Grateful Dead Sound Man Supplied '60s With LSD
by STEPHEN MILLER, online.wsj.com
March 15th 2011
Owsley Stanley, the grandson of a former Kentucky governor, made and supplied
the LSD that fueled acid rock and California's hallucinogenic culture in the
1960s.
Mr. Stanley died Sunday at age 76 after an automobile accident in Queensland,
Australia, where he had emigrated in the 1980s.
An early patron and sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, Mr. Stanley was
memorialized in the band's song "Alice D. Millionaire," named after a newspaper
headline about his arrest for dealing LSD.
Mr. Stanley was credited with distributing thousands—some say millions— of
doses of high-purity LSD, often for free at concerts and "acid tests" run by
Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
Notoriously press-shy, Mr. Stanley thought he was helping introduce a new form
of consciousness. Renegade Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary agreed, calling
him "God's Secret Agent A.O.S. 3" (Augustus Owsley Stanley III was his given
name).
But authorities demurred, repeatedly busting him and finally convicting him for
drug possession in 1969.
"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for," Mr.
Stanley told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007. "What I did was a community
service."
Mr. Stanley was the rebellious scion of an eminent Kentucky family. His
grandfather, Augustus Owsley Stanley, was a U.S. senator after serving as
governor. The younger Mr. Stanley was described by a former schoolmaster
"almost like a brain child," but was kicked out of the Charlotte Hall Military
Academy in 9th grade for "getting the whole campus intoxicated" on smuggled
booze, he told a biographer of Jerry Garcia, the late guitarist for the
Grateful Dead.
After that, he bounced between schools and enrolled briefly at the University
of Virginia's School of Engineering. He enlisted in the Air Force, which sent
him to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. There, he
acquired expertise in electronics, and later worked at radio and television
stations.
By the mid-1960s, Mr. Stanley had been married and divorced twice with two
kids, and was living with a Berkeley chemistry student who helped him
synthesize LSD in makeshift laboratories.
He had also become an audio expert, helping to create the Grateful Dead's
concert sound system that featured a multi-story wall of loudspeakers. He also
initiated the band's live recordings, which become their hallmark.
He helped pay for the band's living expenses in the early years, and he also
came up with the Dead's trademark skull and lightning-bolt logo—originally used
to mark music equipment on tours. When the band released its 1973 "History of
the Grateful Dead, Volume 1," it was subtitled "Bear's Choice"—Bear being his
nickname.
He recorded many other artists, including Janis Joplin and the Allman Brothers.
But it was for LSD that he was best-known, and Owsley became the byword for the
most potent and plentiful acid available. Tom Wolfe wrote that he provided the
drugs used at "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" in Watts in 1966. It became a
popular legend that Jimi Hendrix's breakout hit "Purple Haze" was named after
an Owsley concoction, though Mr. Hendrix denied it.
After his release from about two years in prison in the early 1970s, Mr.
Stanley assumed a lower profile. He became convinced that a new ice age was
upon the world, and decided to move to Australia, where he thought the effects
would be least severe.
There, Mr. Stanley became a jewelry sculptor and sold his ceramic and metal
creations online in recent years from a website packed with essays denying
global warming and espousing his metaphysical and dietary theories.
Mr. Stanley wrote in a recent essay on his website that psychedelics could
"renew our connection with the planet we live on and its life forms."
His relationship to Earth's life forms included following a purely carnivorous
diet. Carbohydrates and vegetables were killers, he said. He blamed a recent
heart attack on poisonous broccoli his mother had fed him as a child.
Write to Stephen Miller at [email protected]
Original Page:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703363904576200762281851194.html
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