#owsley stanley

[speed-freak-jive]

owsley "bear" stanley; acid kingpin and sound engineer. pictured with unknown girl

via instagram

[kosmik-signals]

Grateful Dead

Jerry Garcia & Owsley Stanley

Jefferson Airplane

Merry Pranksters

[babylon-crashing]

Text:

Ulula/ from flowerchild wallflower/ to feral acid freakout!/ “Damn, that orange sunshine is a killer!/ I need mooooore! (snort, drool)/ Oooorange Suuuunshine!/ What would Owsley Stanley and the Hippie Mafia do?/ Heavy Petting Scandals presents:/ “I was in love with a teenage Acid Freak!”/ The Fleas! The Infamy! The Dirty Linen!

[mayamistake]

Sound architect and Lysergic Acid pioneer Augustus “Bear’” Owsley Stanley died this week in his adopted home of Australia. The sixties counterculture fixture (see: Ken Kesey, the Grateful Dead, the Acid Tests, Tom Wolfe, etc.) and fictional inspiration for Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne” reportedly produced upwards of 1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967. While it was his doses that made him (in)famous, fellow heads know Owsley as the man behind the band’s live fidelity—explicitly the Wall of Sound.

[imlikebubbles]

“This is a photo of Melissa Cargill that my mother took in May of 1969. Melissa Cargill was Owsley Stanley's partner in manufacturing the very high-quality LSD that fueled the Merry Pranksters and the hippie movement in the mid to late 60s.

There are no other quality photos of her from that time in the public domain.

My mother would want this one to be in the public domain. Feel free to share it as much as you care to. I discovered it among the items I inherited from her, and for the longest time I did not know what I had. I only found out it was Melissa Cargill when I started writing up the stories that I have published in this group of growing up hippie and meeting some of the more famous people of that era as a teen. This photo was on the same page in the same photo album, and from the same camara, as the four close-up photos of the Grateful Dead that my mother took at the May 5, 1969, outdoor Dead concert held at Sierra College in Rocklin, CA.

If you google it, you will find the only other photo of Melissa is a faded one that is mostly all shades of brown. I will post that one in the first comment here so you can compare this one to what was previously available.

This photo is a high-resolution photo of a low-resolution Polaroid photo. I cropped it to show all the margins because the month and year are on one of them. I only touched it up a tiny bit.

I would love to know if anybody in this group has any photos of her or any stories about her that they could share. Owsley Stanly (aka Bear) was a good friend of my mothers for a long time. I don't have any memories of her talking about Melissa, but I'm sure they knew each other some. I do not recall ever meeting her.

I do have a handful of clear memories of my own personal interactions with Bear. Of being in the room when he visited with my mother and a few other times that I got to see him. He always smelled strongly of patchouli. In the late 60s, my sister and I were driving back from Seattle to Los Angeles, where we lived in Santa Monica. Somehow we knew where to drop in to see Bear in San Francisco. He was working on setting up a stage. For the Dead to play. He didn't have much time to chat with us. But he went backstage and came out with a big jar of pills and poured a bunch into both of our hands and said “take these to your mother.” They were small and white and barrel shaped. They were STP pills.”

-Storm King

[alanblindowlwilson]

“For God’s sake, don’t try STP!” You all have probably seen the STP motor oil logo, but in the 60’s STP was a hallucinogenic methamphetamine apparently stolen from the Army. It stood for “Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace,” had effects similar to LSD and trips could last up to 3 days. It was later synthesized by Owsley Stanley of the Grateful Dead. Alan had a sticker between the pickups of his 1954 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop. You can see it in the pics from Woodstock.

[1962dude420-blog]

Today we remember the passing of Owsley Stanley who Died: March 13, 2011 in Queensland, Australia

Augustus Owsley Stanley III was an American audio engineer and clandestine chemist. He was a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area hippie movement during the 1960s and played a pivotal role in the decade’s counterculture.

Under the professional name Bear, he was the soundman for the rock band the Grateful Dead, whom he met when Ken Kesey invited them to an Acid Test party. As their sound engineer, Stanley frequently recorded live tapes behind his mixing board and developed their Wall of Sound sound system, one of the largest mobile public address systems ever constructed. Stanley also helped Robert Thomas design the band's trademark skull logo.

Stanley was the first known private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD. By his own account, between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced no less than 500 grams of LSD, amounting to a little more than five million doses.

He died in a car accident in Australia on March 12, 2011.

[gratefulfrog]

The Bear and Jerry. Happy Birthday, Owsley!