Fwd: (NP) "Any time the music on the radio starts to sound like rubbish, it's time to take some LSD" - Owsley

[Kevin Dunn]

>
>

> A friend of mine claimed to have taken some LSD - vintage mid-60's,  
> preserved in deep freeze - at Ken Kesey's estate in the Eugene, OR  
> area when he met the author years ago. This article makes me wonder  
> whether Owsley could have been the progenitor of said acid... Great  
> article, I bet Owsley has some mind-blowing tales!
>
> K
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Mar 12, 2009, at 12:50 AM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com 
> > wrote:
>
>> http://hightimes.com/news/ht_admin/3520
>>
>> The small, barefoot man in black T-shirt and blue jeans barely  
>> rates a
>> second glance from the other Starbucks patrons in downtown San  
>> Rafael,
>> although he is one of the men who virtually made the '60s. Because
>> Augustus Owsley Stanley III has spent his life avoiding photographs,
>> few people would know what he looks like.
>>
>> The name Owsley became a noun that appears in the Oxford dictionary  
>> as
>> English street slang for good acid. It is the most famous brand name
>> in LSD history. Probably the first private individual to manufacture
>> the psychedelic, "Owsley" is a folk hero of the counterculture,
>> celebrated in songs by the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan.
>>
>> For more than 20 years, Stanley -- at 72, still known as the Bear --
>> has been living with his wife, Sheila, off the grid, in the outback  
>> of
>> Queensland, Australia, where he makes small gold and enamel  
>> sculptures
>> and keeps in touch with the world through the Internet.
>>
>> As a planned two-week visit to the Bay Area stretched to three, four
>> and then five weeks, Bear agreed to give The Chronicle an interview
>> because a friend asked him. He has rarely consented to speak to the
>> press about his life, his work or his unconventional thinking on
>> matters such as the coming ice age or his all-meat diet.
>>
>> Sporting a buccaneer's earring he got when he was in jail and a
>> hearing aid on the same ear, he keeps a salty goatee, and the sides  
>> of
>> his face look boiled clean from seven weeks of maximum radiation
>> treatment for throat cancer. Having lost one of his vocal cords, he
>> speaks only in a whispered croak these days. At one point, he was
>> reduced to injecting his puree of steak and espresso directly into  
>> his
>> stomach.
>>
>> "I never set out to change the world," he rasps in recalling his  
>> early
>> manufacture of LSD. "I only set out to make sure I was taking
>> something (that) I knew what it was. And it's hard to make a little.
>> And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too. Of
>> course, my friends expanded very rapidly."
>>
>> By conservative estimates, Bear Research Group made more than 1.25
>> million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, essentially seeding the
>> entire modern psychedelic movement.
>>
>> Less well known are Bear's contributions to rock concert sound. As  
>> the
>> original sound mixer for the Grateful Dead, he was responsible for
>> fundamental advances in audio technology, things as basic now as
>> monitor speakers that allow vocalists to hear themselves onstage.
>>
>> Says the Dead's Bob Weir: "He's good for a different point of view at
>> about any given time. He's brilliant. He knows everything."
>>
>> Bear, whose grandfather was a Kentucky governor and U.S. senator,  
>> grew
>> up in Los Angeles and Arlington, Va. He was thrown out of military
>> school in the eighth grade for being drunk and dropped out of school
>> altogether at 18. He managed to get accepted to the University of
>> Virginia, where he spent a year studying engineering. By 1956, he was
>> in the Air Force, specializing in electronics and radar.
>>
>> Later, Bear studied ballet, acting and Russian, worked in jet
>> propulsion labs as well as radio and television, and then entered UC
>> Berkeley in 1963, but lasted less than a year.
>>
>> Then he discovered acid.
>>
>> He found the recipe for making LSD in the Journal of Organic  
>> Chemistry
>> at the UC Berkeley library. Soon after, Bear began to cook acid.
>>
>> The Berkeley police raided his first lab in 1966 and confiscated a
>> substance that they claimed was methedrine. When it turned out to be
>> something else -- probably a component of LSD -- Bear not only walked
>> free but successfully sued the cops for the return of his lab
>> equipment.
>>
>> By the time he made a special batch called Monterey Purple for the
>> 1967 Monterey Pop Festival -- Owsley Purple was the secret smile on
>> Jimi Hendrix's face that night -- "Owsley" was an underground legend.
>>
>> In December 1967, agents arrested him at his secret lab in Orinda.  
>> The
>> "LSD Millionaire" headline in The Chronicle prompted the Dead to  
>> write
>> the song "Alice D. Millionaire." In 1970, after a pot bust in  
>> Oakland,
>> a judge revoked Bear's bail, and he served two years at Terminal
>> Island near the Los Angeles Harbor.
>>
>> "If you make some, you've got to move some to get some money to make
>> it," he says now. "But then you had to give a lot away to keep the
>> street price down. So anyway, I'm sort of embedded in this thing that
>> I'm tangled up in. ... Just as soon as it became illegal, I wanted
