owsley stanley website owsley stanley website

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) Owsley "Bear" Stanley, a 1960s counterculture icon who worked with The Grateful Dead and was a prolific LSD producer, died in a car crash in . We were officially granted 501 (c) (3) nonprofit status by the IRS in December 2012. Until you had tripped, you were not part of the new culture. 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. 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 Owsleys product for more than a year. Please reorganize this content to explain the subject's impact on popular culture, Learn how and when to remove this template message, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, Owsley Stanley, icon of 1960s counterculture, dies at 76, Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead, Bear's Sonic Journals: Fillmore East, February 1970, Bear's Sonic Journals: Dawn of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Bear's Sonic Journals: Found in the Ozone, "For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD, long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area", "Owsley Stanley, Artisan of Acid, Is Dead at 76", "Owsley 'Bear' Stanley Dies in Car Accident", Owsley Stanley, counterculture producer of LSD, dies at 76 KansasCity.com, "Owsley 'Bear' Stanley dies in North Queensland car crash", "The dark, one-dog night of Chuck Negron", "Jerry Garcia of Grateful Dead, Icon of 60's Spirit, Dies at 53", https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/downloads/p5547t98n.pdf, "Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III B&N Readouts", "Internet Archive Forums: Re: Owsley question", "2,5-Dimethoxy-4-methyl-amphetamine (STP): A New Hallucinogenic Drug", "45 Years Ago: The Grateful Dead's Infamous 'Truckin' Drug Bust", "Remembering the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound: an absurd feat of technological engineering", "Remembering Owsley "Bear" Stanley | Grateful Dead", "Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia", "Owsley Stanley's Acid Trips Helped Define the Sound of the 1960s, but His Recordings Are Just as Important", "Owsley Stanley's 'Sonic Journals': Inside the Tape Vault of a Psychedelic Legend", "Doc & Merle Watson: Play 'Never the Same Way Once' on New Box Set", "First Doc & Merle Watson Box Set Released", "Owsley Stanley Foundation Announces Doc & Merle Watson Live Box Set", "Previously Unreleased Allman Brothers Band Recordings from February 1970 Fillmore East Run Coming", "Bear's Sonic Journals: Dawn of the New Riders of the Purple Sage", "Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen Bear's Sonic Journals: Found in the Ozone", "Owsley Stanley Foundation to Release Rare Performance by Ali Akbar Khan from 1970", "Smoke in a Bottle: That Which Colors the Mind", "Bear's Sonic Journals: That Which Colors the Mind Ali Akbar Khan / Indranil Bhattacharya / Zakir Hussain", "Global Beat: Zakir Hussain Revisits a Historic Family Dog Summit", "When the Giants of Indian Classical Music Collided with Psychedelic San Francisco", "Owsley Stanley Foundation to Release Landmark Tim Buckley Live Recording", "Tim Buckley Lets His Freak Flag Fly on Live LP 'Merry-Go-Round at the Carousel', "Review: Tim Buckley "Merry-Go-Round at the Carousel Live", "Tim Buckley Displays Adventurous Spirit Via 'Bear's Sonic Journals: Merry-Go-Round at the Carousel June 1968' (Album Review)", "New Johnny Cash Live Album, 'At the Carousel Ballroom' Captures Country Star in the Counterculture", "A Johnny Cash Live Album from 1968 Is Finally Set to Be Released", "Previously Unreleased Johnny Cash Live Album Recorded by Owsley Stanley Due in September", "Johnny Cash 1968 Carousel Ballroom Live Bootleg Recorded by Owsley Headed for Release", "Johnny Cash's Previously Unreleased Live Album from 1968 to Be Unearthed", "When the Man in Black Met the Guys in Tie-Dye", "Owsley Stanley Foundation to Release Early Chieftains Live Recordings", "Bear's Sonic Journals: The Foxhunt, The Chieftains Live in San Francisco 1973 & 1976 to Be Released", "Ireland's The Chieftains Land on U.S. I dont see how anyone in the Northern Hemisphere could survive the storm. And I certainly never made $1 million from drugs. For him, this is just another day on the road. See Tom Taylor's account of his life and times published late last year in Far Out magazine. Tue 15 Mar 2011 14.49 EDT. The sound of Jerry Garcias guitar grabbed hold of Owsley, and he freaked out on acid for the first time. The Fresno Bee (CA.) The Owsley Stanley Foundations sixth release- Bears Sonic Journals: That Which Colors the Mind features sarod master, Ali Akbar Khan, accompanied by Indranil Bhattacharya (sitar) and Zakir Hussain (tabla). Joel Selvin also wrote an extensive note on Owsley back in 2007 on the occasion of his . He had this stuff, and we thought it might be good, Owsley says. Augustus Owsley Stanley I (May 21, 1867 - August 12, 1958) was an American politician from Kentucky.A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 38th governor of Kentucky and also represented the state in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.From 1903 to 1915, Stanley represented Kentucky's 2nd congressional district in the House of Representatives, where he . He was magnanimous about it, remembers former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow. His early activities spanned the Beat-era years of Ken Kesey 's Merry Pranksters scenes, but he played a role during the explosion of 1960's Psychedelia culture. 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. [UPDATE 11/21/22]: In an effort to refute claims made by Steve Cabella about the origins of a pipe allegedly gifted to Jerry Garcia by Owsley "Bear" Stanley, Bear's son Starfinder Stanley . [30], In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Stanley briefly served as the live mixing engineer for Robert Hunter and Jefferson Starship. 