Augustus Owsley Stanley III, LSD Chef Also Known as Bear, is Dead at 76

[Magda Hassan]

By Michael Hamad Sunday, March 13, 2011 4:26pm

(Chronicle Photo.)

Owsley "Bear" Stanley, who got countless people turned on to the psychedelic experience in the mid-1960s with LSD produced in his Bay Area lab, died in a car crash on Sunday near his home in north Queensland, Australia, according to a Reuters report.
Stanley served as the Grateful Dead's sound man for several years and was largely responsible for the massive Wall of Sound amplification setup the band used in the mid-'70s. He also chronicled the Dead's live shows; the album History of the Grateful Dead, Vol. 1 (Bear's Choice) was released on Warner Bros. Records in 1973 as a tribute to the band's original keyboardist Ron "Pigpen" McKernan.
The incident was Tweeted by John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist and Wyoming rancher, who referred to Stanley as an "Acid King, Annealer of the Grateful Dead, & Master Crank" who died "with his boots on."
Stanley gave few interviews, but here's a brief chat that's said to be Bear talking with an Australian radio host in 1994:

[Peter Lemkin]

Ah, sad news. I was one of his 'clients'. Never met him and didn't know he had left the USA.... His acid was always considered the best...... That was a much more hopeful time in the USA. All of my 'mileposts' to get my bearings from are going one by one by one....

[Keith Millea]

I am saddened to hear of this news,not totally shocked though.Owsley was already fighting with throat cancer.For those who understand,Owsley was the "magician",the "alchemist",the "Shaman", bringer of visions.

Summer 1967-"Blue Cheer",270 micrograms of 99.9 pure LSD.My life was changed forever,as many others can also proclaim.Back in the early eighties,we formed a band that played Grateful Dead songs.We converted a garage into our own little Fillmore Auditorium,complete with projected liquid light show.Deadheads keeping the magic alive!

I was recently reaquainted with one of my band friends from that era.He found me on this forum.He's still trying to keep the magic alive.I feel the best way for me to honor the life of "Bear" at this time is to post up my friends recent band video.

RIP Bear!



Lyrics to "Dark Star".

Dark star crashes, pouring its light into ashes.
Reason tatters, the forces tear loose from the axis.
Searchlight casting for faults in the clouds of delusion.
Shall we go, you and I while we can
Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?

Mirror shatters in formless reflections of matter.
Glass hand dissolving to ice petal flowers revolving.
Lady in velvet recedes in the nights of goodbye.
Shall we go, you and I while we can
Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?

PS:
It was Owsley who created the famous Grateful Dead Logo.

[Phil Dragoo]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLzUme1gN...re=related


8-27-72.


A week later, September 3, we caught them in Folsom Stadium, Boulder, Colorado, thirty-five thousand.


Six hours in the intermittent rain.


Then I hitched back to New Mexico in the American flag vest Alice made me of the remnant left when the locals had burned out the locos from New York.


Under a hatbox of stars, doing a concentric Mozartian petal-stretching yoga, if the doors of Watergate were cleansed we would see things as they are.


I look down at the ground to see where I stand
I follow the stream the way it will flow
I am a practiced and a pre-pared man
I am a Rolling Show

[Keith Millea]

Oh My:

YES,the "Sunshine Daydream" show.This was held about 6 months before I moved up here.It was in,what is now,the parking lot area of the Oregon Country fair.The longest running counterculture gathering to still exist,and thrive.

This was a benefit show for the Springfield Creamery,which is owned by the Kesey family.So,very special indeed,and I suppose,plenty of LSD to go around.

Thanks Phil.......

[Peter Lemkin]

Really 'good' [pure] LSD-25 [like Owsley's] was sublime!!!..but IMHO mescaline was on a higher plane entirely.....[likely slitting my own throat by stating this on the internet]...but WTF.....truth sets one free.... I think my good friend [now dead and gone, all too soon] Terrence McKenna had it all about correct. Nothing wrong with good Owsley Acid...if some of his windowpane was given to me, I'd take it in a second and ask for a lifetime supply.....:flypig:

[Keith Millea]

To really understand the Grateful Dead,and psychedelic music,I think I'll post up the whole 36 minute song.Listen,as the Dead start with an easy going jam,and then move into a free flowing improvisation,which leads into a total deconstruction of the song.They then bring everything back down to earth with an old cowboy tune,"El Paso".A long strange trip.........

[Peter Lemkin]

You, I, and a few others are speaking about a time, place and 'ambiance/set/setting' that those who were not 'there' there; and present then then can not appreciate. It was a window in time....a wormhole in spacetime to something bigger, better, brighter, more ethical and real...now all but lost. May it somehow happen again..but I must admit to being skeptical..... I sadly sense I will die with those special memories of hope, challenge of the system, ethical anarchy, going so mad that one became sane and more.....even had [again] Native Human insights and morality...values...balance...etc.

...the war is over...the good 'guys and gals' lost......(myself included)

.....pity...(not just for us, but for Gaia and all on her...]

...we now have a prison-Planet, run by neo-fascists and their war and propaganda machinery;chewing up and imprisoning/killing/torturing/driving insane all who would dare to challenge all what they paint as reality real....when it is as phony as a Potemkin village/anti-human/anti-life.

[Ed Jewett]

I was late to the dance... both of them. I never really got into the acid scene, the Dead, or West Coast music (I did come close in '66 when I found myself stuck without a job or much income after my freshman year in college in some plain place between endless corn fields and the pig butchery in mid-Iowa, and I had a choice to thumb to California, or go home.) i never made it to Haight-Ashbury or even the state it was in, but the state of mind came by for a few visits years later. I still wasn't into the Dead... most often I thought it was noise and a few who could not carry a tune... until one day when it just came to me, courtesy of some show on PBS, and I said "Who ARE these guys?" and the extended jams just caught me. I think you still have to look hard to find some really great music in that group (aside from that fellow with less fingers than he ought to have) but every once in a while, they would find it and blow me away. That was a long time ago, but a touch of grey suits me anyway.

[Ed Jewett]

For those needing a reminiscent tingle, check out the band known as "The String Cheese Incident". I know them having discovered what I regard as the best cover of the jazz classic "Take Five" I've heard and, in looking to find it again,discovered they have also covered the immortal "So What" (at least I'd guess or hope it is the Miles Davis tune). Both can be found on albums noted and which you can sample here: http://www.stringcheeseincident.com/# The web site has a built-in media player. "So What" is on the "Trick or Treat" album (and itcan't be sampled). "Take Five" is on the "Carnival '99" album (and it can't be sampled either).

But you aren't looking for jazz, are you? So I wondered whether "Shenandoah Breakdown" might be a good jam (it's on the "Rhythm of the Road" album (disc 3) (but it can't be sampled). But, at last, there might be a mini-treasure: "Walking On the Moon" (which if memory serves me was the tune that caught my ear with the Grateful Dead those many years ago) can be sampled. It's on the "Trick or Treat" album.

http://www.stringcheeseincident.com/music.html