Owsley Stanley
Ancestry
Stanley was the scion of a political family from Kentucky. His father was a government attorney, and his namesake and grandfather, Augustus O. Stanley, was a member of the United States Senate after serving as Governor of Kentucky. Another ancestor, William Owsley, also served as Governor of Kentucky in the mid-1800s.
Biography
Early life
When Stanley was twenty-one, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1956 and served for eighteen months before being discharged in 1958. Later, inspired by a 1958 performance of the Bolshoi Ballet, he began studying ballet in Los Angeles, supporting himself for a time as a professional dancer. In 1963, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley where he became involved in the psychoactive drug scene. 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. He beat the charges and successfully sued for the return of his equipment. The police were looking for methamphetamine, but found only LSDhich was not illegal at the time.
Stanley moved to Los Angeles to pursue the production of LSD. He used his Berkeley lab proceeds to buy 500 grams of lysergic acid monohydrate, the basis for LSD. His first shipment arrived on March 30, 1965. He produced 300,000 capsules (270 micrograms each) of LSD by May 1965 and then returned to the Bay Area.
In September 1965, Stanley became the primary LSD supplier to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters; by this point Sandoz LSD was hard to come by and “Owsley Acid” had become the new standard. He was featured (most prominently his freak-out at the Muir Beach Acid Test in November 1965) in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a book detailing the history of Kesey and the Merry Pranksters by Tom Wolfe. Stanley attended the Watts Acid Test on February 12, 1966 with his new apprentice Tim Scully and provided the LSD.
Involvement with the Grateful Dead
Stanley met the members of the Grateful Dead in 1966 and began working with them as their first soundman and helped finance them. Along with his close friend Bob Thomas, he designed the Lightning Bolt Skull Logo, often referred to by fans as “Steal Your Face”, “Stealie” or SYF (after the name of the 1976 Grateful Dead album featuring only the lightning bolt skull on the cover, although the symbol predates the namesake album by eight years). The 13-point lightning bolt was derived from a stencil Stanley created to spray-paint on the Grateful Dead’s equipment boxese wanted an easily identifiable mark to help the crew find the Dead’s equipment in the jumble of multiple bands’ identical black equipment boxes at festivals. The lightning bolt design came to him while driving one night in a thunderstorm. Stanley suggested to Thomas that the words “Grateful Dead” might be drawn beneath the red white and blue circled bolt in such a way that it looked like a skull; Thomas went off and returned with the now familiar Grateful Dead icon, having discarded the hidden word concept. The lightning-adorned skull logo made its first appearance on the 1973 release, History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 1: Bear’s Choice, an album put together by Stanley from recordings he had made in 1970 as his tribute to his dear friend, the recently deceased Grateful Dead co-founder Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. The iconic “Dancing Bears” also first appeared on the reverse cover of this album, painted by Thomas as an inside reference to Stanley; dubbed “Bear” as a young teen when he sprouted body hair before the rest of his friends, he had studied ballet in his early 20s and displayed a distinctive style of dancing while tripping on LSD at showsecoming what his friends called “The Dancing Bear”.
During his time as the soundman for the Grateful Dead, he started what became a long-term practice of recording the band while they rehearsed and performed. His initial motivation for creating what he dubs his “sonic journal” was to improve his ability to mix the sound, but the fortuitous result was an extensive trove of recordings of the Grateful Dead during what many consider their heyday. Focusing on quality and clarity of sound, he favored simplicity in his miking, and his tapes are widely touted as being unrivaled live recordings. He made numerous live recordings of the Dead and other leading 1960s and 70s artists appearing in San Francisco, including Jefferson Airplane, Old and In The Way, Janis Joplin, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Taj Mahal, Santana, Miles Davis, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Blue Cheer, a band who took their name from the nickname of Stanley’s LSD, and many others. While many Stanley recordings have been released, many more remain unpublished.
Richmond LSD lab
Stanley and Scully built electronic equipment for the Grateful Dead until late spring 1966. At this point Stanley rented a house in Point Richmond, California, and he, Scully, and Melissa Cargill (Stanley’s girlfriend who was a skilled chemist introduced to Stanley by a former girlfriend, Susan Cowper) set up a lab in the basement. Stanley developed a method of LSD synthesis which left the LSD 99.9 percent free of impurities. The Point Richmond lab turned out more than 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) of LSD they dubbed “White Lightning”. LSD became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, and Scully wanted to set up a new lab in Denver, Colorado.
Scully set up the new lab in the basement of a house across the street from the Denver zoo in early 1967. Scully made the LSD in the Denver lab while Stanley tableted the product in Orinda, California. Stanley and Scully also produced a new psychedelic they called STP.
Legal trouble
STP was distributed in the summer of 1967 in 20 mg tablets and quickly acquired a bad reputation. Stanley and Scully made trial batches of 10 mg tablets and then STP mixed with LSD in a few hundred yellow tablets but soon ceased production of STP. Stanley and Scully produced about 196 grams of LSD in 1967, but 96 grams of this was confiscated by the authorities.
In late 1967, Stanley’s Orinda lab was raided by police; he was found in possession of 350,000 doses of LSD and 1,500 doses of STP. His defense was that the illegal substances were for personal use, but he was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison. A newspaper headline mis-identifying Stanley as an “LSD Millionaire” following his arrest inspired the Grateful Dead song “Alice D. Millionaire”. The same year, Stanley officially shortened his name to “Owsley Stanley”.
