WHITE LIGHTNING

WHITE LIGHTNING:
OWSLEY ‘BEAR’ STANLEY’S LAST TRIP

© Rak Razam 2012

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“The lips of wisdom are closed,

except to the ears of Understanding…”

– The Kybalion

“One night while we wait for the Bear we talk of the places his
words have taken us. And in those words are new thoughts
that he is sharing with us, and he knows these ideas will grow
and be shared with others. That is what will live on–the love of
life he shared with us.”

– Wendy and Sparks

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THE BEAR’S LAST ROAR:

ENTHEOGENESIS AUSTRALIS (EGA)
MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY FOYER,
OUTSIDE THE MAIN LECTURE HALL,
SATURDAY 11/14/2009

Bear: I normally don’t speak at things like this, but I had a message that I felt is
so important to this planet that I needed to expose myself to [the media] and to
somebody who might understand what I have to say and have a way of
implementing it … I probably made a mistake… but that’s fine because one day
I’ll die and then I won’t have to hear about it… But [until then] I’m gonna keep on
doing it till I find someone…
Dylan: People always become the most famous when they die…
Bear: I don't care about that. I don’t care what people think about me when I die,
if they think of me as a good man with honor or not. All I care about is honor. If
what you do is honorable that's the only thing you really have. People lie and
cheat and don't honor their word and things like that, they aren’t honorable.
They’ve given away everything of value.
You're born into this world with nothing and you leave with nothing. And you have
to–that's part of the game. But what you come back with–a lot of people don’t
even think about that. I think the Tibetans are the closest. Don't leave anything
behind. Don’t die thinking you haven't finished something. That’s their method.
As long as you're not bound by a desire then you'll go where you're supposed to
go. As long as you've left something behind you have to go and finish it. That's
what the [Tibetans] say–I don't say that. All I know is that the only people in the
world who can be found again after they reincarnate–are the Dalai Lamas.
Dylan: The Delai Lamas are strict vegetarians.
Bear: No, they’re not. They eat no vegetables because there aren’t any.
Dylan: Okay, they eat yaks, they eat meat because it’s there.

Bear: They eat meat because that’s what people eat. They eat yak meat and
they eat a lot of yak butter.
Dylan: Buddha came to tell the world to stop killing animals and to stop doing
sacrafice.
Bear: No he didn’t…

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Dylan: Yes he did, that was Buddha’s message to the world, compassion and to
stop killing animals.

Bear: He did no such thing. You don’t know shit, man, Buddha said ‘don’t kill
anything unneccessarily’. In other words if you ain’t gonna eat it, don’t kill it. Don’t
kill things for the sake of killing them. He said nothing about don’t kill animals,
that’s nonsense, that’s the vegans talking, the vegetarians, the people that have
a weird and wicked, twisted diet, which distorts their mentality and makes them
find an explanation to justify every stupid thing they do with their lives. No. You
don’t know because you’ve never really read what Buddha said, you’re just going
on what people have told you.
Dylan: I’m going on what I know, which is all I can go on until someone tells me
more…
Bear: I’m telling you that Buddha said that you should have compassion and
not destroy life unneccessarily… He didn’t say don’t eat meat or you can’t kill
things for food, or any of that shit. Don’t abuse other people and don’t kill things
[you’re not going to eat]. He didn’t say don’t squat mosquitos, but you also don’t
just go out and step on bugs because they’re bugs, that’s wrong in his book and
it’s wrong in mine, too.

Think for yourself. You have to kill conscious things because everything you eat
is conscious. The thing you don’t know is that plants are nine times more
conscious than animals. A carrot has more consciousness than you have. You
get a gigantic tree, 2000 years old, and you plug into it–and I’ve done that–I once
communed with a great and ancient redwood tree in Muir Woods CA, while under
the effects of a strong dose of DMT. And it tells you… it’s in ecstasy, absolute
oneness with the Creator. And people cut them down to make woodchips out of
them!
You can’t kill any living thing–plant or animal–without breaking a conscious loop.
Consciousness is not the limitation, it’s your attitude. You must respect each
living thing that gives you your nutrition, whether animal or plant it doesn’t matter.
If you go against the structure of your own body and your heritage as a carnivore,
if you eat vegetables, then you’re violating your own body and not gaining
anything conscious as far as food is concerned, because most vegetarians have
little to no consciousness from their food.
You can threaten a plant and it will shrink; play music to it and it will love it. A
plant can hear and see. You [can] find an orchid [that] looks so much like a
female bee, and it smells like it, that the male [bee] tries to copulate with it. He
picks up the pollen and then realizes it’s not happening and sees another flower,
carrying pollen with him, and so forth, [essentially doing the plant’s pollination].
But how does the plant know what the bee looks like? How does a plant know
what the bee smells like? How does a plant even know what bees do?
Dylan: They’re conscious.

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Bear: Right. It doesn’t need eyes to see.

I had to pinch myself.

Here was Owsley “Bear” Stanley–legendary figure from the countercultural
history books, a living connection to the 1960s–here in the hallowed halls of an
off-campus Melbourne University lecture hall, the headline speaker at the
EntheoGenesis Australis (EGA) 2009 conference on the psychedelic scene,
Down Under.

Before shortening his name in 1967 he was known by the extended epithet
Augustus Owsley Stanley III–or AOS3, ‘God’s Secret Agent’ as Tim Leary called
him: acid cook, artisan, sound engineer and visionary prophet–whether he damn
well liked that label or not. “I’ve studied with the wisest sages of our times:
Huxley, Heard, Lama Govinda, Sri Krishna Prem, Alan Watts…” said Leary in the
Politics of Ecstasy–“and I have to say that AOS3, college flunkout, who never
wrote anything better (or worse) than a few rubber checks, has the best up to
date perspective on the divine design than anyone I’ve ever listened to.”
And here I was here with a few dozen glazed punters, still trying to chase down
an interview with the man who refused to be photographed for 40 years, who
kept a low profile and was notoriously untrustworthy of journalists, yet kept me
dangling with the elusive interview possibility because I was the one who had
lured him out of his cave at the edge of the world and facilitated his entry into the
Australian psychedelic speaking circuit. In retrospect it was sort of like a bear
tossing round a half-dead animal in it’s bloody claws and playing with the meat.
Owsley, known as the ‘Bear’ to his friends (so named after the hirsuite body hair
he sprouted while still a teenager) was lecturing to a small crowd of hangers-on
in the lecture theatre foyer about honor, meat and the nature of consciousness
and effortlessly running intellectual circles around them–it was surreal.
You could tell just by looking at him that Bear was a dude, even though he was
wizened and frail. As his ex-housemate Charles Perry (author of The Haight-
Ashbury: A History) says, Owsley was “short, the kind of short guy who insists
that he's ‘of average height’ but always wears elevator shoes.”  He was decked
out in tight blue jeans with a brown leather belt and a gold Grateful Dead buckle
of his own making, a black long-sleeved shirt overlaid with a black vest and black
leather shoes. His lined face was all ears, standing out like receiver dishes either
side and framed by a shock of thining gray hair and a salty goatee beard, a gold
bucaneer earring in his left ear and a hearing aid hooked over his right.

Bear had lost over thirty pounds of body weight and was a shade of the robust,
Mars-like figure he was in his prime. But he still resonated with a steely kind of
temperament; you could read it in the way he carried himself and the bark of
command in his raspy voice, squeezed out through a lone vocal cord left after

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aggressive chemotherapy to kill throat cancer took out more than intended.

Bear was the man, and he didn’t kid around–he meant everything he said, no
matter how far out. He was impeccable, guaranteed. Every word, every action,
every deed was weighed and considered for the effect it would have on both him
and the world around him. Every act an occult grace that infused his life with a
presence and consciousness from on high. The Alchemist that walked amongst
us, or so those in the know would whisper in reverent tones.

Bear was legendary because he stood his ground when he knew it was the right
thing to do–like when he challenged the authorities that illegally busted his
chemical lab in ‘65 and he sued the state to get his equipment back. Bear later
participated in the Acid Tests with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and
helped fuel the parties by suppling the acid. He was the first underground cook to
produce high-purity LSD in 1965 when it was legal, and by giving much of it away
for free he single-handedly helped catalyze the hippie movement. Under the
umbrella of the Bear Research Group, history says Bear produced around 1.25
million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, although he claims the output was
much less. What we can say for certain is that without his input, as Grateful Dead
biographer Dennis McNally has said, “there simply wouldn’t have been enough
acid for the psychedelic scene of the Bay Area in the sixties to have ignited.”
Bear went on to concoct the infamous White Lightning and Monterey Purple acid
that switched on such influential users as Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles. It is said
that John Lennon ordered a lifetime supply of LSD from him, smuggled back to
Britain in a film cannister just in time to facilitate the Magical Mystery Tour, acid
which undoubtedly helped accelerate the changes in the Beatles’ music and the
psychedelic zeitgeist of the 1960s in general.
So much was set in motion by Bear's decision to make the purest LSD he could,
and the way that he approached the endeavor as a spiritual act, that set the
psychic imprint for the culture as a whole. What a curious set of events that a
highly intelligent raconteur should find himself in the exact right place at the exact
right time, with the exact right skills or intelligence and fortitude to learn those
skills, to help facilitate a mass awakening. If any details had been different: if
Bear had just been into the acid for the money; if his brave and tenancious
personality had been less inclined to stand up for what he believed was right; if
he hadn't been a student of alchemy and magical will; if any of those things were
different then the world as we know it would also be significantly altered today.

For Bear was no mere chemist, nor a simple drug dealer. By his own admission
he “never set out to change the world … [merely] to make sure I was taking
something [that] I knew what it was. And it’s hard to make a little. And my friends
all wanted to know what they were taking, too. Of course, my friends expanded
very rapidly,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 2007.

Bear’s other great love was, of course, music (acid and rock'n'roll are both about
vibration, after all). He was renowned for his contribution to sound engineering,

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particularly working with the Grateful Dead and perfecting the idea of on-stage
monitors and high quality PAs. Then there was the infamous Wall of Sound
system he built for the Dead’s stadium concerts, consisting of 604 speakers and
an array of tweeters and crossovers, stacked 40 feet high and drawing close to
27,000 watts of power. It reportedly cost $350,000 to create, $200,000 per gig to
maintain and, hauled from venue to venue on four 18-wheeler trucks, required as
many as 26 crewmen 14 hours to set up.

It’s fair to say that Bear invented the modern sound system for rock concerts:
playing through his Wall of Sound system was, according to Phil Lesh, like
"piloting a flying saucer. Or riding your own sound wave." Mickey Hart told
Rolling Stone: “Think of the people who were influenced by his brew. They never
played the same again. Us, Hendrix, the Airplane, just about everybody–music in
general was never the same.”

A tireless archivist, Bear kept a ‘sonic-journal diary’ of his front-of-house mixes,

including hundreds of Grateful Dead performances, a number of which have
been released by major record labels. He is so iconic that the name "Owsley"
entered the English language, listed in the OED/Oxford English Dictionary (as a
noun for an "extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD."). It should probably now
be corrected to mean anything of high quality.
Bear was always coming from somewhere deep and meaningful, on the edge of
genius and madness, or both. Some called him a crank, but he was also
“admired and respected even by many of the same people who roll their eyes in
resignation when he approaches,” as Grateful Dead chronicler David Gans has
said. He was only mad to those who wouldn’t journey to the far reaches of the
known where his mind soared.

Bear told it like it was, but that didn’t mean you would be able to understand what
the hell he was saying. He wasn’t haughty about his intelligence–he simply loved
to share his knowledge. Ad naseum. As Tom Wolfe put it in The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test, “He is, like, arrogant; he is a wiseacre; but the arrogant little wiseacre
makes righteous acid.” He was hard to take sometimes, but he was always
illuminating–even catalyzing.

Yes, it was Owsley “Bear” Stanley alive and kicking, despite all the odds, whom
had come out of a long retirement after having not been seen by the general
public, (apart from the occasional Grateful Dead concert and in concert carparks
where he sold his gold and enamel sculptures–mainly the Deadhead skull with
the lightning bolt he had helped co-create) for almost 40 years. He had shunned
journalists and the media for the most part, with only scattered gems of
interviews since he had emigrated to Australia in 1984 and went underground.

Bear came fleeing imminent climate change that the occult pathways of acid had
revealed to him, a planetary superstorm that would trigger the next ice age. He
was going to survive by living out on freehold land in the rugged Walsh River

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communes on the Tablelands of Far North Queensland (FNQ), building his hippie
dream in the bush. And he did.

The superstorm hadn’t happened–yet–but climate change was here, and so was
Bear, now almost 75, the godfather of the psychedelic 60s, recovering from
throat cancer, a small, wiry, feisty legend of a man. Here he was, this most
archetypal, cantankerous old grandfather, an elder of the tribe, come to talk to
the young generation. And yet his very presence dominated the space around
him as he jousted happily with those that dared to engage him. Some things
never change.

If that foyer conversation had rolled on the orchid-bee analogy would have
spiraled out to encompass the way nature really works, the intelligence behind it
and the secretion of planetary exo-pheremones through the psychoactive plants
to regulate the species, especially the carnivorous humans. Which would have
led on to the meat-eating rant, and humans place at the top of the food chain that
begins with the plants eating the light and the humans eating the animals that
feed on the plants, and the idea of energy circulation and whole systems theory,
which undoubtedly ties into the larger planetary cycles of ice ages and warm
spells where civilizations briefly flourish.
That is to say, if anyone could actually sit and listen to Bear and all his out-there
theories with enough attention to detail, and patience, they would have eventually
realized that they weren’t a hotch-potch sampling of way out acid-musings;
instead, each individual insight and intuition gleaned from a life lived deeply
interconnected and built up to a meta-theory, a new paradigm that showed an
archaic way of sustainability and insight for future generations. It’s just that very
few, if any people–even those closest to him–ever managed to sit through the
marathon downloads that Bear dispensed without pissing him off or intellectually
falling off the rails, much less integrating his wisdom into a cohesive whole. Until
now.
Bear’s theories were bold, sometimes controversial, and pointed towards a new
way of looking at our culture from a whole systems perspective. This book asks
the question: What if Owsley Stanley, affectionately known as ‘Bear’, acid cook,
entrepreneur and genius set loose on the psychedelic culture of the 1960s, who
always had an opinion about everything, what if his crazy, hyperdetailed theories
were in fact, right? Or at least, pointed towards some meaningful truth? What
then? What would it mean to the psychedelic community and to the world at
large?
Bear’s rants were the stories he laid on the tribe, and this book seeks to weave
them together and present them as a whole tapestry. It is less a traditional
biography than a gonzo bio-memoir that relays some of his last recorded public
speeches, blending themes from previous interviews and public statements,
sometimes in long transcription style. In such I have attempted to create a clear
narrative flow that communicates Bear’s theories in his own words, as much as
possible, and embeds them in the context of a life lived deep and true.

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And so I cast back to that time in November, 2009, when the Bear came out of
his delphic cave to lay one last trip on the masses–the urgent need to end the
prohibition on drugs and the war on altered states. "Prohibition is the problem.
The most important thing I have to say to anyone, anywhere, is that they have to
legalize drugs, and I mean not decriminalize, not harm reduce, legalize," he said.
"Make them available on an open market and you can control them, you can limit
them, do anything you want ... We will not recover from the [current] economic
collapse until the drugs are taken out of the mix. The worse it gets the more
money goes to the black market."

The collapse of the world economy was intrinsically linked to the black market
economy, and the two could no longer remain the same, according to Bear. As
he explained, a third or more of the world economy lay unseen in the black
market and the siphoning of that money away from the mainstream was part and
parcel of why the world faced an economic crisis, as well as a crisis of spiritual
disconnection.

Bear had been saying the gist of this for decades but by late 2009 the conditions
on the ground were getting critical: economies were now collapsing, the drug war
was killing millions, and the governments of the world appeared tainted with
corruption on high. Yet on another level it was all expected in a culture rippling
with change at the end of one world cycle and the beginning of another. Bear
was anxious for the right people to hear and understand his plan, the distillation
of decades of applied thought on the matter–and to make a difference.
“There's no way in the world that scene [the global economy] can remain stable
very much longer. It's a monster, and it has to come to a crisis point. The whole
world is moving towards a social, economic crisis point. There are so many things
that are stuffed up, and no one is doing a bloody thing to fix any of it. There's little
in the way of constructive arguments going on about any of it either,” he told
Bruce Eisner back in 1998.

In retrospect, as the hierarchical leadership of the world has further eroded its
credibility when faced with war, economic and environmental crises, and as
leaders elected to make the change the people so desperately wanted have
repeatedly failed, I’ve realized that maybe it isn’t the politicians and other
ineffectual leaders that need to hear Bear’s final message. Maybe it’s you.

Bear followed the ancient alchemical text The Kybalion: A study of the hermetic
philosophy of ancient Egypt and Greece, by Three Initiates closely and wisely,
and felt deeply into the spirit of things. The issues he was grappling with in his
day are just as real and immediate to the turbulent times we are now living
through in the second decade of the 21st century. And so I present to you, in as
much authenthic detail from the lips of Owsley ‘Bear’ Stanley himself, his ideas.
His words. His way. You get them filtered through me, in classic gonzo tradition,

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but perhaps that’s the best way to capture the truth of the matter, the elusive
pearl in the diamond.

As such, this is the story of Owsley in his later years, of the Alchemist gone bush,
and his meeting with the grandchildren of the 60s countercutlure–the latest wave
come full circle.
These then, are his last words–his last trip, in more ways than one.
Hold on, here we goooooooooooooooooooooooooo………

ENTHEOGENESIS AUSTRALIS (EGA)

BUSH CONFERENCE,
OUTSIDE SWANPOOL, VICTORIA,
SATURDAY NOV 6TH, 2009

Owsley ‘Bear’ Stanley arrived at the EGA site in the early afternoon,
accompanied by his son, Starfinder, who had flown out from Oakland to support
his dad and be a general minder, and Sheilah, his vivacious wife of 24 years,
who had come with him from their home in Far North Queensland, up where the
coming ice age wouldn't reach.

Ronny Carmichael, aka Ronny Simulacrum, the redheaded ringleader of the

grassroots EGA network, zipped around permanently stressed and overworked
but always managing a smile, even if there were daggers in it. He was doing the
diplomatic meet and greet trip with Bear and the family as they entered, showing
them round and introducing him to various heads in the local entheo scene.
Ronny had floated the idea of asking Bear to speak at the conference, and
remembering that I had contacted him back in 2002 to see if he would be
interviewed for a psychedelic trance culture documentary we were then working
on, Children of the Sun, he dumped the onorous task in my lap. I had originally
been interested in the confluence of so many of Bear’s theories with the themes
of the documentary, especially the idea that acid was just the latest in a long line

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of ‘planetary exo-pheremones’ that nature secreted to regulate us humans, and

that as everything goes in waves we were approaching the next great cycle or
world age, in which psychedelic consciousness would play an important part.

What Ronny hadn’t remembered was that Bear had deftly shot me down in email
exchanges at that time, disavowing not only to be interviewed, but challenging
the wisdom of releasing any media about the psychedelic scene in the sensitive
cultural aftermath of 9/11 not all that long before. It had ended in the only ‘flame
war’ email exchange I have ever been part of before or since (naively, I had no
idea about Bear’s adversorial reputation at that time), and I thought, to use an
Australian colloquialism, ‘we had buckley’s’ (fat chance) this time around, either.
So we were both surprised–and wary–when Bear agreed, angling for first class
tickets and all the steak he could eat. Literally. It was also surprising because his
health was not good–he had fought the onset of death twice: once from a heart
byass operation in 2000 (caused he said, by “some posionous broccoli his
mother made him eat in his youth”), and from throat cancer in 2004. The
chemotherapy had damaged the soft palate of his mouth, and “everything I drink
or eat now goes up my nose,” he told us, even the pureed steaks. For real. His
health was an issue, and whether he would admit it or not, those around him
were concerned about his ability to travel thousands of miles and speak at a
psychedelic conference without straining himself.

So all in all it was something of a coup for Entheogenesis Australis (EGA) to

have Owsley ‘Bear’ Stanley as their keynote speaker for their 2009 four-day bush
conference, delivering two talks to the tribe and an extra lecture at Melbourne
University the following weekend. EGA “is the largest gathering of ‘entheogenic’
advocates that Australia has ever hosted: people that believe that certain plants
can evoke ‘the divine within’, or in modern parlance, that plants with mind-altering
properties have an important role to play in establishing a deeper connection with
ourselves, and our environment,” said journalist Caleb Gorman in 'Shutting Down
The DreaMTime', the Macquaire University Writing Journal. Entheogenics was
the new branding of the psychedelic movement, with a focus on the shamanic
and nature-based psychoactive plants, rather than man-made chemicals.

Born in humble beginnings as a grassroots lecture space for the entheogenically

inclined at the Ringwood library in 2001, EGA had since grown and attracted a
broad spectrum of people to its gatherings, including international scientists and
policy makers, as well as nurturing homegrown speakers and a community in the
hundreds from across the country. Hosted in the vibrant Aussie bush at a catered
camp retreat near Swanpool, the giant canvas geodesic domes and visionary art
made this a spectacle and a treat for the Aussie tribe to come home to.
One of the conference organisers, Kath Williamson, the dreadlocked,
bespectacled queen bee who coordinates the event, remembers meeting Bear at
the gate with a few others, including hippie musician Neil Pike of the infamous
Australian psychedelia band, the Pagan Love Cult. Pike was infamously known

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as the ‘fourth Furry Freak Brother’, an archetypal 60s hippie: lentil skinny, with
long dark hair and a grizzly beard framed by peace, love and mungbeans behind
his glasses.

Pike had met Bear a few times over the last decade–and been to the ex-Acid
King’s infamous 70th birthday party up on the Walsh, and was part of the same
‘tribe’. So with nary a twist of the arm he tacitly agreed to "do [his] time in the
cave and hang with the Bear" at the conference.

"Hello Neil," Bear growled as he jumped out of the hire car and took careful stock
of his surroundings. He immediately started asking around for pot and showing
off his home-made hearing aid, a high-quality pre-amp microphone and ear
phone set for his ear, housed in a walkman-style black case with knobs and dials
on it and equipped with an LED reader to get the levels right. Mad scientist from
a time long ago, or maybe still to come…

“As a musician, I have been very upset over my hearing for a while”, Bear had
said online in 2006. “There was some slight loss of hearing due to the “roll-off
that years of [touring with the] Grateful Dead did to me, [even though] … I used
cotton wool in my ears most of the time.” The excessive chemotherapy had
further damaged his eardrums, blocking the Eustachian tubes, which required
grommets to open them back up. “The grommets did not 'fall out' as I was told
they would,” he confided, and he later had an operation to repair the holes in his
eardrums, the upshot of which left him needing a hearing aid.

