Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia

[kas125]

LOS ANGELES – Owsley “Bear” Stanley, a 1960s counterculture figure who flooded the flower power scene with LSD and was an early benefactor of the Grateful Dead, died in a car crash in his adopted home country of Australia on Sunday, his family said. He was believed to be 76.

The renegade grandson of a former governor of Kentucky, Stanley helped lay the foundation for the psychedelic era by producing more than a million doses of LSD at his labs in San Francisco’s Bay Area.

“He made acid so pure and wonderful that people like Jimi Hendrix wrote hit songs about it and others named their band in its honor,” former rock ‘n’ roll tour manager Sam Cutler wrote in his 2008 memoirs “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

Hendrix’s song “Purple Haze” was reputedly inspired by a batch of Stanley’s product, though the guitarist denied any drug link. The ear-splitting blues-psychedelic combo Blue Cheer took its named from another batch.

the rest is at -http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/03/13/psychedelic-icon-owsley-stanley-dies-in-australia/

-------------------------------------

RIP, Bear. Thanks for everything!!

[KG]

1. bummer...

[peacefreak]

2. Say hi to Jerry & Jimi

Have a good magic carpet ride.

[grahamhgreen]

3. Rest in Never Never Land! The song "Kid Charlemagne" was about him. (used by Kanye, btw)

Although the lyrics are, at first glance, typically oblique and allusive, writers Walter Becker and Donald Fagen have stated that it was loosely inspired by the exploits of the infamous 1960s San Francisco-based LSD chemist Owsley Stanley<2> — although it conflates the core story with numerous other images of the Sixties. This is evident in the following lines:

On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene
But yours was kitchen clean
Everyone stopped to stare at your Technicolor motor home

The first two lines draw on the fact that Owsley's acid was famed for its purity, and the third line is likely a reference to the famous psychedelic bus named Further, which was used by the Merry Pranksters, who were supplied their LSD by Owsley himself.

The lyric "You'd go to LA on a dare and you'd go it alone" alludes to a story in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test about a trip taken by chief Prankster Ken Kesey.

The final verse foreshadows Owsley's eventual bust:

Clean this mess up else we'll all end up in jail
Those test tubes and the scale
Just get it all out of here
Is there gas in the car?
Yes, there's gas in the car
I think the people down the hall know who you are

Owsley and another person were arrested after their car ran out of gas.

- wiki -

[Wilms]

6. Yes.

Kid Charlemagne - Steely Dan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zmX6_ujBN0

[grahamhgreen]

9. Edited the post to reflect. BTW, just saw "Taking Woodstock", HIGHLY reccomend.

[socialist_n_TN]

30. Yes, that was a good movie.............

I enjoyed it.

[Le Taz Hot]

52. I LOVED that movie.

And I love Dimitri Martin -- one of the funniest and smartest guys out there.

[cliffordu]

4. I took Owsley's product back in the day.

Fookin' amazing.

Wish I had some right now.

[devilgrrl]

5. I wish LSD was still around

eom

[nashville_brook]

7. i'm sure it lives on...i'm just too old to frequent the place it hangs out

:evilgrin:

[Blue_In_AK]

17. It is.

You just have to know the right people.

[devilgrrl]

21. That level of quality hasn't been seen in 20 years

there's no equivalent.

[Blue_In_AK]

24. Well, you're right about that,

but we did have some nice sugar cubes the last two times we were down in SF. My old hippie voodoo priestess girlfriend down there has the connections. It wasn't nearly so psychedelic and mind-bending as in the old days, but we did have a good time and lots of laughs. My grown kids were highly amused. What can I say?

[cliffordu]

27. Lucky fucker.

Been decades for me. Dammit.

[slay]

58. Try going to a Dead/ Phil Lesh/ Bob Wier show

and hit the parking lot scene/shakedown street. you can find quality stuff there by the vial. Not promoting - just sayin.. :evilgrin:

[devilgrrl]

71. You also risk getting ripped off

eom

[slay]

72. That is possible - but no reward without risk

it's not like you can just go down to the store and buy it. Personally I've never been ripped off - but I'm a veteran of the parking lot scene since the 1980's. :smoke:

[walldude]

35. It is but it's crap....

Diluted down to nothing... Did some in November.. not impressed.
Mushrooms are the best psychedelic high at the moment...

