Its absolutely clear. 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. I just wanted to know the dose and purity of what I took into my own body. (Blind Carbon Copy). The Owsley Stanley Foundations ninth release ofBears Sonic Journals: The Foxhuntfeatures the Chieftains performing live in San Francisco in 1973 (CD & vinyl) and 1976 (CD & digital only). Owsley Stanley - YouTube Stanley returned to Los Angeles to pursue the production of LSD. 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. .. Owsley and Scully finally met a few weeks before the Trips Festival in the fall of 1965. It all seemed to fit together. 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.. This should set the Buckley-sphere on Fire! During the past month, he has dispensed with 1,400 of them. [18] Along with his close friend Bob Thomas, Stanley designed the band's iconic 'Steal Your Face' lightning bolt-skull logo. Everything is connected, because its all being created by this one consciousness. Details. Add to Favorites Dancing Bear patch, Grateful Dead patch, Owsley Stanley patch, Iron on patch, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Dead and Company, Shakedown . Technician for Grateful Dead and an LSD cook. In the Oxford English dictionary, the word Owsley is listed as a noun describing a particularly pure form of LSD. Our staff is entirely comprised of volunteers, and many of the support services necessary to run the organization have been donated by generous contributors that believe in the mission to save this music before it is lost forever. Owsley Stanley, better known as the Bear, was the acid hero the 60s never knew it had. 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. Owsley had gotten the recipe for STP from a former Dow chemist named Alexander Shulgin(who would later reintroduce Ecstasy to the rave generation). 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. After a year-long investigations, agents raided a two-story home in suburban Orinda, picked up Stanley, his girl friend, and three others. The Bear | Eat Meat. Drink Water. 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. 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? Stanley's scientific tutelage influenced Gissen's decision to return to her formal studies and pursue the profession of dentistry; their son, Starfinder, would go on to earn zoology and veterinary medicine degrees from Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania.[23]. After a tumultuous 1967 for Johnny Cash, the year 1968 was bookended by what would become his two iconic, highest-grossing albums, At Folsom Prison and At San Quentin. Vandoliers Play Tennessee Concert in Dresses to Protest State's New Drag Bill Jerry Garcia's Lost Pipe Has Been Found After 30 Years and It Still Smells Like Weed. Stanley also helped Robert Thomas design the band's trademark skull logo. Written by WL Woodward. . He was the Grateful Deads original sound man and their initial financial benefactor. Taking acid soon became the watermark. [30], In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Stanley briefly served as the live mixing engineer for Robert Hunter and Jefferson Starship. 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. USA Today. I love them both! We were officially granted 501(c)(3) nonprofit status by the IRS in December 2012. Remembering The Bear: Weird Times With Augustus Owsley Stanley III 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. It is articulate. The following excerpt explores the onset . In 1973, he served as lead designer of the band's Wall of Sound, collaborating with Dan Healy and Mark Raizene, as well as Rick Turner and John Curl of Alembic to design the groundbreaking sound reinforcement system. The Bear. [3][4][5] By his own account, between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced at least 500 grams of LSD, amounting to a little more than five million doses. Owsley Stanley Obituary (2011) - Burlington, VT - Legacy.com Owsley "Bear" Stanley the Acid King is remembered by friends The sound of Jerry Garcias guitar grabbed hold of Owsley, and he freaked out on acid for the first time. Dad gave what I believe to be one of the most intimate and connected shows I have ever heard. John Carter Cash. Stanley is known throughout the west as "king of acid." (He has also never willingly allowed his photograph to be taken.) When Owsley asked Lesh what he could do for the band, the bass player said they had no manager and offered him the job. Amongst his outrageous success from the sale of his acid, Stanley also worked for a time as the Grateful Dead's sound engineer. 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. campaign seeks to raise money to enable the digitization, preservation, and release of Bear's Sonic Journals, a trove of over a thousand live concert recordings from the heart of the psychedelic era. Courtesy Legacy. 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. There were no greens or anything he called it rabbit food. , Nor was there any point in trying to argue with Owsley about it. Youre dealing with part of the unconscious mind that they used to define as angels and devils. 9 were here. the stealie). Owsley Stanley Jewelry For Sale - Starco Jewellers At the time, live sound at rock concerts was extremely primitive. 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. 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. Tue 15 Mar 2011 14.49 EDT. 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. Owsley Stanley obituary | Drugs | The Guardian Before We Were Them - Owsley Stanley Foundation Owsley Stanley. Owsley Stanley 1935-2011 'Bear' helped Grateful Dead, made LSD. On February 21st, 1965, police raided the house and confiscated various chemicals, including a substance they wrongfully identified as speed. 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. These . The bad news was that since Owsley was paying the rent, he expected them to adhere to his unconventional ideas and beliefs. 'Kid Charlemagne': A Close Reading Of Steely Dan's Ode To - SFist In a new biography, find out more about the life of this LSD preacher than ever before. Owsley "Bear" Stanley | The alchemist's tools | From the Vault Owsley Stanley Jewelry - Etsy But he was also an exacting pioneer of live concert sound, a man who helped invent both monitor systems and high . These performances have not been heard since the nights they were played more than 40 years ago ! 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. 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. [24] Stanley and Scully made trial batches of STP in 10mg tablets and then of STP mixed with LSD in a few hundred yellow tablets, but soon ceased production of STP. Augustus Owsley Stanley III (January 19, 1935 - March 12, 2011) was an American audio engineer and clandestine chemist. 