Bear had been waiting for an expensive hearing aid which was taking ages to
supply, and so in typical Bear style he weighed up his options: 200 bucks here,
100 bucks there, and eventually decided to make his own. “It would have been
quality competence because Bear was a soundguy par excellence, and he had
quickly figured out what any sound engineer will tell you–that the quality of sound
from [hearing aids] they sell for anywhere between three and ten grand is crap,”
Pike remembers. “And ultimately if you're a sound guy and you've spent your
whole life working with headphones and mikes… Well, just get an omnidirectional
with a switch to a uni-directional mike, and there you go.”

Equipped with his black box and an air of mystery, Bear set off with his
entourage through the lush grounds of the bush conference, past domed stalls
selling fluro UV artwork and tribal-wear clothes, books, and food, and mingled
with the crowd of young and young-at-heart.

I first caught sight of him passing through the marketplace like Magneto without
his helmet, striding amongst the latest crop of neuro mutatis, heading towards
the main conference dome. It was Owsley. It had to be. I wasn’t really sure what
he looked like or what to expect; one of the only good photos of him on public
record was from when he was leaving a courtroom after his arraignment in 1967,
outfitted in a tassled hippie jacket over a black turtleneck sweater and moustache

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like he’d just stepped out of Easy Rider. But the wizened husk in front of me had
to be him, I knew that with a certainty.

He still had that special energy about him: the alchemist, the acid maker. He was
still a force to be reckoned with. The sheer power of his will radiated from his
shrunken and emaciated frame, like embers from a fire that is still felt, down the
decades. If Bear was Charlton Heston, then we were all apes.

Watching him in the marketplace I immediately groked that he wasn't a hippie.

He may have lived through, and been causally responsible for the sacrament that
fueled the whole hippie generation, but he wasn’t a hippie by any means. He
looked like an aged rock n'roller, like Keith Richards crossed with Obi-Wan
Kenobi. He was full of the righteous Force–and these kids were wild for it. I just
wasn’t sure if they were ready for his moods.

Bear's legend also preceeded him, but to be fair some people close to him
claimed he had also mellowed a lot in his old age as at least some of the
testosterone dried up, and the warmth that was always there got stronger. He
loved socializing and had spent many years touring with the Dead and being part
of that tribe, meeting and dealing his art wares in car parks and standiums with
the Deadheads. He liked a crowd and now once again, the Bear had an
audience.

Like insects drawn to the light, stray hippies were coming up to Bear only to be
frazzled on some psychic electric grill and pulling back, as if there was some
intuitive understanding that this wasn’t the time–there was no need to go down in
flames quite yet. “It also seemed that he'd give most people one shot. And if you
said something stupid, sorry, that was it. Everybody had one shot–and a few
people got a few shots; he was pretty generous about it,” Pike remembers.
Grateful dead historian Dennis McNally describes him as “a man isolated from
others by intelligence and personality to the point of extreme elitism, so that
while he was not genteel, he remained gentry … Owsley had a personality that
wanted to dominate, to ‘gain mastery over’ whatever it was that interested him,
said Melissa [Cargill], ‘to penetrate into things,’ as he put it himself.”

Bear’s insistent and sometimes forceful manner wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. In
conversation with Ann Shulgin, wife of renowned chemist Sasha Shulgin, she
summed it up honestly when she said: “He was very judgemental about
everything, with an arrogance that went a little bit too far. Every time we made an
appointment with him for a meeting, which we felt we had to do when he came
from Australia, every time he would somehow forget it, which was always a great
relief. He used up a lot of energy in everybody.” Country Joe McDonald, of the
'60s band Country Joe & the Fish, remembered Owsley as “kind of an
obnoxious" person, who “fit in really well" with the Grateful Dead. Even Jerry
Garcia himself would quip about the Bear, as Phil Lesh wrote in his book,
Searching for the Sound: "There's nothing wrong with Bear that a few billion less

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brain cells wouldn't cure."

Still, they say you can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep, and
something of Bear’s nobility and integrity seemed to have rubbed off, or attracted
the love of his life, Sheilah. At 5’6” she was just about the same height as Bear,
and more than that, they shared the same lust for life. Sheilah was a vibrant
woman with shoulder-length gray hair and a pearly smile, nearly seventeen years
younger than Bear. She was sassy and sexy, down-to-earth practical and
emminently likeable. You could see what it was that Bear saw in her straight
away.

In 2007 Bear told Rolling Stone that after the cancer, but for his beloved wife
Sheilah, "I don't think I would have survived. We are truly soulmates after twenty-
two years together, and our love is as strong today as it was in the beginning.
How many people can say that?" There was still a palpable electricity between
the two: Sheilah was a good match for the old lothario, who reguarly told anyone
who asked, that sex, like drugs, is something he still enjoyed in his old age.
Bear had pulled through his cancer, and it was obvious looking at him and
Sheilah now how much they were still in love. It was all there in a glance, the way
she looked at him in all his cantankerous, highbrow, obsessional intensity; in the
way she cared and accepted him. She knew that while he needed to come out to
the conference on his manly mission in the world, she was also going to protect
him as much as she could, and so was Starfinder.

Bear’s youngest son, Starfinder Stanley, was a curly-haired, broad shouldered

almost 39-year-old with a palpable love for his father. He had left his five-month-
pregnant wife Audrey back in Oakland expecting their first child, all so he could
be there for his dad. Starfinder practised an all-meat diet just like Bear, and,
somewhat incongrously, was a successful veterinarian back on the West Coast–
also penning an ‘Ask the Vet’ column for The Modern Pet blog. Dr. Starfinder–the
name took some getting used to for some people, he admitted–also played a
mean fender guitar, which considering his pedigree wasn’t surprising at all.
Both Sheilah and Starfinder were concerned about Bear’s overall health, and the
risk of him pushing himself, but they knew better than to challenge him, so like
dogs nipping at his feet they cajoled and tended to his needs nonetheless, and
ran defense for any stray hippie that crossed the line and got him too worked up–
like me.

I finally took the plunge and approached Bear, making my introductions and
small talk, reminding him about the interview we had discussed in our email
exchanges. And out came the Bear’s claws as his old, deep-seated distrust of
journalists–even experiential-psychedelic ones–came roaring to the fore.

Bear: You’re not cool, do you know that?

Rak: Uh… I actually came up to say thank you for coming…

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Bear: I understand that but you can’t just start asking me questions, I don’t
[want to] go there and you’re making me go there... I don’t like being uptight with
ya, cause I want you to be able to do your thing and I was trying to share stuff
with you, but you’re real pushy, y’know? Whats your birthday time?

Rak: 4:55 am.

Bear: Yeah, what day?
Rak: Wed 27th May, 1970.
Bear: 1970? Dog?
Starfinder: Like us.
Bear: Taurus dog?

Rak: Gemini.
Starfinder: We’re Capricorn. We’re both Capricorn dogs–he’s wood.
Bear: And a metal dog, iron dog, a rather unbendable peronality. Gemini
scattered, very scattered.

Starfinder: And charismatic. You’ve got Gemini rising.

Bear: I do. It’s one of my problems.
Rak: Are you into astrology as a tool?
Bear: It’s a way of looking at things. It has to do with interpersonal
communication to a great degree, so it’s of some value to understand where
people are coming from.

Where people are coming from? Where people are freaking coming from? How
do you extend that to someone like Bear, who was always coming from the same
place–an inner integrity, a noble truth he balanced like karma in every
interaction–and God help you if you were found wanting? None of us were ready
for Bear, or his impeccability. That’s what was behind his rants and his debating
style of conversation, his “relentless enthusiasms” as Charles Perry called them.
It wasn’t exactly that he HAD to be right–he usually was right.

“I AM an expert on a great many things,” he said online in 2006. “Those things on

which I am not knowledable, I readily admit to … I have no real knowledge of the
design criteria of gas turbine blades, for one thing. Complex microwave
electronics design also falls outside my interest area. The design of bicycle, car
and motorcycle tyres are a subject of which I have no knowledge. There are a
great many things which do not interest me, or have not yet been brought to my
attention.”

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When confronted with an odd, salient fact in conversation that did go against his
reasoning, and was verifiably correct (miracle of miracles), Bear would admit
such upfront and move on, for his thrust was not about being right, per se, but
about having a clear and truthful representation of whatever was at hand. He
would mentally dissect a concept like flaying meat from the bone and salivate
over the implications in a thousandth of a second between pauses. He was
heavy, as they used to say. But heavy in the best of all possible ways.

“As my viewpoint and my philosophy evolves, it replaces the philosophy that was
there. In some cases I can remember what I thought before, but mostly I’ve found
out that I can hold an idea or a concept, and then suddenly I’ll discover that it’s
wrong, that it’s fallacious that I’m mistaken,” he told David Gans. [If so] “I
immediately discard that and replace it with the new information. It’s like taping
over a tape. I don't necessarily want to go back and remember what a fool I was,
so I chuck it out. Maybe there’s an infinite amount of tape in the brain that can be
recorded…”

It wasn’t just his intellect though that set him apart: Bear also possessed an
indomitable will: that singular willpower it takes to realize that each moment,
every action–everything we do–ripples and reverberates through the web of
spacetime and influences everything else. What a huge responsibility–no wonder
most people recoil from it into the safe boxes of the everyday. But Bear didn't. He
lived his life as art, with consciousness and grace, following through and
completing all that he really set his mind to, and that in itself was a magical act of
creation. That was where the roots of his alchemy lay.

My first brusque interaction with Bear, however, made me question what it was
that I wanted to know of him, what value he held for myself and others beyond
the headlines. He was right to be wary of journalists, after all, and had spent a
lifetime shunning the media, first because of his work as an acid cook and later
because of his reputation. "I'm not really interested in talking about myself," he
told Rolling Stone in 2007. "I don't want my life exposed publicly. I'm interested in
the work I've done and the things I've discovered and in some of my
philosophical stuff, because I think it's of value, but I'm not into being a celebrity,
because I think celebrityhood has no value to anyone, least of all to the celebrity.
I've watched wonderful people get destroyed by it."

But when Bear did open up he would let fly with the truth, you could hear it in his
voice–and he wouldn’t hold back. And I think that was it, the kernel of truth that
he made me face right up front: it was his purity that I was attracted to. That
alchemy of soul.

By this time in my experiential journalism career I had already interviewed Albert

Hofmann at his 100th birthday symposium in Basel, Switzerland and sat with the
shamans of the Amazon and been initiated into the vegetal secrets of the
ayahuasca vine, which turned ino my critically acclaimed memoir, Aya: A

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Shamanic Odyssey, to name just a few choice assignments. I was a spiritual acid
head from way back, but I was still to experience the purity that his white
lightning promised, the secret from the master, the alchemical wisdom from on
high.

White Lightning, the purest of the pure. It was a funny coincidence–or not–that
Bear’s grandfather had been such a vocal critic of alcohol prohibition in the
1920s, where the mafia moonshine, the bootleg neurochemical of the day, was
also known as “white lightning”. The name goes back even further than
moonshine though, all the way to the pre-Buddhist times and the Hindu
psychedelic age, where they used one specific entheogen as the core of their
religion: the soma of antiquity.

Whilst the origin of the soma was debated by Gordon Wasson and other
scholars, Clark Heinrich, the author of the detailed study, Magic Mushrooms in
Religion and Alchemy suggests that the ‘white lightning’ was an allusion to the
amanita mascaria mushroom mentioned in the holy texts. “In the sexual
iconography of the divine couple, Shiva’s penis is called the White Varja, varja
meaning ‘lightning bolt’; his is the ‘white lightning bolt-penis’. Pavarati’s vulva is
called the Red Lotus. If we look at the underside of a fly agaric … the genital
imagery … becomes readily apparent.” Lightning germinated the mushrooms
spores with their intense heat. So it was not just fires, but the spark when the
heavens hit the earth that birthed them: white lightning was the spark of the
divine.
It wasn’t just about the acid, although sure, if Bear had a secret pill left over from
way back when that he wanted to share, preserved from light and heat–I was
there, that goes without saying. That’s the most basic part of my experiential
journalist’s responsibilities, after all. But I knew enough to know that it’s never
about what they say its about. For me, meeting Bear and getting an interview
with him was about alchemy, not drugs. It was about connecting with what acid
opened up in each and every one of us that had the eyes to see, about what lay
behind the doorway, not the key itself.

So while I was grokking the subtle vibrations of the Bear and the alchemical
secrets he embodied, I was also attracting and resonating with his frequency of
being. I was on a mystic soul-hunt for the white lightning within us all, and I had
this feeling I couldn’t put my finger on that Bear could deliver. Maybe not directly,
but somehow by his very presence, his higher vibrational entrainment, we were
all being brought into that purity of intent on the innermost levels of the divine. I
could feel it in my bones.
The white lightning could strike at any time, and I was determined to be ready for
it.

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As Bear wandered off through the crowd with his entourage, I realized that the air
of command he gave off could be traced, in part, to his heritage. Christened
“Augustus Owsley Stanley III”, he came from a long line of the public service
tradition. Born in Kentucky in 1935, Bear grew up around government in Falls
Church, near Arlington, Virginia. His father was Augustus Owsley Stanley II, a
state attorney in Washington D.C. who had served in the U.S. navy in WW II
aboard the U.S.S. Lexington, an aircraft carrier that was attacked by the
Japanese in the Battle of the Coral Sea. AOS2 came away from the trauma of
war with a lifelong addiction to the bottle and an inability to exhibit parental love.

Owsley III was named, like his father before him, after his grandfather, whom he
adored, the original Augustus Owsley Stanley, a trust-busting congressman in
the House of Representatives from 1903-15, the Governor of Kentucky after that,
and a US senator of high repute through to 1925. Senator Stanley was a
commanding figure who campaigned vigorously against alcohol prohibition in the
1920s, price-fixing and monopolies with big tobacco and the steel industry. His
father had been a minister with the Disciples of Christ and a judge advocate with
the Confederate Army, so yes, the air of authority–and righteousness–was
definitely in his genes.

So too, was Owsley’s prodigous intellect. As a small child he had a “remarkable

ability to focus 100% … attention on something for hours to the exclusion of
everything else in [the] environment.” As it turned out, young Owsley was
something of a wunderkinder–his mind was very preternaturally sharp, like a
“well rounded encyclopedia.” He had the “great advantage of being born with a
near eidetic memory, [and] an intense curiosity about everything.”

Owsley learned to read from comic books: “I’ve always loved them,” he told
Bruce Eisner in a rare 1998 interview for the Island Foundation, a psychedelic
not-for-profit organization. “I taught myself to read when I was about two-and-a-
half-years old, which is one of those little windows that Countess Montessori
described in children. From about two to two-and-a-half, then it opens up again
around five or six to eight years old. Children can learn to read in any of these
time slots, and I happened to spontaneously learn to read printed information at
two-and-a-half.

“I didn’t recognize letters,” Owsley continued. “I read more or less like a Chinese
would read. The word itself was like a picture. It had a shape, the shape was
composed of the strokes; the strokes, of course, were the letters. I didn’t know a
letter could be interpreted separately. It took me a long time to learn to use the

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dictionary successfully because I couldn’t make any sense out of a sequence for
the alphabet. It was just a bunch of strokes to me.”

The pictures and the ideas behind the comics of his youth made a big impression
on the young Owsley, however, setting in stone romantic archetypes of heroes,
villains–and engineers. “Dr. Huer, remember, he was the engineering genius that
helped with the rocket ships in Buck Rogers’ strips” he told Eisner. “To me,
engineers were like the heroes in my scenario, which included characters like
Buck Rogers and Brick Bradford, Flash Gordon, etc.” Later as an adult, much like
Ken Kesey of the Merry Pranksters, who was born the same year–he would be
enamored by the Marvel comics of the day in their play of godforms, especially
the mystic travails of Doctor Strange, Sorceror Supreme. So much so that his
hulking MGTF truck was nicknamed ‘The Dreaded Dormammu’ after a flame-
headed villain in the series.

His cousin, Dixie Lane, was later to say that Owsley’s “free spirit was a gift from
his mother, and he used it well." His mother was, coincidentally enough, a niece
of William Owsley–also a Governor of Kentucky from 1844–1848, after whom
Owsley County, Kentucky was named. She had her own emotional issues and
didn’t adapt well to parenting a child either, which caused heartbreaking trauma
for all concerned. "Neither one of them really wanted to be parents," Owsley told
Rolling Stone. "They had no skills at it. If you feel you can't love someone and
you are universally told that you must love, you become very guilty."

After his parents divorced when he was eight, Owsley went to live with his
mother for three years in Los Angeles. Despite his on-the-record lament about
the high-carb diet of his youth, Owsley also acknowledged that his mother “didn't
force me to eat veggies and I lived on huge hamburgers and I had very little
weight to hang onto … My mum fed us tongue sandwiches with mustard, and my
granny used to serve scrambled brains and eggs–but she used calf brains, I like
lamb better, just dipped in duck egg and fried. Duck egg sticks to things much
better than chicken egg. I have never liked tripe or chitlins. Basically the only part
of an animal I won't eat is the hooves hair and bones. I love tongue–nice and
fatty–and lamb's brains.” The genesis for his all-meat, low carbs diet undoubtedly
started here.

Things just didn’t work out with his mother in LA, however, and in 1946 Owsley
was sent back to his father on the east coast. “I smoked for a couple of years
from about 11, but it made me feel shitty in the morning and I gave it away,” he
said online in 2006. The young prodigy errupted in a wild trouble-making streak
in the public school system, so his father promptly enrolled him at the prestigious
Charlotte Hall Military Academy in Maryland. By this time, with the onset of
puberty, he acquired his lifelong nickname, the ‘Bear’ when he began sprouting
chest hair.

Young Owsley was already showing signs of his future potential everywhere you
looked. The headmaster of Charlotte Hall told High Times magazine in a 1979

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interview that he remembered Owsley as "almost like a brainchild …

tremendously interested in science." Owsley himself mentioned that he got “into
trouble with the FCC for the wideband radio noise a Tesla Coil produces.” He
was experimenting with “Kirilian photography … done with current from a Tesla
Coil–a simple source of radio frequency, high voltage current,” he claimed in
2006. “The voltage is harmless but spectacular. The patterns it makes on
photographic paper are determined by the RF conductivity of the item under
study, and have no significance other than as a curiosity. Can be great fun at a
party.” He must have been all of 14.

Owsley was brilliant, but clearly not motivated to play the usual ego-power
games of the herd. He also loved to sing, “but when my voice changed I think I
lost my confidence and I never went back to it,” he told Grateful Dead chronicler
Blair Jackson. Music was another matter entirely: “I grew up listening to
bluegrass and country music. I didn't care too much for the pop of the '40s–the
Big Band sound didn't really appeal to me for the most part. I've always liked
music of all kinds … though I was never really a performing musician, except for
a spell at school when I played a sax in the marching band.”

In high school he also joined the boxing team to “learn a bit of skill and get the
other kids to stop messing with me (it worked like a charm). Our coach would
feed us a plain rare steak, with fat on, but with no water about one hour before
every match. He said it took 45 minutes to leave the stomach, and fifteen to be
absorbed into the blood–thus providing a lot of energy for the bout–he was not
wrong, we won almost every match. This was in 1949, well before the diet-Nazis
had taken over. Obviously you would not want to be hit in the gut if there was
anything still undigested in your stomach, and boxers always go for the gut.”

Owsley’s rebellious streak continued to grow in his teenage years, developing

into what he later called "this rogue, get-high nature of mine". It culminated in his
expulsion from Charlotte Hall in the ninth grade for smuggling alcohol into the
school during homecoming weekend, and getting his fellow students "blasted out
of their minds." It wasn’t the first time he had tried to get high–when he was a kid
“we used to put aspirin in Coca-Cola, which would get you kind of woozy,” he told
Psychedelic Island Views.

Owlsey dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade, and in 1950 he self-
admitted himself to St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Washington D.C., which back in the
Civil War days used to be formally known as the Government Hospital for the
Insane. The poet Ezra Pound had been incarcerated there four years earlier by
the time Owsley arrived, having suffered a nervous breakdown after the war. "I
was just a neurotic kid," Greenfield quotes Owsley as saying, whose "mother
died a few months into the experience”. Still, during the eighteen months Owsley
was a patient there he managed to “sort out my guilt problems about not being
able to love my parents, and I came out of it pretty clear."

However, as Ezra Pound was to say on his later release from St. Elizabeth’s in

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1956: “When I left the hospital I was still in America, and all America is an insane
asylum.” Given a decade or so, Owsley might just agree.

For a while there Owsley managed to keep it together in the pressure-cooker

world of Cold War America–even thrive in the face of monocultural imperialism–
by exploring his own innate difference to the white-picket-fenced world around
him. He dropped out of school at 18–notoriously receiving a “D” in physics for
pointing out to his teacher that she had contradicted the textbook–and cut all ties
with his family to make his own way in the world.

His innate intelligence–if not his rebellious spirit–shone through on the aptitude
tests to the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering, where he was
accepted in 1955. “I thought I wanted to be an engineer because I thought
engineers made things. I went off and enrolled in engineering college. It took me
about a year to discover that engineers seemed to be sitting at desks with slide
rules all the time. Slide rules were terrible, man!”

But Owsley was always one step ahead of the game, even back then, for his
near eidetic memory gave him a one up on his fellow students. "I never took
notes when I was in college," he says. "During the first week of the course, I'd
buy my textbooks and read them all through. Then I'd sell them all back to the
bookstore at full price as if I'd changed classes, because I never needed to look
at them again."

After spending a summer as a lifeguard at ninteen, where he damaged his ear in

a diving accident, he continued to find himself and try on new ideas and
philosophies. According to Dennis McNally, when Owsley was twenty he fell
“very ill and … spent some time analyzing religion, reading everything from the
Book of Mormon to the texts of High Church Anglicans. It all seemed like the
hypothetical work of priests to him. Then he met lifelong friend Bob Thomas, who
led him to alchemy.”

As Owsley worked through his family karma he joined the military like his father.
In 1957 he enlisted in the Air Force and trained as a radio operator at the
Edwards Air Force base in California for the next eighteen months, where he
earned his first-class radio telephone operator's license. Edwards was famous by
this time as the military base where the Bell X-1 first broke the sound barrier
almost a decade before, and the Bell X-2 had achieved over 100,000 feet
(30,000 m) of altitude and speeds greater than Mach 3 in 1956.

For an electronics whiz like Owsley it was a great training ground, but he just
didn’t have the ‘right stuff’ for the military. After leaving in 1958 he worked at a
number of jobs within the nascent electronics industry in Los Angeles, including
time at Rocketdyne and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which was
itself abuzz with the thrill of new frontiers, having launched America’s first
satellite, the Explorer 1, on February 1, 1958.

