Augustus "Bear" Owsley Stanley III

Recently I picked up a book, Practical LSD Manufacture, by someone named “Uncle Fester”, clearly an alias.  My impression going into the book is that of all the clandestine substances  you might attempt to make yourself, LSD is among the hardest and least amenable to those of us (e.g. me) who struggled through high school chemistry and stayed light years away from it from graduation onward.  I lack (A) the lab or space to make it, (B) the precursor chemicals (most of which are closely watched by The Man), (C) the equipment (unlike Walter White, I don’t have chemistry lab to raid for my own use), and most importantly, (D) the skill set necessary to do any of the necessary procedures.  In the unlikely event that I could cook it up, what would I do with it?  I’d have several lifetimes of LSD at my disposal, and the examples of excessive personal consumption aren’t good: (1) Charles Manson – still in prison, (2) Syd Barrett, baked out of Pink Floyd and retired, now dead, and (3) Roky Ericksson, who went insane.  No thanks.  

Although 90% of the material went over my head, many of the comments were fairly amusing.  A “cook” (clandestine LSD chemist) in the UK was nabbed in “Operation Julie”, so named after the female operative who took down the operation, much of which involved orally stimulating the chemists’ genitals.  This particular cook had come up with yet another way of making LSD, which itself was of major interest to the author.  And yet another method – there appear to be several – involves phosgene, evoking images of WWI chemical warfare. 

But reviewing this gave me more understanding and appreciation of this famous counterculture personality, Augustus Owsley Stanley III, often known as either “Bear” or “Owsley”.  Of course, reading a biography on him also helped.

Bear: the Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, by Robert Greenfield.  “Bear”, as in the Dead album “Bear’s Choice”, is mainly known for two things:  developing the Grateful Dead’s on-stage sound system (and recording countless shows) and making killer LSD he claimed was more pure than Sandoz’.  [Note, Hofmann’s book, LSD – My Problem Child, does not mention him, nor does it mention Ken Kesey, but Timothy Leary does come up.]

Owsley was a remarkable character.  AOS I – his grandfather – was governor of Kentucky during WWI.  His father (AOS II) was a drunken Navy guy who survived the sinking of the Lexington at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in WWII.  AOS3/Bear lived in the DC area for awhile, went to Washington & Lee High School (down the street from GMUSL, and I even took a car class there), and briefly went to UVa in Charlottesville (long before my Cousin Eddie went there).  

Much of the story involves the other of Owsley’s major roles with the Dead: taping their shows and developing their sound.  He was more effective at the former, much of which was intended as feedback for the band to improve their live performances.  Garcia himself once confessed that he had been unhappy with Phil Lesh’ bass playing during one early show, so much so that he threw Lesh down a flight of stairs.  After listening to the tapes (most likely recorded by Bear) he was so impressed that parts of that show wound up on Anthem of the Sun, their second album.  Naturally, Garcia was remorseful about his.  [Ah, so this is why Lesh doesn’t tour with the Dead any more.]

Owsley’s later “Wall of Sound”, a massive and unwieldy PA system which overtaxed the band’s logistics, proved too much and had to be abandoned in favor of more mundane and conventional concert amplification.  As of 2017, a more tangible and lasting legacy of Owsley’s work with the Dead are several live albums and bootlegs, the most notable being The History of the Grateful Dead, Part 1: Bear’s Choice.  Naturally, Greenfield’s book has a fairly extensive list of all those recordings.  They also include non-Dead recordings, e.g. Janis Joplin & Big Brother & the Holding Company.  Owsley also recorded supporting acts and other bands playing with the Dead.  His tangential relationship with Blue Cheer (and the LSD they named themselves after) is briefly mentioned.  While not nearly as famous as the Dead, Janis, Quicksilver, etc. they were still part of the San Francisco, Haight Ashbury scene – the hairy edge of that scene and its connection to the Hell’s Angels (e.g. “Gut”, ‘Cheer’s famous manager). 

