Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia

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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.

© Thomson Reuters 2011
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/03/13/psychedelic-icon-owsley-stanley-dies-in-australia/
 
Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia


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LOS ANGELES | Sun Mar 13, 2011 7:07pm EDT

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - 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 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 psychedelic-blues 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, providing him with a healthy income in later life.

"When it came to technology, the Bear was one of the most far-out and interesting guys on the planet," Cutler wrote. "The first FM live simulcast could be, in part, attributed to his vision, as could the first quadraphonic simulcast on radio."

The Dead, a fabled rock band formed in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1965 known for its improvisational live concerts, wrote about him in their song "Alice D. Millionaire" after a 1967 arrest prompted a newspaper to describe Stanley as an "LSD millionaire."
Continued: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/13/us-owsleystanley-idUSTRE72C3AF20110313
 
Off topic but is Alex Shulgin ok? He wasn't doing too well a few months ago.

On topic. NOO!:( too many good people dying
 
Death of an Icon

When one talks about the so-called "Counter Culture" and the 1960s one name more than any other comes up time and again: Bear Owsley.

Born in the American State of Kentucky in 1935, the scion of one of that state's leading political families, Augustus "Bear" Owsley Stanley III could have taken life's easy path. Shunning it early on Owsley began his clandestine career manufacturing "bootleg" whiskey for his classmates at a prestigious military academy. Not doing well academically he threw caution into the wind and joined the American Military, serving in the Air Force.

After being discharged from the service Owsley moved first to Los Angeles, and then to San Francisco, California where he enrolled at UC Berkeley. Not long after beginning his first semester at university he was introduced to LSD, the substance that would change his life and by relation the lives of millions of others.

At the time, 1963, LSD was a legal substance in the US. Owsley at the time was a heavy user of methedrine (an amphetamine no longer in production legally or otherwise) and had been flirting with the manufacture of the substance for some time. After dosing with LSD though he could think of little else. He claimed to have taught himself the extremely difficult manufacturing process for his new drug of choice. As he told it he spent 3 weeks, night and day, in the UC library perfecting a synthesis scheme he had stumbled upon in the "American Journal of Organic Chemistry." Emerging from the library he promptly dropped out of school and set up shoppe as a registered lab doing business as "Bear Research Group."

Though he had also been manufacturing methedrine in the first months of operation he soon confined his activities to the synthesis of extremely pure LSD. It came as a suprise then when the Berkeley Police Department raided his lab in 1966. Though LSD would soon be declared illegal by California, that was still months away and as yet merely a worrisome rumour. Owsley must have felt relieved then when he found that the warrant was soley for methedrine. However that relief must have turned to anger when his valuable equipment was impounded. Though he escaped prosecution it would take a lawsuit to get the police to release his equipment, even though that by the time he won, LSD had been declared illegal and so didn't enjoy the return of his supply of ergot, the essential precursor to LSD.

After that arrest, Owsley, his partner Nick Sands and his girlfriend who assisted the duo relocated their operation to Orinda. It was there that the group began manufacturing the forms still discussed reverentially today, half a century later: Blue Cheer, Purple Monterrey, White Lightning and the seminal Orange Sunshine.

In 1965 Owsley had met Ken Kesey and soon became the sole supplier for Kesey's Merry Pranksters. It was through Kesey that Owsley entered into a very lucrative distribution arrangement with the Oakland Chapter of the Hells Angels. Likewise it was Kesey who introduced Owsley to a new but popular San Francisco group, the Grateful Dead. Owsley's relationship with the band initially centered around his other obsession, audio electronics. It was the Dead who benefited most from Owsley's genius when in 1966 he gifted them with first musically dedicated PA System.

It wasn't long before Owsley was using his profits from LSD to financially back the band and became such an integral contributor that he co-designed the band's iconic "Steal Your Face" emblem. Though eventually Owsley's eccentricities would cause an irreparable break with the Dead, for the time being he was instrumental in their success.

The 1966 arrest didn't dull Law Enforcement's appetite. Now fully aware of who they were dealing with, but out of luck since the group had moved outside of Berekeley's jurisdiction, they made sure to pass on the information they had gathered to the BNDD (Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs), the forerunner of today's DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration). The BNDD wasted no time and in 1967 he took a fall over his LSD Operation.