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But as the space race heated up, Owsley was coming down to earth, landing, of
all places, at the ballet. “In my 20's I was a ballet student and finally a pro
dancer.” After reading about the Inuit eskimos and their all-meat diet in a book by
Vilhjalmur Steffansson, The Fat of the Land, Owsley:

Began my journey of 100,000 steps … I did not attack nor question the veracity of
my informant, I wrote to him (Stefansson) and told him about my trip at the time.
He answered me, and I was stoked. At first on the path, I questioned whether
vegetation might not have some value, it was only after many years trudging
along that it became more and more clear that was not the case, and that
vegetation had only body-negative effects in the diet.

My energy and height in jumps almost doubled when I adopted the all meat diet.
Endurance on a zero carb regime goes right through the roof. When I was a
dancer, I used no salt in anything, I drank huge amounts of plain water during
class, and never had a bit of problem, whereas the other dancers scarfed salt
tablets like candy and still had problems–plus their clothes dried out with a heavy
salt rime on them. Salt is not good in your food, it is a chemical and will damage
your skin and your kidneys over time. It also interferes with fat metabolism. The
skin and the kidneys are forced to shed excess salt and cannot quickly stop,
however if you eat at least 30 gm of meat a day you will get all the salt you need,
the urine and sweat can go as low as a few parts/billion of salt to conserve it.

My habit, back in my ballet days when I had very little money to live on, around
$50/week for everything including my 10 classes each week and $50/month for
my tiny single apartment (room), was to always check the local newspaper for
supermarket meat specials, and travel to each market to buy that cut. Since most
people had (and still have) a severe fat-phobia, the meat on special was always
trimmed very lean, so I paid only for my lean. I would ask the butcher on duty if
he could give me some fat (for free) to use in cooking, they always did, and
usually generously, so most of my daily caloric requirements cost me nothing.

I followed ballet, modern and jazz intensely for over 6 years, abandoning it finally
after finding a dancer's pay was just not enough to live very well on, with classes
every day, and new shoes every six weeks, plus you eat a lot since you burn a
tremendous amount of calories–dancing is extremely strenuous. The rest goes to
rent. I could not afford a car and used a ten speed bike to get around LA.

While Owsley’s mind was soaring, so was his maverick personality: “I studied
Russian language at same time I studied ballet–my turn-on to ballet was seeing
the men dance in the Bolshoi Ballet in 1958. I was not able to talk to the dancers
backstage, so I decided to learn Russian as well as dance,” he told Bruce Eisner.

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One of the many old Russians I met in the little LA Russian expat community
where I lived (in a rented room in the house of Micheal Chechov's widow), once
told me the secret of the great ages tribes people in the remote Caucasian region
often lived to–alleged to be as long as 158 years in one or two cases. He said that
they lived simply and did not overeat. He also said they never ate but one specific
thing at any given meal. I mean only ONE thing. Bread alone might be one meal.
Cabbage plain would fully constitute one meal. A cut of meat made one complete
meal. It was his contention that the human stomach was only capable of digesting
a single thing, alone, at a time, and mixing even two things was a bad idea for
your health. I could not ague this, it seemed so simple really, and I knew he had
lived amongst those people when he was a cossack (soldier)...

Was it strange that Owsley decided to study Russian in 1958, at the height of the
Communist panic, just because he couldn't speak to dancers backstage at the
Bolshoi Ballet? And that he lived in the Russian quarter at that time? Or that he
had the year before left the US Air Force Radar Department where he worked as
a technician? Of course it was, by the provincial standards of the day–everything
Owsley did was strange. But was there anything more to it, or does the Cold War
intrigue–shades of James Bond–color our perceptions of his actions at that time?
Could Augustus Owsley Stanley III, grandson of a governor of Kentucky and US
State Senator, have been working for the Russians? No, it doesn't seem that
way. It was just a wild conflux of events and intrigue, but it does make you
wonder.

Like the communist menace, LSD was also condensating in American culture all
throughout the 1950s and into the 60s, spearheaded by the CIA and their covert
and illegal MK-ULTRA program exploring mind control and psychedelic drugs–
which in 1953 alone was allocated six percent of the CIA’s annual budget,
approximately $10 million, with no oversight or accounting failsafes. The U.S.
General Accounting Office issued a report on September 28, 1994, which said
that: “working with the CIA, the Department of Defense gave hallucinogenic
drugs to thousands of "volunteer" soldiers in the 1950s and 1960s … Many of
these tests were conducted under the so-called MK-ULTRA program, established
to counter perceived Soviet and Chinese advances in brainwashing techniques.
Between 1953 and 1964, the program consisted of 149 projects involving drug
testing and other studies on unwitting human subjects…”

Despite the fact that organizations as prestigious as NASA were later revealed to
be trying mind-altering substances for training astronauts in the 60s (like JB118–
aka the ‘Space Drug’), and the CIA's great obsession with LSD that birthed MK-
ULTRA and dozens of other public experiments with hallucinogens and public
safety, there is no evidence that the Air Force at the time engaged in any such
activity. And Owsley himself wouldn't encounter LSD till his days at Berkeley in
1964, so there seems no historical parallel. But still, LSD was hovering in the

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culture of the time like an iceberg with most of its mass–the psychic potential–
hidden beneath the surface.

Owsley, apparently, was oblivious to all of this, as was the general public at the
time. Owsley was busy being a renegade, following his self-made path with a
righteous integrity, and perhaps speaking the language of the main enemy of the
US empire was somehow a romantic proposition. He was always very self-willed
and would do what he wanted to do, regardless of what anyone else thought. But
considering all those variables–ex-military, electronics expert, studying Russian–
if nothing else, one would think his peculiarities would have earmarked him for a
CIA file.

Owsley personal life was complicated. “He married, divorced, and remarried in a
Tijuana ceremony that was later invalidated,” states Jay Stevens, author of
Storming Heaven, LSD and the American Dream. In his early twenties Owsley
married twice and had two children, Peter (1957) and Nina (1960). His second
wife “was on a near total meat diet during her entire pregnancy and only got
pulled into carbs while breast feeding after the birth,” he said online in 2006. After
he hit the headlines as an acid cook, one of his wives told the Los Angeles Times
in 1966 that he was “just a little boy afraid to grow up, a Peter Pan”.

In context, Owsley’s restless intelligence and questing soul would have been
hard-placed to settle down in 1950s suburbia–and there wasn’t really a viable
alternative to the homogenized American Dream at the time. There were the
Beatniks, of course, but living in LA at the time, Owsley “wasn’t aware of the
Beats”, and even if he had been, he might not have geled with their bohemian
lifestyle. He wasn’t really into drugs at all back then–believe it or not–and hadn’t
even tried marijuana.

“Well, I knew people in the ‘60s that were in the scene I fell into around 1958 or
’59,” he told Bruce Eisner in Psychedelic Island Views:

I knew people who used pot and peyote, and I just wasn’t interested. I didn’t relate
to it as anything that had anything to do with me. I was athletically inclined. I
studied dance and music, acting and things like that. I worked summers as a
broadcast engineer at a television station. I was down in LA for a long time. But I
just wasn’t interested in the drugs. I didn’t care if people smoked pot or anything; I
just wasn’t interested in it. And my friends were quite tolerant; they didn’t have any
problems with me about that. If I didn’t want to do it, fine. If I didn’t want to drink,
fine. If I didn’t want to smoke cigarettes, that’s fine. None of this was important,
and nobody was on any kind of crusade about it. It was there, I just wasn’t
interested.

Owsley also had his first brush with the law, which kept him on the straight and

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narrow for many years. After the breakup of his second marriage he “bounced
some checks, [worth $645]” and stole some credit cards from his ex-wife’s new
boyfriend.

[I] got into trouble, and I realized that I couldn’t deal with the regular, commercial
world of finance that allowed you to write checks, and to have credit cards and all
the rest of it. I decided after that I didn’t want to deal with it, and I’ve never had a
checking account after that, ever. Or any sort of credit card. I was on probation for
a while for having written some checks that the money wasn’t there for. I regretted
it. I thought it was a terrible breach of honor and everything else on my part; I was
just appalled at what I had done. The judge gave me probation, and when the
probation ended [three years later] I felt sort of like I had been released from
something.

Eager for a fresh start, Owsley moved to Berkeley and in late 1963 went back to
college at the University of California, studying art and languages for a semester
before dropping out and joining KGO-TV as a broadcast engineer. In January,
1964 “I was living in a weird little boarding house in Berkeley and this guy named
Owsley Stanley moved in”, remembers housemate Charles Perry. “Somebody
[had] moved out and all sorts of pensioners and bag ladies started answering the
room for rent sign. Suddenly it looked as if our mellow scene was doomed, so
when this guy in his late twenties checked out the room and started talking drugs
within three minutes, we begged him to move in.

“Forty-five minutes later, when he hadn’t stopped talking about drugs, we weren’t
so sure he was cool. Not really tall, he had a sort of hulking manner anyhow, and
a wary look, as if constantly planning an end run … [Still] he was a very
extraordinary guy. He had paintings, he was a ballet dancer, he had a complete
bee keeping costume, he was also a trained blacksmith. He was different from all
the other people.” Owlsey’s image at the time was of a sharp-dressed eccentric,
the boho-dandy look that was coming in around San Francisco as cheap rents in
the old Victorian houses in the Haight spawned a resurgence of old-style fashion.

They were a weird bunch, as Perry wrote in Rolling Stone in 1982, but they were
bonded by their lifestyle choices and quest for expanding consciousness. Owsley
described the situation to author David Gans in 1991 like this: The ‘Brown Shoe’
was a boarding house where “everybody paid their rent to the landlord; we
shared a kitchen; the fact is that we were all friends and none of us had much
money and whoever happened to have some money would buy a bunch of food
and we’d all eat.”

However, “Owsley never ate dinner with us because he was anti-vegetarian,”

Perry recalls–getting all his nutritional sustence from four almost raw steaks a
day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. “Once when we smoked some hashish and
developed a case of the munchies, he accused me of trying to poison him with

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apple pie. ‘I haven’t had any plant food in my system for years,’ he groused
between mouthfuls. ‘My digestion will be fucked up for a month.’”

Owsley had, in fact, just discovered marijuana a few weeks before moving to the
Brown Shoe and the proto-countercultural hotbed it provided. As he told Eisner:

I was living by this time in Berkeley, and wanted to see my old friends down in LA,
and drove down at the semester break to visit. I found a buddy at a little funky
coffee house near LA City College, and he came over to me and said, ‘I’ve got
make a trip to Pasadena.’ I said, ‘What for?’ He said, ‘You don’t want to get
involved, I need to score some pot, and you don’t want to have anything to do with
drugs, you’re on probation.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not on probation, I got off probation a
couple of weeks ago. I’ll give you a lift.’ I gave him a lift out there, and after he
came out of the house, I said, ‘Well, look, maybe it’s time I should try some of
this.’

So I had my first smoke sitting in my little MGTF on the side of the road in
Pasadena after my friend had scored the weed, and I thought it was interesting … I
got kind of stoned and disoriented and whatnot, and thought well gee, this isn’t at
all unpleasant. I didn’t drink. I don’t like alcohol much to this day. So over the next
few weeks I got more into it. At first it was hard to figure out where to buy it, as my
scene in Berkeley was not involved in smoke. I finally scored, smoked some,
decided I liked it. Then someone told me about morning glory seeds … I didn’t
want to get involved in dealing pot. I had no money or anything. But I asked my
friend, ‘Is there anything legal that will get you high?’ He said morning glory
seeds. So I bought a pound bag of those.

Morning glory seeds are often called ‘nature’s LSD’ because they contain ergot
alkaloids including ergonovine and ergine (LSA), which are hallucinogenic. The
seeds were freely available in many gardening shops at the time, although the
government had just discovered their psychoactive potential and denatured them
with a pesticide that made people sick if they tried to eat them. “If you eat 100
morning glory seeds, you will go to morning glory heaven. Heavenly Blues,
Pearly Gates, and Flying Saucers will do the trick,” said Herb Caen, a writer for
the San Francisco Chronicle in 1958, whom also coined the term ‘beatnik’ the
same year. “People were ordering 25 lb. sacks of seeds from whomever sold
them,” said chemist Alexander Shulin in his 1997 book, TiHKAL, quoting a
newspaper report at the time. “In the middle of May, 1963, a vice president of a
major supplier, the Ferry Morse Seed Company, began to get suspicious.
Although morning glory seeds were one of their five most popular items, he said,
their sales had leapt to 50 times normal. The three most sought-after varieties
had the unbelievable names, Heavenly Blue, Pearly Gates, and Flying Saucers."

Owsley’s stash of Heavenly Blue’s was clean, however, although he mightn’t

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even have been aware of the quality as “I never actually got around to eating
them,” he confessed in his 1998 interview with Eisner. Owsley says he started
“dealing the seeds around (I put up 3 by 5 cards with my post office box address
on bulletin boards: ‘250 Heavenly Blue seeds for $1’.” Perry remembers it a bit
differently, saying he gave his phone number “because I was the only one in the
commune with a phone … Nobody ever called, though.”

Still, Owsley was making up for lost time and going deeper into the world of
chemicals, consciousness and the law. As Perry describes: “If you walked
through the University of California campus with him, he’d be grabbing leaves
and flowers and confiding in a paranoid hiss, ‘Horse chestnut leaves–they’ll get
you high. Mullein leaves–get you high.’” That brainchild mind of Owsley’s had
been turned on, and nothing was going to ever be the same again.

Through the morning glory seeds ads Owsley says he “met a lot of people with
other things, and traded different things, and ultimately came across speed and
LSD and all the rest of it. I think one of the aspects of illegality in drugs is that
once you’ve made things illegal, all of a sudden you’ve opened up a Pandora’s
Box of things, and anyone who goes for any of them winds up in contact with all
of them. And if you’re going to break one law, which is a civil disobedience of a
sort, well why not break another? These kinds of laws (prohibition) teach
disrespect for the legal process.”

Owsley’s first experience with the doublethink of state-sponsored propaganda

known as Prohibition had begun.

ENTHEOGENESIS AUSTRALIS (EGA)

BUSH CONFERENCE,
OUTSIDE SWANPOOL, VICTORIA,
SATURDAY NOV 7TH, 2009

As the sun set on the Saturday night and the sound of circadias filled the air with
their insectoid frequencies, bathing us in vibration, Bear took to the stage for his

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first lecture of the conference under a giant 30-foot canvas dome.

Inside, green and purple triangle flags trailed down guide ropes like fairy dross,
spread out down the main thoroughfare, peppered with tatsumi mats and ending
in three smaller half-hemisphere domes adorned with visionary art canvases
stretched out along their inside walls. Walking inside was like stepping into a
beatific vision and being consumed by the art, pocket oases of color and
interdimensionality against the canvas of the night. Green spotlights spilled out
and covered the underbelly of the roof, awash in a seaweed miasma like we
were all deep underwater, or in some gnomic cave with phosphorescent lichen
lighting our way.

The space was jam-packed with hundreds and hundreds of next-gen Aussie
hippies kicking back on rugs and beanbags. Unlike the modern global trance
music scene, the local entheo tribe wasn’t swathed in the latest eco-feral
fashions, but wrapped itself in a down-to-earth melange of urban streetwear and
jeans, a few t-shirts with fractals and new age imagery, a fair smattering of
dreadlocked white boys and girls with feathers and crystals, and the everpresent
flower of life symbol–interlocking circles and ellipses–as medallions and tattoos
on their skin.

By and by the crowd, mainly young twentysomething urban heads mixed with
men and women in their thirties and forties and older, looked like any other
crowd. It reminded me of the original wave of hippies in the early 60s, before they
appropriated the Indian beads and mandalas and the western cowboy boots and
vests, the boho look that only later metamorphized into the tie-die cliché that the
media helped brand. And the funny thing is, many of the crowd were taking
notes. This wasn’t just another gathering; they were taking the conference to
heart, asking questions, grokking the knowledge and the vibe.

It’s said that that entheogenic community is maybe 10% of the mainstream, and
of that 1% overall are the true journeypeople, willing to learn and go deeper with
the experience. And if that’s true, then the strategic thing about EGA gatherings
is that critical mass of the really deep heads, and those willing to become really
deep heads. It was the entheogenic cognescenti Down Under, a ‘Gathering of
the Tribes’ in microcosm. And when the tribe gathered, the game was afoot.

The stage was set low to the ground–about three feet high–which was the same
dymanics of the stage at Altamont, where Bear was the soundman for the
Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones–and we all know how that ended up. But
that was then. This is now.

Earlier in the afternoon Bear had gone backstage behind the main lecture dome
to see how the speakers and audio equipment were wired up, and like a good
facilitator Ronny Carmichael had agreed, shepherding him and his entourage
through the crowd of punters to the side of the stage. After all, here was one of

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the legendary architects of modern sound stages, so it was entirely reasonable

that he would want to have a look under the hood, as it were.

Whilst EGA stalwart Michael Bock lectured on essential oils in Australasian flora
on the front of stage, Bear was carving out a niche for himself out the back,
where he was introduced to the main soundmen running the rig, and Boffin, a tall,
lanky crew volunteer in his thirties and a student sound engineer who handled
the technical side of things.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Bear said gruffly as a way of introduction. “[You]
guys are just kids [that] can’t even wire up a high school dance! … How did you
even come to [this] conclusion, it’s unbelievable,” he whined, inspecting the audio
gear around him and sighing with the deep satisfaction of an old man happy to
be back amongst it yet again.

“There’s a board–and there must be a manual with it that explains exactly how it
works and what facilities it has–it’s standard, professional gear, and [you] have
seven mixers on that board! And what have you done? Soldered everything up
into the pre-fade list and then connected [your] computer (mono) to the monitor
output, so [you] have no way of listening, no way of checking, and it’s
overloading all the channels with that pre-fade or post-fade or whatever [you’ve]
got going!” The poor soundmen just went limp and took the verbal thrashing, the
rough tongue of the master.

“It was hilarious,” Boffin related to me later. “I was pissing myself laughing
watching Bear berate these poor guys… They'd set it all up based on a standard
conference set up that you get taught, under basic conventional rules for setting
up a sound stage for speakers, and they'd set it up perfectly. Bear was obsessed
with the sound and I think it comes from his breakthrough with the Wall of Sound
design. He was harranging us that we had to get it all feeding into one big stack,
and he made them move it into this one giant stack of speakers… Now that's
completely unconventional and rewrites the book on sound design...”

The young cubs were getting a grilling alright, but that was all part of the
initiation.

As Bear was led up to the stage and settled fretfuly amongst the trestle tables full
of tech gear on one side and half a dozen full and mid-range speakers on the
other, I lay down amongst the beanbags and my crew to listen to the master.
Indigenous Shipibo weavings showing the energetic grids and maps that are
revealed on ayahuasca decorated the black speakers, and the screen behind
Bear had the Entheogenesis Australis banner draped over it with a picture of
some psilocybin mushrooms. But if you squinted your eyes and took another toke
you could imagine the stylized lettering on Avalon Ballroom posters and the
stereoscopic strobe lights at the Fillmore, with Bill Graham and his clipboard
powering around keeping the show going whilst everyone else was tripping out of
their gourd.

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Bear pottered around up there on the stage while the audience waited patiently.
He was dressed In the same basic blue jeans and black t-shirt that he arrived in
earlier in the day, wizened and frail, shrunken, cantankerous, like any old man
drinking in any bar, anywhere in the world… Except he wasn’t. He was Owsley
Stanley. The Bear.

For all his years of anonymity and playing it down here he was, now, finally ready
to step out and talk to the Australian–and via them, the world–community about
his message. This was Bear’s last great hurrah in the public eye, and he was
going to milk it for all he was worth.

[EGA_Bear_11_07_09] TALK ONE: The Bear Roars Against Prohibition

(crowd) Louder… louder…

Bear: I can’t hear myself… testing… (testing the microphone and sound equipment)…
that’s a little better… I could have set this up on the ground as a fallback, actually… I
didn’t think of that… I can hear myself–I’m not listening to the rest of the band they’re
not playing right now–so I think we can deal with it pretty much…
What am I supposed to talk about?… You’ve got to understand I’m not an accomplished
public speaker, I know how to speak and I’ve done a lot of it in my time, I’ve been on all
type of stages and things… I’ve studied acting and ballet, and all that. But rather than
give a prepared speech … I thought I would just tell some tales… I’ll try and make the
tales interesting and see if we can make the sound a bit louder for you… Can everyone
hear? Put a little more level on the system… a bit of whistling… I think that’s about as
loud as its going to go…

We have a problem in the world today… The problem has developed slowly but it’s
gotten way out of hand. And it goes all the way back to around 1890 when a bunch of
women got together... the Women’s Temperance Society was the actual name of it, rather
than the Temperance League.
And they had the idea somehow that if they made it hard for people to get alcohol then
people would stop drinking. And that would help stop men beating their wives, getting
drunk and fighting, and all that sort of thing. No robberies, no murders, no break ins,
nobody would do that stuff because it’s illegal.
Well, guess what? The first thing they did in the 1890s was to try to get congress to pass
a law, and they must have had some muscle because they did. But of course all the pubs
and bars and liquor salesmen protested and said it wasn’t Constituitional, and the

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Supreme Court said they were right. You can’t stop adults from doing this kind of thing,
it’s their right. It’s a free society, people get to choose, that’s their freedom.
Well, the Temperance League couldn’t give up, so right around the time that WWI was
happening they went around and worked up a petition to pass an amendment to the U.S.
Constitution so the Supreme Court would have to allow it, because it would be read into
the law. It was called the Volstead Act and it was passed. And so Prohibition lasted from
around the end of WWI to around 1933. As soon as Roosevelt took office the first thing
he did was get rid of it.
Now there’s no doubt that the economic problems of 1929 had something to do with the
black market. The economy was smaller and the black market had more affect. I mean
everybody drank, there was a huge amount of money flowing through the bootleggers.
The mafia and the enforcement agencies found it very lucrative for both of them. And
then bang–it’s gone.

Well I guess the mafia wasn’t all that keen to go back to just protection rackets and
loansharking and all that. They wanted to soak up an incredibly lucrative trade in
something that people wanted to have–but weren’t allowed to have. So what if it was
illegal? Well, breaking your kneecaps was illegal. Killing your uncle Ben was illegal, but
that’s what they did… so…
So there we were with the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. They said you had to have a tax
on marijuana because almost nobody in white society used it–maybe muscians, black
musicians, laborers, [Link]… There was a little bit of it around but y’know, it was a totally
harmless medicinal herb.

By doing that they thought that no one was going to object. And then they got Randolph
Hearst on their side, and he sold a lot of newspapers pushing the “killer weed”, “reefer
madness” sort of thing. All the kids are smoking it and blowing their brains out sort of
thing. Well they weren’t and there was nothing wrong with that, and there weren’t many
of them, maybe a tenth of one percent of the population used this stuff and other drugs
like alcohol and tobacco, the usual things. They also had a little problem around the turn
of the century with paragyerics and people getting addicted to them.
Around 1904-5, somewhere around then, there were about 400,000 people addicted to
paragyerics: opium extracts, painkillers, cure-alls and what not. 400,000 addicts–big deal,
come on. Even with alcohol and tobacco it was less than one percent [of the overall
population]. Do you know what it is today? Over 50%. And I bet almost everybody has
smoked marijuana, or taken some other kind of illegal substance from time to time. And
so they should, it’s their life, their human right; its their right to do it themselves.