Of all the “cooks”, Owsley is probably the most famous.  He supplied Ken Kesey with his doses.  What I found funny was that Kesey’s preferred dose was 400 micrograms, which even veteran tripper Bear thought was excessive (100-200 is the ideal, 250 being Hofmann’s famous bicycle ride dosage).  Owsley also supplied the Beatles with their LSD.   Remarkably, Owsley often gave about half his output away free not only to various celebrity musicians, but also anonymous festival patrons.  Of the half he sold, he did so practically at cost.  His goal was to distribute as much top quality LSD as he could to as many different people.  Unlike Walter White – who so far as we know, never sampled his own meth (and in any case was a fictional character anyway) – Owsley could and did trip on his own supply.  For one thing, he enjoyed it, but also it was a sincere question of quality control.  Owsley would not expect anyone to trip on a batch he wasn’t sure was up to his standards, and he took immense pride in the quality and purity of his LSD.   

Acid Tests.  These were public gatherings at which people could trip on LSD amidst friendly comrades with a house band playing the appropriate music, occurring in the San Francisco, CA area.  The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe, is the most famous description of these.  They occurred from 1965 to 1968.  The house band was the Grateful Dead; the LSD was supplied by Owsley.  Note: over in London, similar gatherings were done, mimicking the California version.  The house band at these was Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd.  The SF version was organized by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.

Owsley himself estimated his lifetime production to have been somewhere close to 5 million doses.  Since LSD doses are measured in micrograms, as opposed to milligrams, a relatively modest amount of LSD can produce an unusually high amount of effective doses.   In fact, for some time the Guinness Book of World Records listed LSD as the world’s most powerful drug. 

What’s also remarkable about Owsley’s LSD operation is that technically he had no background in chemistry and “taught himself” how to make it.   Again, the prior book explains how difficult this is.

However, there are two major caveats to this assessment of his achievement.  First, his GF at the time was a chemist, so undoubtedly she taught him the procedures necessary to do so.  This goes a long way to explaining how he was able to “teach himself”, very likely taught by her, as she was also closely involved with him and his lifestyle and also helping him consume and distribute the top quality acid he was making.  Second, he was doing so before it became illegal and shortly after it was banned, at a time at which the feds were far less sophisticated at tracking down cooks by precursor chemicals and such.  He would have had a much easier time than a contemporary cook at acquiring what he needed.    

Owsley was busted eventually and went to prison for two years (Terminal Island).   Oddly, although he taped many Dead shows – and the opening acts too, which supposedly included Blue Cheer – it seems only a fraction of these recordings have been released to the public.  He moved to Australia and made a compound out in the outback.  He long since stopped doing interesting like doing the Dead’s sound or making killer LSD – but his cause of death was actually a car accident in the outback.    

While I’m on the topic of cooks.

Nick Sand & Tim Scully.  I recently watched “The Sunshine Makers”, a 2015 documentary on this pair of cooks, essentially Owsley’s successors.  Scully trained under Owsley himself.  With Owsley’s arrest and incarceration, this pair became the biggest and most important producers of LSD – until they themselves were caught.  Sand died in April of this year in exile; Scully served his time and permanently retired from the LSD business. 

William Pickard.   If you believe the Feds, this man was the biggest cook, as the supply of LSD dropped dramatically after he was caught – though Pickard himself insists (quite plausibly) that LSD production has always been decentralized since its banning in 1966, and the end of the Grateful Dead’s regular touring schedule (Jerry Garcia died in September 1995) essentially shut down the most important distribution network the drug had.  [If you don’t know anyone personally who sells LSD, a jam band concert is probably the best place to score acid.]  What’s interesting is that Pickard had been particularly careful about his operations.   He was arrested in 1999 and is serving a life sentence.   

One thing you notice: every major “cook” – and while “Uncle Fester” falls short of identifying himself as one, his extensive knowledge of the intimate details of LSD production would infer that he was one, or maybe still is – has eventually been caught, sooner or later.  None of them were stupid or careless, they were all aware their activities were illegal, and all took the matter of evading notice or capture seriously.  But it wasn’t good enough.