After he was released from prison, Stanley (1999 pic) went on to do more sound work for the Grateful Dead. Later, he would work as a broadcast television engineer.
Recent years
A naturalized Australian citizen since 1996, Stanley and his wife Sheilah live in the bush of Far Northern Tropical Queensland where he creates sculpture, much of it wearable art. He has two sons and two daughters by four different women; Peter and Nina preceded the 1960s, while Starfinder and Redbird followed them.
Diet and health
Stanley believes that the natural human diet is a totally carnivorous one, thus making it a no-carbohydrate diet, and that all vegetables are toxic. He claims to have eaten almost nothing but meat, eggs, butter and cheese since 1959 and that he believes his body has not aged as much as the bodies of those who eat a more “normal” diet. He is convinced that insulin, released by the pancreas when carbohydrates are ingested, is the cause of much damage to human tissue and that diabetes mellitus is caused by the ingestion of carbohydrates.
Stanley received radiation therapy in 2004 for throat cancer, which he first attributed to passive exposure to cigarette smoke at concerts, but which he later discovered was almost certainly caused by the infection of his tonsil with HPV. He credits his low carb diet with starving the tumor of glucose, slowing its growth and preventing its spread enough that it could be successfully treated despite its advanced state at diagnosis.
Musical references
In 1966, the Grateful Dead sometimes performed a song titled “Alice D. Millionaire”, which is a reference to the newspaper headline of when Stanley was arrested. The headline read “LSD Millionaire Busted”.
The Jimi Hendrix cover version of the Beatles song “Day Tripper”, from a 1967 BBC session first released on CD in 1987, features Jimi Hendrix clearly shouting out, “Oh Owsley, can you hear me now?” during the climactic guitar solo.
The title of the Jefferson Airplane song “Bear Melt”, from their 1968 live album Bless Its Pointed Little Head, is a reference to Stanley’s nickname “Bear”. Paul Kantner also refers to Stanley by name on the album. The Jefferson Airplane song “Mexico”, which was released as a single in 1970, opens with the lyric, “Owsley and Charlie, twins of the trade, come to the poet’s room.”
The Frank Zappa song “Who Needs the Peace Corps?”, from the Mothers of Invention’ 1968 album We’re Only in It for the Money, satirized the hippie scene and features the opening verse:
What’s there to live for?
Who needs the peace corps?
Think I’ll just DROP OUT
I’ll go to Frisco
Buy a wig & sleep
On Owsley’s floor
The Steely Dan song “Kid Charlemagne” from the 1976 album The Royal Scam was inspired by Stanley:
While the music played, you worked by candlelight
Those San Francisco nights
You were the best in town
Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl
You turned it on the world
That’s when you turned the world around
Did you feel like Jesus?
Did you realize
That you were a champion in their eyes?
On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene
But yours was kitchen clean
Everyone stopped to stare at your technicolor motor home
Every A-Frame had your number on the wall
You must have had it all
You’d go to L.A. on a dare
And you’d go it alone
Could you live forever?
Could you see the day?
Could you feel your whole world fall apart and fade away?
In 1990, a UK psychedelic Ska Punk band named themselves AOS3 after Stanley’s initials, culled from a chapter of the book “The Brotherhood Of Eternal Love”. They used an Image of Stanley as a t-shirt graphic, and named their first tape release simply “Owsley”.
In 1996, Peter Kember’s post-Spacemen 3 band Spectrum released the “Songs for Owsley” EP. The song “Owsley” is an appropriately tripped-out melange of electronic mayhem and highly processed vocals.
Glasgow psychedelic pop group The Owsley Sunshine, take their name from a brand of LSD produced by Stanley.
Australian band The Masters Apprentices released a song called “Our Friend Owsley Stanley III” in the late 60s.
References
^ Owsley Stanley blog posting. 17 March 2006.
^ Pareles, Jon (1995-08-10). “Jerry Garcia of Grateful Dead, Icon of 60’s Spirit, Dies at 53”. New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE2D7173EF933A2575BC0A963958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2. Retrieved 11 March 2009.
^ Owsley Stanley blog posting. 26 February 2006.
^ Selvin, J. For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD, long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area San Francisco Chronicle, July 12, 2007.
^ Owsley Stanley blog posting. 25 February 2006.
^ Owsley Stanley blog posting. 2 March 2006.
^ FRANK ZAPPA lyrics – Who Needs The Peace Corps?
^ Lyrics | The Royal Scam
Lee, Martin A; Bruce Shlain (1986). Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond. Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-3062-3.
McCleary, John Bassett (2004). The Hippie Dictionary: A Cultural Encyclopedia of the 1960s and 1970s. Berkeley, California: Ten Speed Press. ISBN 1-58008-547-4.
Wolfe, Tom (1968). The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
External links
Owsley’s website
For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD, long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area – 2007 Interview
Aron Ranen’s Power & Control LSD in the Sixties
Persondata
NAME
Stanley, Owsley
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
Stanley, Augustus Owsley, III (birth name); Owsley (nickname); Bear (nickname)
SHORT DESCRIPTION
LSD chemist
DATE OF BIRTH
January 19, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH
living
PLACE OF DEATH
Categories: 1935 births | American chemists | American audio engineers | Grateful Dead | Living people | Psychedelic drug advocatesHidden categories: BLP articles lacking sources | Articles lacking reliable references from December 2008 | All articles lacking sources | Articles with hCards
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