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. Owsley adored his grandfather, but his relationship with his parents was difficult. Long before global warming became an international hot-button issue, he delivered what writer David Gans described as a ninety-minute lecture on a thermal cataclysm that he said would begin with a six-week rainstorm and leave the entire Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable. Passing around Australian visa applications, Owsley then urged all those present to join him in the Southern Hemisphere. as Owsley acid." The American psychologist Timothy Leary's famous invitation to "tune in, turn on and drop out" changed a generation. Although no man knows the exact time, we feel that time is very near! 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. This guy made the best LSD of the '60s - New York Post See Tom Taylor's account of his life and times published late last year in Far Out magazine. As above, so below. We called it the microcosm and the macrocosm. A year later, the novelist Ken Kesey was given acid at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park as part of a federally funded program in which volunteers were paid twenty dollars a session to ingest hallucinogens. Later that year, a friend gave Owsley 400 micrograms of pure LSD manufactured by Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland, where Dr. Albert Hofmann had first synthesized the drug in 1938. 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. Especially this one. 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. 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. Owsley "Bear" Stanley the Acid King is remembered by friends Long before the Summer of Love drew thousands of hippies to Haight-Ashbury, Owsley was already an authentic underground folk hero, revered throughout the counterculture for making the purest form of LSD ever to hit the street. [28] During this period, he also assisted Phil Lesh in salvaging the technically deficient recordings assembled for Steal Your Face (1976), a poorly-received live album culled from the final October 1974 pre-hiatus shows at Winterland Ballroom. It is loud without being loud. 'Kid Charlemagne': A Close Reading Of Steely Dan's Ode To - SFist Owsley Stanley, an icon of Bay Area counterculture in the 1960s and a longtime associate of the Grateful Dead, died Sunday in a car . The "Save The Music!" Every single note is separately placed in space as well as in time. [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. When Owsley showed up one day during the fall, he walked over to Kesey and handed him a couple of hits of acid. The new lab was set up in the basement of a house across the street from the Denver Zoo in early 1967. Obituary: Owsley Stanley dies at 76; 'Acid King' of the '60s Adopt-A-Reel Program:For donations of $400 or more, we will work with you to select one of Bears Sonic Journals for priority preservation. For the Dead, the good news was that they now had nothing to do all day but jam. Details. Augustus Owsley Stanley III (January 19, 1935 - March 12, 2011) was an American audio engineer and clandestine chemist. Owsley Stanly Tribute Page These performances have not been heard since the nights they were played more than 40 years ago ! 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. We were officially granted 501 (c) (3) nonprofit status by the IRS in December 2012. The Fresno Bee (CA.) It was amazing, he told Jerry Garcia biographer Blair Jackson. On December 11th, 1965, the Dead played at the Muir Beach Acid Test in a lodge by the sea in Marin County. Bears Sonic Journals - Owsley Stanley Foundation It is for this reason that Owsley and his wife, Sheilah, whom he first met at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley in 1985 while she was working in the ticket office for the Dead, now live in Australia forty-five minutes from anywhere on 120 acres of land he claimed by squatting on it like a pioneer. 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He retained backstage access during this period, and his clientele included such notable figures as Keith Richards. 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. The price I had to pay to get through the gate. All of the rest of their calories came from fat. In every way, the briefcase reflects his mind. Believing there is no past and no future because everything exists only in present time, it never occurs to him to drive five minutes out of his way to the Monterey Fairgrounds where, forty years ago, his high-powered rocket fuel helped launch the Summer of Love. Technician for Grateful Dead and an LSD cook. 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. The thing about Owsley, Townshend said, is that when he gave you something, he would take it too. Night after night during the summer months, Owsley can be found stalking Bufo marinus, the species of poisonous toads (whose venom, Owsley insists, wont get you high) first introduced into Australia in 1935 in the mistaken belief that they would help control the cane beetle. 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. Under the professional name Bear, he was the sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, recording many of the band's live performances. 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. Owsley Stanley, 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 19. His grandfather, also named Augustus Owsley Stanley, was a trust-busting Democratic congressman from Kentucky who spent twelve years in the House of Representatives. 