All donations to the Owsley Stanley Foundation are fully tax deductible. . I am often asked about the origin of the so-called "dancing bears" which were commonly seen around GD shows. Thats what alchemy says., To generate enough cash to purchase the raw materials to make LSD, Owsley and Cargill began making and selling methedrine in a makeshift bathroom lab in Berkeley. Because the Dead controlled everything from onstage, no one had to mix from the house. Every single note is separately placed in space as well as in time. Former Rolling Stone editor Greenfield's pretty solid, if skimpily researched, book provides an . The effort to preserve these historically vital recordings is estimated to cost between $300,000 $400,000. The Owsley Stanley Foundation is pleased to present an audiophile release of incendiary performances by the incomparable Doc and Merle Watson, from Bears Sonic Journals -Owsleys storied trove of live concert recordings. A thought occurred to me: if the orange were red and the bar across were a lightning bolt cutting across at an angle, then we would have a very nice, unique and highly identifiable mark to put on the equipment. Ego death. I dont care who you are. The key element was "turn on" and it was Owsley . If you wanted to be an idiot and do something any way but his, that was your decision. Later, inspired by a 1958 performance of the Bolshoi Ballet, he studied ballet in Los Angeles, supporting himself for a time as a professional dancer. The statement released on behalf of Stanley's family said the car crash occurred near his home, on a rural stretch of highway near Mareeba, Queensland. The lead and the gold is the lead of the primitive nature into the gold of the enlightened man. $40.00. Owsley "Bear" Stanleyinterview by David GansJanuary 13, 1991KPFA (94.1 FM) Radio ArchivesAugustus Owsley Stanley III (January 19, 1935 - March 12, 2011) was . And Then There Was David Lindley, See the Beths Deliver Refreshing 'Expert in a Dying Field' Mini-Set on 'CBS Mornings', The YSL Case Is Stretching Fulton County's Justice System to Its Breaking Point, NBA 'Investigating,' Team Suspends Ja Morant After Allegedly Flashing Gun on Social Media. Yet today, at seventy-two, he is all but forgotten. Please reorganize this content to explain the subject's impact on popular culture, Learn how and when to remove this template message, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, Owsley Stanley, icon of 1960s counterculture, dies at 76, Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead, Bear's Sonic Journals: Fillmore East, February 1970, Bear's Sonic Journals: Dawn of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Bear's Sonic Journals: Found in the Ozone, "For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD, long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area", "Owsley Stanley, Artisan of Acid, Is Dead at 76", "Owsley 'Bear' Stanley Dies in Car Accident", Owsley Stanley, counterculture producer of LSD, dies at 76 KansasCity.com, "Owsley 'Bear' Stanley dies in North Queensland car crash", "The dark, one-dog night of Chuck Negron", "Jerry Garcia of Grateful Dead, Icon of 60's Spirit, Dies at 53", https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/downloads/p5547t98n.pdf, "Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III B&N Readouts", "Internet Archive Forums: Re: Owsley question", "2,5-Dimethoxy-4-methyl-amphetamine (STP): A New Hallucinogenic Drug", "45 Years Ago: The Grateful Dead's Infamous 'Truckin' Drug Bust", "Remembering the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound: an absurd feat of technological engineering", "Remembering Owsley "Bear" Stanley | Grateful Dead", "Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia", "Owsley Stanley's Acid Trips Helped Define the Sound of the 1960s, but His Recordings Are Just as Important", "Owsley Stanley's 'Sonic Journals': Inside the Tape Vault of a Psychedelic Legend", "Doc & Merle Watson: Play 'Never the Same Way Once' on New Box Set", "First Doc & Merle Watson Box Set Released", "Owsley Stanley Foundation Announces Doc & Merle Watson Live Box Set", "Previously Unreleased Allman Brothers Band Recordings from February 1970 Fillmore East Run Coming", "Bear's Sonic Journals: Dawn of the New Riders of the Purple Sage", "Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen Bear's Sonic Journals: Found in the Ozone", "Owsley Stanley Foundation to Release Rare Performance by Ali Akbar Khan from 1970", "Smoke in a Bottle: That Which Colors the Mind", "Bear's Sonic Journals: That Which Colors the Mind Ali Akbar Khan / Indranil Bhattacharya / Zakir Hussain", "Global Beat: Zakir Hussain Revisits a Historic Family Dog Summit", "When the Giants of Indian Classical Music Collided with Psychedelic San Francisco", "Owsley Stanley Foundation to Release Landmark Tim Buckley Live Recording", "Tim Buckley Lets His Freak Flag Fly on Live LP 'Merry-Go-Round at the Carousel', "Review: Tim Buckley "Merry-Go-Round at the Carousel Live", "Tim Buckley Displays Adventurous Spirit Via 'Bear's Sonic Journals: Merry-Go-Round at the Carousel June 1968' (Album Review)", "New Johnny Cash Live Album, 'At the Carousel Ballroom' Captures Country Star in the Counterculture", "A Johnny Cash Live Album from 1968 Is Finally Set to Be Released", "Previously Unreleased Johnny Cash Live Album Recorded by Owsley Stanley Due in September", "Johnny Cash 1968 Carousel Ballroom Live Bootleg Recorded by Owsley Headed for Release", "Johnny Cash's Previously Unreleased Live Album from 1968 to Be Unearthed", "When the Man in Black Met the Guys in Tie-Dye", "Owsley Stanley Foundation to Release Early Chieftains Live Recordings", "Bear's Sonic Journals: The Foxhunt, The Chieftains Live in San Francisco 1973 & 1976 to Be Released", "Ireland's The Chieftains Land on U.S. These performances have not been heard since the nights they were played more than 40 years ago ! In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe described how Owsley completely lost control of himself, dissolving into gaseous nothingness until he became nothing more than a single cell. And he was probably right. Years later, Lesh would