Quickly bailed out Owsley entered into an arrangement with the Laguna based Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and by relation the Counter Culture guru Dr. Timothy Leary. This new relationship widened his circle even more. It was that relationship that eventually led to an English manufacturing group that would end in "Operation Julie" (music buffs might recall a Clash song about that bust).

It was a simple mistake that ended Owsley's stellar career. In 1970, out on bail for his 67 Arrest, he was arrested for marijuana and incarcerated. He ended up serving 2 years on Terminal Island in the Federal System. Upon his release Owsley resumed his operation but on a much smaller scale but something about the man changed.

Always prone to an eccentric outlook, he now championed an all meat and dairy diet. Vegetables and fruits he considered toxic to the point of life threatening. To make matters worse, he impressed his views upon anyone he came in contact with. It was this obsession with diet that led to his fallout with the Grateful Dead. Soon he added the environment to his list of obsessions. It was a fear of Climate Change that ended up driving Owsley to move to Australia in the early 1980s, where he would gain citizenship in 1996.

Owsley picked Australia's northern coast because of its tropical climate. Long before "Global Warming" jumped to the forefront of public consciousness Owsley had become terrified at the idea of an impending Ice Age that would destroy much of the world. His home in the bush outside Cairns, Queensland was in a sub-tropical climate and comforted him with the idea that he would at least have a fighting chance against the expanding ice sheets when the big chill came.

He spent his time tinkering with a newly found passion for metal sculpture. Living largely off the grid with his lover Sheila they ended up starting a small but profitable enamel and gold jewlery business that was operated out of their home. Though he had given up on the manufacturing end of the game he was a lifelong devotee to psychadelics and ethnogens in general and remained committed to their redemptive value.

The world passed him by in many ways but he continued quietly enjoying himself. On Sunday, March 13, 2011 he and Sheila were driving outside the town of Mareeda, not far from their home when a storm came upon them. Rounding a turn on the slippery road Owsley lost control of his vehicle and ran off the road. In the ensuing accident he was killed instantly. Sheila was severely injured with a broken collarbone.

Augustus "Bear" Owsley Stanley III was 76. In addition to Sheila he is survived by sons Starfinder and Pete, daughters
Redbird and Nina, 8 grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren. A complex man, noone can deny his genius.

(Edited for spelling)
 
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Owsley Stanley, Artisan of Acid, Is Dead at 76

STANLEY-obit-articleInline.jpg

Owsley Stanley, left, with Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead in a 1969 publicity photograph. Mr. Stanley was a financial backer of the Dead and also provided the band with a supply of LSD.

By MARGALIT FOX
Published: March 14, 2011

Owsley Stanley, the prodigiously gifted applied chemist to the stars, who made LSD in quantity for the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and other avatars of the psychedelic ’60s, died on Sunday in a car accident in Australia. He was 76 and lived in the bush near Cairns, in the Australian state of Queensland.

His car swerved off a highway and down an embankment before hitting trees near Mareeba, a town in Queensland, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Stanley’s wife, Sheilah, was injured in the accident.

Mr. Stanley, the Dead’s former financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer, was in recent decades a reclusive, almost mythically enigmatic figure. He moved to Australia in the 1980s, as he explained in his rare interviews, so he might survive what he believed to be a coming Ice Age that would annihilate the Northern Hemisphere.

Once renowned as an artisan of acid, Mr. Stanley turned out LSD said to be purer and finer than any other. He was also among the first individuals (in many accounts, the very first) to mass-produce the drug; its resulting wide availability provided the chemical underpinnings of an era of love, music, grooviness and much else. Conservatively tallied, Mr. Stanley’s career output was more than a million doses, in some estimates more than five million.

His was the acid behind the Acid Tests conducted by the novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, the group of psychedelic adherents whose exploits were chronicled by Tom Wolfe in his 1968 book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” The music world immortalized Mr. Stanley in a host of songs, including the Dead’s “Alice D. Millionaire” (a play on a newspaper headline, describing one of his several arrests, that called him an “LSD Millionaire”) and Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne.”

