Augustus Owsley Stanley III (January 19, 1935 - March 12, 2011) is an American clandestine audio engineer and chemist. He was a key figure in the San Francisco Area hippie movement during the 1960s and played an important role in counterculture this decade. Under the professional name Bear , he is a singer for the Grateful Dead rock band, whom he met when Ken Kesey invited them to the Acid Test party. As their sound engineer, Stanley often records live recordings behind his mixing board and develops their Wall of Sound sound system, one of the largest mobile public address systems ever built. Stanley also designed the band's trademark skull logo.
Stanley was the first private individual to produce bulk quantities of LSD. According to his own records, between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced no less than 500 grams of LSD, which amounted to just over five million doses at the time.
He died in a car accident in Australia (where he took citizenship in 1996) on March 12, 2011.
Video Owsley Stanley
Leluhur
Stanley is the son of a political family from Kentucky. His father was a government lawyer. His grandfather, A. Owsley Stanley, a member of the United States Senate after serving as Governor of Kentucky and in the US House of Representatives, campaigned against the Prohibition in the 1920s.
Maps Owsley Stanley
Biography
Early life
At an early age, he is committed to St. Elizabeth in Washington, D.C. He studied engineering at the University of Virginia before dropping out of school. In 1956 when Stanley was 21, he was enrolled in the US Air Force and served for 18 months before dismissal in 1958. Later, inspired by Ballet Bolshoi's appearance in 1958, he studied ballet in Los Angeles, supporting himself for a while as a professional dancer. In 1963, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was involved in a psychoactive drug scene. He broke up after a semester, took a technical job at KGO-TV, and started producing LSD in a small laboratory located in the bathroom of a house near the campus; his emergency laboratory was raided by police on February 21, 1965. He beat the charges and successfully sued the return of his equipment. Police sought methamphetamine but only found LSD, which was not illegal at the time.
Stanley moved to Los Angeles to pursue LSD production. He used the Berkeley laboratory to buy 500 grams of lysergic monohydrate acid, a base for LSD. His first delivery arrived on March 30, 1965 and he produced 300,000 hits (270 micrograms each) from LSD in May 1965; then he returned to the Bay Area.
In September 1965, Stanley became the main LSD supplier for Ken Kesey and Pranksters Merry. At the moment, Sandoz LSD is hard to come by, and "Owsley Acid" has become the new standard. He displayed (most strikingly oddly out at the Muir Beach Acid Test in November 1965) at The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Tom Wolfe's book detailing the history of Kesey and Merry Prankster. Stanley attended the Watts Acid Test on February 12, 1966 with his new disciple Tim Scully, and gave LSD.
Stanley also provided LSD for The Beatles during the filming of the Magical Mystery Tour (1967), and former Three Dog Night Chuck Negron singer has noted that Owsley and Leary provide LSD-free LSD bands.
Engagement with Grateful Dead
Stanley met with members of the Grateful Dead during 1965. He financed them and worked with them as their first soundman. Together with his close friend, Bob Thomas, Stanley designed the Thunder Light Skull Logo. Lightning design came to him after seeing a similar design on a roadside ad: "One day in the rain, I looked sideways and saw a sign along the freeway which was a circle with a white bar above it.The top of the circle was orange, and the under blue I can not read the name of the company, and so just look at its shape A thought occurred to me: if the red orange and the bar opposite there is a lightning cut at the corner, then we will have a very nice, unique and very identified to use equipment. "
During his time as a sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, Stanley started what became a long-term practice of recording the Dead when they practiced and performed. His initial motivation for creating what he called his "sonic journal" was to improve his ability to mix sound, but the unintended result was an extensive collection of recordings from the heyday of the San Francisco dance concert/scene in the mid-1960s. (Another reason for the first recording is that Stanley was partially deaf from time in the military and wanted a way to check himself.)
In addition to the huge archive of his Dead show, Stanley made numerous live recordings from eminent artists of the 1960s and 1970s that appeared in San Francisco, including Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, Early Starship Jefferson, Old and in the Way, Janis Joplin , Big Brother and Holding Company, Taj Mahal, Santana, Miles Davis, Flying Burrito Brothers, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, and Blue Cheer.
Richmond LSD Lab
Stanley and Scully built electronic equipment for the Grateful Dead until the end of spring 1966. At this point, Stanley rented a house in Richmond Point, Richmond, California. She, Scully, and Melissa Cargill (Stanley's girlfriend and skilled chemist, were introduced to Stanley by Susan Cowper, ex-girlfriend) who set up a lab in the basement. The Richmond Point lab turned out to be more than 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) from LSD, dubbed "White Lightning". When LSD became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, Scully decided to set up a new lab in Denver, Colorado. The new laboratory was set up in the basement of a house across the street from the Denver Zoo in early 1967.
In Denver, the trio was augmented by Berkeley colleagues Rhoney Gissen, who joined the manufacturing business and started relationships with Stanley (along with Stanley's relationship with Cargill and Cargill's separate relationship with Jefferson Airplane bassist Jack Casady) who survived until the early 1970s, an; though they never married, Gissen would eventually take the surname of Stanley. Stanley's scientific teaching influenced Gissen's decision to return to formal studies and pursue the dental profession; their son, Starfinder, will get a zoology and veterinary degree from Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania.
