Owsley Stanley

Early life

When he was fifteen, Owsley spent fifteen months as a voluntary psychiatric patient in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. Without having graduated from high school, he was admitted to the University of Virginia, where he studied engineering for a year. Despite maintaining a 3.4 grade point average with minimal effort, he dropped out because of 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 as its classification as a Schedule I controlled substance in the U.S. did not occur until 1968.

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 sold under the trade-name Delysid was hard to come by, as Sandoz halted LSD production in August 1965 after growing governmental protests at its proliferation among the general populace, which meant that "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.

Post–Grateful Dead career

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Stanley briefly served as the live mixing engineer for Robert Hunter and Jefferson Starship. From 1974 to 1981, he also grew and sold cannabis from his garden in Fairfax, California, but his profit was far less than that of his earlier work in clandestine chemistry. 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. He retained backstage access during this period, and his clientele included such notable figures as Keith Richards.

Stanley's level of access to the group's inner echelon (including complimentary food from the band's caterers) was somewhat controversial among the band's employees, with one staffer opining that "he had the sales tactics of a Mumbai street peddler"; on one occasion, Garcia and Weir were forced to intervene when Stanley provoked Chelsea Clinton's Secret Service detail as he attempted to conduct business with the then-First Daughter.

Notwithstanding his tour activities, Stanley made his first public appearance in decades at the Australian ethnobotanical conference Entheogenesis Australis in 2009, giving three talks during his time in Melbourne.

Stanley believed a "thermal cataclysm" related to climate change would soon render the Northern Hemisphere largely uninhabitable due to a new ice age, and he moved to Australia in 1982. He became a naturalized Australian citizen in 1996. Stanley lived with his wife Sheilah off the grid in North Queensland where he worked to create sculpture and wearable art.

From at least the mid-1960s until his death, Stanley practiced and advocated an all-meat diet, believing that humans are naturally carnivorous. He argued that rare red meat was a complete food and that a diet of such is optimal for human health and longevity. He held many radical opinions on biology and nutrition. He argued that the body could not store protein or fat as adipose tissue, but would instead be simply excreted if consumed in excess, and that only consumption of carbohydrates and sugars could make someone obese. He also theorized that diabetes was not technically a disease but actually the term for the damage wrought by insulin, and that adopting a zero carb diet would treat this so-called disease.

Owsley was treated for Stage Four throat cancer around 2004–2005, undergoing radiation therapy that caused him to lose one vocal cord, significant weight, and the ability to swallow solid food easily. He attributed his survival in part to his strict carnivorous (all-meat) diet, which he believed "starved the tumor of glucose".

Stanley died after a car accident in Australia on March 12, 2011, not March 13 as reported in most publications (a widely propagated error stemming from the Monday release to the press of the initial family statement, which was written on Sunday, stating he "died yesterday"). The crash happened near his home in Mareeba, Queensland, when Stanley lost control of the vehicle and crashed while driving in a storm. His wife was injured but survived.

His ashes were placed on the soundboard at the celebration of the Grateful Dead's 50th anniversary at the Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead shows in Chicago, on July 3–5, 2015.

Shortly before his death, Stanley was in the process of curating and releasing the first of a planned series of concert recordings, to be called "Bear's Sonic Journals". The first of these releases was set to be Live at the Carousel Ballroom 1968 by Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin. After he died, the album was finished and released by Columbia / Legacy Records, under the supervision of his family and some close friends.

Subsequently, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization known as the Owsley Stanley Foundation was founded, dedicated to restoring and preserving the archive of Stanley's recordings, which he called his "sonic journals". Through the work of the Owsley Stanley Foundation, some of these concert recordings have been released as a series of live albums.

Bear's Sonic Journals

Bear's Sonic Journals Presents: Live at the Carousel Ballroom 1968 – Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin – March 12, 2012

Bear's Sonic Journals: Never the Same Way Once – Doc Watson and Merle Watson – June 23, 2017

Bear's Sonic Journals: Fillmore East, February 1970 – The Allman Brothers Band – August 10, 2018

Bear's Sonic Journals: Before We Were Them – Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady – January 18, 2019

Bear's Sonic Journals: Dawn of the New Riders of the Purple Sage – New Riders of the Purple Sage – January 17, 2020

Bear's Sonic Journals: Found in the Ozone – Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen – July 24, 2020

Bear's Sonic Journals: That Which Colors the Mind – Ali Akbar Khan – December 18, 2020

Bear's Sonic Journals: Merry-Go-Round at the Carousel – Tim Buckley – June 4, 2021