So widely known was Mr. Stanley that he appears in the Encyclopedia Britannica article on LSD under the apparently unironic index term “Augustus Owsley Stanley III (American chemist).” The Oxford English Dictionary contains an entry for the noun “Owsley” as “an extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD.” In 2007, Mr. Stanley was the subject of a long profile in an issue of Rolling Stone magazine commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love.

In short, Mr. Stanley lent the ’60s a great deal of its color — like White Lightning, Monterey Purple and Blue Cheer, the varieties of his LSD that were among the most popular. (He did not, contrary to popular lore, release a product called Purple Haze; in interviews, he sounded quite miffed that anything emerging from his laboratory could be thought to cause haziness rather than the crystalline clarity for which he personally vouched.)

He also lent the era much of its sound, developing early, widely praised high-fidelity sound systems for live rock concerts, including the Dead’s towering “wall of sound.”

Mr. Stanley was previously a ballet dancer and a member of the United States Air Force.

Augustus Owsley Stanley III was born on Jan. 19, 1935, to a patrician Kentucky family. His paternal grandfather, for whom he was named, was a congressman, governor of Kentucky and United States senator. (Somewhat prophetically, given his grandson’s future pursuits, the elder Mr. Stanley was a vigorous public foe of Prohibition.)

Young Owsley, whose adolescent hirsuteness caused him to be known ever after as Bear, was sent to a military preparatory school in Maryland. He was expelled in the ninth grade for furnishing the alcohol that, as he told Rolling Stone in 2007, had nearly all his classmates “blasted out of their minds” on homecoming weekend.

He briefly attended the University of Virginia before enlisting in the Air Force, where he learned electronics. He later worked in Los Angeles as a broadcast engineer for radio and television stations. He also studied ballet and for a time was a professional dancer.

In 1963, Mr. Stanley enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. The next year, he encountered LSD, a transformative experience. “I remember the first time I took acid and walked outside,” he said in the Rolling Stone interview. “The cars were kissing the parking meters.”

Mr. Stanley had found his calling, and at the time it was at least quasi-legitimate: LSD was not outlawed in California until 1966. What he needed to do was learn his craft, which he accomplished, as Rolling Stone reported, in three weeks in the university library, poring over chemistry journals. Soon afterward, he left college and a going concern, the Bear Research Group, was born.

In 1965, he met Mr. Kesey, and through him the Dead. Enraptured, he became their sound man, early underwriter, principal acolyte, sometime housemate and frequent touring companion. With Bob Thomas, he designed the band’s highly recognizable skull-and-lightning-bolt logo. Mr. Stanley also made many recordings of the Dead in performance, now considered valuable documentary records of the band’s early years. Many have been released commercially.

Mr. Stanley remained with the band off and on through the early ’70s, when, according to Rolling Stone, his habits became too much even for the Grateful Dead and they parted company. (He had insisted, among other things, that the band eat meat — nothing but meat — a dietary regimen he followed until the end of his life.)

His other clients included John Lennon, who, according to “The Beatles,” a 2005 biography by Bob Spitz, contracted to pay Mr. Stanley for a lifetime supply of his wares.

In 1970, after a judge revoked Mr. Stanley’s bail from a 1967 drug arrest, he served two years in federal prison. There, he learned metalwork and jewelry making, trades he plied in recent years.

Mr. Stanley, who became an Australian citizen in the 1990s, was treated for throat cancer in 2004. In the Rolling Stone interview, he attributed his survival to his carnivorous diet. (A heart attack he had suffered some years earlier he ascribed to eating broccoli as a child, forced on him by his mother.)

Besides his wife, Sheilah, Mr. Stanley’s survivors include two sons, Pete and Starfinder; two daughters, Nina and Redbird; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Though he helped transform the culture, Mr. Stanley asserted that he had never meant to do so. As he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2007, he had set out only to make a product he knew he could take, because its ingredients were known.

“And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too,” Mr. Stanley said. “Of course,” he added “my ‘friends’ expanded very rapidly.”

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@ The Network: Yeah, Shulgin's recovered pretty well from what I hear. Ann updates his facebook page almost daily (we're friends) :D

Sorry to hear about Owsley. He was a counterculture icon for sure.
 
Hey Rach, thanks for postin but this belongs in Drugs in the Media. Ima move it over there, with a request for them to merge it with the discussion on his death that already exists, since I dont wanna lose your post:)
 
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