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.    

Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD)

Despite what happened with Marge in the kitchen, Shelbyville cannot lace Springfield’s (or anyone else’s) water supply with LSD: the drug is too unstable and complicated, and gets broken down immediately by the chlorine and other chemicals in the water treatment plants.  This is the same reason the water supplies are essentially immune to potential biological terrorist attack, as these chemicals attack bacteria as well.  In any case, the effects would take an hour or two to really get going, not instantaneous as happened to Marge.  

 In the Beginning, there was Sandoz.  Working on ergot alkaloids for Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland, Albert Hofmann (one f, two n’s) invented lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938.  They marketed it as Delysid.  Can you imagine the ads today?  “Delysid is not for everyone…consult your doctor about Delysid.  Side effects may include…”.   Having successfully developed several other (non-hallucinogenic) ergot compounds which became commercially successful for Sandoz, he put LSD aside for the time being.  In 1943, he dusted off the LSD and began working on it again, and accidentally ingested it through his skin, becoming the first person to trip on it.  Soon after he took another trip, resulting in a horrifying bicycle ride (wartime restrictions limiting gasoline engine vehicles).  The rest is history.  His book, LSD: My Problem Child is remarkable, although only half of it is really about LSD itself.  The drug definitely changed him, although he remained the efficient, normal-looking Swiss chemist with the analytical mind we expect from Germans/Swiss.   

 Eventually Sandoz was embarrassed by the publicity surrounding LSD and stopped making it.  The premier LSD source of the 60’s, Augustus Owsley Stanley, III, better known as "Bear", claimed to be able to make purer LSD than Sandoz itself; his variety “Blue Cheer” became the name of a SF metal band, and his poetry graces the inside covers of their albums, but he is usually associated with the Grateful Dead and claims he was never very impressed by Blue Cheer.

 Effects. LSD is the most powerful drug known to man, as noted in the Guinness Book of World Records.   Doses are measured in micrograms, not milligrams.  Although it’s been produced in tablet and liquid form, blotter paper (as shown second left) is probably the most popular and well known, and certainly uniquely open to artistic interpretation, something that can't be said about a drug which is injected, snorted or smoked….LSD doesn’t have to be injected, snorted, or smoked.

Low doses.  The spaced out feeling like a mild fever, or Darvocet/Percocet.  Something isn’t quite right, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Still able to have something close to a normal conversation.

            Medium doses.  The visuals show up – trails, colors are brighter, glow, and begin to melt into each other.  Patterns, like wallpaper and oriental carpets, begin to shift, swerve, or scroll; lines on a flannel shirt will dance, woodgrain breathes.  Grass grows before your very eyes.  Album covers breathe and begin to act up, like the living portraits in Harry Potter.  Speech becomes more difficult as the brainwaves no longer directly connect thoughts to spoken words – someone inside (who?) has to translate from the brain to the mouth. 

            Higher doses.  Totally out to lunch, on another planet.  More intense visuals, and the mindf**k goes into overdrive.  The self dissolves into the universe at the molecular level, the ego disappears and nothing has any true meaning anymore.   You’ve shifted into a completely different dimension.  Welcome to “where the hell am I now???”

There is no “cure” for a trip, but thorazine will calm down a bad trip somewhat. Theoretically, a bad trip can happen to even the most experienced tripper, but it's most likely when LSD is taken carelessly  in the wrong set or setting - or if it's given to someone without their knowledge ("Somebody Put Something In My Drink", as the Ramones might  say); the Dead were notorious for doing so, so much so that it was common knowledge to avoid eating or drinking anything in their presence.  Syd Barrett's friends would constantly dose him, thinking they were doing him a favor by keeping him tripping 24/7, ultimately not helping him. 

 The CIA.  It experimented with the drug in the 1950s in the MK-Ultra program, as fully described in Acid Dreams, by Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain.  It turned out to be a lousy truth drug: the subject was as likely to spout complete nonsense as the “truth” (however that could possibly be defined under the influence of the drug), with the interrogator scarcely able to tell one from the other.  It was also useless as a mind control drug, because its effects were so unpredictable and (as noted above) it breaks down in the water supply.  The CIA finally gave up on it altogether, about the same time certain anti-establishment elements discovered it.  This is the twisted part about LSD: it started out within the darkest depths of the establishment, the CIA, and then went to the counterculture.  Before Leary (mentioned below) there was Captain Alfred M. Hubbard, one of the CIA’s biggest fans of LSD.

