Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has an interview with Bear, aka Owsley Stanley, who made the best acid, helped the Grateful Dead get started, and practically invented concert sound.
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.
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By conservative estimates, Bear Research Group made more than 1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, essentially seeding the entire modern psychedelic movement.Less well known are Bear’s contributions to rock concert sound. As the original sound mixer for the Grateful Dead, he was responsible for fundamental advances in audio technology, things as basic now as monitor speakers that allow vocalists to hear themselves onstage.
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“If you make some [acid], you’ve got to move some to get some money to make it,” he says now. “But then you had to give a lot away to keep the street price down. So anyway, I’m sort of embedded in this thing that I’m tangled up in. … Just as soon as it became illegal, I wanted out. Then, of course, I felt an obligation.”
There’s a more in-depth piece in the current Rolling Stone which I haven’t seen yet, and of course I claim the first-ever extended interview with Bear, conducted in January 1991 and published in Conversations with the Dead. He’s a great man, if somewhat hard to deal with in many ways. From the Chronicle piece:
Bear has always lived in a quite particular world. “He can be very anal retentive, on a certain level, on a genius level,” says Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane. “I’ve seen him send his eggs back three times at Howard Johnson’s.”
One member of the Grateful Dead told me, years ago, that you could always tell it was Bear’s acid. I’m not sure exactly what the criteria were, but on the one occasion I knew for sure I was taking Bear’s acid, it was as good as it gets. Sigh.
“The Grateful Dead wouldn’t have been the Grateful Dead without acid,” Phil Lesh told me in 1984. In addition to his work on sound systems (and of course that alchemical wizardry), he provided the band with “meat and milk, and roofs over our heads. He was our patron, in the ultimate sense of the word. He didn’t send us a check every month – we lived together. He paid the bills.”