Bear's Sonic Journals: At the Carousel Ballroom, April 24, 1968 – Johnny Cash – October 29, 2021

Bear's Sonic Journals: The Foxhunt – The Chieftains – September 2, 2022

Bear's Sonic Journals: Sing Out! – various artists – February 23, 2024

Bear's Sonic Journals: You're Doin' Fine – John Hammond – November 22, 2024

Bear's Sonic Journals: Concordance: 150 Years of Charles Ives – John Kirkpatrick, Donald Berman – April 17, 2026

Notes:

Legal trouble and continued involvement with the Grateful Dead

A psychedelic known as STP (DOM) was distributed in the summer of 1967 in 20 mg tablets and quickly acquired a bad reputation (later research showed that 20 mg was over six times the dose required to produce hallucinogenic effects, and its slow onset of action may have caused street users to take even more than a single tablet). Stanley and Scully made trial batches of STP in 10 mg tablets and then of STP mixed with LSD in a few hundred yellow tablets, but soon ceased production of STP. Stanley and Scully produced about 196 grams of LSD in 1967, but 96 grams of that were confiscated by the police.

In late 1967, Stanley's lab at La Espiral, Orinda, California, was raided by police and he was found in possession of 350,000 doses of LSD and 1,500 doses of STP. His defense was that the illegal substances were for personal use, but he was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison. The same year, Stanley officially shortened his name to "Owsley Stanley". After his release from prison, Stanley resumed working for the Grateful Dead as their live sound engineer.

On January 31, 1970, at 3:00 a.m., 19 members of the Grateful Dead and their crew were arrested for possession of a variety of drugs at a French Quarter hotel after returning from a concert at The Warehouse in New Orleans. According to Rolling Stone magazine, 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. Stanley was charged with illegal possession of narcotics, dangerous non-narcotics, LSD, and barbiturates. Another West Coast–based rock band, Jefferson Airplane, had been arrested two weeks earlier in the same situation. According to an article in the Baton Rouge State Times, Stanley identified himself to the police as "The King of Acid" and technician of the band. The 1970 Grateful Dead song "Truckin'" is based on the incident ("Busted, down on Bourbon Street / Set up, like a bowling pin / Knocked down, it gets to wearing thin / They just won't let you be").

Stanley was confined to federal prison from 1970 to 1972, after a federal judge intervened and revoked his release from the 1967 conviction. Stanley took advantage of the opportunity in jail to learn the trade of metalwork and jewelry-making.

Immediately following his release in the summer of 1972, Stanley resumed working for the Grateful Dead as a roadie and sound engineer. Since his portfolio had been delegated to as many as four sound engineers during his time in prison, he struggled to regain his past influence with the band and support staff. In a later interview with Dennis McNally, he opined that he received "just a taste" of his previous position: "I found on my release from jail that the crew, most of whom had been hired in my absence, did not want anything changed. No improvements for the sound, no new gear, nothing different on stage. They wanted to maintain the same old same old which under their limited abilities, they had memorized to the point where they could sleepwalk through shows. Bob Matthews, who had been mixing since my departure, did not want to completely relinquish the mixing desk, which was a total pain in the ass for me, since he was basically a studio engineer and no match for my live mixing ability." The situation was exacerbated by his disdain for the coarse language and deleterious drugs (most notably alcohol and cocaine) favored by the band's physically imposing roadies, many of whom perceived themselves as "macho cowboys", in contrast to Stanley's diminutive stature and scholarly demeanor.

The tensions culminated in a logistical mishap at an October 1972 concert at Vanderbilt University, at which students recruited by Stanley to deputize for an absent Matthews absconded with half of the band's PA system, resulting in a fellow employee throwing Stanley into a water cooler. The altercation led Stanley to request the formal codification of his perceived managerial power over the equipment staff, including unprecedented hire/fire privileges.

Although Stanley stopped touring with the Grateful Dead following their refusal of his demands, he continued to be employed by the band. In 1973, he served as lead designer of the band's Wall of Sound, collaborating with Dan Healy and Mark Raizene, as well as Rick Turner and John Curl of Alembic, to design the ground-breaking sound reinforcement system. During that period, Stanley also assisted Phil Lesh in salvaging the technically deficient recordings assembled for Steal Your Face (1976), a poorly-received live album culled from the final October 1974 pre-hiatus shows at Winterland Ballroom. Following the hiatus, Stanley returned as Lesh's personal roadie for "a couple of tours" in the late 1970s, although personality conflicts with other crew members once again precipitated his departure.