But central intelligence is not allowed in any society and there’s rules, and you have to
follow the rules … Alcohol is engrained in Western culture and you can trace it all the
way back to Christians when they developed their religion and they had alcohol as their
sacrament.

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Alcohol: you set a bunch of fruit juice in the back room and forget about it and a week
later you’ve got wine. It’s the easiest thing in the world and its everywhere. You can’t
outlaw it. But you need to have alternatives. I never saw violence with a bunch of people
sitting around smoking pot. And even acid, y’know, you get some weird behaviour, but
most of that is due to the fact that you have to be covert. A lot of bizarre behaviour from
drug taking is directly tied to the fact that it’s illegal, and that you have to hide your
activities, which are perfectly normal.

Every animal on this planet likes to get high. Ronald K. Siegel wrote a book about 20
years ago called “Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances”
[1989]. And every animal that he examined likes to alter it’s consciousness when it [can].
Back in the old days I used to give acid to the dog and cat.
Mickey Hart [drummer in the Grateful Dead] gave acid to his horse and they used to go
riding stoned together. The horse used to love it. And so we had a pussycat and we used
to sit around smoking pot. And one day we grabbed the cat and put it in a paper bag and
put a bunch of smoke in there and closed the bag. Well, the cat starts looking around and
after a while the cat starts slowing down and we let it out and it went off. And the next
night we rolled up a joint and watched the cat dragging through the bag. Now you tell me
that being high isnt a natural thing for cats and animals! Of course it’s a natural thing–it’s
a human right. But [the authorities] won’t look at that.
The Supreme Court has never ever examined the Constituitionality of outlawing anything
like that, which is personal behaviour.
Drugs can’t be controlled in any way by making them illegal. You want people to not use
drugs? Well it seems pretty silly to make selling drugs the most lucrative job you can get.
A paranoid could do it. Schoolkids can do it. Anybody could do it. It’s that easy. In cities
you could go out in the morning, get a front for a hundred dollars worth and walk home
at night with a couple of grand in your pocket, easy, and that ‘aint even working hard. It’s
not right, that’s not a good thing.
If you pay $200 for an ounce of pot you’re not paying $200 for the pot, you’re paying ten
cents for the pot, or less. Throwing a few seeds in the compost costs nothing. But the
government can’t control it. The money goes to the black market, to the mafia, and it
wasn’t so bad back in the 1930s and 40s and 50s. But when Nixon and Reagan closed the
borders to get tough on drugs, it propelled the price–the delivery price, that’s what we’re
talking about, the delivery service–through the roof.
And all of a sudden the amounts of money started to attract the mobs and cartels and very
dangerous people, and the violence escalated more, with more and more assassinations.
There’s a war going on right now in Mexico between groups for the right to carry drugs
across the border to the US. The Taliban, Al Queda, all of these, where do you think their
money comes from? 90% of it is supplying heroin and from the profits of growing the
poppies in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The people that are killing Australian and American soldiers are actually being given the
money to grow opium poppies. It’s not actually illegal to grow opium poppies in

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Australia it’s only illegal to make opium from it. You could grow peyote here, too,
there’s no laws against that. But if you want to grow marijuana…
Throughout the world people are wising up… They’re saying, y’know, well, this planet is
conscious, it’s a living place and we’re part of it… This conference is called
Entheogenesis, right? I don’t have much truck with that… I think psychedelics are
psychedelic because they alter the mind, and that was what Humphrey Osmond chose.
etheogenesis means it creates a ‘god’ inside of you… Well I don’t think acid or peyote or
any of those things create anything. They facilitate your mind, stimulate you, expand you,
they get rid of filters. They do a lot of things… And then there’s this legal shit that’s laid
on top of it all. And this is why I’m mentioning prohibition and all these things–it’s a
nanny state. You gotta do this, you cant do that, we’ve got to stop them from doing that,
you’ve got to restrict them…
They say “we can’t legalize drugs, it would be open slather!” I heard that when I first
came to Australia… and I can speak fairly good Australian–my accent’s shit but I can
understand it… And people would talk to me and 90% of it I thought I knew what they
were talking about, but I had no idea… It’s a totally different language from American.
“Open slather…” Boy, that creates an image…

Why do people think that all of a sudden… It’s just like saying, oh, if we give everybody
a free shower then everybodys’ going to run out and grab a bar of soap. Some people will
take drugs, other people won’t take drugs. If we make drugs illegal there’s always going
to be someone turning your kids on at school because they can’t find somebody stupid
enough to try this stuff. You’ve got all these salesmen running around…
What you want is a free society. A free society means an individual is expected to
behave. They are expected to be educated and to understand that when they do things that
their social behaviour may be interferred with. They are expected to seek counseling.
You shouldn’t have to do things in a hidden and covert way that breaks the law. If you’re
breaking one law then why not break another kind? You’re criminalizing people. I don’t
think theres any difference if you smoke pot, take acid, or drink alcohol or smoke
tobacco, any of that stuff. It’s your behaviour and it’s your responsibility–you can’t go
out and kill somebody in your car because youre drunk and expect to get away with it.

They’re saying that people are not responsible enough so they’re taking [their rights]
away from them. And taxes… you cant tax drugs, you cant tax gambling. You tax them
and you’re out of business.
I’ve worked in broadcasting as a broadcast engineer. It’s one of the things I’ve done. You
may know about some of them but you don’t know about all of them. I’ve done
everything from construction work on up and there’s nothing–I’ve not done a single thing
I’m not proud of. I’ve gained value from everything–even studying acting, believe it or
not. Acting kept me out of jail about 50 times. “Oh no, officer, I couldn’t possibly have
done that… That’s not mine, I never saw it before…” While the police have been
searching me I’ve moved a single flask of drugs from one pocket to another–while two
cops were searching me and they never saw it.

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It’s a matter of directing what people are doing when they interact with you. I studied
method acting. There’s a school of acting by Michael Chekhov. There’s two schools of
method acting: one Stanislovsky, the other’s Michael Chekhov’s. With Chekhov’s you
impersonate the character. With Stanislovsky you create the character from your own
resources. Both are very similar in the end because you’re working with yourself. But the
thing with the Chekhov theme was that you only worked in little pieces, here and there.
Your goal was over there and you took little steps. An actor would come on stage with a
goal and the idea was to bring the others around to that goal.

So if you were interacting with say, a cop, or anybody else, you know where you want to
go. He doesn’t know where he wants to go so he doesn’t really have a goal. And so he
says something to you and you work off that. And then you say something to him and he
works off that. You can steer it. It’s like steering a car. You can open up a visual sense
and a direction. You can make them see what they want to see …
That was acting… I also studied ballet. But ballet dancers don’t earn enough as soon as
they finish dancing they ca’nt afford enough food. Ballet dancers are always skinny, no
matter what they eat. I’m skinny because of what I eat but that’s nothing you guys want
to hear. I don’t eat the corpses of vegetables of any kind. I haven’t for 50 years. That’s
not common, but I no longer try to change people or teach them or even tell them much
about it, because…What you eat is what you learn from your mother. That’s very hard to
change. It’s like your language or your culture–it’s the thing that’s sort of wired in. We’re
humans because we’ve aquired the things that we do when we were children. And it
overwrites an area of the brain that most animals use for instinct. Our instincts are very
weak and we can overwrite them. If the overwriting isn’t any good then you get
somebody that misbehaves, criminal activity and things like that.

If you put your kid in front of a TV when they’re say, eight years old, then they’re not
learning what they have to learn at the time they have to learn it. Kids interact with
people all the time and pull what they need from those around them, from adults and
children–that’s what they are and how we’ve learned to do this. When kids passively
watch TV–and it doesn’t matter if it’s just a test pattern–they’re not learning what they
need to learn at that particular time with the process.

And so when they are adults, a man or a woman… wait a minute… their toolbox is nearly
empty. And they know this as kids, they know something is wrong. They’ve got to fit in
but they can’t work it out, so they go hang themselves or something stupid like that.
Everyone says, gee, why are the kids committing suicide? Well, let me tell you
something. I call it Sesame Street.
Kids sit there watching Sesame Street and they won’t learn to spell, or read. They’re just
watching funny puppets; it’s fun, but there’s no interaction, and human learning is not
passive. Once you get past eight, yeah it’s passive and it’s the content that matters. Well
the content’s pretty dead, too. They put adult programs on after ten o’clock but do you
think kids like to go to sleep at ten o’clock? No, they find a way.

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I used to get a flashlight out of the cupboard and read books because there were no TVs
in those days. And every day when I’d get out of the bed in the morning my mother
would ask me why the hell I was so sleepy? [I’d tell her] I had a lot of sleep, yeah sure.

We’ve got a complicated culture, not well understood. Anthropologists sociologists,

culturists, everybody else. It’s like trying to do brain surgery on yourself–it’s hard to
understand why you get what you do, how you do it, or anything else.

And the politicians are always talking about something they can do to attract attention
and get elected. And they’re afraid that legalizing drugs will get them unelected, and yet
the majority of the people that are electing them use one kind of thing or another. And
always have and always will. And besideswich, now we get to the point where, words
aside, the damage is severe and it’s economic. The money flowing into the black market
is trillions. That money is going into the pockets of the worst elements of society who are
buying the people and the corporations.

Why is it the executives of this corporation or another corporation make a hundred

million when their top employees only make forty five thousand? Well hey, you ever
notice that mafia chiefs up on the hillside with their mansion and yacht, limosines and
everything? Where are they working? It’s like the Sopranos down in the neighborhood.
The big difference is it’s like an expensive aristocracy. The mafia is pure feudal
aristocracy. Mobs of all kinds work that way. So it’s not surprising that they own them
all.
All the money’s flowing to them and they’re buying everything with it. But the thing of it
is that today’s economy is so complicated and moves so fast that nothing matters. Well,
you can’t manage what you don’t know. You cant manage what you don’t see.
There’s a possibility that between a quarter and a third of all the money that moves in
trade is moving underground. The arms trade, the drug trade, etc., everything that’s
illegal. Ever heard of chop-chop? They’ve taxed tobacco to the point where it costs thirty
or forty times what it costs to make it. And it’s easy, just a handful of seeds–it’s just a
weed. It’s a common weed in North America. And so now the people growing the stuff
are peddling it and selling it. You can buy an ounce of tobacco for less than ten percent
what the price of taxed tobacco is. And they’re still making more money than they would
selling it to the government.
The government tax it to the point that creates a scarity for a high price. They could have
learned this by watching the United States. People smuggled container loads of cigarettes
across the border from one state to another because there was a two cents difference in
the tobacco tax. Two cents a pack. And tons of it goes.

With something like that you have to move a lot more [to make a big profit]. That’s why
heroin was more popular with the mafia than pot until the price went far enough up. Still
is. That’s wrong. The delivery… government can’t be in the business of delivering things
like that. And illegality or high taxes promotes, rather than reduces. It creates a side
market that is out of control. You can’t regulate it, you can’t control it, you can do
nothing about it.

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They say health and safety, that the drug laws are there for health and safety. What’s
healthy about getting an unknown amount of an unknown substance and sticking it into
your arm with a needle that someone else has used? I don’t get it, and I’m sorry, I never
did.

When I was first turned on to pot–in 1963–I was like … 29 years old, and I didn’t know
anything about it. I’d never heard of it in high school. And later on it was just a weed that
grew on the side of the road. Oh, that’s beautiful stuff, yeah. You say this is illegal…
why’s that? And then of course, stick the seed in a pot and boom! Easy done it. How can
you outlaw a plant for chrissake???
And I thought they were Christian. I thought that the bible said that God gave Adam all
the animals and all the plants but to stay away from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and
Evil and the Tree of Eternal Life and you’re cool. Well of course he didn’t do that, but it
says right there in the Old Testament, right there in the fundamental faith that built
Christianity. You have the right to grow any animal or plant. Well why’d you make it
illegal, see? I don’t get it. They’re wrong.
I knew that eventually it would cause a problem economically, it has to. And I think that
once you have that thought you wonder when’s it going to happen, when’s it going to
happen, and then BANG! It’s happened. But boy is it big time. It’s gotten so far out of
hand before it went down. I don’t understand how they managed to do it. Those guys are
managing the world economy? Boy, they must’ve been like the guy trying to tune four
pianos with both hands and feet whilst juggling a set of drums! I don’t know… but when
it did collapse it came down with a bang.
So now what are they doing? They’re handing out money like crazy. The stimulus. But
that doesn’t seem to be working too well. Retail sales are up–we must be recovering! But
unemployment keeps rising. How do you judge whether you have a recession? Jobs? You
don’t have [enough] jobs in America. The unemployment is still rising. Oh, people are
buying stuff because you give them stimulus… here’s some money go buy some stuff…
But not as much money is being given out…
I don’t know if you guys are familiar with the old 60s comic book called the Fabulous
Furry Freak Brothers…? Everybody likes that one… Well one of the Freak Brothers–I
don’t remember which one, they pretty much looked all the same–said that, “dope will
get you through times of no money better than no money will get you through times of no
dope”. You can buy Burger King with a pound of weed. And you know, he’s right, that’s
the thing.
If you give people money they will think, well, I could pay a month’s mortgage, or I
could buy an ounce of weed. Think I’ll buy an ounce of weed... Maybe two ounces.
That’s robbery, it ‘aint going to work. They say it’s this that and the other, bad loans,
well we fixed this, y’know. Well, they can’t fix it. They don’t understand the cause. You
can’t repair a car if you don’t know what’s broken. You know it won’t run. But they
don’t know how to fix it because theyre not looking in the right place.

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Drug prohibition is like the Emperor’s New Clothes. They don’t see it for what it’s doing.
They say oh, look at all this violence, all these wars … and they don’t think why, why??
Why are they fighting to deliver this plant that you can grow in your own yard? There’s
not a single, traditional drug that is not derived from a plant.

Opium–derived from the poppy plant, that’s a decorative flower. You have to pay
somebody to collect it, then process that down to opium, and then you have to extract it
and make a chemical out of it that’s more powerful. It all starts out being a plant. We
make this worth several hundred dollars a gram and then people go out and say gee, I
think I can make some money out of this.
Amphetamines! You can get the stuff [you need] from the hardware store and make
amphetamines. And then we can make more money, we can sell that for a profit, it
doesn’t cost that much to buy it, you can double your money.

They’ve created an artificial climate that creates these weird drugs and it’s really bad
stuff. Speed’s always been around but it used to be a little bit … most people would put it
in their mouths and go boom. I can’t stand to listen to myself talk like that, I got to drop
that shit. That’s crazy. It’ll destroy your memory.
When they discovered the coca leaf you got twice the output … and one tiny outcome
was noticed. They were so desperate for a local anesthethic that that’s the one they
concentrated on. You take the cocaine away and nothing else… It’s not cocaine that they
grow coca leaf for, it’s the other guys. If you take the cocaine away it’s fine, it’s not bad.
You don’t become addicted to chewing coca leaves. It doesn’t destroy your life or your
mind or anything else.

So when they found cocaine they were desperate for a local anaesthetic but there were
problems. You put cocaine on tissue and the tissue dies. If you inject it under the skin it
causes an abcess. It’s psycho-toxic, it kills the cells. It gets into your nervous system and
it stimulates you and shuts down the nerves temporarily. It blocks the nerve and the nerve
dies. After a while the nerves to your heart go bad and you lose your memories because
the pathways have been killed. It never really gets you high–it’s toxic, it’s like sniffing
glue or petrol. Sure it changes your consciousness for a few minutes, but it’s not really a
high. But that’s the thing you think. If you just take a little more, the next one will do it.
But it doesn’t.
Some things–plant substances–are all lumped together [with the other illegal drugs]. But
we don’t get free unless everybody gets free. You cant say oh, well let’s legalize
marijuana, let’s legalize peyote, let’s legalize acid… No, it’s all or nothing. Serious
damage is done by hiding activities, by criminalizing normal behaviour, by creating a
black market where nothing has any pitfall.
If you can control it, regulate it, you can teach people and make a fee, not a tax, but a fee
to educate people, to train them that if they’re going to take this drug they need to
understand it, what it will do, what it won’t do, how to get out of it if you don’t like it,
how not to hurt yourself with it. All of these things are important. But you can’t say you
can’t have it. And you can’t say I’m going to sell you a nickel’s worth of tobacco for

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fourteen dollars. Or [have a market where] five cents worth of marijuana will bring you
$250. Maybe not even five cents–if you have a compost heap and seed you can get two
pounds of it for nothing. For nothing, right?

But then the first thing you’ve gotta do is stamp out domestic protection, make sure all
the money doesn’t go overseas, you want that back in your economy. When the first
Japanese governor got elected in Hawaii; and the Maui Wowi, the finest, most incredible
pot you’ve ever even dreamed about, right, the first thing they did was take the
helicopters out and put infra-red cameras in, and wipe out the marijuana crops. Well the
Hawaiian economy was going on the boil. It took them ten years to get back to half of
what they were doing. They literally shot their own foot off.

I don’t get it. I didn’t get it then, I don’t get it now and I see no reason for them to pursue
it. I’m hoping that someone in this crowd understands what I have to say and has a
connection that can get this information where it needs to go in a way that can be
understood.
I personally respect… Barrack Obama and many other leading politicans. I respect
honest, integral people that have the best wishes of their country and their people in
mind. I think they’re bombarded with stuff from every direction and the chances of them
understanding something as sensitive and complex as this… it has to come in from the
right way, from the right person, at the right time. They have to open their mind ‘cause
I’m telling you, you can’t possibly not see this if you look at it. You have to see it
because it’s so obvious what’s going on. But somehow they don’t. But, like I say…
there’s ways of not seeing it. There’s an Australian expression ‘blind freddy could see
that’. Well unfortunately, none of these guys are blind–that’s why they can’t see
anything, I guess.
The problem isn’t with marijuana, or heroin, or cocaine, or any of that, the problem is
with the LAW. Drugs have been used by humans since pre-history, for thousands and
thousands of years… They’ve been in trade, they’ve always been in trade, they’ve always
been used. Some people use them, some don’t. The trouble is not marijuana versus
heroin, the soft versus hard–that’s bullshit! The problem is the Law. The law is doing the
damage. You can legalize marijuana but do you think the black maket for heroin is going
to disappear? Where’s the money? The money’s not in the marijuana. It’s probably about
ten pecent of the black market. The major, major heavy drugs is where the money is. It
takes the same amount of effort to smuggle a pound of marijuana as it does to smuggle a
pound of pure heroin, now which one do you think is going to bring the most money? It
won’t be the pot…
… The problem is [governments] are always worried about something you’re going to do
… Now most of the recreational drugs are also medicinal substances, but there’s an
approach to make things available as a medicine but not for other reasons. Cannabis has
it’s purposes and it’s one of the best sellers of the plant world. It gives us food, it gives us
pleasure, it gives us healing, and it’s a pretty plant and it’s lovely to be around.

The pharamceutical industry have learned that if people will pay that amount of money to
do heroin or smoke dope, then why are we giving them these life saving pills so cheap?

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Viagra? Oh my god it costs half a cent a tab and they put insurance on it for fifteen. $15
for 100mgs. That’s why medicines are so expensive today. If we pay so much for
recreational drugs why are we giving these life changing drugs for so little money go
figure. The damage is so widespread on so many levels. Corrupting government,
destroying economies, making peope take unknown amounts of very unknown drugs
under unsafe conditions… I don’t see anything good in it at all, I’m sorry…

As Bear so astutely pointed out, the problem is the law, and the governments
that make the law, ostensibly on behalf of the people they should be
representing, but in practice that gets warped by money, power and the nature of
hierarchies in general. Back in 1998, during his interview with Bruce Eisner, Bear
put forth a proposal that would counter the problem of government corruption at
the root, and considering the current turn of world events, it’s worth considering
again:

Well, people evolved over millions of years from a very poorly defined animal—
because archeological traces of people are not all that easily discovered—and no
one’s really quite sure what the proto-human mammal was like, or what precursor
it evolved from. These are the so-called “missing link” things that anthropologists
have so much trouble with. But I think we’ve been pretty much like we are today
for a very, very long time. A lot longer than most people realize. And our social
structures were basically tribal during most of this developmental period. It is the
social interaction between people that is the thing which makes us unique. Our
social structures, and our methods of learning virtually everything that we use in
our behavior, is learned from adults while we are children. That’s all very
important, and this is one of the things I’m discussing in the little diatribe against
children’s TV. It’s all interrelated, we know we’ve got something wrong, things
are not working right.

In a tribal setting, people generally gather together to discuss and make decisions,
and often there will be a person who is chosen as spokesman. Usually these
people are highly dominant. And the development from this highly dominant
individual as a spokesperson into the kings and princes was kind of a lineal thing,
it just happened, that’s the way it went.

We now have a society that’s hierarchical. Most of the power is taken away from
the people, and it’s put in the hands of the few individuals. These individuals form
a government. We have over the centuries slowly tried to modify and develop a
form of government that was more responsive to the people. Unfortunately, it’s
always been diverted, it’s always been taken over by those who love the power;
you know, it’s an elitist group. One time this elite group was called princes and
dukes and kings. Now the elite group is basically the people with lots of money.
The people who are elected into politics are elected according to a set of rules.

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In the United States this set of rules is called a constitution. There are some
countries that don’t have written constitutions. They have a body of law that is
considered as a whole, combined with traditions over generations, that actually
functions as their constitution. But the rules that are described in the constitution
are to define the way in which elections are run, the kind of people who can run for
them, and so forth and so on.
If you examine the intention of the people who wrote the United States
Constitution, their intention was that the government be a protector of the public
welfare and promote good, health and so forth. They had a high ideal. The elite
who wrote the US Constitution intended for the government to be weak, and to be
easily ruled by the elite. The elite, of course, was the framers, and they were
descendents of the aristocracy who had migrated here from England, and they had a
very strong social, moral feeling that they were the only ones who knew how to
take care of things, that most people didn’t, and therefore the society depended
upon them to make sure things were done right. That didn’t last very long; the
framers were replaced by the mercantile classes very quickly in the early nineteenth
century. Money rules to this very day. So they were disenfranchised from their own
system which they had set up for themselves; it was some sort of cosmic karma …

Unfortunately, most of the [Constitution] documents are too simple. They don’t
really produce a description that will provide a real representative government, a
government that really represents the people who go down and cast their votes. It
represents other—monied—people’s interests.

You see it everywhere. In order to get elected, you have to have a lot of money,
because media costs are very high. In order to get this money, unless you’re
independently wealthy, you have it given to you by someone. And these ‘donors’
never give things without strings attached. So conditions are always placed on the
donations in various ways. Sometimes these conditions are quite explicit, and
sometimes they’re implied, but they’re always there.