[hollowdweller]

40. My Friend Ernie Lundquist

Says acid these days is way cleaner today than in the old days.
But the potency is very low compared to even the 80's.
He says the standard is about 100mcg per suqare inch of blotter now
In comparison a square inch back in the day could be 400 plus mcg.

[Le Taz Hot]

54. It's still around.

What isn't around anymore is mescaline.

[Terry in Austin]

13. The orange barrels were mighty fine, too

Makes your mind water just thinking about it!

[cliffordu]

20. Orange Barrel!!!!!

LUUUUUVED IT!!

Best I ever had, though, was some Swedish pharmaceutical sugar cubes, rumored to come from the US military.....

I knew a guy who knew a guy......who knew a guy....

[socialist_n_TN]

31. Windowpane! Windowpane!

:rofl:

[Blue_In_AK]

25. Related to the Laguna Beach orange sunshine?

[kohodog]

29. Maybe

The Orange Sunshine on the East Coast in the 60's was a little orange barrel. Very clean (and powerful!).

[socialist_n_TN]

32. First time I ever tripped was on what was called......

Orange Sunshine. 1969 Atlanta Pop Festival.

[PufPuf23]

38. Orange Sunshine was Brotherhood of Love not Owsley nt

[kohodog]

41. Are they still around?

That was perhaps the best I had, along with purple haze and "clinical acid" wherever that came from. Supposedly Army but I never believed that.

[Warpy]

22. Well those days are over, but it was wonderful stuff

The Blue Cheer was especially fine.

[Zorra]

50. Yeah. Ooooh yeah.

Took some with some friends in an old graveyard on Halloween. First time I ever saw a three foot tall mushroom with a red cap and white spots.
:wow:!!!

[Raine]

8. R-I-P nt

[stevedeshazer]

10. Thanks, O.

For ye helped me understand myself.

:)

[hobbit709]

11. he made some righteous acid.

[Old and In the Way]

12. Just another sad footnote to these miserable times.

For those that might be interested, I think this was Owsley's personal website: http://www.thebear.org/albums.html#anchor753232 In addition to be the bands Director of Psychedelic Alchemy, he was pretty active in the sonic side of the band's sound. He claims to have been the architect of the Wall of Sound that the Dead used in the early 70's

<>

[Wilms]

14. They wrote the book on doing that stuff back then. n/t

[kas125]

49. Parrish, Kreutzmann, etc. talking about Bear's Wall of Sound

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PODPgBaiFI4

[grahamhgreen]

57. Phase cancelling mics, that is brilliant!

[hifiguy]

66. Indeed

The Wall of Sound was designed and created by Owsley and Alembic's Ron Wickersham.

[G_j]

15. RIP Bear!

:loveya:

[Blue_In_AK]

16. He made great products.

The best. RIP, Mr. Stanley. :hippie:

[walldude]

37. Made in America!!

It used to mean something...

[Cetacea]

18. ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldSFuEOA9wc

[Gabi Hayes]

19. from vh1/youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylr2D4Pwn58

some say......

[Enthusiast]

51. I love that!

Love it, love it, love it!

[robdogbucky]

23. Want to don a tinfoil hat for a while?

Dr. James S. Ketchum,

"...Sitting on the panel next to Shulgin was an unlikely expositor. Dr. James S. Ketchum, a retired U.S. Army colonel, told the audience, "When Sasha was trying to open minds with chemicals to achieve greater awareness, I was busy trying to subdue people."

Ketchum was referring to his work at Edgewood Arsenal, headquarters of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, in the 1960s, when America's national security strategists were high on the prospect of developing a nonlethal incapacitating agent, a so-called humane weapon, which could knock people out without necessarily killing anyone. Top military officers hyped the notion of "war without death," conjuring visions of aircraft swooping over enemy territory releasing clouds of "madness gas" that would disorient the bad guys and dissolve their will to resist, while U.S. soldiers moved in and took over.

