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. “I just wanted to know the dose and purity of what I took into my own body,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 2007. “Almost before I realized what was happening, the whole affair had gotten completely out of hand. I was riding a magic stallion. A Pegasus. I was not responsible for his wings, but they did carry me to all kinds of places.”
In 1964, an NYT critic writes, a brilliant renegade named Augustus Owsley Stanley III spent three weeks in the university library’s organic chemistry stacks learning the secrets of synthesizing lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as LSD. Before long, Owsley was creating mass quantities of the purest acid the world had ever known, just in time for the seismic cultural and generational transformation of the era.
Owsley Stanley died last weekend in a car crash in Australia, where he lived. It was Owsley who made Ken Kesey’s parties the Acid Tests. It was Owsley who made 300,000 hits for the Human Be-In. It was Owsley who gave acid to Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend and Brian Jones (among many others) at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival of 1967. It was Owsley who agreed to deliver a lifetime supply of LSD to John Lennon.
The Washington Post obit has it that, As finicky about audio as he was about acid, he worked for years to develop the Dead’s “wall of sound,” a 40-foot-tall bank of more than 600 speakers whose output could be controlled by the musicians on stage. 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.
His obit in the Australian, Unrepentant chemist of the 60s acid culture
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