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. Owsley Stanley - Wikipedia 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. Augustus Owsley Stanley III was infamous in the 60s counterculture scene and his legacy reaches further than most. 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. Although no man knows the exact time, we feel that time is very near! sulver buckle. 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. The Trippy Life of the LSD Manufacturer Who 'Helped Create the - Vice [12] In 1963, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became involved in the psychoactive drug scene. 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. 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. [22], In Denver, the trio was augmented by fellow Berkeley student Rhoney Gissen, who joined the manufacturing effort and began a relationship with Stanley (concurrent with Stanley's relationship with Cargill and Cargill's separate relationship with Jefferson Airplane bassist Jack Casady) that endured through the early 1970s; although they never married, Gissen would eventually take Stanley's surname. Theyre extremely glucose-avid. Owsley declined. There were no onstage monitors, so musicians couldnt hear one another. Until then, the drug had been available in America only to those conducting serious medical research. Bear: The Owsley Stanley Story, Part Two - PS Audio Berkeley's historic Troll House sells for $1.4 million The new lab was set up in the basement of a house across the street from the Denver Zoo in early 1967. 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. 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. Owsley Stanley (born Augustus Owsley Stanley III, January 19, 1935 - March 12, 2011) also known as Bear, was a figure of the San Francisco Bay counter-culture. . "[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. Owsley Stanly Tribute Page The Owsley Stanley Foundation is pleased to present an audiophile release of incendiary performances by the incomparable Doc and Merle Watson, from Bears Sonic Journals -Owsleys storied trove of live concert recordings. The problem is'Packet-sniffer 'bots', very small programs which hackers insert by stealth into an internet router's . Stanley was the first known private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD. Owsley Stanley Foundation Merch Mountain Store He was magnanimous about it, remembers former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow. Stanley was the first known private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD. 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. By doing so, he compiled a historic collection of live performances. During his service, he secured an amateur radio license and a general radiotelephone operator license. 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 operators 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. 94tracks reflecting a broad cross-section of musical forms, including bluegrass, blues, folk, country, swing jazz, and rockabilly, among others. [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]. It is a 36 point lead type-slug of a . It was amazing, he told Jerry Garcia biographer Blair Jackson. For most people, Owsley says, the proper dose is about 150 to 200 micrograms. Photo Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph from San Francisco Chronicle, via . Your body gets old but your mind can always accept that. 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 bands other gear to the Straight Theater, a hippie venue on Haight Street. On December 11th, 1965, the Dead played at the Muir Beach Acid Test in a lodge by the sea in Marin County. Reach out if you have questions, or to see how you can support the Owsley Stanley Foundation. At the time, Owsley was living with a Berkeley undergraduate chemistry major named Melissa Cargill. Stanley Clarke took possession of his first Alembic bass in 1972 which brought a fair amount of interest from outside the Grateful Dead community . The Bear - Owsley Stanley - Gregg's Diet Shack 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. Custom Owsely Buckle - Ramstar Designs 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. 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. Im not really interested in talking about myself, he says. Stanley's lab in Berkeley was raided in 1966 and he was arrested. The Owsley Stanley Foundation is dedicated to preserving and sharing the experience of the. The reason is that Im a total carnivore. A high-school dropout of preternatural intelligence who was born from a Kentucky political dynasty and became the live sound-engineer for the Grateful Dead, his most notorious legacy is as the first Acid Millionaire. How Owsley 'Bear' Stanley Inspired Steely Dan's 'Kid Charlemagne' Come take a magical trip with us and find out! 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. If you wanted to be an idiot and do something any way but his, that was your decision. Source: medium.com. 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. At a time when the Dead were trying to keep ticket prices down, the wall cost about $350,000. From the start, Owsley felt that his state of mind while he was making acid would affect the nature of the product. You can donate via our secure form, or send checks made out to the Owsley Stanley Foundation to: Owsley Stanley Foundation PO Box 625 Occidental, Ca 95465. The photo to the right shows the source of the design of the bear motif on Bear's Choice. Stanley was the Dead's audio engineer, longtime friend, and perhaps the most notable LSD chemist in the 1960s. 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. 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. 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. By his own account, between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced no less than 500 grams of LSD, amounting to a little more . 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. Jr. 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. Unable to swallow solid food since the cancer treatments, he laments that he can no longer enjoy dining out with friends. He also studied ballet, Russian and French. 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.. He was a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area hippie movement during the 1960s and played a pivotal role in the decade's counterculture. These analog reel-to-reel recordings are nearing the end of their expected shelf lives and will deteriorate and be lost forever if they are not preserved.