 Merry Pranksters.  Yes, these are the anti-establishment elements, led by Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) – they ran out of the Beatles’ 1964 tour screaming as they couldn’t handle “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” on acid.  Kesey & crew, with a plentiful supply of still-legal LSD, painted a school bus (“Furthur”) dayglow colors and toured the country in summer 1964, freaking out unsuspecting locals who had yet to experience LSD or hippies.  Eventually the Acid Tests evolved, group parties in California where a warehouse would be rented, a vat of electric Kool-Aid (laced with LSD) was there for communal drinking, and a house band, the Grateful Dead, would play – all in safe, nonthreatening environment where you were surrounded by like-minded (?) people and not thrust out into a hostile outside world of squares and pigs.  In London the same experience was imitated, the house band being Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd.  Kesey’s antics are best described in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

 Timothy Leary. The all-time ultimate LSD guru.  After a mushroom trip in 1960, he discovered LSD and proceeded to lose his job at Harvard.  From then he preached the LSD gospel to everyone, convinced that LSD could solve all the world’s problems.  Hofmann met him a few times in Switzerland but felt that Leary was responsible for attracting too much unwelcome attention to LSD and encouraging its use among people who really should NOT be tripping.  Eventually Leary got off his acid trip (after a vacation in exile in Algeria, Switzerland, and finally picked up by the FBI in Afghanistan) and turned his attention to space travel and the ultimate final trip, death itself.  Before he died he engaged in a series of public debates with G. Gordon Liddy, his erstwhile nemesis as a NY prosecutor in the late 60s.

 Change the world?  The hippies, including Leary, felt that if LBJ or Nixon could just be dosed, they would wise up and stop the war in Vietnam.  Highly unlilkely. The effects are unpredictable even for the same person tripping more than once – each trip is completely different, like a snowflake – much less predicting how it would affect the President.  For all we know, Nixon might have decided to nuke North Vietnam.  Not good. 

 Acid Casualties.  Charles Manson & Syd Barrett, who I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs, are the most notorious.  Hofmann, though, notes that no one has ever died of an LSD overdose, which can’t be said for heroin.  Much of the anecdotes about people flying off rooftops because of an LSD trip gone wrong usually turn out to be urban legends (remember Pop Rocks?).  The rumors that LSD damaged chromosomes turned out to be complete nonsense, as Generation X has ably demonstrated (these kids are normal, right?).  And the top ranks of corporate America are full of baby boomers who consumed vast quantities of acid in the 60s and eventually rejoined the mainstream rat race like everyone else, none the worse for the whole “experience.”

 It’s the music, man.  Of course, far beyond Timothy Leary or Charles Manson, the ultimate legacy of LSD is in the music we listen to today.  Although much of the LSD-influenced music was psychedelic with little appeal to those not already disposed to take LSD, marijuana, mushrooms, etc. – notably Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and Hawkwind – a substantial amount was, and is, accessible to those of us who would never dream of tasting the temporary madness of LSD, but who can nonetheless enjoy the music made by those who did dare to “turn off their minds, relax and float downstream”, the biggest example being the Beatles and their masterpiece, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  Very little of Sgt Pepper is psychedelic in the sense of “Interstellar Overdrive” (Pink Floyd), “Dark Star” (Grateful Dead) or anything by Hawkwind or King Crimson.  The LSD effect is more subtle than that: it’s the whole concept of the album and how it all fits together; “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is just the ambassador of LSD within the album itself, to those not in tune enough to recognize it in the whole, the big picture.

            But that’s not all.  To the extent a second wave, an “equal and opposite reaction” in the Newtonian sense, of 70s rock developed, mainly Black Sabbath and punk rock (remember that “Pink Floyd Sucks!” t-shirt?), in defiance of the hippies and California sound, we have a secondary ripple from LSD.  From there, you get the bands Black Sabbath influenced, i.e. Metallica and the whole dark heavy metal genre, and its offshoots such as grunge, meaning that LSD’s impact on music is far beyond the Beatles, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd or the Grateful Dead.  Again, even if some metalheads wouldn’t dream of doing LSD, they still listen to, bang their heads to, and enjoy, music which was indirectly caused by the very drug they shun.  There's also a whole newer genre of heavy metal, which developed in the mid 1990s and continues today, called stoner rock, a genre which deserves its own blog entry in its own right.

             Finally, that brings us to Blue Cheer – not only named after LSD, not only having Owsley’s poetry on their albums, but merging both the San Francisco sound with the darker noise of Black Sabbath and proto-metal...arguably the first stoner rock band.