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 Deads equipment. 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. 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 grandson of a Kentucky senator, Owsley found his way to California, discovered drugs, and promptly blew . The Bear) A colourful character, carnivore for over 47 years. The Idol: How HBOs Next Euphoria Became Twisted Torture Porn. [18] Along with his close friend Bob Thomas, Stanley designed the band's iconic 'Steal Your Face' lightning bolt-skull logo. 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 had Meet the Beatles! While doing two years in federal prison in the early Seventies for manufacturing acid, Owsley taught himself how to make jewelry. The altercation led Stanley to request the formal codification of his perceived managerial power over the equipment staff, including unprecedented hire/fire privileges. 1st ever box set of live concert recordings from Doc & Merle Watson, 1st release of Bears Sonic Journals from the Owsley Stanley Foundation, Several rare songs Doc Watson never recorded live, The only known contemporaneous photographs of Doc & Merle Watson, Photos of Old Hoss, the Gallagher guitar Doc played from 1968 until the end of this tour in 1974, In depth interview with bassist T. Michael Coleman, An original essay by David Holt, 4-time Grammy winner and longtime Doc collaborator, Original cover art by Mike DuBois based on a drawing by Owsleys son, Starfinder. 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 was the key supplier of LSD during the 60s Hippie movem. Three weeks later, on January 8th, 1966, Owsley sashayed into the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco for another Acid Test. 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. All donations to the Owsley Stanley Foundation are fully tax deductible. By his own account, between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced no less than 500 grams of LSD, amounting to a little more . On January 30th, 1970, after a Dead show in New Orleans, police walked into the bands Bourbon Street hotel with search warrants and busted the Dead, along with Owsley. How did the court musician of the Maharaja, a man called the "Bach of India," and "perhaps the greatest musician in the world" find himself playing to a psychedelic crowd at the Family Dog, a countercultural beacon on the edge of Western civilization, with Owsley mixing the sound? . Musicians plugged their instruments into amplifiers connected to single-channel speakers. 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. In 1984, Owsley appeared at Phil Leshs house with a map of the world showing the mean temperatures at the height of the last ice age. 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. 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. We were officially granted 501(c)(3) nonprofit status by the IRS in December 2012. 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. Cancers grow on glucose. 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. I did not buy expensive things. 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. There are three septic systems on the property, a hot tub, three kitchens and a large gym where he works out regularly. [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. Neither one of them really wanted to be parents, he says. But he was also an exacting pioneer of live concert sound, a man who helped invent both monitor systems and high . The pot vessel was made by LSD pioneer Owsley Stanley for the Grateful Dead frontman. The "Save The Music!" So they never became visual, they stayed in the oral world, which is, everything is part of reality. 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. Stanley took advantage of the opportunity there to learn the trade of metalwork and jewelry-making.[5]. When LSD became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, Scully decided to set up a new lab in Denver, Colorado. Owsley Stanley (born Augustus Owsley Stanley III, January 19, 1935 - March 12, 2011) also known as Bear, was a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s, and played a pivotal role in the counterculture of the 1960's.As a crafts-person, Under the professional name of "Bear", he worked with the psychedelic rock band the Grateful Dead's international fan "family". 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. By then, most of the money Owsley had amassed during his days as the worlds reigning acid chemist was gone. 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. His paternal grandfather, Augustus 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.[5]. The photo to the right shows the source of the design of the bear motif on Bear's Choice. Owsley's high octane rocket fuel enabled Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters to put on the Acid Tests. 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. 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. It is a 36 point lead type-slug of a . This article appeared in the July 12-27, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone. Immediately following his release, Stanley resumed working for the Grateful Dead as a roadie and sound engineer in the summer of 1972. 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). within a few days of it coming out. That was his strength and his flaw. A Pegasus. Spirited. - Commander Cody, "Sociologically, you know, this all represents a big switch in the whole rock 'n' roll trip" - Jerry Garcia, A legend recording a legend T. Michael Coleman, Bass, Its not just the energy of youth that shakes me when I listen to these tracks its the musical dialogue that Jack and I shared in these amazing moments. The reason is that Im a total carnivore. Take out the sun, and the planets all go their own way. 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. I had it for at least three years, but it never left the left side of my neck. 