Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, a book review by Greg Heffelfinger

Robert Greenfield, the author of quite a few wonderful books about the Rolling Stones, maybe should stuck with The Glimmer Twins and the gang. The subject of the book is a fascinating man for many reasons and this book is only half a dose about the man who turned on the world.

  Let's start with Robert Greenfield. The man is a great writer. His book about the making of Exile on Main Street is a wonderful read. As well as his book about the STP aka the Stones Touring Party, is fascinating from cover to cover and quite well-written. His newest book about the worst-kept secret personality of the sixties and the creator of some of the purest LSD in the world, according to Albert Hoffman,no less, doesn't do the man or the myth the treatment he deserved. Greenfield spends the first chapter delving into Bear's genealogy and his blue blood upbringing. Owsley hated the name "Gus" and went by Owsley for most of his life and he goes into the childhood of the man who would turn the whole world on. Owsley spent a lot of his youth getting in trouble and running around causing trouble.  Greenfield spends a lot of time discussing his early years and his first two marriages and their dissolution. Most people don't know that Owsley was a wonderful dancer and a ballet dancer of some repute. Bear was arrested in Daytona Beach for disorderly conduct and he was sent back to LA to deal with a charge of writing a bad check. Greenfield goes into a lot of detail about the man before he even introduces the reason he was famous.        

This specific charge affected him deeply. Passing a bad check made him feel extremely bad because he had broken his word and even at that time, Bear lived by an extreme code of ethics. This would manifest itself in lots of different ways throughout his life. When he went to Berkeley in 1964, he showed up at a rooming house. By this time everyone was already smoking weed and this short, weird guy shows up at the door and they rented him a room and he immediately began to talk about drugs for a solid forty five minutes. By the time he stopped talking everyone was sure he was a narc. Pot was still that far underground at that point. Charley Perry, a writer for several magazines about drugs, asked Bear to pick up a friend, Will Spires, at the airport and this friend busted out some herb and got Owsley high the first time.

    Greenfield gives a lot of great information about the beginning of the myth of Owsley. He documents the growth of the myth and the man from his beginnings of slinging morning glory seeds to his meeting Melissa Cargill and how he taught himself to make speed to sell to make the money to buy the ingredients to make LSD. In between the years, he taught himself to make LSD that he sent to Albert Hoffman, who sent him back a letter telling him it was one of the purest samples he had ever seen.  Greenfield documents the Acid Tests and Owsley's tendency to take way too much of his own product and told the famous story of Owsley pushing around the chair on floor, making a horrible screeching noise and how he went up to Ken Kesey and told The Chief he was doing it wrong. I'm not doing the story justice, find it on your own. This was the first time he also heard The Warlocks. He spent half the night, when he wasn't annoying the shit out of everyone, dancing to the band and using his own inspiration plus his ballet training, and birthed the interpretive dancing seen at so many GD shows. You could call him the ur-spinner. 

Greenfield describes Owsley's fascination with the band and how he loved the sound and how it lead him to become the patron/taskmaster of the Grateful Dead. He tells the story of the making of Monterey Purple for the Monterey Pop Festival and the White Lightning for the Human Be-In. He spends a lot of time talking about early Owsley and the Watts time period, then up until the inevitable bust. 

    Then, Greenfield skips through the years and talks about how disturbed he was when he came back from prison and became the Dead's soundman again. By this time, cocaine had infiltrated the Dead scene and everyone was very territorial about their jobs and Bear still believed in the hippie ethos of communal work to make the show the best it could be. The band's crew didn't see it that way and didn't have the Owsley experience to just deal and Bear was slowly pushed out after every other show it seemed like Owsley was a wingnut who talked to the amps and had to re-solder every piece of sound equipment before every show. Luckily, he ran a tape deck next to the soundboard and for the first years the band would listen to the recordings but by 1973-74, the band was no longer interested in listening their shows anymore.

Owsley's Baby

    After leaving the organization, Bear moved around and Greenfield goes off the path during this period of his life. He talks about Owsley and his children and how he used his time in prison to learn metallurgy. He talked about how it was possible in the nineties to meet Bear at a GD show and buy a handmade belt buckle or pin for crazy amounts of money. Now those buckles and pins are priceless.  Greenfield does spend a lot of time discussing Bear's trips to Australia and the building of his home there. He spends a lot of time on Bear's fight with cancer and the end of his life.

    The book is a good read. I hate to call it a beach book but it had the same traits. I read it in maybe two or three consecutive sittings. I think Greenfield just skims the top of his life and the highlights and high lows of his careers. It's not a bad book but if you really want to know more about the man they called Bear, and it is mentioned in Greenfield's book, read the book by his ex-wife, Dr. Rhony Gisson-Stanley, "Owsley and Me". It goes into much more detail about the reason we all know Owsley and if you really want to know as much as possible, read both.  At times it seems that Greenfield did his research from Wikipedia or other lightweight sources and he got some great interviews but I feel like Rhony's book was much closer to the real Bear. Owsley made an effort to stay out of the limelight and it sort of worked. Greenfield had his work cut out for him to start with, especially compared to the Rolling Stones, but he only seemed to skim the top of the sine-wave that is Owsley Stanley. It's well-written but I felt like he could've dove deeper. It's a solid B or maybe I'd give it three and a half lightning bolts. Actually, I'd probably give him four bolts because Owsley didn't leave much of a paper trail so it wasn't an easy assignment. "Alice D. Millionaire" was a complicated, highly intelligent, and incredibly talented man. The book gets that across but I don't feel like it's greedy for Greenfield to have given more. For one of the most original, creative, and massive intellects of the 1960's, i just feel like Greenfield could've done more.