Ketchum was into weapons of mass elation, not weapons of mass destruction. He oversaw a secret research program that tested an array of mind-bending drugs on American GIs, including an exceptionally potent form of synthetic marijuana. (Most of these drugs had no medical names, just numbers supplied by the Army.) "Paradoxical as it may seem," Ketchum asserted, "one can use chemical weapons to spare lives, rather than extinguish them."


...There was no doubt in my mind that working in this strange atmosphere was just the sort of thing that would satisfy my appetite for novelty," Ketchum wrote. Soon he became chief of clinical research at the Army's hub for chemical warfare studies. Although the Geneva Convention had banned the use of chemical weapons, Washington never agreed to this provision, and the U.S. government poured money into the search for a nonlethal incapacitant."

http://www.bohemian.com/bohemian/07.02.08/cover-Ketchum-0827.html


Okay, that is all factual. Here is the tinfoil hat part vis-a-vis Owsley.

In a current lawsuit, VVA v CIA, et al,l information about which you can find here: http://www.edgewoodtestvets.org/court-filed-documents/ Dr. Ketchum was being deposed after documents he produced had been examined. One of those documents I am told included an account of a mysterious barrel that suddenly appeared in Dr. Ketchum's office in Edgewood Arsenal, MD while he was conducting his experiments on unwitting US military personnel unlucky enough to find themselves there. That barrel turned out to contain millions upon millions of doses of pure Sandoz quality LSD in powder form. And under oath, the arrogant Dr. Ketchum claims he knew not from where it came. Did he ask? No. Did he throw it away? No. What happened to the barrel? Under oath Ketchum claimed it disappeared the same way it appeared, suddenly one day when he came to his office, it was gone.

Dr. Ketchum, humble man that he is, also produced in his document production a draft novel. The subject matter of that draft novel was about a "fictitious psychiatrist that worked at a government installation testing humans with psychoactive drugs. That "fictional," doctor found a barrel of pure LSD one day in his office. In a fit of humanitarian concern once the good doctor figured out that he had millions of doses of pure Sandoz quality acid on his hands decided the best thing to do was to move to California and disseminate this wonder drug to the masses through local drug lords of the time.

After Dr. Ketchum's time at Edgewood Arsenal, he moved to Nor. Cal. to work on a similar project at Stanford, the same summer that Owsley surreptitiously and suddenly put millions of hits of almost pure acid on the streets.

Tin foil? Or not?


Hands off my Social Security!
Hands off Latin America!


rdb

[kas125]

34. Wow, thanks. Now I'm very curious. It's a great story

whether it's true or not, I guess.

[grahamhgreen]

45. Interesting!

[MrScorpio]

26. R.I.P., Kid Charlemagne

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylr2D4Pwn58

[Canuckistanian]

43. HE was Kid Charlemagne?

I did not know that.

[grahamhgreen]

46. See post #3

[GliderGuider]

28. RIP. I suspect you're already on a first name basis with the owner of the joint up there

Put in a good word for the rest of us, we'll be along as soon as we're done here.

[Ramulux]

33. If Hallucinogenic drug use was as popular as marijuana

Our society would be in such better shape. I know I am the person I am today because of the multiple psychedelic experiences I have had. It changed me in ways I can't even begin to describe.

[walldude]

36. Shhhhhhhh!!!

You are going to confuse some people...

Haven't you heard? Drugs are BAD!

[robdogbucky]

39. Ramulux, what are you up to?

Ya wanna have peeps start turnin' on again? Youse gonna hab dem flashbacks if ya do my frien'

Yoous gonna jump from da top of bildins tinkin' you kin fly and stare into da sun til blind, doncha know?


I stumbled across an old archived interview of Owsley in the SFGate news site some years ago and was amazed at how he kept the faith and kept pusing the envelope. He had gone survivalist over in Australia, eating only raw wild game he killed himself, trying to keep in tune with the cosmos over there with the aborigine people, etc. He claimed to still drop frequently. I am going to have to search those archives and see if I can dig it up. It was a very interesting update on a figure from my past.

Now he is gone too.


rdb

[kas125]

47. I read one of his essays once that explained why he ate

only meat, but I can't find it now, dammit. His theory was that eating anything other than meat somehow interferes with the way weed works in our bodies. He said a dog, who is a carnivore, eats a bag of weed and he's wasted. A deer, who is a vegetarian, can stand there for hours eating entire plants and gets no effect. Therefore, we should all eat nothing but meat, lol.

