a 1958 performance of the Bolshoi Ballet, he studied ballet in Los Angeles, supporting himself for a time as a professional dancer. In 1963, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became involved in the psychoactive drug scene. He dropped out after a semester, took a technical job at KGO-TV, and began producing LSD in a small lab located in the bathroom of a house near campus; his makeshift laboratory was raided by police on February 21, 1965. He beat the charges and successfully sued for the return of his equipment. The police were looking for methamphetamine but found only LSD, which was not illegal at the time.

Stanley moved to Los Angeles to pursue the production of LSD. He used his Berkeley lab to buy 500 grams of lysergic acid monohydrate, the basis for LSD. His first shipment arrived on March 30, 1965 and he produced 300,000 hits (270 micrograms each) of LSD by May 1965; then he returned to the Bay Area.

In September 1965, Stanley became the primary LSD supplier to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. By this time, Sandoz LSD was hard to come by, and "Owsley Acid" had become the new standard. He was featured (most prominently his freak-out at the Muir Beach Acid Test in November 1965) in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Tom Wolfe's book detailing the history of Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Stanley attended the Watts Acid Test on February 12, 1966 with his new apprentice Tim Scully, and provided the LSD.

Stanley also provided LSD to the Beatles during filming of Magical Mystery Tour (1967), and former Three Dog Night singer Chuck Negron has noted that Owsley and Leary gave Negron's band free LSD.

Involvement with the Grateful Dead

Stanley met the members of the Grateful Dead during 1965; he both financed them and worked with them as their first soundman. Along with his close friend Bob Thomas, Stanley designed the Lightning Bolt Skull Logo. The lightning bolt design came to him after seeing a similar design on a roadside advertisement: "One day in the rain, I looked out the side and saw a sign along the freeway which was a circle with a white bar across it. The top of the circle was orange, and the bottom blue. I couldn't read the name of the firm, and so was just looking at the shape. A thought occurred to me: if the orange were red and the bar across were a lightning bolt cutting across at an angle, then we would have a very nice, unique and highly identifiable mark to put on the equipment."

During his time as the sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, Stanley started what became the long-term practice of recording the Dead while they rehearsed and performed. His initial motivation for creating what he dubbed his "sonic journal" was to improve his ability to mix the sound, but the fortuitous result was an extensive trove of recordings from the heyday of the San Francisco concert/dance scene in the mid-1960s.

In addition to his large archive of Dead performances, Stanley made numerous live recordings of other leading 1960s and 1970s artists appearing in San Francisco, including Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, early Jefferson Starship, Old and in the Way, Janis Joplin, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Taj Mahal, Santana, Miles Davis, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, and Blue Cheer.

Richmond LSD lab

Stanley and Scully built electronic equipment for the Grateful Dead until late spring 1966. At this point, Stanley rented a house in Point Richmond, Richmond, California. He, Scully, and Melissa Cargill (Stanley's girlfriend and a skilled chemist, introduced to Stanley by Susan Cowper, a former girlfriend) set up a lab in the basement. The Point Richmond lab turned out more than 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) of LSD, dubbed "White Lightning". When LSD became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, Scully decided to set up a new lab in Denver, Colorado. The new lab was set up in the basement of a house across the street from the Denver Zoo in early 1967. Scully made the LSD in the Denver lab while Stanley put the product into tablets in Orinda, California. Here, the psychedelic DOM, better known under its street name STP, was also produced.

Legal trouble

STP was distributed in the summer of 1967 in 20 mg tablets and quickly acquired a bad reputation (later research in normal volunteers showed that 20 mg 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). Stanley and Scully made trial batches of STP in 10 mg tablets and then of STP mixed with LSD in a few hundred yellow tablets, but soon ceased production of STP. Stanley and Scully produced about 196 grams of LSD in 1967, but 96 grams of this was confiscated by the police.

In late 1967, Stanley's La Espiral, Orinda lab was raided by police; he was found in possession of 350,000 doses of LSD and 1,500 doses of STP. His defense was that the illegal substances were for personal use, but he was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison. The same year, Stanley officially shortened his name to "Owsley Stanley". After he was released from prison, Stanley did more sound work for the Grateful Dead and later worked as a broadcast television engineer. On January 31, 1970, at 3:00 am, 19 members of the Grateful Dead and crew were arrested for possession of a variety of drugs at a French Quarter hotel, after returning from a concert at "The Warehouse" in New Orleans.