The individual who seeks government usually is in a system that allows people to
be reelected and often, in fact, gives them generous retirement benefits at the end of
a certain number of years of service. This induces people to become professionals,
professional politicians. Their true profession, however, is getting elected, and then
retain the office, so their most important skills are solely to be elected and to
remain in office. Their skills involve manipulating public opinion, of looking nice
and talking well, seeming intelligent, seeming responsive, seeming competent.
None of this is necessarily true.

In fact, that’s why you see the biggest absurdity of them all, movie actors becoming
leaders of countries. It’s just absurd! Because a good actor with a good script can
present himself as anything. A professional politician does not need to be a
lawmaker. He’s used as one, but that’s not his profession. A politician need not
know how to write a good law, how to run a country, how to generate foreign
policy, how to generate an economic policy. He doesn’t have to have any of these

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skills; he can hire advisors. Actually, the advisors attach themselves to him like
parasites, like fleas to a dog. He doesn’t actually have need of any skills at all that
are of any other use except to become elected and reelected. Judging from the
current crop, perhaps other skills are just an impediment to a successful career.

I think what we need is people who are part of the community, who are citizens
who have other jobs and other interests, who go and serve in the same spirit a
person would serve on a jury, not as a profession that’s going to lead to a fat
retirement, but rather as a service to the community and to his fellow citizens.

[We need to] establish  a  truly  democratic  form  of  government  which  is  
responsive  to  the  actual  needs  and  will  of  the  people.  You've  got  to  address  that,  
you've  got  to  find  the  way.  We've  got  a  system  that  doesn't  respond  to  people,  it  
responds  to  money.  And  it  can  convince  people  of  anything  it  wants.  People  are  
holding  office  whose  only  job,  the  only  thing  they  really  know  how  to  do,  is  how  to  
gain  office,  and  how  to  remain  in  office.  They're  governing  by  means  of  their  
advisors  and  by  means  of  the  permanent  public  service,  which  is  the  career  part  of  
the  government.  If  you  want  a  career  in  government,  then  you  go  and  become  a  
bureaucrat,  because  career  people  assure  stability  and  that  things  keep  working  
from  day  to  day.  When  the  government  changes,  you  don't  have  a  period  of  
confusion  for  awhile  while  everybody  new  figures  out  how  to  get  a  secretary  or  
something.  The  office  already  has  them,  the  office  is  there,  the  secretary  is  there,  
you  just  move  in.    

The  people  at  the  top  have  to  be  just  ordinary  citizens,  they  have  to  be  regular,  
working,  respected,  intelligent,  capable  members  of  the  community.  Whether  or  
not  they  are  very  knowledgeable  in  writing  laws,  well  then,  there's  the  need  for  
advisors  again.  But  they  need  to  be  not  owned  by  money  interests,  or  by  some  
other  interests,  where  they  will  not  implement  policy  that's  difficult  because  it  
wouldn't  get  them  re-­‐elected.  The  necessary  policy  is  difficult,  because  it's  the  
cure  society  needs.  You  have  to  somehow  eliminate  this  loaded  deck  the  political  
systems  have  been  set  up  based  on  the  wording  of  the  Constitution.  A  Constitution  
is  like  the  foundation  of  a  building.  There's  no  point  in  trying  to  fix  the  third  story,  
which  isn’t  straight  if  the  foundation  is  crooked.    
 
All  the  laws,  the  Supreme  Court  and  its  decisions,  and  the  form  of  Congress  and  
the  people  elected  to  it,  and  everything  else,  all  have  the  structure  described  in  the  
Constitution.  It  describes  who  can  run  for  office,  who  can  hold  office,  how  old  they  
have  to  be,  what  rules  and  behaviors  are  expected  of  them.  All  of  those  things  are  
laid  down,  and  the  structure  of  laws,  how  the  laws  are  written  and  how  the  laws  
are  interpreted  and  how  they're  put  into  effect  and  so  forth,  they're  all  structured  
according  to  the  underlying  framework  which  is  laid  down  in  the  Constitution.  If  
there's  a  problem  with  the  framework,  then  there's  a  problem  with  everything  
that's  built  upon  it.  You  can't  make  the  corrections  on  the  third  floor,  it  all  comes  
down  to  fixing  the  Constitution.  So  you  can't  say,  ‘Gee  the  Supreme  Court  said  
such-­‐and-­‐such,  there  must  be  something  wrong  here.’  You  can't  fix  it,  you  can't  
correct  the  problem  in  the  laws  because  the  laws  are  written  and  interpreted  only  
the  way  the  Constitution  allows  them  to  be.  

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The  Constitution  should  very  explicitly  exclude  things  like  the  making  of  laws  
governing  non-­‐injurious  consentual  behavior,  moral  judgements.  Also,  it  needs  to  
exclude  laws  which  create  black  markets.  All  commerce  must  be  conducted  openly  
in  a  legal  forum.  Disallowing  monopolies  would  be  a  nice  touch.  The  system  
should  also  require  that  laws  be  enacted  only  for  a  limited  period  of  time,  at  the  
end  of  which  they  automatically  expire.  And  cannot  be  renewed  unless  they  are  
reintroduced.  They  have  to  be  re-­‐debated,  reconsidered.  All  laws.    

It  is  not  a  good  idea  to  allow  people  to  go  and  become  career  politicians.  An  office  
holder  is  allowed  to  serve  one  term,  or  two  terms,  or  specific  periods  of  time  in  
office,  or  a  certain  number  of  years  maximum,  at  which  time  you're  no  longer  
eligible  to  hold  office.  No  handsome  retirement  fund.  While  serving  in  office  
you're  given  a  reasonable  stipend  to  cover  your  costs,  rather  than  a  big  salary,  
somewhat  like  pay  for  jury  duty.  You're  expected  to  continue  with  your  present  
business  as  well.  You're  just  expected  to  devote  a  certain  amount  of  time  as  a  
servant  to  your  country,  to  help  run  the  government,  to  help  organize  and  pass  
legislation,  and  so  forth.  You're  expected  to  be  one  of  us,  so  that  what  you  do  is  
what  you  would  do  for  yourself,  not  what  you  can  do  for  such  and  such  
corporation  or  such  and  such  moneyed  interest,  or  because  the  media  will  show  
you  in  a  good  light  for  reelection  if  you  do  this,  or  anything  else.  It  has  to  be  
because  it's  the  right  thing  to  do.  I  guess  I  am  a  bit  too  idealistic  in  all  this.  

It's  all  rhetoric,  though.  They  talk  about  less  government,  but  simultaneously  
they're  increasing  the  government's  size.  They  talk  about  saving  money,  but  the  
only  programs  they  want  to  cut  are  programs  that  feed  some  tax  money  back  to  
ordinary  citizens.  They  cut  welfare,  health,  education,  any  kind  of  support  
programs  that  help  new  businesses.  The  tax  breaks  all  go  to  the  big  corporations.  
The  poor  guy  with  the  little  shop  down  on  Main  Street,  he's  bloody  lucky  to  feed  
his  family  each  week!  800,000  businesses  do  3%  of  the  business.  12  businesses  do  
90%  of  the  business.  The  other  7%  is  the  medium  size  guys.    

But  the  little  guys,  which  are  everywhere,  it's  like  the  donkey  and  the  carrot.  It's  
the  carrot  of  capitalism.  This  is  a  great  free  enterprise  system,  you  can  start  your  
own  business.  They  don't  tell  you  that  you're  going  to  work  60  hours  a  week,  at  an  
average  pay  that's  below  the  minimum  wage,  and  suffer  from  all  kinds  of  stresses  
that  will  probably  shorten  your  life,  and  you'll  be  lucky  to  be  able  to  send  your  
kids  to  college.  That's  the  reality  of  small  business.  And  not  just  in  the  United  
States,  either,  it's  everywhere,  it's  the  way  it  works.  The  rules  are  different  for  the  
little  guy.  They  shouldn't  be,  you  know.  

The  first  four  priorities  that  a  government  should  take  care  of  are:  welfare,  health,  
education,  and  protection  (like  from  fire  or  violence).  Those  four  are  foremost,  all  
the  rest  are  immaterial  if  you  can  take  care  of  those  four.  Then  what's  left  over,  
you  can  spend  on  other  things.  As  technology  increasingly  replaces  human  labor  
with  machines,  there  has  to  be  a  way  of  transferring  the  wealth  these  machines  
produce  back  to  the  people.  It  all  goes  to  the  owner  at  present.  If  you  can  replace  
5,000  people  in  a  factory  with  3  technicians  and  a  bunch  of  robots  that'll  produce  
twice  as  much  as  the  5,000  did,  if  you  don't  drop  the  price  of  the  product,  where  

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does  the  profit  go?  It  doesn't  go  to  the  people  who  are  put  out  of  work.  They  now  
can't  buy  the  things  the  factory's  making.  What  happens  when  all  the  goods  are  
made  by  machines  and  nobody  has  a  job?  Who's  going  to  afford  to  live?  Where's  
all  that  wealth  going?  Whose  interest,  and  what  purpose,  does  it  serve?  There's  
not  a  single  government  anywhere  in  the  world  that  can  provide  an  answer.  Most  
are  not  even  looking  for  one.    
 
The  governments  that  are  socialist  have  deteriorated  into  bureaucracies  which  eat  
up  and  absorb  all  the  energy  without  creating  any  incentive  for  people.  Those  that  
are  capitalist  allow  all  the  money  to  go  into  the  hands  of  a  few.  The  worst  thing  on  
top  of  all  of  this  is  the  fact  that,  as  far  as  I  can  determine,  no  economist  anywhere  
has  ever  proposed  a  stable  economic  model.  Every  economic  model  I've  ever  seen  
is  predicated  on  a  certain  minimum  ‘level  of  growth.’  Growth  means  expansion.  
Something  that  is  growing/expanding  is  not  stable,  any  more  than  something  that  
is  contracting/declining  is  stable.  Stable  means  it  remains  the  same,  and  functions  
normally.  It's  a  buffered  system.  It  doesn't  expand,  it  doesn't  contract,  it  just  goes  
along  running  perfectly.    

No  one  has  ever  proposed  an  economic  model  including  this  concept  of  stability.  
It's  always  predicated  on  growth.  You  can  only  grow  so  far  before  something,  
what  happens,  you  hit  the  ceiling.  Then  what  happens?  You  crash!  So  you  get  
boom,  bust,  boom,  bust.  The  economic  history  of  mankind  is  boom,  bust.  Because  
the  economic  history  of  economists  is  everything  must  have  growth.  You've  got  to  
expand,  you've  got  to  have  more  people,  more  products,  more  this,  more  that.  And  
there's  a  limit.  There's  only  so  much  available  in  raw  materials,  there's  only  so  
much  space  that  people  can  occupy,  there's  only  so  many  products  they  can  
absorb.  Eventually,  growth  must  cease.  Otherwise  there  will  always  be  boom  and  
bust  cycles.    

And  yet,  no  one  is  prepared  for  that.  No  one  is  prepared  for  the  realities  of  it,  it's  
what's  valuable  to  you  now,  the  money  in  your  pocket  today  or  tomorrow,  don't  
worry  about  next  week,  next  month,  next  year,  your  children  or  your  
grandchildren.  

In  some  ways  the  shit  has  already  hit  the  fan.  Look  at  Bosnia,  look  at  Africa,  look  at  
where  things  are  starting  to  break  down.  They're  having  sort  of  a  slow-­‐motion  
breakdown  in  the  relationships  between  India  and  Pakistan.  (More  bloody  
bombs!).  Russia  is  an  800  lb.  gorilla  who  has  broken  into  the  stash  of  home  brew,  
or  something,  no  one  knows  what's  going  to  happen.  China's  long  history  is  that  of  
personal  enterprise  and  reward,  with  a  rigid  and  very  elaborate  social  and  family  
system  that  evolved  some  of  the  best  businessmen  that  this  planet's  ever  seen.  To  
become  Communist,  and  to  remain  Communist  for  as  long  as  it  has,  to  me  seems  
almost  unbelievable.  Already,  we  are  seeing  real  Chinese  capitalism  starting  to  
break  out  on  the  mainland.  There's  no  way  in  the  world  that  scene  can  remain  
stable  very  much  longer.  It's  a  monster,  and  it  has  to  come  to  a  crisis  point.    

The  whole  world  is  moving  towards  a  social,  economic  crisis  point.  There  are  so  
many  things  that  are  stuffed  up,  and  no  one  is  doing  a  bloody  thing  to  fix  any  of  it.  
There's  little  in  the  way  of  constructive  arguments  going  on  about  any  of  it  either.  

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I've  always  thought  that  probably  no  change  of  significance  could  occur  in  the  
United  States.  I  can't  really  judge  the  rest  of  the  world,  it's  a  very  complex  picture.  
But  my  experience  has  led  me  to  the  conclusion  that  ultimately,  the  social  
structure  would  have  to  break  down  to  some  form  of  civil  war  before  any  
significant  political  change  could  come  about.  In  the  case  of  the  United  States,  
there  is  an  serious  ongoing  deterioration  of  the  social  structure,  and  a  total  retreat  
from  any  sort  of  rational  action.  Draconian  laws  are  filling  the  prisons  with  non-­‐
criminals  and  no  safety  net  is  in  place  for  those  whose  jobs  are  eliminated  by  
technology.  I  don’t  quite  see  what  is  keeping  the  whole  thing  economically  afloat,  
to  tell  the  truth.    
 
In  the  United  States,  also  for  some  reason,  socialism  has  become  an  anathema.  If  
you  even  talk  about  socialism,  you're  a  pariah  of  some  sort.  You  don't  have  to  call  
it  communist,  but  when  anyone  stands  up  and  says  they  think  government  has  a  
responsibility  to  its  citizens,  these  people  are  automatically  considered  to  be  a  
problem.  They're  considered  a  problem  by  everyone,  not  just  the  authorities,  and  
are  treated  that  way.  The  term:  ‘Liberal’  used  to  be  a  badge  worn  with  great  pride,  
by  people  in  political  life.  It  was  considered  absolutely  one  of  the  highest  
compliments  you  could  earn  if  you  were  said  to  be  liberal  in  your  outlook.  It's  now  
considered  as  one  of  the  worst  epithets  that  can  be  applied  to  you.  To  me,  it's  
bizarre  how  they  can  twist  the  meaning  of  this  term.  Someone  who  is  liberal  is  
someone  who  stands  for  freedom,  the  word  liberal  comes  from  the  same  root  as  
liberty.  How  can  you  possibly  make  that  into  an  epithet?  I  guess  it  is  now:  ‘Liberty  
and  Justice  for  those  who  can  afford  it.’  Or:  ‘All  men  are  created  equal,  but  some  
are  more  equal  than  others....’  

I’m not proposing that people should use heroin or cocaine, or anything. I don’t
even propose that people should necessarily use psychedelics, unless they prepare
themselves ahead of time. It’s a decision that each person certainly has the right to
make. No one else should have the right to tell them whether they can or cannot do
things.

Bear’s website, [Link] provides the last details of his ‘modest

proposal’ to end the war on drugs. On it, Bear details the real reasons for drug
prohibition, saying:

The authorities don't have any valid arguments against pot, their purpose in
opposing legalization is to prevent any chinks in the armour, or cracks in the wall
of prohibition. All propaganda against drug usage is false and/or misleading.
The authorities likewise don't give a stuff about what any particular drug does.
The stance that pot is a dangerous drug of abuse is only a surface excuse,
propaganda for the masses. Marijuana was made illegal in the 1937 to remove a
threat to the synthetic fibers made by DuPont, just as the same company has
connived a ban on Freon, now that their patent on it has run out, under the

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pretense that it is ‘harming the ozone’–a claim completely without any proof
whatsoever. DuPont has never had any interest in the welfare of people.

The law against LSD was put into place in 1966 primarily by Sen. Thos. Dodd,
who set up and put through the law in 1966. The only real function of the drug
prohibition is to create a black market trade, otherwise known as ‘money for
nothing’.

The addition of any particular drug to the prohibition is a matter of the same
policies which will maintain the illegality of all drugs to the bitter end. The drug
trade is now the single biggest money operation in the US economy, and the
money it produces is used to see to it that the laws will not change. I was told
recently [1998] that the current value of the drug trade is estimated at $500
billion, a figure which agrees with the statements I heard about the amount of
money leaving the US for cocaine in 1980, which was said to be $1 billion/day
passing through Miami, at that time the main portal for the trade. Watch them
invalidate the plebiscites in Arizona and California for the medical use of pot. I
can almost gaurantee that these laws will never be implemented, for the
authorities cannot tolerate any ‘erosion’ in the wall of prohibition.

Pot isn't even important to those in the big-money drug trade, except for
maintaining a solid wall of prohibition, the same reason I noted above for the
uselessness of proving scientific merit for the use of any prohibited drug. Money
does indeed drive these things, which is why you have no chance to change
anything. No one gives a minute's notice to thoughts of ‘hypocrisy’. It isn't a
question of what's ‘good for you’ or ‘what's bad for you’. Alcohol is not as good a
way to create money-for-nothing as heroin and cocaine (too easy to make at
home), plus it was put outside the rules by the repeal of Prohibition.

Wm. Bennett, like the current fool, Barry McCaffrey, in charge of the ‘war on
drugs’, is only a lackey of the money which runs the US government, i.e., ‘Big
Business’, and the biggest business in the US is drug-running, so give it up...
Barring a revolution or a new constitution, the US congress will never change the
way election financing is structured, and that is one of the most important
principles these interests will protect at all costs. This is a serious threat to the
social stability and future of the country, so everyone must try to understand the
real reasons behind it.

And then in a later essay, WIN THE WAR WITH NO MORE CASUALTIES,
Bear says:

Having said this, I wish to put forward the following proposal as a solution which
I hope will be seriously considered. This is based on the Dutch approach, but is
far more complete and coherent. I believe that we are now presented with a

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unique opportunity for some brave country to lead the world in eliminating this
disastrous prohibition, which may very well be threatening the survival of all of
humanity's social fabric. The operant principle here is harm minimization. The
best laws are always the simplest.

An outline for the reform of present laws on drugs and their use.

First, the entire designation until now called ‘illegal drugs’ needs to be divided
into two classes, much as the drugs used in legitimate medicine are divided, into
those which are freely available to any adult person, as are the over-the-counter
products, and those which require medical advice and/or supervision, such as the
prescription drugs.

Category A

This category includes all plants and crude plant derivatives including tobacco,
opium and hashish, alcohol and (although not a drug per se) gambling. Including,
but not limited to all plants containing the substances psilocybin, ergoline
alkaloids, mescaline, cannabinoids, opioids, nicotine, caffeine, ecgonines (coca
alkaloids) and ethanol. Although it is not a ‘drug’, I believe the costly, socially
disruptive and frequently addictive practice of gambling should also be grouped
in this category, since ‘problem gamblers’ often require counseling and
rehabilitation, which is similar to that needed by people with problems controlling
their use of drugs. Here too, advertising never mentions the odds against winning.

Category B

This includes all the chemical and highly purified products, whether derived from
natural materials, or synthetic. Whether currently used in medicine, or not.

These two categories would then be dealt with in the following fashion.

Those in Category A:

The plants and materials in this category would be permitted freely to be grown,
processed, possessed, and used by an individual for the personal use of that
person and immediate family, but cannot be sold. A small fee must be paid on a
yearly basis by those exercising this right.

Individuals may, however apply and be granted a license to produce these

materials for sale to others, provided they are of good character, and pay a
licensing fee. All the sales made under this provision will have a small fee
attached at the point of sale. These fees are not tax, and cannot be transferred to
general revenue. All such revenue derived from this fee must be used in the
following manner by government: A portion of all fees collected under this rule

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will be set aside for education, detoxification and rehabilitation, and the
remainder will be passed on to the health service to help with defraying the costs
of treatment of the increased number of ailments which are the result of such drug
use. In this way the system is prepared to deal with any problems, by making it
‘pay its own way’.

Those in Category B:

The material in this category may only be bought and used under the supervision
and/or authority (prescription) of a medical practitioner, but otherwise are not
restricted. The same licensing and fees for producers and sales as in Cat. A will
apply.

Educational, detox and rehabilitation facilities must be well funded, staffed and
available to anyone who needs them. A drug-user's equivalent of ‘driving
licenses’ could be required for the Cat. B (and perhaps also for Cat. A users). This
license would take the form of a required course in the effects, dosage, hazards
and health risks, followed by a test and the issuance of an ID card similar to that
issued to road vehicle operators. The user is then informed of all the pertinent
facts. Both categories would require that the user be an adult.

A requirement might also be made that a person who wishes to use the
psychedelics be a member of a support group which should have a trained
psychological worker associated with it.

An important principle is that the fees are kept reasonable and do not represent a
‘sin tax’ mentality, so as not to raise the price too high and re-establish the black
market. Drugs and gambling are not of benefit to society and governments must
not derive revenue from them, otherwise there is little motivation for the powers
to discourage the practice.

Other drugs under consideration for prohibition, like anabolic steroids, must be
returned to the medical community so as to destroy the growing international
black market in these substances.

It is important to realize that ALL black markets are dangerous to the public
health, damaging to the economy, corrupting to officials, and create a basis for
crime. Honest democratic governments must never knowingly act to create
situations which will allow black markets to develop, no matter how reasonable
the impulse to do so seems at the time. It is also important to understand that
legalizing the use of drugs will not encourage more people to use drugs, nor will
it, as many have proclaimed, ‘send a message’ to youth that drug use of any kind
is approved of by society.

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As Bear wound down his talk and fuffed with the microphone, Starfinder went to
help him down from the stage. As Bear turned to walk off, he said non-chalantly
“… I’m hoping that someone in this crowd understands what I have to say, and
has a connection that can get this information where it needs to go in a way that
can be understood.”
And it dawned on me then what strength of character and courage Bear had to
come out of his self-imposed exile to share his message with the world. Public
discourse on ending prohibition was peaking in the US at this time with the
Californian medical marijuana explosion, and subsequent [unsucessful] vote on
legalization, and Bear was spitting in the wind and trusting his long thought-out
approach could make a difference. And really–he was Owsley, if anyone knew
about drugs and dealing with the law–it was him.
Colonel Kurtz, one of the EGA lecture presenters, summed it up when he said: “I
felt a great love and respect for [Bear], personally… because [in the 60s] he was
dosing the masses, or providing an opportunity for the masses to self-elect to
dose themselves and get a swift education into other aspects of consciousness.
And that’s a beautiful thing, that’s the essence of psychedelic spirituality: to
provide the opportunity for people to dose themselves. And to have the wisdom
not to push it on them.”
The hippie kids were still kicking back on the floor under the main dome, grokking
this Old Testament prophet from the psychedelic 60s in all his wilfull,
meandering, raw integrity. There had been a few sniggers and windups scattered
throughout the audience, mixed with cheers, and I heard one young dude calling
him the “Grandpa Simpson of acid”. But despite his age, or perhaps because of
it, there was also a deference to the elder, with an undercurrent of amusement.