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. The world would be, like, over. I lost control of that cell as well, Owsley says. The Owsley Stanley Foundations 8th release ofBears Sonic Journals: Johnny Cash At the Carousel Ballroomfeatures Cash playing songs of outsiders, outlaws, and in-laws, exquisitely captured by Bear. Another West Coastbased rock band, Jefferson Airplane, had been arrested two weeks earlier in the same situation. It all seemed to fit together. The same year, Stanley officially shortened his name to "Owsley Stanley". Owsley Stanley Belt Buckles - Etsy Pittsburgh Post Gazette (PA.) Reno Gazette Journal (NV.) A year earlier in Los Angeles, narcotics agents had begun picking through their garbage. Augustus Bear Owsley Stanley 1967 Gathering of the Tribes. Together, they dwell in a complex of sheds, caravans, large canvas tents, modified shipping containers and corrugated-iron structures designed and built by Owsley. He was a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area hippie movement during the 1960s and played a pivotal role in the decades counterculture. Under the professional name Bear, he was the soundman for the rock band the Grateful Dead, whom he met when Ken Kesey invited them . Musicians can adjust it. 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"). He was magnanimous about it, remembers former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow. In this new three-part series, you and I will explore the life and times of Owsley Stanley, who early on financed the Grateful Dead with money he made as a "cosmic chemist" and was instrumental in the design of the band's legendary "Wall of Sound" stage system. The Bear, says Jerry [Garcia], is Satan in our midst, friend, chemist, psychedelic legend, and electronic genius; not a leader, but a moon with a gravitational pull. From Owsley's '60s to Today: A Long, Strange Intergenerational Trip Owsley Stanley. The Wall of Sound fulfilled Owsley's desire for a distortion-free sound system that could also serve as its own monitoring system. . 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. Stanley attended the Watts Acid Test on February 12, 1966 with his new apprentice Tim Scully, and provided the LSD. The situation was exacerbated by his disdain for the coarse language and deleterious drugs (most notably alcohol and cocaine) favored by the band's physically imposing roadies, many of whom perceived themselves as "macho cowboys" in contrast to Stanley's diminutive stature and scholarly appearance. His father was a government attorney. [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. He married and divorced twice, fathered two children and got himself arrested on a variety of charges. [1], Called the Acid King by the media,[2] Stanley was the first known private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD. The shelves werent even in there just these big hunks of meat. 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. Stanley Clarke took possession of his first Alembic bass in 1972 which brought a fair amount of interest from outside the Grateful Dead community . 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. 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. 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. 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. Check out our owsley stanley shirt selection for the very best in unique or custom, handmade pieces from our shops. I later learned who every one of them was, Owsley says, but I did not feel I could do anything about it. The lead and the gold is the lead of the primitive nature into the gold of the enlightened man. After Stanley got out of prison in late 1972, he, Dan Healy and Mark Raizene of the Grateful Dead . 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. Until you had tripped, you were not part of the new culture. 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. Unreleased Live Johnny Cash Album From 1968 Due in September Joel Selvin also wrote an extensive note on Owsley back in 2007 on the occasion of his . It's made of solid bronze, It's made of solid bronze, there were also some made in the mid 90's that were solid silver. Since 1965 he and Melissa Cargill had distributed an . Though Owsley seemed to be living the life of a counterculture superstar, Cargill remembers their time together back then as not so much an adventure as constantly looking over your shoulder. The feeling was more than just paranoia. I worked my way up to the top job, he recalls, which was as a line backer for the steam tables, and I traded my two cartons of cigarettes a week for a steak a day from the butcher, and I got all the meat and eggs I needed, and I cooked my own food and had a great time. Transferred to Lompoc, where his job was to wax the dining-room floor, Owsley soon moved on to the maintenance shop, where he used the tools to begin doing exquisitely detailed carvings in wood and stone. 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. Thomas, who died in 1993, sold it to the band as a letterhead for $250, meaning that neither he nor Owsley ever saw a dime from all those Deadhead stickers on the rear bumpers of Volkswagen buses. Stanley moved to Australia in 1982, and frequently returned to the United States to sell his jewelry (which commanded high prices) on Grateful Dead tours. Bcc: this option will retain the list of addresses on the server, placing only one address per copy as it sends to each name on the list. The sound of Jerry Garcias guitar grabbed hold of Owsley, and he freaked out on acid for the first time. Kesey was playing with something he did not understand, Owsley says. The original idea was to put recording studio technology into an electric guitar. As much of his portfolio had been delegated to as many as four sound engineers during his prison sentence, he struggled to regain his past influence among the band and support staff. Concise Comments. He was the key supplier of LSD during the 60s Hippie movem. We had enough acid to blow the world apart. 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.
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