Owsley Stanley
telegraph.co.uk | Mar 14th 2011
Working from his basement laboratory in the Bay area of San Francisco, home of
the “flower power” movement, Stanley was the drug’s single most prolific
producer, manufacturing it to such a high standard that “Owsley” became a slang
term for quality LSD.
Hendrix’s hit song Purple Haze (1967) was reputedly inspired by a batch of
Stanley’s LSD. Steely Dan’s song Kid Charlemagne (1976) was a musical portrait
of what the band’s co-founder, Walter Becker, described as the
“outlaw-acid-chef of the Sixties”.
Formed in the San Francisco Bay area in 1965, the Grateful Dead also wrote
about Stanley, in their song Alice D Millionaire (after a newspaper had
described him as an “LSD millionaire”).
Such was the revenue from Stanley’s production of the drug that he was able to
become the first financial backer of the psychedelic band, whose “dancing bear”
icon derives from his nickname “the Bear”. Having trained in electronics during
a spell in the US Air Force, he also developed and directed every aspect of the
Dead’s live sound at a time when scant attention was paid to amplification in
public arenas. His recordings of their concerts were turned into live albums,
furnishing him with a steady income in later life.
His activities first attracted the attention of the authorities in 1966, the
year LSD was made illegal in California. But after a substance police claimed
was methedrine turned out to be something else, Stanley walked free and sued
for the return of his laboratory equipment.
At that time he was midway through an intensive two-year period of LSD
production that accounted for millions of doses of the drug taken by
tripped-out devotees of the growing psychedelic movement. Stanley’s wares
fuelled the celebrated “Summer of Love” in San Francisco in 1967, and a special
batch of LSD called Monterey Purple was reportedly used by Jimi Hendrix at the
Monterey Pop Festival. “Purple haze all in my brain/Lately things just don’t
seem the same/Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why/’Scuse me while I kiss the
sky,” sang Hendrix.
It was only after being arrested in 1970 on drugs charges, relating not to LSD
but to marijuana, that Stanley’s narcotics career was derailed. Despite being
sentenced to two years in prison, however, he remained defiant: “I wound up
doing time for something I should have been rewarded for,” he said. “What I did
was a community service, the way I look at it. Was I a criminal? No. I was a
good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are
different.”
The son of an American government attorney, Augustus Owsley Stanley III was
born on January 19 1935 in Kentucky, a state governed between 1915 and 1919 by
his grandfather, who represented it in both the House of Representatives and
the Senate. Owsley, who shed his first given name in 1967, grew up in Los
Angeles and Virginia, and was expelled from school for drunkenness. He wangled
a place at the University of Virginia to read Engineering, but after only a
year joined the US Air Force, where he specialised in electronics and radar.
He left the military after 18 months and, having been mesmerised by a
performance of the visiting Bolshoi company in 1958, studied ballet. He worked
briefly as a professional dancer before returning to electronics, taking jobs
in jet propulsion laboratories and at a television station. In 1963 he enrolled
at the University of California at Berkeley, lasting only a year. Before
leaving, however, he discovered the recipe for LSD in the Journal of Organic
Chemistry in the university library.
After teaming up with the Grateful Dead he soon graduated to the role of sound
engineer with the band. He claimed that his recording genius dated from a
swimming accident that damaged his right ear when he was 19 . “When stereo
sounds good to me, it sounds fantastic to everyone else,” he said. “And when it
sounds fantastic to me, well, you wouldn’t believe it.”
Stanley is credited with having devised the first public address system
specifically designed for music, and created the group’s Wall Of Sound – a vast
array of speakers used during concerts. With a graphic artist friend, Bob
Thomas, Stanley also created the band’s logo showing a skull riven by a
lightning bolt which became known as Steal Your Face.
But his efforts were not universally lauded by musicians. Frank Zappa (who
styled himself a “freak” not a “hippie”) satirised the West Coast psychedelic
scene in Who Needs The Peace Corps? (1968), which opens with the 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 and sleep/On Owsley’s floor.”
Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test also emerged in 1968, but again Stanley
was less than pleased, this time because the book portrayed him as a brilliant
but eccentric acid “chemist”.
“I was never a chemist,” he complained, adding that he had just “followed the
directions” to make LSD. “It was the adventure the thing created that was
interesting. Making the thing was not. It was just something that somebody
needed to do, so I did it.”
By the early 1980s Owsley had left San Francisco for the Australian state of
Queensland, apparently to avoid a new ice age destined to engulf the northern
hemisphere. There he established a business selling enamel sculptures and
adhered to an all-meat diet. He also kept a low profile, rebuffing journalists.
Owsley Stanley, who died as the result of a road accident, is survived by his
wife, Sheila, and their four children.
Original Page:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/8381945/Owsley-Stanley.html
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