Owsley Stanley, 1935–2011

In the 1960s, Owsley “Bear” Stanley was a hero to San Francisco’s rock musicians, both for pioneering high-end sound systems and for making more than 1 million doses of LSD between 1963 and 1967. He had discovered the recipe for the drug in a scholarly journal in 1963, when he was briefly enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. Jimi Hendrix is said to have written “Purple Haze” in his honor.

Stanley was born Augustus Owsley Stanley III (he legally shortened the name in 1967) in Kentucky. “His namesake grandfather was the governor of that state from 1915 to 1919,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. After enrolling at Berkeley in 1963, he joined the nascent counterculture and befriended musicians who would later form the Grateful Dead, which Stanley briefly bankrolled. He went on to become the band’s sound engineer, designing the floor-to-ceiling bank of speakers, known as the Wall of Sound, that the band used in the mid-1970s. “Along with Bob Thomas, he also designed the band’s famous lightning-bolt skull logo” and lent his name to a Dead album, Bear’s Choice.

In the 1980s, Stanley served two years in prison on drug charges, and then emigrated to Australia, “fearful of a new ice age,” said the Sydney Australian. Believing vegetables were toxic, he ate only meat and dairy products, and he lived off the grid. He died this week when he drove off the road and hit a tree.

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Deadheads around the world were alerted to Stanley’s demise by a posting on the Twitter account of Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow. He described Stanley as an “Acid King, Annealer of the Grateful Dead, and Master Crank” who “died with his boots on.”