After spending time with Bear I noticed, like all good public speakers, he had his
pet theories and ideas and catchphrases that he would repeat and weave into all
his conversations. The prodigous eidetic memory of his prime had devolved to
large snatches of theory that would recycle fully formed, punctuated by long
stretches of not having a fucking clue as to what went on back in the old days.
“My memory's been trashed–there's still stuff in there, right, but it's sort of like a
library and a bunch of vandals have broken in and taken all the card catalogue
and scattered it over the floor,” Bear said later at EGA. “But all the books are still
there in the stacks … People have to now walk around and look at each title …
Pretty soon you make those pathways once more and it's a lot of work and you
need a lot of friends [to jog your memory] and it's not much good when you're my
age and you've outlived almost all of them.”
At 74, by his own admission, he didn’t “remember all of it”–as Paul Krassner, who
founded the Realist magazine once said, and Bear loved to quote: “‘if you
remember the 60s you weren't there!’ But some of the stuff I do remember I
have to stop and say I'm not sure I did do that, but I think I did. And in my time
I've had a lot of insights.”

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Which is like saying Woodstock was, ‘alright’. A lot of insights, indeed.

Owsley’s initiation to psychedelics didn’t come till 1964, but his experimentation
with altered states had been growing, almost parallelling the slow turning-on of
America since he moved to Berkeley and the ‘Brown Shoe’ boarding house.
Charles Perry wrote in Rolling Stone that “Owsley was furiously trying every
mind-affecting drug he could find mentioned in the chemical literature.”

Perry describes the mood of the day when he says: “Dopers were a tiny minority
… even in college towns where drugs were becoming a sneaky fashion. Dope
was hard to get–we were still buying grass by the half or even the quarter ounce,
and psychedelics were in very short supply–so it was a paranoid, conspiratorial
scene. Acidheads were nervous about walking around in public stoned, which
didn’t make much sense, since LSD was still legal. Most dopers wasted a lot of
energy worrying about whether their neighbors were suspicious of them, but we
were fortunate to live in a house where everybody turned on.”

It was around this time that the cultural vector of LSD started charting off the
scale, as word of mouth spread to the street and recreational use kicked off. In a
radio interview about LSD in the 1990s hosted on [Link], Jerry Garcia, who
would soon enter Owsley’s orbit with the Grateful Dead, said that: “It was right
around ‘64 when the first LSD really hit the street… Before that it was something
you read about in the Doors of Perception, if you read about it at all, or else you’d
been exposed to mescaline…”

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist that worked for Sandoz Laboratories had
‘discovered’ the psychoactive properties of LSD in 1943, after first synthesizing it
in 1938. The actual details of LSD’s ‘birth’ are highly contentious, and directly
pertinent to Bear’s theory about psychedelics, which we will examine later.
Suffice to say that LSD, if by some chance you are unfamiliar with it, was
described by Hofmann in 2005, on the occasion of the opening of the Ludlow
Santo Domingo Library in Geneva, as being “the closest, the most dense, the
most mysterious link between the material and the spiritual world. A hardly visible
trace of LSD matter is capable of evoking heaven or hell in the spiritual world, i.e.
in human consciousness."

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The government propaganda about marijuana being a ‘gateway drug’ to the

harder chemicals seemed to be right on the mark with Owsley’s experience. In
the space of a few short weeks after being turned on to weed in late 1963 and
peddling morning glory seeds in early 1964, Owsley quickly encountered both
amphetamines and LSD in the budding counterculture around Berkeley: “So one
day a friend of mine gave me a sugar cube with a spot on it. He said this was …
LSD, and I said, oh yeah, what's that? He replied that it was sort of like morning
glory seeds only better.”

And it wasn’t just the drugs: through some crazy cultural synchronicity rock’n’roll
became a dominant pasttime for Owsley and millions of other Americans at the
same time that drugs were seeping into the social foundations: “I got turned onto
acid and The Beatles in the same week; it was amazing. It all seemed to fit
together,” Owsley said on his website. “I hadn't been that exposed to the various
forms of R&B that were an undercurrent to the whole rock'n'roll scene until those
guys brought it to the fore. But one of my favorite forms of jazz was New Orleans;
I was exposed to a lot of that in my college days. My introduction to what we now
call Rock and Roll was the first album, Meet The Beatles. We had it within a few
days of it coming out [Released on 20 January 1964]. One of my friends who was
a folkie, Will Spires, brought it in and said, 'Man, you gotta listen to this!' And I
was off and running on it. I loved it.”

Charles Perry recounts that Owsley “encountered LSD in 1964 (while he was
rooming with me in Berkeley–I was not the one who turned him on, I have to
insist; that was the heiress of a famous leather goods company) and was suitably
impressed.” Owsley described it to David Gans, saying “the first time I did it I
realized it opened a door. And it was a place I wanted to explore.” The other
thing the ‘Speed Freak Heiress’–as she was also known–gave Owsley, was of
course, speed, which would have a larger affect on his life in the short term than
the LSD, believe it or not.

“Now speed was illegal because you were supposed to have a script for it,”
Owsley said. “Acid wasn't illegal because it wasn't used for anything, therefore
there were no scripts you could get, and it wasn't really defined as a drug or
anything. Of course, that didn't last very long, did it?”

Like acid, speed has a habit of altering the personality–if in different ways–and
Owsley on methedrine became even more intense than before. Charles Perry
describes the amplification thusly:

So now, on top of all the other difficulties of having Owsley for a roommate, we
had to put up with Owsley the amphetamine enthusiast, running around the
commune at all hours, racing downstairs to ride his motorcycle at 3:30 a.m.
Wherever you turned, there he’d be, trying to cajole you into a taste of dimethyl
amphetamine or his favorite cocktail of dimeth and methedrine.

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It got so bad we held secret meetings to consider how to get rid of him. After all,
we had a groovy little scene here. Lots of people wanted to room with us,
particularly this math student we knew. Somehow Owsley got wind of the plans
and came tearfully pleading with us to let him stay and making out the other guy
to be a bigger speed dealer than himself (which turned out to be true). We were
kind of ashamed of ourselves and dropped the plans.

But there was still a lot of disapproval in the air, so to heal the philosophical
breach with his friends, inside the commune and out, Owsley proposed that
everybody give methedrine an honest trial. So one day a big powwow circle of 15
or 20 people gathered in his room and geezed up in a spirit of fair play.

It so happened that our landlord was a lonely Chinese bachelor who used to
wander upstairs from time to time and make painful attempts at conversation. He
chose this particular afternoon to stand in Owsley’s doorway and try one of his
great conversational gambits – ‘Ah, nice weather we been having, ah?’ was the
one, I believe – on the powwow circle, which instantly turned into a huddle of
teeth-grinding paranoids with eyes pingponging back and forth between the
landlord and the damning pile of hypodermic needles in the middle of the floor.

After nobody would even agree that the weather had been nice, the landlord
awkwardly excused himself and went back downstairs. Now the powwow circle
was really paranoid, but Owsley was on top of things. ‘No,’ he said, the light of
inspiration in his eyes. ‘No, he’s not calling the police. He just realized we had
something . . . beautiful here . . . and he was too shy to ask in! I’ll go offer to turn
him on!’ So we didn’t have to get rid of Owsley after all. The landlord evicted
him on the spot.

Owsley told Eisner in 1998 that “speed … seemed like it was a very nice
pleasurable drug. Nobody knew at first, but after a little while on the street you
found out it made a raving, babbling idiot out of you, very quickly! … I wouldn’t
say I didn’t like it. I didn’t like what it did to me.” Owsley had the willpower to stop
taking methedrine, but his curious mind was now obessed with making it. And not
just speed, but LSD as well.

In 1964 LSD was owned and made by the Swiss chemical giant Sandoz
Laboratories, who still hoped to find a commercial uses for the drug in both
psychotherapy and medicine, where the ergotine was used to induce uterus
contractions in childbirth and as ergotamine, used to combat migraine
headaches. Sandoz packaged up the blue liquid LSD in glass ampules in tablets
and sold it on to chemical companies for global distribution. Michael
Hollingshead, author of The Man Who Turned on the World, says: “Until 1965,
supplies of ergot could be bought with little difficulty from three or four European
chemical companies; but pressure from Washington put a stop to this,

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doubtlessly hopeful that this would lead to an end of clandestine LSD.”

The April 10, 1966 edition of the Los Angeles Times told that the U.S.
government “plans [an] intensive campaign against LSD … The Food and Drug
Administration has quietly set out to dry up illicit sources of LSD-25 … Behind the
concerted federal effort are disturbing signs that the drug is becoming all too
available on college campuses …The Bureau of Drug Abuse Control is now
training its brigade of drug agents who will fan out across the United States to
fight illegal traffic in all the dangerous drugs under the agency’s jurisdiction.”

But in 1964, as the demand from the street began, and with legal ergot sources
difficult to source, an explosion of underground LSD labs arose that churned out
doses of varying purity, often using a synthetic base substitute called ergotamine
tartrate that was, according to Michael Hollingshead, "really quite different from
those [effects of purer LSD] reported at Harvard."

Consider the example of Bernard Roseman, one of the earliest known acid
cooks, whose output has been described as being of “less than pharmaceutical
quality”. In his book LSD and the Age of the Mind, Roseman recounts how he
worked up to creating d-lysergic acid monohydrate from his starting materials,
and then “stumbled upon a few articles that at first seemed quite unrelated to
LSD, but they were logical and worth a try; because by comparison the process
was exceedingly simple, compared to Hofmann's monumental preparation.” He
claims that he was recrystallizing the precious few grams he had obtained from
the base materials, filtering the crystals off by vacuum and using ether when the
crystals absorbed moisture from the air and turned into a black goo before his
eyes.

In testimony in federal court after his 1963 LSD bust, where it is alleged he
attempted to smuggle 62,000 doses of LSD into the US from Canada along with
accomplice Bernard Copley, Roseman told another story. He revealed he
actually made the LSD “in Los Angeles in 1960 while he was working with a Dr.
Grossman, a friend of his, at the California Corporation for Biological Research.
Although not a chemist, he worked with Dr. Grossman in making the LSD, at
least a portion of which was made into pills.”

Timothy Leary, in The Politics of Ecstasy, writes a more colorful description:

"Bernie and Barnie, the flipped-out desert holy men, who had been taking the
peyote trip with the indians for years and writing crazy, brilliant, illiterate books on
telepathy and accelerated learning through LSD. Bernie claimed to have
mastered the German language in two acid sessions. They had learned how to
make LSD, which they distributed in rubber-stopped bottles, a strange brown
elixir with curious green seaweed strands. They sold the sacrament at bargain
rates to dozens of famous people in California before they were treacherously
betrayed to the feds."

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It wasn’t just the drugs but something in the nature of the scientific inquiry into
the chemicals and what they did to consciousness that sparked in Owsley and
others at this time. As George Marquardt, the ‘drug wizard of Wichita’ said about
his profession after his arrest in 1991, “[It's] the last American folk adventure...
the light in the moon...narcotics agents chasing you all over the land. It's a
fantasy made real." In the halcyon days of the early 1960s, being an LSD cook
had an archetypal attraction that drew intelligent, altruistic wizards–as well as
baser profiteerers–to try their hand at mystic transubstination of the masses.

Owsley disputed that Roseman even followed the published synthesis he

claimed to have used, saying “it was a total scam … I read that thing I thought he
was a big joke …” Roseman’s acid, however he acquired it, underscores the
main problem with the street use of LSD at the time: finding good quality
material. In his interview with Eisner in 1998, Owsley admitted that most of the
street acid in 1964:

…Was terrible. It would make you high, but it was so full of impurities and other
things that it was a totally rough trip … There [were] all kinds of derivatives of
ergot containing various derivatives of lysergic acid that are active in some way in
the body … They are very complex, many of the derivatives, and most of them
are active—and when you are doing a synthesis you get all kinds of things that
hook up to the lysergic acid molecule. Breakdown products, isomerization—who
knows what’s in there?

The first acid that I took was made by a guy who was actually a civil engineer that
got interested in it, read one of the syntheses, and performed it in his kitchen in
one step… The first doses … were probably about 100 mcg … I think the vast
majority of the material that was floating around in those days–that wasn’t made,
you know, in somebody’s kitchen–was actually from Czechoslovakia. Lots of
blue liquid in vials was around.

The flavor of the experience, Owsley told Rolling Stone in 2007 was significant, if
not the full cellular explosion of the stronger dosages: "I remember the first time I
took acid and walked outside, and the cars were kissing the parking meters."

A few months later, in April, 1964, Owsley was given quality acid through an old
friend who was an LA defense attorney. “When I told him I had taken LSD, he
said, ‘My God, I’ve got something to give you.’ A friend of his had given it to him
down in Mexico. He said he didn’t want to take it again, he was around 60 at the
time, but he said, ‘You should really try this, because this is the Kind, the real
thing.’ He gave me this cap, which was a #4 cap with powder in it. It was
probably either Sandoz or Czech material. I took this cap home, and when my
cousin came to visit me from the East Coast, I split it with him. He’d never taken
it. And I found out that I had never really taken real acid. God, if one person had

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taken that cap! It must have had 500 mcg. in it, I swear to God. It was POTENT,”
he told Eisner in 1998.

Years later, Tim Leary waxed lyrical about Owsley’s breakthrough in The Politics
of Ecstasy, describing how he “had taken the full LSD trip, hurled down through
His cellular reincarnations, disintergrated beyond life into pulsing electron grids,
whirled down beyond atomic form to that unitary center, that is one, pure, radiant
humming vibration. Yin. Yin. Yin. Yang. Yang. Yang. His face was glowing, and
He was screaming that full-throated God-cry that was torn from the lungs of
Moses and shrieked by San Juan de la Cruz … the eternal, unmistakable cry of
the man who has heard God’s voice and shouted back in joyous, insane
acceptance. If you’ve ever opened your ears to anyone who has surrendered,
wide-eyed, to the sound of God, you know what I mean.”

Owsley told Eisner that “…It was at the conclusion of that trip that I realized that
that was what real LSD was all about. And after that I tried to get some more. I
couldn’t get any, so I thought, ‘Well, shit, if I can’t get any, obviously there’s only
one other way out. Go to the library.’ All the organic synthetic chemistry that I
know about is the stuff I picked up in a few weeks in the UC library,” sure
enough, in the Journal of Organic Chemistry.

By all accounts Owsley had the classic ego death and rebirth initiation that is so
archetypally present in the shamanic and magical paradigms. Owsley was on the
way to becoming an alchemist. “Throughout history the alchemist has always
been a magical, awesome figure. The potion. The elixir. The secret formulary …
And every generation or so, someone would rediscover the key. And the key is
always chemical. Consciousness is a chemical process,” Leary said in The
Politics of Ecstasy.

That first consciousness-obliterating trip was the catalyst for the future direction
of Owsley’s life and work as an acid cook and social engineer to the emerging
counterculture. It revealed a truth to him that perhaps couldn’t be put in words:
“A.O.S.3 carries the official stamp on His skin’s passport that He has been where
all the great mystics have been–that point where you see it all and know it all
belongs together,” Leary proselyted. “But how can you describe an electronic
rhythm of which 5 billion years of our planetary evolution is just one beat? He is
in the same position as every returned visionary–grabbing at ineffective words.”

Owsley knew in a flash that the truth LSD revealed could be anchored, however–
in the lab. In 2009 he said: “So anyway, I spent some time [three weeks] reading
some organic [chemistry] manuals and handbooks and looking up stuff in the
literature and I thought well, this wasn't so bad. I understood the apparatus and
whatnot…” Reading about LSD manufacture was one thing, however, but
obtaining the necessary chemicals and glassware was going to be expensive,
and methedrine paved a way to make the capital needed to move on to LSD
manufacture.

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Though in his later years he would play down the messianic-alchemist archetype
he painted for himself in the peak of the psychedelic 60s, there was an
undeniably pure intent in Owsley and others alchemical endeavours in those
early days. Jay Stevens hit the nail on the head when he said, “[Owsley] was
going to save the world by making the purest and cheapest and most abundant
LSD possible.”

In his last EGA lecture in 2009 Owsley explained:

I did things that I felt needed to be done, like with the speed and the acid and
whatnot. I had no trouble going into a library to browse around the literature. I
would compare this synthesis with that synthesis, and even though I wasn't skilled
in chemistry–it wasn't a subject I had much knowledge in (although I could make
rocket fuel from zinc and sulphur, and cherry bombs and things–nitroglycerin, I
knew how to make that, a destructive little bugger I was), but I had no idea how to
make drugs or anything, or any kind of organic stuff.

Luckily, he was about to meet someone who did.

[Anyway] one thing led to another and I had this little spoon and I thought I'd
better go and weigh [the speed] and figure out what it is. So I went wandering
around [the University of California campus at Berkeley] and I went into a
laboratory where I met this nice lady, and I asked her if I could use the scales
there and she said sure. That woman turned out to be Melissa, who was one of the
people who eventually became a partner of mine and helped me with all of the
acid we cooked up in those days.

Other sources say that Owsley was introduced to Melissa Cargill, 24-year-old
“cute little honeybee with tender intellectual eyes” by a former girlfriend, Susan
Cowper, but either way he soon made a dazzling impression upon her, and “in
three days flat he pried her away from a boyfriend who smoked a pipe and wore
tweed jackets with leather elbow patches and changed her mind about going on
in grad school,” said Charles Perry.
For Cargill’s term practical project Owsley persuaded her to make 100 grams of
methedrine in the safety of the Berkeley campus lab. As he confided in his last
EGA lecture:

So I get all the stuff together that it said to make the speed and I said, let's try this
and see if it works. And pretty soon we had the stuff spread out on the counters, and

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one of the teaching assistants wandered in we just said we were working on a

synthesis and he said oh, okay. It was all kind of funny.

It [later] turned out that the gear that she needed to work with acid was not cheap.
In fact a little glass bottle cost five or six hundred bucks. And I thought, Holy Cow!
So I had to do something. The speed was easy and I didn't know anything about it,
nobody did. No one considered it particularly bad and it was just a little scene that
used it. And I learned pretty quickly that it made you pretty crazy as a jitterbug and
maybe it wasn't such a good thing to do.
So as soon as I could get the gear and materials and figure out how to buy it and all
that and how to do the whole thing, the acid thing, I left [the speed] all behind. I
don't deny that I did it because that was my bootstrap and sometimes you have to
do things to facilitate other things. As long as you do something like that with
integrity and honor and you can work on it. And if it's not good you stop doing it,
which I did, y'know.

The first methedrine project was a great success and with Owsley booted from
the Brown Shoe, he and Cargill found a new lab to work out of in the bathroom of
1647 Virginia Street on the corner of McGee, near the UC campus–the ‘Green
Factory’. As Barry Miles recounted in Hippie, “Berkeley was awash with speed
and Owsley was responsible for much of it.” That may be not be an exaggeration,
although Owsley himself remembers it as being “just a little scene that used it.”
Nonetheless, it made enough serious money–tens of thousands of dollars–to set
up the lab, pay for the glassware and base materials–and hire lawyers in case of
a bust.

Which is lucky, because on Feburary 25, 1965, while Owsley was out of town,
police agents descended on the factory and seized all the glassware, lab
equipment and chemical materials they believed to be methedrine. In The
Brotherhood of Eternal Love by Stewart Tendler and David May, the authors
claim the chemicals seized were precursors to methedrine and that the finished
product was in fact in the boot of Owsley’s beloved red MGFT, which wasn’t
present at the time of the raid.

In conversation with Owsley himself, he paints a different picture: “The [police]

raided me because some moronic kid was staying in my apartment and he sold
some speed out the front door to an agent. So they came back looking for me
and they found a little laboratory. I was in the process of figuring out the acid
process so there was no speed there. So they took all my stuff anyway and then
arrogantly said fuck you. And I said no, you can't do that.”

Owsley refused to lay down to the establishment power trip, and indeed, seemed
to take great delight in upsetting convention. Charles Perry, in his book The
Haight Ashbury: A History, describes his court appearance, saying Owsley first
“showed up in denim trousers and jacket; at the next he wore a sharp Italian suit.

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He broadcast dangerous, edgy resentment rather than decent fear.” One reason
he wasn’t worried was that he had hired the best lawyer his now considerable
resources could buy–Arthur Harris, also the deputy mayor of Berkeley, who
immediately got the case thrown out of court. “[We] forced them in court to
furnish us with a sample, which we submitted to an independent laboratory that
proved them wrong, leading to the dismissal of all charges," Owsley told Rolling
Stone magazine.
But it didn’t stop there, as he confided to me in 2009: “They told me to get a court
order and so in less than a week I was back with a court order that named that
officer and named the state. I told them they had to give back everything: all the
glassware and all the chemicals. The court said to me that these [chemicals]
were poisons and I said to them so what? Lots of things are poision. Draino's
poison. And I picked up my stuff and walked out.”  
Astoundingly, audaciously, Owsley had sued the state and won, and with his lab
equipment and growing legend in hand, he simply packed up shop and
disappeared. He went back to Los Angeles and set up the Bear Research Group
at 2205 Lafler Road, overlooking the campus of California State College, the
legal front through which he would launch his consciousness jihad on the world.
The first hurdle was that “there pretty much wasn’t any [lysergic acid
monohydrate, the base material to create LSD] floating around,” he told Eisner.
“It was hard to get. You couldn’t just walk into a chemical store and buy it.
Organic houses didn’t carry it much. It was expensive as chemicals went, and
unstable, and they often wanted to know exactly who you were before they would
sell you any organic chemicals–especially those that were pharmaceutically
active. You had to present a really good front in order to get them to accept you.
And the average individual in possession of lysergic acid monohydrate had not
much hope in hell of producing any LSD from it, because the reagents are so
reactive that the slightest mistake and you produce nothing but brown goo.”

In The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, Tom Wolfe says that Owsley ordered 800
grams of pure lysergic monohydrate from two separate companies, Cyclo
Chemical and the International Chemical and Nuclear Corp. Jay Stevens quotes
that Owsley signed “affidavits to the effect that the chemicals would be used for
research purposes only.” He paid $20,000 upfront, in cash–no questions asked,
because his charisma, intelligence, and natural flair for command satisfied all
parties. “I dealt with everybody–I could call and order...crazy stuff... I could get
large quantities of chemicals and things in the mail because I knew what to say
and how to say it.. No one ever turned me in for anything.”

Charles Perry remembers Owsley’s air of command well. “One day in 1966,” he
wrote in Rolling Stone, “he showed me a letter from the president of Cyclo
explaining that this would have to be his last shipment of lysergic acid because of
a recent federal law. I was amused to see that the president's name was Milan

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Panic. A couple of years ago, I realized that was the same Milan Panic who later
became the president of Serbia.”