write that Garcia once told him, Theres nothing wrong with Bear that a few billion less brain cells wouldnt cure., The bands impatience with how long it took Owsley to set up its equipment and then take it back down again soon led to a parting of the ways. Ignoring the inquiry, Owsley roots through his bags for a large state-of-the-art conical burr grinder and a white funnel-shaped device to heat water so he can make coffee from beans he grew and roasted at home in Australia. The Wall of Sound fulfilled Owsley's desire for a distortion-free sound system that could also serve as its own monitoring system. We are truly soulmates after twenty-two years together, and our love is as strong today as it was in the beginning. Although no man knows the exact time, we feel that time is very near! Stanley lived with his wife Sheilah (a former clerk in the Grateful Dead's ticket office) in the bush of Tropical North Queensland, where he worked to create sculpture and wearable art. Lenny Hart and Owsley, who had never trusted preachers anyway, got on like oil and water. It all seemed to fit together. David Lindley, Multi-Instrumentalist Who Shaped the Sound of Soft Rock, Dead at 78 After Stanley got out of prison in late 1972, he, Dan Healy and Mark Raizene of the Grateful Dead . Bear wanted to be the sound man, and he was not the sound man, and he just never got it, because he had a single vision. He then talked to his friend Bob Thomas about putting the lightning bolt through the words Grateful Dead in lettering, which from a distance would look like a skull. . Owsley Stanley, famed Grateful Dead soundman and the first person to privately manufacture LSD, lived in the Poet's Corner cottage during the Summer of Love. Would the Summer of Love have ever happened without Stanley, the reclusive acid impresario who turned on the world? By his own account, between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced no less than 500 grams of LSD, amounting to a little more . 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. All of the rest of their calories came from fat. His paternal grandfather, Augustus Owsley Stanley, a member of the United States Senate after serving as Governor of Kentucky and in the U.S. House of Representatives, campaigned against Prohibition in the 1920s.[5]. Link to comments by the Bear on a low carb forum back in 2006. The Owsley Stanley Foundations Seventh release of Bears Sonic Journals: Merry-Go-Round at the Carousel features Tim Buckley at his jazzy, improvisational best, including the only known recordings of several Buckley originals and a stunning medley showcasing a version of Fred Neils, Merry-Go-Round.. Those were all allegories. The reason is that Im a total carnivore. 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. Lansing State Journal (MI.) And if you believe, as I did, that the universe is a creation in the mind of a being that is creating time and space, then everything is mental. Born in 1935, Owsley was "authentic Bluegrass political royalty." His father was a prominent government attorney and his grandfather, Augustus Owsley Stanley, was elected governor of Kentucky in 1919 and served in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Immediately following his release, Stanley resumed working for the Grateful Dead as a roadie and sound engineer in the summer of 1972. Owsley Stanley was a counterculture transformer famous for the purity of two things: the LSD he cooked up and the rock 'n' roll sound system he created. When Owsley asked Lesh what he could do for the band, the bass player said they had no manager and offered him the job. By Nate Todd Jan 19, 2023 6:14 am PST. It was the most dangerous, underpaid job I ever had in my life, he says.I was never a real grower. Stanley also developed the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound, one of the largest mobile sound reinforcement systems ever constructed. 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. He's also related to William Owsley, the 16th governor of Kentucky, for . Augustus Owsley Stanley III aka Bear was an American audio engineer and an underground drug maker. On January 14, 1967, Owsley supplied LSD for an even larger festival, The Gathering of the Tribes, a Human Be-In, held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Augustus Owsley Stanley III was born on Jan. 19, 1935, to a patrician Kentucky family. 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. There were no onstage monitors, so musicians couldnt hear one another. 631 ratings55 reviews. Professionally recorded by Owsley in 1974, and mastered using todays most cutting edge technologies, they are exquisite. So they never became visual, they stayed in the oral world, which is, everything is part of reality. [30], In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Stanley briefly served as the live mixing engineer for Robert Hunter and Jefferson Starship. Three weeks later, on January 8th, 1966, Owsley sashayed into the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco for another Acid Test. Taking acid soon became the watermark. 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At this point, Stanley rented a house in Point Richmond, Richmond, California. Five months later at Monterey Pop, Owsley passed out his Monterey Purple backstage to Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend and the Stones Brian Jones, not to mention much of the festivals staff and crew. When Owsley was eight, his parents separated and his mother took him to Los Angeles. Because he wanted to keep a sonic journal of his work, Owsley began plugging a suitcase-size Ampex 602 tape recorder into the sound board each night as the Dead played in 1966. 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. The Owsley Stanley Foundation, in partnership with the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, CA, is pleased to announce the sixth release from Owsley's storied archive of live concert recordings - Bear's Sonic Journals: That Which Colors the Mind, a previously unreleased 1970 live concert featuring one of the greatest masters of Indian classical music, Ali Akbar Khan (sarod .