Greg Heffelfinger

"I'm not interested of having a biography of any kind published about me or my childhood. Anything written about me should be about the things I've done and the skills or talents I have and not, "He grew up here and he went to this school, he was in trouble there" and all that bullshit. Because that's the way you create celebrityhood and I'm not into being a celebrity. I don't give a shit." - 

-Owsley "Bear" Stanley 

Jan.31st 2007

"There's nothing wrong with Owsley that a few billion less brain cells wouldn't cure."

-Jerry Garcia

© 2016 Grateful Music LLC

The Grateful Dead and the Secret Sauce: LSD, Owsley and the Primal Dead

The Grateful Dead and the Secret Sauce: LSD, Owsley and the Primal Dead.

It's no secret that the Grateful Dead are considered the pioneers of psychedelic rock. How could you not be when the famous Owsley "Bear" Stanley is your patron? When the band was trying to find it's footing in the early days, LSD was still legal. In fact, it had just slipped the bonds of the CIA and the mental ward through people such as Ken Kesey, Michael Hollingshead, and the infamous Dr. Leary. Although how they went about it was vastly different, each coast of the country was getting turned on. Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters held concerts that the Warlocks could play, or not. Everything was free in that space. A large garbage can of Kool-Aid and it was off to the races. Then the Haight started getting hectic. The band had hit a ceiling oh how far they were moving, even going so far as to almost fire Bobby and Pigpen. They might have been fired but just kept showing up. Hippies! 

All of the hassles proved too much and the band decamped down to L.A. In Watts, shortly after the riots, a group of scruffy white kids could play as loud as they wanted and the neighbors certainly weren't going to call the cops. The band woodshedded down in LA long enough to get ready to come back to SF with material they play to this day.

 One of the most popular stories from this period was told by manager Rock Scully who said that Owsley had an old German printing press for capping his LSD but every time he used it, while the band was playing to cover the noise, it released little puffs of the crystal into the air. By the time the lease was up, LSD had drifted down through the house until even, some people claimed, their teeth were gritty from the powder. Owsley had them on an all-meat diet,he claimed humans are naturally carnivores, and many rules for the unruliest of bands. They also had to sell product for him to the local heads. 

The band, would go down the street and let it be known they had the product and the LA scenesters ate it up. The Doors were popular at the time and every time some cute little thing would walk up and say,"Is this the good stuff? It's for Jim" and the boys would pull out the same product that everyone else got, just from a different pocket and say" yeah but don't tell anyone else" and all had a good laugh at the pretentiousness of "The Lizard King". 

Eventually, the band could take Owsley's rules and regulations no more and scampered back to SF. Bobby stopped taking LSD on purpose, though he was regularly dosed, because he said,"by the end I was sitting in a corner bubbling my spit." They moved back to the Bay Area and moved from idyllic hippie spot to spot until checking into 710 Ashbury and Phil and Billy had another house since they were married at the time. All of this swirled and melted and congealed into the band we know and love. They were there when it was legal and saw when it criminalized. Then dealers moved in on the scene.  The party still rages though.

The DEA would watch LSD arrests rise in direct correlation to their tours in the 80's. They pushed mandatory minimum sentencing, which made no sense for LSD since doses are measured in micrograms. There are people that have been in jail longer than murderers for LSD. Get caught with a few sugarcubes in the 80's and you'd be in jail longer than the rapist next door.  Still, besides all the politics, the Grateful Dead are known as THE band to listen to while tripping. 

They played on the chemical and achieved the group mind, gestalt, whatever it was that allowed them to link up as a unit and blow minds. The sci-fi freaks, of which Jerry proudly was, called it "bleshing". Blending and meshing and from that came the swirling psychedelia of "Dark Star" and "That's It for The Other One" and the six song shows that are known as "Primal Dead." Funnily enough, Pigpen only took acid onee and not on purpose. He was a drunk among psychedelic rangers but he was still an integral part of the early Dead. Owsley was eventually arrested but the band kept playing on. With a little drop of liquid or a tiny square of paper, you couldn't be sure they were ever there at all. Next up, the eventual come down. 

Enjoy Your Days Between!

Written by: Greg Heffelfinger

Sources: Living with the Dead by Rock Scully

               Searching for the Sound by Phil Lesh

               Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams and Drugs by Bill Kreutzmann

               Acid Dreams by Lee Shlain

               Owsley and Me: My LSD Family by Rhoney Gissen Stanley

© 2016 Grateful Music LLC