According to Rolling Stone, everyone in the band except Pigpen and Tom Constanten was included in the arrest, along with several members of their retinue, including Stanley and some locals. Stanley was charged with illegal possession of narcotics, dangerous non-narcotics, LSD, and barbiturates. Another West Coast-based rock band, Jefferson Airplane, had been arrested two weeks earlier in the same situation. According to an article in the Baton Rouge State Times, Stanley identified himself to the police as "The King of Acid" and technician of the band. Based on this incident, the Grateful Dead wrote the song "Truckin'" (1970).

Stanley was confined to federal prison from 1970 to 1972, after a federal judge intervened and revoked his release from the 1967 case. Stanley took advantage of the opportunity there to learn metalwork and jewelry-making.

Post-Grateful Dead career

A naturalized Australian citizen since 1996, Stanley lived with his wife Sheilah in the bush of Tropical North Queensland, where he worked to create sculpture, much of it wearable art.

Stanley made his first public appearance in decades at the Australian ethnobotanical conference Entheogenesis Australis in 2009, giving three talks during his time in Melbourne.

Stanley died after a car accident in Australia on Saturday, March 12, 2011, not Sunday, March 13, as reported in most publications (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"). The statement released on behalf of Stanley's family said the car crash occurred near his home, on a rural stretch of highway near Mareeba, Queensland. He was survived by his wife Sheilah, four children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

"The Owsley Stanley Foundation" was created by Owsley's immediate family and some of his close friends, and was incorporated on August 25, 2011 as a California non-profit corporation dedicated to fostering diverse charitable, artistic, musical, and scientific endeavors for the public benefit.

His ashes were placed on the soundboard at the Grateful Dead 50th anniversary shows in Chicago, on July 3–5, 2015.

In literature

• Owsley's association with Ken Kesey and the Grateful dead is described in Tom Wolfe's novel The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test (1968).
• Stanley's incarceration is lamented in Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) as one of the many signs of the death of the 1960s.
• In Steve Hillard's novel Mirkwood: A Novel About JRR Tolkien (2011), a fictional character named Osley modeled loosely after Stanley is described as a fugitive from the 1960s and the "Henry Ford of Psychedelics".

In music

• A newspaper headline identifying Stanley as an "LSD Millionaire" ran in the Los Angeles Times the day before the state of California, on October 6, 1966, criminalized the drug. The headline inspired the Grateful Dead song, "Alice D. Millionaire".
• Stanley is mentioned by his first name in the song "Who Needs the Peace Corps?" by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, which first appeared on the band's album We're Only in It for the Money (1968) ("I'll go to Frisco, buy a wig and sleep on Owsley's floor.").
• Stanley is referred to in Jefferson Airplane's song "Mexico" on the Early Flight (1974) album.
• The Steely Dan song "Kid Charlemagne", from the album The Royal Scam (1976), was loosely inspired by Stanley.

• The great shark hunt: strange tales from a strange time. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Retrieved 2011-04-21. 
• Troy, Sandy, Captain Trips: A Biography of Jerry Garcia (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1994). Acid Tests pp. 70–1, 76, 85; LSD Millionaire p. 99.
• "Frank Zappa - Who Needs The Peace Corps? Lyrics - MetroLyrics". metrolyrics.com. Retrieved 31 December 2015. 
• 1960s LSD Figure Owsley Stanley Dies In Crash – Entertainment News Story – WISC Madison
• "Newser - Headline News Summaries, World News, and Breaking News". newser.com. Retrieved 31 December 2015. 
• R.I.P. OWSLEY – Viceland Today
• NME.COM. "Jimi Hendrix inspiration and LSD producer Owsley Stanley dies". NME.COM. Retrieved 31 December 2015. 
• "Owsley Stanley Obituary - Owsley Stanley Funeral - Legacy.com". Legacy.com. Retrieved 31 December 2015. 
• "Complete transcript of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker in a BBC-Online Chat, March 4, 2000". BBC. 2000-03-04. Retrieved 2010-05-26. 
• Kamiya, Gary (2000-03-14). "Sophisticated skank". Salon. Retrieved 6 January 2013. 
• Marcus Singletary. "Steely Dan: Kid Charlemagne". Jazz.com. Retrieved 2010-05-26. 
• Pershan, C., "Kid Charlemagne: A Close Reading Of Steely Dan's Ode to Haight Street's LSD King", SFist, July 20, 2015.