Legal issues and ongoing engagement with the Grateful Dead
Psychedelics known as STP were distributed in the summer of 1967 in 20 mg tablets and quickly gained a bad reputation (subsequent research on normal volunteers showed that 20 mg was more than six times the dose required to produce a hallucinogenic effect, and its slow onset might cause the user path takes more than one tablet). Stanley and Scully made STP experiments in 10 mg tablets and then STP was mixed with LSD in several hundred yellow tablets, but soon stopped production of STP. Stanley and Scully produced about 196 grams of LSD in 1967, but 96 grams were confiscated by police.
In late 1967, Stanley's La Espiral, Orinda's lab was invaded by the police; he was found to have 350,000 doses of LSD and 1,500 doses of STP. His defense was that the illegal substance was for personal use, but he was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison. That same year, Stanley officially shortened his name to "Owsley Stanley". After he was released from prison, Stanley returned to work for the Grateful Dead as their live sound engineer. On January 31, 1970, at 3 am, 19 Grateful Dead members and crew were arrested for possessing various drugs at a French Quarter hotel after returning from a concert at The Warehouse in New Orleans.
According to Rolling Stone, everyone in the band except Ron "Pigpen" McKernan and Tom Constanten - both did not use psychedelic drugs - were included in the arrest, along with several members of their entourage, including Stanley and some locals. Stanley is accused of possessing illegal narcotics, non-narcotic drugs, LSD, and barbiturates. Another West Coast rock band, Jefferson Airplane, was arrested two weeks earlier in the same situation. According to an article in Baton Rouge Country Times , Stanley identifies himself to the police as "The King of Acid" and technicians of the band. The 1970 Grateful Dead song "Truckin '" is based on the Busted () incident, down on Bourbon Street/Set up, like a bowling pin/Knocked down, it's thinner/They will not let you be ".
Stanley was locked up in a federal prison from 1970 to 1972, after a federal judge intervened and revoked his release from the 1967 case. Stanley took the opportunity there to study metal trading and jewelry making.
Soon after his release, Stanley returned to work for the Grateful Dead as a roadie and sound engineer in the summer of 1972. Since most of his portfolio had been delegated to as many as four voice engineers during his sentence, he struggled to regain his past. influence between the band and support staff. In a later interview with Dennis McNally, he argued that he received "only taste" from his previous position; according to Stanley, "I found out on my release from prison that the crew, most of whom had been hired when I was not around, did not want anything to change, no improvements to the sound, no new equipment, nothing different on the stage. wanting to keep olds old under their limited ability, they have memorized to the point where they can sleep while walking through the show Bob Matthews, who has been mixing since my departure, does not want to really release the mixing table, the total a pain in the ass for me, because he is basically a studio engineer and unsuitable for my mixing ability of life. "The situation is exacerbated by an insult to rough language and destructive drugs (especially alcohol and cocaine) favored by the band physically imposing roadies, many of whom regard themselves as "macho cowboys" in contrast to Stanle's tiny figure y and scientific mien.
Tension culminated in a logistical crash at a October 1972 concert at Vanderbilt University when students were recruited by Stanley to represent absentee Matthews absconded with half of the PA band system, so fellow employees threw Stanley into the water cooler. The quarrel caused Stanley to request an official codification of his managerial power perceived on the equipment staff, including an unprecedented privilege of rent/fire.
Although Stanley stopped touring with the band after the rejection of his demands, he continued to be employed by the Grateful Dead through their 1975 hiatus in a more limited capacity. During this period, he served as the principal designer of the PA band's Wall of Sound system and helped Phil Lesh in rescuing a technically incomplete recording for Steal Your Face (1976), a non-acceptable live album. from the October 1974 pre-hiatus show at the Winterland Ballroom.
Post Dead Career
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Stanley briefly served as a mixing engineer for Jefferson Starship while earning a poor living through marijuana cultivation in Marin County. A naturalized Australian citizen since 1996, Stanley lives with his wife Sheilah (former clerk at the Grateful Dead ticket office) in Tropical North Queensland bushes, where she works to create sculptures, mostly usable art. Due to the anticipation of the "thermal disaster" associated with climate change, he began spending most of his time in Australia in 1982 while frequently returning to the United States to sell his high-priced jewelry on the Grateful Dead tour, where he maintained access at backstage; during this period, his clients included figures such as Keith Richards.
Stanley's access levels to the echelons in the group (including free food from band providers) were somewhat controversial among the band's employees, with one staff arguing that "he has a sales tactic of Mumbai street vendors"; on one occasion, Garcia and Weir were forced to intervene when Stanley provoked Chelsea Clinton's companion when he attempted to do business with the First Princess.
Despite his tour activities, Stanley made his first public appearance in decades at the Australian Entheogenesis Australis ethnobotanical conference in 2009, giving three talks during his time in Melbourne.
Death
Stanley died after a car crash in Australia on Saturday, March 12, 2011, not Sunday, March 13, as reported in most publications (a widely distributed error derived from Monday's release of early family pressures, written on Sunday , declared him "dead yesterday"). A statement issued on behalf of the Stanley family said a car accident happened near his home, on a rural highway near Mareeba, Queensland. He survived by his wife Sheilah, four children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
"The Owsley Stanley Foundation" was created by the close family of Owsley and some of his close friends, and was founded on August 25, 2011 as a non-profit California corporation dedicated to fostering diverse charities, arts, music, and scientific efforts for the community. benefits.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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