Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III

by Robert Greenfield

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.