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. Augustus Owsley Stanley III (later nicknamed Bear) was born on Jan. 19, 1935. He also studied ballet, Russian and French. Some of his other recorded works include Bears 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. The effort to preserve these historically vital recordings is estimated to cost between $300,000 $400,000. For decades, a . Stanley and Scully produced about 196grams of LSD in 1967, but 96grams of this was confiscated by the police. Im not really interested in talking about myself, he says. Stanley's lab in Berkeley was raided in 1966 and he was arrested. Amongst his outrageous success from the sale of his acid, Stanley also worked for a time as the Grateful Dead's sound engineer. The sound turns into something youve never heard before. 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. Adopt-A-Reel Program: Ill never forget that when youd open the refrigerator, there were big slabs of beef in there, Rosie McGee, Phil Leshs girlfriend at the time, later told Garcia biographer Jackson. Owsley Stanley, (Augustus Owsley Stanley III), "audio engineer and clandestine chemist", iconic figure of the counter-culture, "Acid King", "Bear"(as he was affectionately known), is our focus today. When Owsley was eight, his parents separated and his mother took him to Los Angeles. Stanley attended the Watts Acid Test on February 12, 1966 with his new apprentice Tim Scully, and provided the 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. The money flow was very embarrassing, he recalls. His grandfather, also named Augustus Owsley Stanley, was a trust-busting Democratic congressman from Kentucky who spent twelve years in the House of Representatives. Global warming: the panic, is based exclusively on temperate-zone land measurements and ignores the fact that the planet is seventy percent ocean. Another West Coastbased rock band, Jefferson Airplane, had been arrested two weeks earlier in the same situation. From 1974 to 1981, he also grew and sold cannabis from his garden in Fairfax, California, but the profits from this endeavor proved to be far less remunerative than his earlier work in clandestine chemistry. 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). When you get to 400, you just totally lose it. As their sound engineer, Stanley frequently recorded live tapes behind his mixing board and developed their Wall of Sound sound system, one of the largest mobile public address systems ever constructed. I did not feel it was mine, since what I was doing was in my mind a service to my community. 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. The "Save The Music!" 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 Hells Angels. 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. 94tracks reflecting a broad cross-section of musical forms, including bluegrass, blues, folk, country, swing jazz, and rockabilly, among others. The Grateful Dead's "Wall of Sound" was a massive sound system designed by LSD chemist, Owsley Stanley. 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. 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 he lost control of that one cell, there would be nothing left, Wolfe wrote. He says his method was simple. Photo Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph from San Francisco Chronicle, via . 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"). When Owsley showed up one day during the fall, he walked over to Kesey and handed him a couple of hits of acid. Would the Summer of Love have ever happened without Stanley, the reclusive acid impresario who turned on the world? We are truly soulmates after twenty-two years together, and our love is as strong today as it was in the beginning. In April, Owsley visited Timothy Leary, the east coast figurehead of LSD, at the Hitchcock Estate in Millbrook, NY.Stanley and Leary had met in LA in the spring of 1966, but . Stanley is known throughout the west as "king of acid." The world would be, like, over. I lost control of that cell as well, Owsley says. On December 11th, 1965, the Dead played at the Muir Beach Acid Test in a lodge by the sea in Marin County. [29] Following the hiatus, Stanley returned as Lesh's personal roadie for "a couple of tours" in the late 1970s, although personality conflicts with other crew members once again precipitated his departure. OWSLEY STANLEY OBITUARY. The problem is'Packet-sniffer 'bots', very small programs which hackers insert by stealth into an internet router's . 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. 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. $30.00. Along with other recognition of your generous contribution, if the recording you select is viable for future release by OSF, you will receive a liner note credit. SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. - Millionare Augustus Owsley Stanley III, revered among hippies as the "King of Acid," finally has run into big, big trouble with the federal narcotics boys. 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. [5][7][8], Stanley was the scion of a political family from Kentucky. From the start, Owsley felt that his state of mind while he was making acid would affect the nature of the product. A legend recording a legend T. Michael Coleman, Bass. Jerry Garcia's Lost Pipe Has Been Found After 30 Years and It Still Smells Like Weed. There were no greens or anything he called it rabbit food. , Nor was there any point in trying to argue with Owsley about it. Wall Street Journal. 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. . After obtaining a court order that made the police return his lab equipment, Owsley and Cargill split for Los Angeles. We were officially granted 501(c)(3) nonprofit status by the IRS in December 2012. 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. 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. Lansing State Journal (MI.)