Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III

by Robert Greenfield

There’s nothing wrong with Bear that a few billion less brain cells wouldn’t cure. —Jerry Garcia

Because of Kesey’s utter fearlessness and incredible personal charisma, as well as the huge amount of beer and LSD that the Pranksters had laid on for the event, the wildly out-of-control party, which included a gang bang that both Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe later described in great detail, was a roaring success. The event was also seen as proof that acid was so powerful an elixir that it could transform even the most fearsome band of outlaws imaginable into relatively peaceful human beings. In truth, the Merry Pranksters and the Hells Angels had almost nothing in common. Despite how crazy the Pranksters could sometimes get while tripping, they were for the most part well-educated dropouts who saw themselves as part of a significant social experiment. Five years before Tom Wolfe would coin the term, their odd alliance with the Hells Angels was an early form of radical chic. While it may now be difficult to understand why a band of psychedelic loonies would want to reach out to an outlaw motorcycle gang for any reason whatsoever, it should be remembered that much of what went on during the 1960s was motivated by an unceasing quest for authenticity. Whatever else anyone might have had to say about the Hells Angels, they were definitely real, often in the most terrifying way imaginable.

Not surprisingly, Owsley never bonded with Kesey or the Pranksters, whom he considered to be “a bunch of people who were goofing off and getting high on acid once a week and playing around with what it did to their heads. There was a lot of pretension, and it was almost impossible to get Kesey to listen to anybody else and understand or accept what they had to say. You just couldn’t give him any kind of advice or anything. It was always all about Kesey.” With the possible exception of his father, Owsley had finally come into contact with someone he could not control.

When Phil Lesh politely declined Owsley’s offer to take acid with him one night, Owsley told him, “The band is my body. You are my left leg. My left leg is asleep. You must get high.” Knowing it was useless to argue about it, Lesh complied with Owsley’s demand. Accurately, drummer Bill Kreutzmann would later write that Owsley “was as stubborn as red wine on a white carpet.”

Accurately summing up what Owsley had done for the Dead during this period, Dennis McNally would later say, “He gave them a vision of quality that quite frankly influenced them for the next thirty years. And that alone gives him credibility for that scene.” By insisting that the band rehearse as often as possible while they had all been living together in Los Angeles as well as urging them to listen to the tapes he had made of their live performances, Owsley had helped the Dead take what they had been doing at the Acid Tests to another level. Out of his own pocket, he had furnished the band with the best equipment that money could buy and then worked tirelessly to ensure that their sound onstage would be second to none. He had also found a manager to look after their business interests, thereby freeing them to focus solely on their music. And perhaps more importantly, he had also imprinted the obsessive nature of his personality on the way in which they approached their live performances.

One Saturday afternoon, Owsley had flown on a helicopter to Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, where he had distributed acid to his disciples like Jesus. In what must still rank as the greatest story of them all, Owsley was said to have gone to visit a group of Berkeley Free Speech activists who had been thrown in jail. Wearing a purple velvet suit and carrying a Bible, he solemnly began reading passages from it only to reveal that the Bible had been dipped in acid so those in jail could “groove” on the pages. Each activist then tore out a page from a favorite section of the Bible and sucked on it until they were all tripping madly behind bars.

“You become as you are beheld. And Owsley was smart enough to know that. Not being photographed was his dodge, which was very thoughtful. He was not so easily beheld. And so there was no caricature for him to live up to. There certainly was one of Jerry Garcia. You become a cartoon of yourself.”

After Owsley’s shipment had arrived safely in England, the Beatles spent the next three weeks tripping. The continuing aftereffects of whatever visions they may have derived from Owsley’s batch of Monterey Purple can clearly be seen in Magical Mystery Tour, the Merry Pranksters–inspired, homemade road-trip movie that the Beatles filmed in September 1967.

Although the mustache does make him look somewhat like an outlaw from the Old West, he seems far more like a serious young professor who has only just learned that his research grant has been taken away by those who will never understand the importance of his work.

Many years later, Owsley explained the Dead’s fairly ingenious plan to get Graham high by saying, “Nobody injected anything. We had been trying to hit him for years and we knew he wouldn’t touch anything that was opened or in a cup. He had to open his own. We saw what kind of soda he liked and made sure that every can he was likely to find was already fixed. “When you picked up a soft drink out of a cooler, it was always covered with beads of condensation. So a drop or two was put on the lid of every can in the room. They were all still sealed. The drop was in the little ridge around the outside. Take a sip and the drop went in with the first sip. But it wasn’t me who did it. It was our road manager at the time. He was very clever at that.”

During an utterly chaotic gig that Michael Lydon would later describe in great detail in his landmark article about the Dead in Rolling Stone magazine, Bear could be found lying flat on his back curled up among the amplifiers with his eyes “sightless as fog” as the band began to play.

Accurately, Lydon described Lenny Hart and Bear as being “like two selves of the Dead at war, with the Dead themselves sitting as judges.” Noting that Jerry Garcia had described Bear as “Satan in our midst,” Lydon wrote that he was a “friend, chemist, psychedelic legend and electronic genius; not a leader but a moon with a gravitational pull. He is a prince of inefficiency, the essence at its most perverse of what the Dead refuse to give up. They [i.e., Bear and Lenny Hart] are natural enemies, but somehow they have to co-exist for the Dead to survive. The skirmishing has just begun.”

History of the Grateful Dead, Volume One, which then became more commonly known as Bear’s Choice. Composed entirely of tracks that Bear had recorded while the band performed at Fillmore East on February 13 and 14, 1970, the album was intended as a tribute to Pigpen and was both engineered and produced by Bear.

Aptly, Kreutzmann described the Wall of Sound as “Owsley’s brain, in material form. It was his dream, but it spawned a monster that rose from the dark lagoon of his unconscious mind.” In ways that Bear himself had never anticipated, the Wall of Sound was, in Kreutzmann’s words, “impossible to tame.” Despite all the problems, he had achieved precisely what the Dead had asked him to do. “The Wall of Sound was a system which gave every iota of control to the musicians onstage. With a central cluster and all the monitors pulled back so everything was coming from one spot, the sound turned into something that no one had ever heard before. It was loud without being too loud. It was articulate. Every single note had a space around it. Once the system was set, I could walk away from the board because it all came from the musicians, which had been my goal right from the beginning.”