In the sixties, Owsley “Bear” Stanley was the first private individual to mass produce LSD, making well over five million doses of the finest acid around. And for much of the time that he was the Acid King, as the press dubbed him, Owsley also served as the Grateful Dead’s on again, off again sound engineer. In that capacity he, as Jerry made clear, “brought a really solid consciousness of what quality was to our whole scene,” putting the pursuit of excellence at the heart of the Dead’s ethos. Bear also started the tradition of recording shows, paving the way for the Vault, tape trading, and the taper’s section. And, after getting out of prison in the 70s, Owsley made another significant contribution to the Dead, designing and building the Wall of Sound.
After spending time in a psychiatric hospital, studying engineering at the University of Virginia, working as a rocket scientist making cruise missiles, serving in the US Air Force, and making a living as a professional ballet dancer, Owsley enrolled at UC Berkeley in 1963 and quickly started taking and, soon after that, cooking LSD. And he was an excellent and prolific “gourmet chef, master of fine mental cuisine.” By 1965, Bear was putting out hundreds of thousands of doses of the finest LSD around; “Owsley Acid” became the paragon.
In the fall of ’65, Bear started hanging out more regularly with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Unsurprisingly, Owsley Acid and Bear himself became fixtures at the early Acid Tests. And though he had met most of the members of the Dead previously, it was at the Muir Beach Acid Test in December that Bear first heard them play, the sound of Jerry’s guitar, as Tom Wolfe famously described in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, causing him to freak out for the first time. Despite the bad trip, Owsley came away thinking the Dead were “magic personified” and determined to “work for the most amazing group ever, have a fabulous time of it and try to make a positive contribution.”
The next time Phil saw Owsley, as Lesh recounts in Searching for the Sound, was in January. Owsley came into the Fillmore for an Acid Test “like a conquering hero or some Robin Hood figure out of swash-buckling antiquity…wearing an Aussie digger hat and a leather cape. Every inch the figure of the psychedelic warrior, here’s a man who knows that he’s on to something, something cosmic and eternal.” Finding it “hard to reconcile this vision with the freaked-out dude from Muir Beach,” Phil went up, shook his hand, and said, “So you’re Owsley. I feel as if I’ve known you through many lifetimes.” To which Bear responded without missing a beat, “You have, and you will through many more to come.” The encounter made Phil feel “as if I’d been living inside his head; maybe that was the result of all the trips I’d taken using his product,” cemented a lifelong friendship between the two, and began Bear’s close connection with the Grateful Dead.
Within a month, Owsley was handling the Dead’s sound, buying them audio equipment, and living with them in Los Angeles, all while cooking and tabbing massive amounts of LSD. And perhaps as early as his second show as sound man, he had started taping the Dead, both so he could fine-tune the sound and so that the band could listen to themselves. After six weeks of living together, the Dead had enough of Owsley’s enforced all-meat diet, not to mention his other eccentricities. So when they decamped to the Bay Area, Bear lived in Berkeley while the Dead moved out to Olompali. This first time around, his tenure as Dead sound man lasted only a little longer than their communal living. After the band tired of the interminable time Bear spent setting up and perfecting the sound, they parted ways amicably; Owsley bought the Dead all new sound equipment as a parting gift.
It took the police less than a year after LSD was criminalized in 1967 to arrest Bear. On December 20th of that year, the cops raided Bear’s tabbing house in Orinda, California, seizing 350,000 doses of LSD and a large quantity of STP. While the case wound its way through the courts, Owsley first worked sound for Bill Graham at the Fillmore and then rejoined the crew of the Grateful Dead. And it was during this second term with the band that Bear came up with the idea of marking the Dead’s gear to make it easier to find and load at festivals. After being struck with the concept of a lightning bolt, Owsley worked with his friend Bob Thomas to design the stealie that we know and love today.
In mid-1969, a judge finally sentenced Owsley to three years in prison for his 1967 bust. But that still did not send Bear to jail as he appealed the case. While out on bail, Bear was arrested with the Dead in their infamous New Orleans’ bust on January 30, 1970. Those charges were dropped, but the arrest caused him to finally enter the poky on a parole violation. Before long, he was once again out, only to be arrested again on July 15, 1970, this time for possession of opium, weed, and hash. And this put Owsley behind bars on the original Orinda charges. While Bear was in the federal pen, the Dead played a show in the library at the prison, the Terminal Island Correctional Facility in San Pedro on August 4, 1971, making sure to dose Owsley, his fellow prisoners, and all the guards while they were at it.
By the time Owsley gained his release in 1972, the Dead had long since hired other roadies and sound engineers. As Weir told Robert Greenfield, author of a biography of Bear, “there was a lot of water that had gone under the bridge during the time Bear was in prison in terms of our development, particularly in regards to the equipment we were using and our approach to it, so he had a lot of catching up to do. And he disagreed in a major way with some of the direction in which we had chosen to go, and he was capable of being fairly bullheaded.” That bullheadedness resulted in Owsley regularly pissing off the entire crew and getting roughed up by them. But Bear stayed with the band and eventually convinced them to fund his development of the Wall of Sound.
With 55 McIntosh amplifiers putting out twenty-six thousand watts of power to 88 15-inch speakers, 174 12-inch speakers, 288 50-inch speakers, and 54 tweeters, the 40-foot high and 70-foot wide Wall of Sound both looked and sounded like nothing anyone had seen before when it made its debut at the Cow Palace in 1974. Projecting the sound perfectly while allowing the band to communicate on stage, the system was a work of art. As Phil recalled, playing on stage with the Wall of Sound at their backs was like “piloting a flying saucer or riding your own sound wave.” But it was also impossible to set up in a timely fashion, and the Dead ended up buying a second stage and hiring another crew to get things set up in advance while the band played another show. Costs spiraled out of control and that became the single biggest reason the Dead retired after a final five shows at Winterland in October 1974.
With the Dead on hiatus, Bear started growing weed in Marin. And when the band started playing regularly again in 1976, they hired Dan Healy to be their sound man, “even though,” in the words of Owsley, “he couldn’t mix a cake from a Betty Crocker package.” Phil, Bear’s best friend and staunchest ally in the band, eventually hired him as his personal roadie for a few tours. But Owsley never played a significant role in the Dead scene going forward.
In the eighties, Bear became convinced that another ice age was going to set in after a biblical flood. To prepare for the cataclysm, he moved to Australia, squatted on and improved some land, and eventually gained permanent residency status. He still returned to the States regularly, hanging out on tour and selling his handmade jewelry – a craft he learned in prison – at shows. And like some cosmic stroke of serendipity, although we are talking about the Grateful Dead around whom these sorts of things happened regularly, Owsley met the love of his life, Sheilah Manning, who worked for the Dead ticket office, on July 13, 1984, while the Dead broke out Dark Star for the first time in three years at the Greek Theatre.
On March 12, 2011, Owsley died in a car accident in Australia with Manning by his side. His ashes were placed on the soundboard at the Chicago Fare Thee Well shows in July 2015.
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