Owsley Stanley


Stanley in 1967 at his arraignment

Born: Augustus Owsley Stanley III; January 19, 1935; Kentucky, U.S.
Died: March 12, 2011 (aged 76); Queensland, Australia

Other names: Bear
Occupation: Audio engineer
Relatives: Augustus O. Stanley, grandfather
Website: www.thebear.org

Augustus Owsley Stanley III (January 19, 1935 – March 12, 2011) was an American audio engineer and clandestine chemist. He was a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area hippie movement during the 1960s and played a pivotal role in the decade's counterculture. Under the professional name Bear, he was the soundman for the rock band the Grateful Dead, whom he met when Ken Kesey invited them to an Acid Test party. As their sound engineer, Stanley frequently recorded live tapes behind his mixing board and developed their Wall of Sound sound system, one of the largest mobile public address systems ever constructed. Stanley also helped Robert Thomas design the band's trademark skull logo.

Stanley was the first known private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD. By his own account, between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced no less than 500 grams of LSD, amounting to a little more than five million doses.

He died in a car accident in Australia (where he had taken citizenship in 1996) on March 12, 2011.

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Ancestry

Stanley was the son of a political family from Kentucky. His father was a government attorney. His grandfather, A. 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.

Biography

Early life

At an early age, he committed himself to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. Without having graduated high school, he studied engineering at the University of Virginia for a year, maintaining a 3.4 grade point average with minimal effort before dropping out due to his disinclination for slide rules and mechanical drawing. Despite his dearth of formal education, he secured a position as a test engineer with Rocketdyne in Los Angeles; in this capacity, he worked on the SM-64 Navaho supersonic cruise missile. In June 1956, he enlisted in the United States Air Force as an electronics specialist, serving for 18 months (including stints at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Edwards Air Force Base's Rocket Engine Test Facility) before being discharged in 1958. During his service, he secured an amateur radio license and a general radiotelephone operator license.

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. 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 LSD, which was not illegal at the time.

Stanley returned to Los Angeles to pursue the production of LSD. He used his Berkeley lab to buy 500 grams of lysergic acid monohydrate, the basis for LSD. His first shipment arrived on March 30, 1965 and he produced 300,000 hits (270 micrograms each) of LSD by May 1965; then he returned to the Bay Area.

In September 1965, Stanley became the primary LSD supplier to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. By this time, 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 (1968), Tom Wolfe's book detailing the history of Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Stanley attended the Watts Acid Test on February 12, 1966 with his new apprentice Tim Scully, and provided the LSD.

Stanley also provided LSD to the Beatles during filming of Magical Mystery Tour (1967), and former Three Dog Night singer Chuck Negron has noted that Owsley and Leary gave Negron's band free LSD.

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LOCAL COMMENTARY

Our Man in Arlington

November 22, 2016 3:26 PM by Charlie Clark

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New biography out on a Washington-Lee High School notable alum. Fans of the Grateful Dead and prankster author Ken Kesey will recall Augustus Owsley Stanley III (1935-2011), the group’s sound engineer and chief dispenser of psychedelic pills on the crazed West Coast during the 1960s.

The book titled “Bear” by Robert Greenfield notes that Stanley hung at the W-L lunch table with Shirley MacLaine (Class of ’52). The future hippie complained at being held back in 11th grade. “The school system punished me by now allowing me to take a test and go back into the proper class,” he recalled, even though he eventually got highest score on the physics achievement test ever.

Still, Stanley got into UVA engineering, without that W-L diploma.

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Obituaries

‘Bear’ Stanley, who made the LSD on which Haight-Ashbury tripped, dies at 76

By Emma Brown
March 15, 2011

Self-taught chemist Owsley “Bear” Stanley, a legend of the 1960s psychedelic underground who produced the LSD that fueled Ken Kesey’s “acid tests” and the Grateful Dead’s acid rock, died March 13 after a car accident in Queensland, Australia, where he had lived since the 1980s. He was 76. ... Mr. Stanley, the grandson of a Kentucky governor, grew up in the Washington area before he found his calling in Berkeley,­Calif., as an early patron of the Dead and one of the first people to produce mass quantities of acid.

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He plugged in a tape recorder at nearly every one of the Dead’s early sound checks, rehearsals and performances, creating a historical record of the live shows that helped turn the band into a cultural phenomenon. He also helped design the Dead’s widely reproduced skull-and-lightning logo.

Augustus Owsley Stanley III was born Jan. 19, 1935. His grandfather and namesake was Kentucky’s governor from 1915 to 1919 and also served in both houses of Congress. ... The younger Stanley, nicknamed “Bear” for his prematurely hairy chest, had a difficult relationship with his father, a lawyer for the federal government who struggled with alcohol addiction through most of his life, and with his mother, who died when he was a teenager.

Mr. Stanley was kicked out of Charlotte Hall Military Academy in St. Mary’s County after sneaking booze onto campus. He committed himself voluntarily to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington — “I was just a neurotic kid,” he told Rolling Stone — and then briefly attended and dropped out of both Washington-Lee High School in Arlington and the University of Virginia.

He tried the Air Force and taught himself about electronics and ham-radio operation. On the side, he took courses in Russian, French and ballet. In 1963, he moved to Berkeley to resume his college education. He lasted two semesters. ... Mr. Stanley took his first dose of LSD in 1964. He walked outside, “and the cars were kissing the parking meters,” he told Rolling Stone. ... Determined to make his own acid, he holed up in Berkeley’s library for three weeks and emerged with all he needed to know.

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Emma Brown
Emma Brown is a reporter on the investigative team who joined The Washington Post in 2009. Previously, she wrote obituaries and covered local and national education. Follow https://twitter.com/emmersbrown