Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III

by Robert Greenfield

‘In the promoter position, you have to try to get the artist for as little as possible so you can make money. What I’m proposing to you now is that you protect the art and protect the musicians by becoming the manager of the Grateful Dead and trying to get as much money as you can for them.’

He insisted that we follow his diet regimen, which was basically one hundred percent protein. Meat and milk were all that we were allowed. I was pathologically antiauthoritarian and reacted to that fairly swiftly by becoming a strict vegetarian.”

Although this was the first time Owsley would find himself celebrated in song, it would not be the last. Ten years later, Steely Dan would record “Kid Charlemagne,” a song loosely based on Owsley’s exploits that includes a reference to his time in Los Angeles with the Dead. Owsley is also mentioned by name in “Who Needs the Peace Corps?” by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention as well as in “Mexico” by the Jefferson Airplane.

Leary urged all those in attendance to “flick on the inner switch to full power” to avoid spending “the rest of your life as a badly paid extra in someone else’s low-budget black-and-white documentary/training film.”

“For Owsley, there was always a right way and a wrong way. And he was pro-choice. He was magnanimous about it. If you wanted to be an idiot, that was your right. And he was not surprised that you would choose to be an idiot. Because if you did it any way but his, that was pretty much what you were.”

After the show was over, Owsley and Gissen drove to the Masonic Temple, a large auditorium on California Street in the Nob Hill section of the city. Carrying his tape recorder and a Fender amp, Owsley followed Hendrix into a dark room with heavy draperies and a fireplace. After lighting a fire, Owsley set up his recording equipment and gave Hendrix a dose of liquid LSD from the Murine bottle. Seated on a chair with his guitar, Hendrix then began to play. After he was done, Owsley held up the cassette he had just recorded in triumph as Gissen drew the drapes to admit blinding sunlight into the room. Asking if he could see the tape, Hendrix took it from Owsley’s hand and threw it into the fire. Smiling broadly, he then grabbed his guitar and walked out the door. Frantically, Owsley did all he could to retrieve the cassette from the fire, only to realize that the tape had already been destroyed. Lest anyone think that all this could be just another acid-drenched fantasy that never happened, consider that before Jimi Hendrix began his guitar solo on a cover version of the Beatles’ “Day Tripper” that was recorded on December 15, 1967, at the BBC-1 studios in London, he can clearly be heard calling out, “Oh, Owsley, can you hear me now?” But by then, Owsley’s everyday life had already become far stranger than fiction.

As Jerry Garcia left the stage, he told Jon McIntire, the band’s road manager, “It’s nice to know that you can blow the most important gig of your career and it doesn’t really matter.”