>> out. Then, of course, I felt an obligation."
>>
>> Bear, chemist to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, was involved  
>> with
>> the Dead almost from the band's beginnings at Kesey's notorious Acid
>> Tests. Bear was the Dead's first patron and, briefly, their manager.
>> He bought the band sound equipment and began to use the Dead as a
>> laboratory for audio research.
>>
>> "We'd never thought about high-quality PAs," says the Dead's Weir.
>> "There was no such thing until Bear started making one."
>>
>> Bear made the first public address system specifically dedicated to
>> music in 1966. If he was the first concert sound engineer in rock
>> music to take his job seriously, his habit of making tape recordings
>> of the shows he mixed also gave the Dead an unprecedented archive of
>> live recordings dating back to the band's first days. Many of Bear's
>> tapes have been turned into albums.
>>
>> Bear has always lived in a quite particular world. "He can be very
>> anal retentive, on a certain level, on a genius level," says Paul
>> Kantner of Jefferson Airplane. "I've seen him send his eggs back  
>> three
>> times at Howard Johnson's."
>>
>> His all-meat diet is a well-known example. When he was younger, Bear
>> read about the Eskimos eating only fish and meat and became convinced
>> that humans are meant to be exclusively carnivorous. The members of
>> the Grateful Dead remember living with Bear for several months in  
>> 1966
>> in Los Angeles, where the refrigerator contained only bottles of milk
>> and a slab of steak, meat they fried and ate straight out of the pan.
>> His heart attack several years ago had nothing to do with his strict
>> regimen, according to Bear, but more likely the result of some
>> poisonous broccoli his mother made him eat as a youth.
>>
>> As a sound mixer, Bear holds equally strict viewpoints, insisting  
>> that
>> the most effective rock concert systems should have only a single
>> source of sound, his argument quickly veering into the realm of
>> psycho-acoustics.
>>
>> "The PA can only be in one spot," he says. "All the sounds have to
>> come from a single place because the human brain is carrying around
>> the most sophisticated sound processing of any computer or living
>> creature. It equals the bats that fly by echo. It equals the  
>> dolphins.
>> It equals the owls that hunt at night without any daylight at all. It
>> is a superb system for locating and separating one sound from
>> everything else."
>>
>> Bear left Northern California in the early '80s, convinced that a
>> natural disaster was imminent. He predicted at the time that global
>> warming would lead to a six-week-long ultra-cyclone that could cover
>> the Northern Hemisphere with a new ice age. Determining that the
>> tropical northern side of Australia would be the most likely region  
>> to
>> survive, Bear made a beeline for Queensland and says he felt at home
>> the moment he set foot on the new continent.
>>
>> "I might be right about the ice age thing," he allows. "I might be  
>> wrong."
>>
>> Old friends express shock that Bear would ever even admit to that
>> possibility, but, if not exactly mellowed in his old age, he has  
>> found
>> room to accommodate other points of view.
>>
>> "He's come a long way," says Wavy Gravy, who visited Bear in  
>> Australia
>> this year. "He used to be real snappy and grumpy. Now he can be
>> actually sweet."
>>
>> His four children are grown. He has five grandchildren, and his  
>> oldest
>> son, Pete, in Florida, just became a grandfather, making Bear a
>> great-grandfather for the first time. His other son, Starfinder, a
>> veterinarian, hosted a party for him last month at his Oakland home
>> attended by the old Dead crowd, a tortoise and a caged iguana. He has
>> two daughters, Nina and Redbird, and maintains his own Web site
>> (www.thebear.org) where he sells his sculpture and posts various
>> diatribes and essays.
>>
>> He keeps up with the music scene -- he singles out Wolfmother and the
>> Arctic Monkeys as new bands he likes. "Any time the music on the  
>> radio
>> starts to sound like rubbish, it's time to take some LSD," he says.
>>
>> Owsley Stanley (he legally dropped the "Augustus" 40 years ago) has
>> also not joined the ranks of the penitent psychedelicists who look on
>> their experiences as youthful indiscretions.
>>
>> "I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded  
>> for,"
>> he says. "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."
>>
>> At the hilltop San Anselmo home where Bear had been house-sitting,
>> pretty much all available space was taken over with his belongings.  
>> He
>> squatted over the piles, trying to figure out what to ship and what  
>> to
>> take with him. Two days before his flight, it looks like he'll need
>> every minute.
>>
>> This time, he was extending his stay to catch his old friends Jorma
>> Kaukonen and Jack Casady of Hot Tuna play at the Fillmore. But when  
>> he
>> left for the airport the next day, he got as far as Sausalito before
>> he discovered that he had left the briefcase with the tickets back in
>> San Anselmo, and the trip home was postponed for another week.
>>
>> "I even said, 'I wonder what I'm leaving behind this time?' before I
>> left," he says, somewhat sadly.
>>
>> -- 
>> - "Be groovy or B movie" - the old 24fps signoff