In conversation with Eisner in 1998, however, Owsley claimed that the actual
amount of base material may have been less than originally thought. “You could
[get lysergic monohydrate] if you had connections,” he said. “It wasn’t all that
easy to get. I was able to obtain some–sixty grams from a well-known chemical
firm–and then I found a better connection, who was ordering it from Farmitalia.
He was changing the bottle so I wouldn’t know where it came from. I bought 400
grams from him. He was actually pretending he made it! I guess he took me for a
fool, or something, but he did sell me the material, and it was the genuine article.”
With satisfactory base materials at hand, the alchemist lit out on his first LSD
expedition, backed up, one must always remember, by his girlfriend Cargill, who
was the legitimate chemistry major and who had traveled with him to Los
Angeles and the next stage of their drug making career. They were the Bonnie
and Clyde of early psychedelia, and Cargill was to play a crucial role both in the
lab and in Owlsey’s personal life, by his alchemical side in all operations until
LSD finally became illegal in California on Oct 6, 1966 (the day of the “Beast”, the
hippies called it).

As Owsley said to Eisner and repeated many times in his public talks:

There’s no more chemistry to making LSD than there is to baking a bloody cake.
You just have to know how to do it, what parts to use, what temperature to set the
oven, etc. Most of it is published, and that which isn’t published is available to an
investigative mind. It helps to be smart; if you’re bright and you pick up on things
and pay attention, you can pretty soon figure out what was left out of the
published account.
I’m not a chemist, I never pretended to be a chemist. I’m an artist. [A chemist] is
synthesizing this compound in order to prove it’s structure, or to provide a means
of manufacturing it other than extracting it from a plant. A chemist is a highly
skilled person. I don’t have any of those skills. What I did is like following a
recipe. The correct and accepted term for those who make the entheogens is
‘cook.’ I like to think of it as a sort of Gourmet Chef, master of Fine Mental
Cuisine.

Owsley was seldom self-deprecating, and while making LSD was in some sense
an act requiring simple adherence to a formula, he quickly saw the essence lay in
securing the purity of the material all the way through to it’s alchemical
transformation, and he grokked that the way to do that was to have a pure intent
himself. “I always tried to do it as well as my ability would allow,” he told Eisner,
and his unswerving will allowed for a very pure result, indeed. This was an occult

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act of creation, Owsley believed, in which every thought and emotion imprinted
on the subtlest levels of vibration to affect the material itself.

To really understand Owsley’s approach to alchemy–and life in general–one

must remember that one of his formative influences in his early twenties was The
Kybalion, a hermetic text published first in 1908 that purported to hold mystic
secrets of the universe. Owsley was introduced to the book by his lifelong friend
Bob Thomas, and he not only took these secrets to heart, they deeply affected
him and the way he viewed himself in the universe, and the type of energies he
wanted to manifest–only of the highest vibration.

The Kybalion taught him the perfect "context [to] all the things I [later]
experienced on acid,” Owsley told Robert Greenfield. “The universe is a creation
entirely within a being that is outside time and space, and dreaming what we are.
Everything is connected, because it's all being created by this one
consciousness. And we are tiny reflections of the mind that is creating the
universe. That's what alchemy says."

In Conversations with the Dead, Owsley said, “The practicioners of alchemy had
[the belief] that they could understand the universe by manipulating the physical
things, which then became chemistry and physics and so forth; that, by
understanding understanding the rules by which the universe was put together,
they could extrapolate these rules into the unseen universe and into other
things.”

As above, so below. The micro and the macro, Implicate and Explicate the
quantum priests would call it now, ideas which permeated so much of Owsley’s
worldview and the work he created. The Kybalion held seven truths in all, which it
named “principles”. According to Wikipedia, they are the:

1. Principle of Mentalism: embodies the truth that "All is Mind." 2. Principle of

Correspondence: embodies the idea that there is always a correspondence
between the laws of phenomena of the various "planes" of being and life. As above,
so below; as below, so above. 3. Principle of Vibration: embodies the idea that
motion is manifest in everything in the universe, that nothing rests, and everything
moves, vibrates, and circles … Matter, Energy, Mind, and even Spirit, are the result
of only different "vibrations". 4. Principle of Polarity: embodies the idea that
everything is dual, everything has two poles, and everything has its opposite. 5.
Principle of Rhythm: embodies the idea that in everything there is manifested a
measured motion, a to and fro, a flow and inflow, a swing backward and forward, a
pendulum-like movement. 6. Principle of Cause and Effect: explains that there is a
cause for every effect, and an effect for every cause. It also states that there is no
such thing as chance. 7. Principle of Gender: The Principle of Gender embodies
the idea that gender is manifested in everything. The authors state that this does not
relate explicitly to the commonly understood notion of sex, but rather "... to beget; to
procreate, to generate, to create, or to produce..."

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"[Alchemy] was never about transforming substances,” Owsley said in his 2007
Rolling Stone interview. “Those were all allegories. The lead and the gold is the
lead of the primitive nature into the gold of the enlightened man. Alchemy didn't
talk about lead into gold until it had to deal with the church in the early Middle
Ages." To Owsley the act of making LSD was an alchemical miracle that would
open the soul.

As well as his magical understandings from the Kybalion, history can also thank
the tempering influence of the woman behind the man when it came to the most
renowned acid of the era. As Owsley told David Gans:

It was very funny because the lady I was with it those days [Melissa] was quite
direct about everything. And when we would get high–and this was long before I
met the Dead, right, and whenever we would get high and things would start
getting weird, she would insist on dealing with them as though they were real–not
a hallucination, not something that the drug was doing, “this is reality”–and she
would force me to deal with it.

So I never got into that space at all that a lot of people get into where they say,
‘oh, its the drug thats doing this. This is a hallucination. This is a non-real effect
which is being produced by a chemical which is in my brain’. I had to deal with it
as if this was the everyday, concrete absolute reality now–deal with it, right? And
that was interesting, because it’s different that way, see? You have a whole
different set. It’s like the difference between driving a car in a video game or
getting in a car, and she wouldn't let me drive the video-game car. Deal with it!
On the street! Now!

Owsley received his first shipment of lysergic monohydrate on March 30, 1965,
and by early May the finished product was on the street, around the same time
as the “free speech speech rap” according to Jim Lofflan, aka Travis T. Hip, in an
interview on LSD and the countercuture on [Link]. It was “the night of the
big rally when they had 10,000 people in the square in the afternoon, that was
the night that he first quality quantity of LSD produced in this country from
Owsley Stanley arrived in quart jars in Berkeley, California. Neal Cassady and
several other people were in town that evening…”

Owsley returned to Berkeley and the Brown Shoe in early May, where he showed
his astonished ex-housemates his personal LSD stash, which must have been
considerable. “I made this acid–and there's no such thing as a little acid. You
make the smallest batch that you can and it's like, 15 grams. If you do it once you
get 15 grams out and 15 x 3600 makes 300 microgram tablets which are like four

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times the [average] dose you can buy today–if you can find somebody to sell it to
you,” he said in 2009.

It’s hard to say the actual ballpark figure as either by accident or design,
Owsley’s head for numbers and other details changed over the years. Back in
1998 he told Bruce Eisner that from that initial batch of lysergic monohydrate,
“the published synthesis worked with about seven and a half grams of material.
Seven and a half grams of starting material carefully manipulated produces
nearly seven and a half grams of final product. That’s about a 67% yield, which is
a very, very good yield for a synthetic peptide process–especially as sensitive
and unstable as the lysergic acid compounds are. So seven and a half grams of
material is a supply for a big mob of people–a massive amount, at the dosage we
chose, nearly thirty thousand trips!”
Whatever the number, it wasn’t the quantity, it was the quality, of course, that
made all the difference. Charles Perry describes it as “not just any acid but the
strongest LSD around. It came in “funny-looking vitamin capsules that were
slightly deformed from having been dosed with LSD out of an eyedropper.” Perry
recalls the experience as “devestatingly strong in an almost heavy-handed way
that recalled Owsley’s own insistent manner.” When he gave his feedback the
next day, Owsley simply said “Oh, hey. Those first ones were too
heavy. You only should have taken half.”
 
Owsley’s acid was heavy indeed, even for the 60s. In many ways his decision to
high-dose was causally responsible for much of the far-out-ness of the 60s
psychedelic scene and the waves of change it engendered. “We used to dose it
out to about 3600 doses to a gram, which was a little over 300 micrograms per
hit …” he told Bruce Eisner. “The dosage was perhaps the biggest mistake we
made.”

It seemed to be a fair call Owsley said in 2009, “because after all, Albert
Hofmann [the chemist who ‘discovered’ LSD] had taken 250 micrograms. We
had heard that light destroys [the acid] and all that, so we thought we should put
in a little extra 10%, which is 25 micrograms, and so we put an extra little bit in to
accommodate any variations. And so what we ended up with was instead of
2500, 250 microgram does, we ended up with 3600 doses that were supposedly
275 micrograms but were probably 300 mcs or more. And that was what we got
for a gram: 3600, not 4,000, and we ran with it.” In comparison the East Coast
Leary-Harvard intelligensia were reportedly using 100 mcgs and up per dose,
and the tablets that Sandoz made and distrbuted at the time were 25 mcgs, while
the vials were 100 mcgs.

“The strength of the dosage was far too high,” Owsley told Eisner. “And after we
got out of doing it, and other people got involved, dosages dropped. They
dropped to a point where they hung at 80-100 mcg. This does not cause a
cosmic experience for the person taking it. The person can remain quite
functional. If you wanted to take two or three of the current doses, then you

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would definitely would get into the same cosmic areas that we did.

“I was so upset when I got into the underground drug scene with the twenty gram
ounce, you know, and the 500 mg. spoon, and things like that, that I thought,
‘Jesus, no one who gets one of these tabs is going to get shorted.’ So we figured
250 mcg, with a possible plus or minus 5% tabbing error–so we put an extra 10%
in there. And then we decided that we wanted to cover for any possible
deterioration from exposure to light, so we put another 10% in there, and wound
up with over 300 mcg. It was sort of like rocket fuel. It was a mistake. I’ll freely
admit to that.”

Robert Forte, editor of the seminal book, Entheogens and the Future of Religion,
claims that the two premier acid chemists–Owsley and Hofmann–met sometime
in the late 60s or 70s. "Albert told me a funny story about one day when Owsley
dropped in on him, uninvited. Albert didn't know who he was–some motorcycle
gang-looking guy just shows up at his sort of remote home outside of Basel one
summer afternoon, and starts talking chemistry with him on his patio,
occasionally reaching into his backpack to get a steak which he tossed on the
grill, singeing ever so slightly and devouring–never offering any to Albert.... ‘He
knew his chemisty,’ said Albert...."

For all his brilliant mind, Owsley was invariably facing a high learning curve, not
just making the most potent, legal mind-altering chemical on the planet, but
disseminating it to the masses using the grassroots networks springing up
around San Francisco as his starting point. He was bound to make a few
mistakes, which is this line of business would prove to be costly. And the first one
was his anonymity.

“It was a mistake that my name was attached to it,” he told me in 2009. “I gave
the first batch to a musician friend of mine and he told everyone who made it. I
asked [him] why the fuck he did that... It wasn't illegal at the time but I still didn't
want my name attached to it because I knew that this stuff was so powerful, so
strange and so weird that it wouldn't stay legal for long.”
Owsley’s acid exploded upon the folk-music and proto-counterculture scene of
the Bay Area like a bolt from the blue, sparking all kinds of synergistic
transformations. Charles Perry recalls it flooding the “coffeehouses and all of San
Francisco’s hip neighborhoods,” and through them the artists, musicians, lovers
and dreamers of a generation. Furthermore, Perry says, “[Owsley’s] personal
style–maverick, purist, aggressive–started having an impact on the psychedelic
scene.
“When his strong, consistent LSD flooded the market, it had the effect of a
munitions factory opening at Valley Forge. Not only did it get a lot of people high,
it encouraged the idea of big projects. It gave a big shot in the arm to the
boldness, the public outrageousness, that distinguished San Francisco
acidheads from the yoga-studying, indoor-tripping acid[heads] in other parts of
the country.”

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The epicenter of the LSD revolution had to be the Haight-Ashbury district, where
cheap rents in the old, weatherboard Victorian houses nurtured an influx of artists
and students and those of an experimental, anti-establishment ilk. This new
generation of “bohemian-minded kids … were very interested in these mind
drugs,” Perry said in his 1982 Rolling Stone article. “They were also interested in
such traditional bohemian subjects as art, psychology, pacifism, exotic religions
and anything else that stretched the limits of understanding.” What a perfect
storm for a consciousness revolution.

Just as the mainstream press had coined the term ‘beatniks’ a decade earlier,
the San Francisco Examiner ran a piece on September 5, 1965 entitled: ‘A New
Haven for Beatniks’ that reported on the Haight-Ashbury, referring to the
denizens as ‘hippies’, as they called themselves (junior Hipsters), and the name
stuck.

Hippies were appearing everywhere across San Francisco and the Bay Area,
and in June a troupe of them moved to Virgina City, Nevada and opened a
hippie-Old-West-saloon, the Red Dog, that nurtured the new rock’n’roll music
with bands like the Charlatans–and lots of Owsley’s acid. With tens of thousands
of doses in just that first batch, much of it given away as free samples percolating
through the proto-counterculture in the summer of 1965, strange things were
afoot, and the hippies were leading the way.

Owsley nurtured the growing counterculture with the money his alchemical
pursuits provided and became the defacto reigning ‘Acid King’. Over the next
eighteen months or so as the burgeoning hippie culture peaked, Owsley would
also be called “the unofficial mayor” of the Haight, giving money to the support
the Oracle, the hippie newspaper that used colored inks to fulfil their vision of a
‘rainbow paper’; he donated to the Diggers, an anarchist collective who ran free
daily soup kitchens in the Panhandle for the homeless and hungry; and he had
his finger in a dozen other projects that directly stimulated the creative economy
of the movement.

‘Owsley’ soon became a name synonymous with the consciousness-raising of

the new counterculture. “My name is a household word in London and New
York,” he told Charles Perry.

Owsley’s LSD that was the real game changer, and the game it changed was the
culture. But why there, then? Since its creation in 1943, LSD had wound on a
serendipitous journey from the lab to the doctors, the intelligentsia and other
cultured elites, the military, the artists and now to the street, building like a
charge that needed to be released.

All was going according to plan–but whose?

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ENTHEOGENESIS AUSTRALIS (EGA)

BUSH CONFERENCE,
OUTSIDE SWANPOOL, VICTORIA,
SUNDAY NOV 8TH, 2009

The sun was setting on the Sunday night as Bear came to the stage under the
main dome to deliver his second lecture of the program, on the nature of
psychedelics and his experiences with them.
Bear liked being out amongst the tribe, and had been listening in on the day’s
lectures and jousting with stray hippies that engaged him all afternoon. I caught
him backstage on numerous occasions cussing out the soundmen about how
they had hooked up the sound gear.
“What are you doing–that shouldn’t be hooked up that way! I told you that
yesterday, why didn’t you listen to me? Why doesn’t anybody listen to me? You
laid the speakers down flat–I told you yesterday if you do that it will wipe out the
EQ… Why did you do that? Why weren’t you listening to me?!” He was a cranky
old man and the headline speaker, growling at the grandchildren, the cubs–and
loving every minute of it.
As hundreds of hippies poured in and settled on the floor and molded into
random beanbags, a buzzing, bubbly energy connected them all. As I scanned
my eyes across the gathering, full of friends and tribe-mates from over a decade
of ‘doof’ outdoor electronic trance parties and entheogenic conferences, I
wondered just how many were really aware of their own psychedelic lineage,
descended from the Acid Tests via Goa and the waves of change that the LSD
movement caused, parallelled and synergised in the zeitgeist of the time?
It’s all too easy from the vantage point of 50 years later to miss the forest for the
trees, to remember the 60s as a time of great social and cultural change, but
forget some of the foundational catalysts that caused it. And while ultimately LSD
surged into the cultural rockbed, the fact that it did so at the time it did is
important, even serendipitous, as Bear was about to expound.

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But for now, the basics: The Cold War that gripped the world after WWII
manifested itself in all aspects of culture, from the fear of nuclear bombs and the
power games of nation states that brought them to the brink again and again.
LSD was no different–after its discovery in 1943 the OSS, the precursors to the
post-war CIA, soon became aware of it (the chemical formula was published in
scientific journals in 1947) and like the power of the atom, the power of the
molecule was seen as a weapon.

So if the 50s was the era of the bomb, then LSD also gave off its fair share of
psychic fallout. Underground tests on volunteers by the British and American
military were common, and the powers of the time reported that if LSD could be
fired in a rocket and released over the Soviet Union "it could at a stroke put the
entire Red Army out of action". There were fears–never confirmed but great to
buoy the defence budgets–that the ergot fungus proliferated in Russia and that
the Soviets were hoarding their supplies.

According to Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, authors of Acid Dreams: The
Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond, there was
over a decade of legal and illegal testing of LSD by the CIA on it's own men, from
1953-1966, when they dosed unsuspecting doctors and servicemen to see if the
chemical would make an efficient brainwashing mechanism. Lee examined over
20,000 pages of Freedom of Information (FOI) material about the CIA-LSD
connection, and revealed that the CIA initiated their first tests of LSD in 1951
under the umbrella of Project ARTICHOKE. They had no qualms about testing it
on unwitting civilians, as Lee relates: “the [ARTICHOKE] report [dated Oct 21,
1951] concluded by recommending that LSD be critically tested "under threat
conditions beyond the scope of civilian experimentation."
In 2009 investigative journalist Hank Albarelli used the FOI system to find a CIA
document labeled: “Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and [Link] Files. SO Span/France
Operation file, inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin–tell him to see to it
that these are buried." Pont-Saint-Esprit was the small French village that
suffered an outbreak of suspected ergot rye poisoning on 16 August 1951, where
Time magazine described: "Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed
wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their
bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead."
Mass hallucinations broke out across the town, causing citizens to jump out of
windows, scream through the streets and be chained to beds whilst the fevered
dreams of terrifying beasts and fire passed. The New York Times later reported
that “more than 300 people [were] afflicted, [with] 7 to 10 dead, 46 detained in
asylums, and many unable ever to hold jobs or lead normal lives.”
F. Olson was Frank Olson, a CIA scientist involved in early LSD research, which
lead Arabelli to believe that the CIA dosed the small village with LSD as part of
its expanding field operations with the chemical. A recent exhumation of the body
of Dr. Frank Olson (who was thought to have jumped from a hotel window in

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1953 whilst high on CIA-dosed LSD) has shown that he was in fact, murdered.
Olson's son hypothesised that Dr. Olson, who was involved in clandestine
American chemical warfare testing, had wanted out and was silenced.
Another CIA document from 1954 obtained under FOI legislation by Arabelli
recounts a CIA agent conversing with a member of Sandoz Laboratories–only a
few hundred kilometers from the French village–who confessed: "The Pont-Saint-
Esprit 'secret' is that it was not the bread at all... It was not grain ergot." The
agent furthermore said it “was not ‘at all’ caused by mold but by diethylamide, the
D in LSD.” Sandoz was, of course, supplying both the U.S. Army and CIA with
LSD at this time.
Now if the CIA were willing to do this to civilians outside America, they were soon
to experiment in the homeland itself, on a scale previously unimaginable.
ARTICHOKE gave way to Operation MK-ULTRA, which was authorized by the
newly appointed CIA director Allen Dulles on April 13, 1953 but was proposed by
Richard Helms, a high-ranking member of the ‘Clandestine Services’ department
(and later CIA director from 1966 to 1973). The paper trail for over 150 CIA-
funded MK-ULTRA ‘research projects’ into mind control, psychoactive drugs and
and “methodologies to manipulate individual mental states and alter brain
functions” was destroyed in 1972 under direct order from Helms.
“The central irony of LSD is that it has been used both as a weapon and a
sacrament, a mind control drug and a mind-expanding chemical,” Martin Lee
says. “Each of these possibilities generated a unique history: a covert history, on
the one hand, rooted in CIA and military experimentation with hallucinogens, and
a grassroots history of the drug counterculture that exploded into prominence in
the 1960s. At key points the two histories converge and overlap, forming an
interface between the ClA's secret drug programs and the rise and fall of the
psychedelic movement.”

For instance: Al Hubbard (nicknamed “Captain Trips”, the “Johnny Appleseed” of

LSD) was a “rum-drinking, snake-oil-fundamentalist-Bible Belt salesman … a
legendary behind-the-scenes operator” who had been a high-level OSS officer a
generation before, and retained connections to the FBI and other government
agencies (although he claimed the CIA were "lousy deceivers, sons of the devils
themselves"). He indoctrinated an estimated 6,000 people to LSD before it was
effectively banned in 1966, sharing the sacrament with a prominent Monsignor of
the Catholic Church in North America, plumbing the roots of alcoholism with AA
founder Bill Wilson, and gatecrashing the pearly gates with Aldous Huxley. It was
through Hubbard (who was rumoured to have the biggest supply of LSD in the
world after Sandoz themselves) that many of the Beverly Hills psychiatrists
turned on actors Cary Grant, James Coburn, Jack Nicholson, novelist Anais Nin,
and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, amongst hundreds of others.

The CIA’s front companies and “cutouts” included the Society for the Study of
Human Ecology and the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, which funded medical

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research by extending grants for LSD research. The Geschickter Fund for
Medical Research, another CIA-extension, had partially paid for Gordon Wasson,
the Vice President of J.P. Morgan’s unusual expedition to the highlands of
Huautla de Jimenez, in the State of Oaxaca, Mexico, where he first encountered
psilocybin mushrooms under the watchful eye of curandera Maria Sabina in
1955.

Similarly, the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park was a federally funded research
program that in 1960 paid a budding young novelist named Ken Kesey to
examine the effects of psychotomimetic drugs including LSD, mescaline, Ditran
and more. Kesey went on to write the breakthrough novel One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest based on his experiences at the hospital when he was later
employed there as a night attendant in the psychiatric ward, sometimes tripping
on LSD while he leaned on his mop. Helping himself to supplies of LSD he found
at the hospital, he shared the drug with his bohemian friends on Perry Lane,
where many Stanford college students resided. His notorious venison chili–dosed
with LSD was a hit at his psychedelic dinner parties there, and Kesey himself
was instrumental in turning on the West Coast scene with his band of Merry
Pranksters and the Acid Tests a few years later.

There is a cause and effect for everything, and while the CIA might not have
directly planned the runaway excess of LSD revolution, they certainly
researched, funded and facilitated the larger social uptake of psychedelics to
explore the results. The public record shows that the CIA’s covert drugs
programs also presaged and laid the path for the later street appearance of these
drugs. As Martin Lee writes, “As it turns out, nearly every drug that appeared on
the black market during the 1960s—marijuana, cocaine, heroin, PCP,
amylnitrate, mushrooms, DMT, barbiturates, laughing gas, speed, and many
others—had previously been scrutinized, tested, and in some cases refined by
CIA and army scientists.”