[Rebubula]

61. Agreed

I have the same life-changing opinion of using acid\mushrooms in my earlier years.

Peace

[Canuckistanian]

42. Bummer, man

He was even mentioned in Frank Zappa's "Who Needs the Peace Corps"

Think I'll just DROP OUT I'll go to Frisco Buy a wig & sleep On Owsley's floor....

[Morning Dew]

44. Aw, too bad, too bad. RIP, Bear.

C20H25N3O

Pass it on!

[underseasurveyor]

48. I owe this person a huge thank you

For all the great times and experiences I had in the early to mid 70's :-)

Yea thanks a BUNCH Bear:thumbsup:
RIP

[xchrom]

53. i'm another one who used to trip on his stuff. bye bear. nt

[HughBeaumont]

55. "I'll go to Frisco, buy a wig and sleep on Owsley's floor!"

RIP.

[slay]

56. Ack!

What an awesome ride that guy had - when the cops weren't fucking with him! I still have the "Bear's Choice - History of the Grateful Dead #1" CD he did the audio for. Guy was so awesome - made sure people who wanted to try LSD had access to safe, high quality product. His LSD is the stuff of legend.

RIP Bear indeed. He was one of the open-minded good guys.

Grateful Dead - Ripple (live acoustic) -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVdTQ3OPtGY

[grahamhgreen]

59. If you liked that, you'll LOVE

http://www.archive.org/details/gd1980-10-10.sbd-acoustic.willy.8780.sbeok.shnf


Dancing Bears and all.

[slay]

65. Nice

i've found a way to download their streaming mp3's on archive.org. get the .m3u file - change it to .txt - and use each song's individual link to d/l it in soundboard quality. :evilgrin: :smoke: :hippie:

[kas125]

68. Shhhh, don't tell Bobby!! n/t

[kas125]

67. This one's my favorite show, at least at the moment, lol

http://www.archive.org/details/gd1979-11-05.sbd.clugston.2410.shnf

[Warren DeMontague]

60. ***

Rest in peace, Bear.

[Strelnikov_]

62. Soundtrack for this thread . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yVBMUXr4xo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1PhMSTj0uw&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h82sL4cTXSU&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvIDHz8yOE0&feature=related

[grahamhgreen]

63. Very nice.

[grahamhgreen]

64. Bear Speaks! Found this clip on youtube...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXVQqhU0fQc

[robdogbucky]

69. For all you hungry freaks, I found the Owsley interview in SFGate....

The small, barefoot man in black T-shirt and blue jeans barely rates a second glance from the other Starbucks patrons in downtown
For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD, long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area
Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic

San Francisco Chronicle July 12, 2007

"San Rafael, although he is one of the men who virtually made the '60s. Because Augustus Owsley Stanley III has spent his life avoiding photographs, few people would know what he looks like.

The name Owsley became a noun that appears in the Oxford dictionary as English street slang for good acid. It is the most famous brand name in LSD history. Probably the first private individual to manufacture the psychedelic, "Owsley" is a folk hero of the counterculture, celebrated in songs by the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan.

For more than 20 years, Stanley -- at 72, still known as the Bear -- has been living with his wife, Sheila, off the grid, in the outback of Queensland, Australia, where he makes small gold and enamel sculptures and keeps in touch with the world through the Internet.

As a planned two-week visit to the Bay Area stretched to three, four and then five weeks, Bear agreed to give The Chronicle an interview because a friend asked him. He has rarely consented to speak to the press about his life, his work or his unconventional thinking on matters such as the coming ice age or his all-meat diet..."


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/12/MNGK0QV7HS1.DTL




There is but one truth, Daddy....

[robdogbucky]

70. Someone should start a "My most memorable trip on Owsley acid,"

thread. I would look forward to reading that collection of stories here.





A friend of the devil is a friend of mine.

[ozone_man]

73. Purple Owsley?

Back in the day I thought it was Purple Oz, before I realized the connection. It was exceptional and smooth.