Statistically then, out of the thousands of people dosed in the CIA, someone had
to have had a spiritual experience. And did that person facilitate and allow LSD
use to permeate into the industrial machine and through it on to the culture at
large? Did those who trip simply rely on the ‘national defense’ strategy, whilst
grokking the cosmic play at work? Martin Lee quotes in Acid Dreams that “there
were times when CIA agents found themselves propelled into a visionary world
and they were deeply moved by the experience. One MK-ULTRA veteran wept in
front of his colleagues at the end of his first trip. ‘I didn't want to leave it,’ he
explained. ‘I felt I would be going back to a place where I wouldn't be able to hold
on to this kind of beauty.’ His colleagues assumed he was having a bad trip and
wrote a report stating that the drug had made him psychotic.”
 
Was the CIA out to elevate the consciousness of America, or control it? Ted
Kennedy, the Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific
Research unsuccessfully tried to find out in congressional hearings on MK-
ULTRA in 1977. At the same time Allen Ginsberg wondered what that would

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mean to the hippies and the culture leaders than championed it back in the day:
"Am I, Allen Ginsberg, the product of one of the ClA's lamentable, ill-advised, or
triumphantly successful experiments in mind control?" he asked at the 1977
psychedelic conference, ‘LSD: A Generation Later.’ Could the CIA, “by conscious
plan or inadvertent Pandora's Box, let loose the whole LSD Fad on the U.S. & the
World?" Actually, yes. With no street availability, Ginsberg’s virgin trip with LSD
was at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, in 1959. One of the
researchers involved in that institution was Dr. Charles Savage, who had been
running hallucinogenic drug experiments for the US Navy in the early 1950s.

Tim Leary quipped that: "It [the LSD revolution] was no accident. It was all
planned and scripted by the Central Intelligence, and I'm all in favor of Central
Intelligence."

Leary hits on a foundational tenet that Owsley was to expound upon at length–
namely, that higher forces were at work guiding the dissemination of LSD itself
and the unitary state of mind that it engendered. There is ample documentation
regarding individuals like Hubbard, Hofmann, Owsley [Link] and organizations like
the CIA’s involvement with LSD as it traveled out from the labs and the medical
establishment to the streets and into the minds of a generation. But at some
stage a tipping point was reached and whatever agendas may have been
involved quickly became overshadowed by the larger cultural metastasis.

The CIA managed the first wave of LSD like a boom and a bust in the economic
cycle–funding and seeding it, and then curtailing it when their experiments failed
to brainwash recipients, noting that sometimes dosing increased their psychic
tenacity to not co-operate.
And whether they were originally aware of it or not, the LSD revolution would go
on to spawn a slew of breakthroughs that helped American business. It birthed a
creativity revolution that got the USA ahead in the ideas stakes, for one thing. For
instance: there are reports of key figures in the information age that spawned the
personal computer revolution using LSD as a creativity drug. As Wired magazine
was to report from Albert Hofmann’s 100th birthday symposium in 2006:

The gathering included a discussion of how early computer pioneers used LSD for
inspiration. Douglas Englebart, the inventor of the mouse, Myron Stolaroff, a
former Ampex engineer and LSD researcher who was attending the symposium,
and Apple-cofounder Steve Jobs were among them. In the 2005 book What the
Dormouse Said, New York Times reporter John Markoff quotes Jobs describing
his LSD experience as "one of the two or three most important things he has done
in his life." Or as one lecture topic had it–‘From Open Mind to Open Source'.

Jaron Lanier, one of the pioneers of the late 1980s virtual reality industry says:
“almost to a person, the founders of the [personal] computer industry were

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psychedelic style hippies … Within the computer science community there's a

very strong connection with the 60s psychedelic tradition, absolutely no question
about it.” And it didn’t stop in the 60s: Bob Jesse, once VP of Business
Development at Oracle, once the third largest software company in the world
after Microsoft, left the company to chair the Council on Spiritual Practices, a
non-profit NGO that has advocated the responsible use of entheogens for
religious purposes.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. As LSD activated the mind and the spirit,
parallel social movements that birthed the ecology, civil rights, anti-war, back-to-
the-earth and many other modalities all sprang forth like Athena from the brow of
Zeus. In short, the waves of change that were slowly anchored and disseminated
from the acid revolution and all those it tested, literally made the bedrock of the
social networks and the cultural milieu that we find in the 21st century. Was it the
times, or the LSD, or the LSD and the times synergizing together? And why then,
since LSD had been percolating through the intelligentsia since its birth during
the dark days of WWII? Just what level of Central Intelligence was running the
show, anyway?

Could IT be working behind the scenes even now, birthing social networks and
Google, non-linear data flows of information linking us togther in mesh networks
beyond the physical, data tribes webbed by silicon, all of it that other great
alchemical miracle: the internet? In his book, Mycelium Running, author Paul
Stamens makes direct allusion between the mushroom mycelium network, the
dense network of information sharing systems that form the internet, and the
neuron networks in the brain. All seem to be forms of nature expressing herself
on different levels, or as Stamens says: “I believe that the mycelium operates at
a level of complexity that exceeds the computational powers of our most
advanced supercomputers. I see the mycelium as the Earth’s natural Internet, a
consciousness with which we might be able to communicate.”

If anyone could shed light on the matter, it was going to be Owsley. Hyper-
intelligent, cantankerous, a living relic of the first wave, the Alchemist to the
hippie generation.

He’s settled in his chair now with the mic in hand as a silence descends on the
crowd. An electric energy runs through us all as we open to the master…

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[EGA_Bear_11_08_09] TALK TWO: Psychedelics

“People don’t understand the powers that are built into their own nervous system.
People don’t use it. Somebody said ‘hey you use only ten percent of your brain’,
well, they’re not wrong, I’ll tell you. But how do you get at the other 90%? Now
that’s where these things come from… I thought, well, peyote and psychedelics–
they mostly come from plants, even LSD is like a lot of things you find in plants,
although a little bit different; we’ll probably find [LSD] one day in some obscure
plant…”
The night was early but it had been a long day out of his usual routines and
comfort zones, and Bear was showing signs of irritability. The soundmen and
technical crew were the ones who were feeling the rough side of his tongue when
someone swiveled a stage light around and shone it on him, and he started
freaking out:
“Please don’t shine that light in my face, I asked you not to…” he said in that
strange, wound-up, nasally voice of his, channeled through his one remaining
vocal cord. “Take it away… do not point that thing at me now, now I’m telling
you… Can you understand I don’t want to be lit up like a balloon… People will …
think I want to be a celebrity and want my autograph or something… I’m just
another person being like you..”
Bear’s second talk was patchy, so is complemented here with his words to earlier
commentators on the subject of psychedelics and their chemical origins. In
conversation with Bruce Eisner, Bear elucidated more on this important
cornerstone of his psychedelic theory:

Ergot contains many natural, highly psychedelic alkaloids. Iso-ergine is one of

them, hydroxy-methyl-lysergamide is another one, and in fact, is considered nearly
identical to LSD in effect. Albert Hofmann told me so himself. They believe that it
was this derivative contained in extracts of [Link] that was used in the
Eleusian Mysteries.

I believe that they will find a plant which contains the exact diethylamide of
lysergic acid in natural form. In alkaline alcoholic medium the isomers of the
amines of lysergic acid will reach an equilibrium. This equilibrium will be a certain
per centage of the iso compound, and a certain per centage of the normal
compound. Of all the compounds listed experimentally by Hoffman, LSD has the
highest ratio of active to inactive isomers in the equilibrated mixture, it runs 88-12.
Of all the compounds, and it lists about 20 of them, it has the highest ratio of active

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to inactive. This means that nature favours the active form of LSD over the inactive
by a considerable margin.
With a planet that has literally hundreds of thousands of species of animals and
plants yet to be discovered, you cannot definitively say that this compound does not
naturally occur. I mean, how long ago was it that they thought that ergot alkaloids
only existed in various forms of fungus? When they discovered them in morning
glory seeds, people thought there’s got to be contamination in the laboratory,
there’s something wrong here. The fact of the matter is that there are probably
hundreds of extremely powerful psychedelic plants that are just not yet known to
modern science.

In all the psychedelic literature it is the scientists that have focused on the
chemicals themselves, and apart from the indigenous cosmovisions that ascribe
a relationship with the spirits in the plants (as with madre ayahuasca in Peru, for
example), there has been little Western appreciation of the reason that nature
produces these substances in significant amounts across uncounted vegetal
carriers. Bear believed that nature secretes psychoactive substances–essentially
as chemical activators for the human species.

We’ve got hormones in our body, we’ve got hormones that develop us as we grow
up. We’ve got sex hormones, there’s emotional hormones, we’ve got all kinds of
hormones. And maybe the [psychedelics] are hormones, but they’re extra-corporal.
They’re planetary hormones, the plants, who interact with us in the mental sphere
that is this biosphere, Gaia or whatever you want to call it. And they know what we
need.
I mean, I’ll tell you something. You tell a cannabis plant what you want and she’ll
give it to you. And old time growers, you can always tell, no matter what strain
they’re growing, you’ll know. Oh, that’s Bob Brown’s weed–I know that. In
California the old growers–you always knew whose strains you got because it
reflected the person who was growing it–because the plant was in his head all the
time. Plants ARE in your head. They have nothing to protect themselves. They’re
in constant union with the manifesting energy that’s creating this wonderful
universe and this beautiful planet that we live on.

Bear told David Gans that “my experiences with plants through psychedelics lead
me to believe … it’s an extension of my alchemical belief. The basic tenet of
alchemy is that the universe is mental. There's a being which is nothing but mind,
pure mind. And all that we experience is a creation of this mind according to the
rules of nature, physics and chemistry and so for attraction and repulsion,
polarity, all these things, it’s still mental. And since everything in the universe is
mental because it is the mentation of the being which is mental, everything has to

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use the same kind of mentality. All consciousness relates, it is the same. So the
plant shouldn't have any trouble being able to communicate mentally with any
other living thing, whether that be a man, a dog, a plant, or anything else,
because all thought has to be of the same nature. It’s all manifested by it.”

Up on the stage at EGA 2009, the spotlight was removed and Bear segued back
into his lecture, picking up the psychedelic thread again:

… [Now] the psychedelics… Actually, they get into your nervous system like a
hormone and they’re causing a kind of development. Now we don’t know because
they’ve made the things illegal; they’ve made people fearful of using them and you
have to hide them, you have to hide yourself, and that warps and distorts the
experience. They’re not getting natural development.
We did experience that [in the 60s] but we didn’t give a shit–for one thing it wasn’t
illegal when I was taking it. It wasn’t illegal in a way that it was probably illegal to
make asprin without a license. What are they going to put you in jail for, a few
millograms of something? The whole thing’s gone nutty. Nutty. Drug laws are
ruining this planet and they’ve destroyed the world’s economy. Look what they’re
doing to our community. Everyone’s afraid to do this, to grow pot, afraid to talk
about it. That’s bullshit. Those are human rights. You can take anything you want.
It’s supposed to be a free society.
A free society is just that–free. But that doesn’t mean you have no responsibilities.
You’re definitely responsible for more. Society has rules and behaviour that have to
be observed–that’s what makes us a group. Otherwise were a mob, or there’s chaos.
I don’t see anything wrong with that–you can’t get drunk and crash into people and
get away with it. Your behaviour–whether you’re drunk or sober, high or not–is
your responsibility. And a responsible member of the community is supposed to do
that. If you can’t handle something, you shouldn’t take it. There’s nothing wrong
with that. If you can’t handle gambling you shouldn’t gamble. If you put poker
machines on every corner, why they’re going to destroy the neighborhood and the
community.
I knew the laws were nonesense when I discovered pot in 1963. There was no pot
in public school in 1953. I was 29 years old before I smoked dope. And I said this
is illegal? Why? I still don’t know. We used to do this weird thing–and this is the
one thing that kinda set the keynote for the ––
Will someone please turn these bloody spotlights away from me and I don’t want to
have to say this again! … I’m gonna get up and walk away, okay. What does it
take? You don’t listen to me. What am I here for? Why’d you bring me here if you
don’t want to listen to me? I’ve lived a long time and I’ve learned a few things.

You guys are just kids–I’m 75 fucking years old, man!

[crowd cheers]

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I’ll tell you something–it don’t get easier, and people listen to you less. You’ve
been there and done that and you know, hey, that’s not a good idea–and so he
laughs at it–what do you know, man?

I wanna share it with you, but I do expect a little respect–so don’t shine the bloody
spotlight in my eyes again. Three times I have to say that there’s something wrong
with that. You’re not listening. Maybe they’re too high. You smoke too much dope
you guys. You’re working, you’re not playing. You can’t be stoned all the time
because then there’s no stone because you’re high and that’s your stone …
So [with psychedelics] I think we’re throwing away something the planet has sent
to help us for many years, and that has developed along with us, and is important.
That’s what these plants are. They don’t turn us into God. They turn us into
something else. It’s another step of some sort in our evolutionary process. The
planet, through the plants and the psychedelic drugs, has given us the planetary
hormone to do that. Nothing else makes sense.
Deer eat cannabis like it was lettuce. [The psychoactive affect] can’t be to protect
it–the resin doesn’t protect the plant from anything, in fact, a lot of animals eat it
because it makes them crazy… A guy named Ronald Segel [a California-based
psycho-pharmacologist] wrote a book about this [Intoxication: The Universal Drive
for Mind-Altering Substances] and every animal that he studied liked to get high.
One way or another they want to change their relationship with the universe and
their experience, to alter their perception. To get stoned one way or another…

The interesting thing about the drive to intoxication is that nature has designed it
so that it is primarily the carnivores that get high, Bear believed. He based his
theory largely on the work of an Indian doctor from 1860 who studied cannabis,
which was at that time a widely-used herb throughout the country. The doctor
found that herbivores like goats, rabbits and sheep were virtually unaffected by
the plant, but the carnivores like cats and dogs were hit hard.
Bear deepened this theory by pointing out that marijuana grown in the wild will
eventually lose its psychoactive effect after a few generations, and that it seems
to be only the plants that are specifically cultivated by man that remain mind-
altering. “The cannabis plant seems to specifically produce its resin to intoxicate
man in a pleasant fashion so that the man is now interested in the plant,” he told
David Gans. “This plant has latched on to producing a substance that is so
pleasant for the man that he will care for the plant, propagate it, etc.

For instance, all of the Mexican stuff, the big sativa plants, they grow really tall,
sixteen feet, twenty feet, and it grows in the same style as the hemp that’s grown
for fibre. Obviously it’s derived from the early hemp plantations established in
Mexico by the Spanish settlers. Because you've got to have hemp: it makes rope, it
makes twine, it makes cloth, your ships have got to have it. So one of the first

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things that any colonial group … in fact, I wouldn't have been surprised if hemp
seeds weren't always carried on ships for that reason. Suppose you got
shipwrecked, well at least you had a chance if you had the hemp seed to grow
yourself some rope. So hemp, at least, was a very early cultivar. And it just went
off into the woods with the Indians and over 400 years or so they've simply selected
it to do what they wanted. And what they wanted was to get very stoned.

So the grass is extremely strong. It’s funny because the nature of the high is such
that if the seeds are allowed to go for several years before they’re planted they
become weaker and weaker and weaker. They'll still grow a plant but you end up
back with a plant that doesn't do anything. They lose the psychedelic thing. They'll
still grow a plant and do everything it’s supposed to do, but it tends to become
hermaphrodite. A hermaphrodite was the original form of the plant … The
separation of male and female is something that man has imposed on it. The
exemplification of the psychedelic properties of the intoxicating resin is something
that man selects for. And the plant knows. The plant is conscious of the man.

And this relationship must also exist between man and the cactus, between man and
the fungus, all the plants which we know, the shamanistic plants with psychedelic
properties. All I believe, do it to get the man high. Not as a protection against
something. Because there’s other things besides man that eat peyote. There’s a lot
of insects that eat them up. There’s lots of things that eat up pot plants. Lots of
things eat up mushrooms–even deadly poisonous mushrooms are eaten quite
frequently by insects and things. So any specific so-called defense seems to be an
illusion.

As Bear said online in 2006, “The truth no vegan can ever accept is that ALL
forms of life, whether plant fungus or animal are conscious. It is just that we
animals are unable to communicate or 'hear' the consciousness of plants. Plants
on the other hand seem quite able to do so with both other plants and animal in
remarkable fashions. There is an orchid that not only looks exactly like a female
bumble bee, but also smells like one, leading the males to attempt to couple with
the blossom and in process getting the two pollen-masses (pollinia) stuck on their
heads. The can't copulate with the flower of course, but then visit another
blossom and deposits the load of pollen in a further vain attempt to mate. Since a
plant cannot see or smell (or can it?), how could this ever have come about?”

If nature could regulate the carnivores with cultivars like cannabis, forming deep
symbiotic relationships, it could do it with psychoatives and entheogens that it
secreted all across the planet, whever humans are found. And if the humans
wouldn’t go back to the garden, that higher intelligence could theoretically bring
the garden to them, en masse, via the laboratory–if it wanted to. If the need was
there. Bear had a theory about that, too, of course, and it was connected to his
ideas on alchemy, consciousness and the alchemical "All is Mind" that pervades
existence.

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In conversation with Tim Leary back in the 60s, as reported in The Politics of
Ecstasy, Bear said:

Oh, man, how beautifully it all fits together. Dig, the first atomic fission occurred in
December 1942 … The Van Allen Belt is a thick blanket of electronic activity
protecting the planet. What is the earth? A core of molten metals covered by a thin
layer of soft, vulnerable, organic tissue. Life nibbling away, nibbling away at the
rock beneath. All life on this planet is a delicate network unified. Each living form
feeding on the others. And being eaten. The Van Allen Belt is the higher
intelligence protecting earth from lethal solar radiation, and it’s in touch with every
form of living intelligence on the earth–vegetable, animal, human.

Now dig. The Supreme Intelligence sees that man has rediscovered atomic energy.
Wow! We gotta stop those cats before they disrupt the whole living network. The
only thing that DNA fears is radiation. That’s why the Van Allen belt is there.
OK, now get this. Four months after the first fission, Hofmann accidentally, ha ha,
resdiscovers LSD, which is now psychoactive … Hofmann first synthesized LSD in
1938 and nothing happens, and then in 1943, three months after atomic energy is
released, he puts his finger on lysergic acid and gets flipped out? What happened?
Did Hofmann suddenly get careless? Or had LSD suddenly been changed into a
psychedelic chemical? Competent chemists just don’t change their handling of
compounds. Hofmann’s techniques are standard.

Now dig. The atomic fission in December 1942 changed the whole system of
energy in this solar system. The higher intelligence decides to make a few simple
changes in the electronic structure of some atoms, and zap! We have LSD, an
incredibly powerful substance that is the exact antidote to atomic energy. People
take LSD and flash! They get the message and start putting things back in harmony
with the great design. Stop war! Wear flowers! Conservation! Turning on people to
LSD is the precise and only way to keep war from blowing up the whole system.

It was an alchemical transformation that satisfied the Kybalion’s principles of

polarity and rhythm. Nature, or the animating intelligence–whether it be from
within or without its all the same, really–regulates the frequencies and if needed
dips into the minds of men to seed the ideas and connections, or so Bear, and
others like writer Aldous Huxley and poet Gerald Heard hypothesized. Heard
went as far as remarking that “LSD was simply God’s way of saving man from
the bomb.”

The case for higher intervention with LSD is part of the psychedelic folklore, but it
does show up some historical discrepencies that make you wonder. It starts, as
all good psychedelic stories start, at the beginning, with the creator. In the lab.
Hofmann and the 25th batch of lysergic acid:

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On the afternoon of April 16, 1943, while preparing derivatives of lysergic

acid I had to leave my lab suddenly. I felt something was happening to
me. Whatever I imagined came into my mind as images. It was a horror
trip and I felt like the end was nigh. I thought that this was the end. But in
the morning I felt re-invigorated, as if new life was entering my body–it
was a wonderful feeling. It was impossible to describe how wonderful this
experience was … I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic
pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.
After some two hours this condition faded away.

– Hofmann, LSD: My Problem Child, 1983.

Hofmann says he had a ‘strange presentiment’ to re-examine this chemical, first

synthesized five years earlier then left on the shelf when animal tests proved
inconclusive. “LSD came to me–I didn’t look for it. LSD wanted to be found, it
wanted to tell me something. If I had worked 100% safely and taken all proper
precautions then we would not be here today. So sometimes it pays not to be
perfect!” Hofmann joked at his 100th birthday symposium in Basel, Switzerland, in
2006.

An essay by John Beresford on the Albert Hofmann Foundation’s website,

clarfifies the matter even further: Hofmann “had what he called a ‘Vorgefühl’. The
usual English word for this is "presentiment”, but the German word suggests
something stronger than the laid-back "presentiment". Something was telling
Hofmann to retrace his steps and perform a new synthesis of the discarded
molecule, LSD-25. It had to be that molecule and not one of the others consigned
to the ‘useless’ pile. Hofmann does not remember what he was doing when the
‘presentiment’ came over him. He won't say if it came in a dream, or if he was in
a state of unusual lucidity.”
Dr David Nichols, chemist and pharmacologist, professor of medicinal chemistry
and molecular pharmacology at Purdue University in Indiana and one of a
handful of modern government-sponsored researchers into serotonin and other
mind altering drugs, seems to agree. At the MindStates IV LSD panel discussion,
held in May, 2003, Nichols said:

On April 16, 1943, when Albert Hofmann accidentally ingested LSD, he ingested
at least … 50 to 75 micrograms … Now, how many people believe that the effects
of a 50-75 microgram dose of LSD would only have lasted two hours? … How
can we formulate a hypothesis consistent with this observation? We need to
consider a few things.
…Even though the pharmacologist at Sandoz was probably a friend of Albert's,
can you imagine this chemist coming down the hall and saying, "You know, I

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made this compound five years ago, out of this whole series, and there's this one
compound, LSD-25, that you said was uninteresting... but you must have missed
something. I just have this 'peculiar presentiment,' this strange hunch that you
missed something.’ You're going to look at Albert and say, ‘You know, really, I'm
an expert in pharmacology Albert. We tested it very well.’

The Germans and the Swiss are very precise chemists, and pharmacologists, and
scientists. There wouldn't have been any question about this being somehow mis-
analyzed the first time.
This is another interesting point. Why the 25th? We know that only the 25th in the
series was active. Any other compound that he made–and I've made many of
them, we've tested many of them–none of the others approach LSD, either in its
sophistication or in its potency. Only the 25th. And this is unusual. In
pharmacology often you have a regular series. If we think of things like DOB, and
DOI, there's a kind of regular progression. They all fit into a kind of subgenus.
And LSD doesn't. We don't call the other members of the series Albert made as
LSD something or other, but if we had LSD-23, 24 and 26, they would all be one-
tenth the activity of LSD-25. Peculiar presentiment indeed!

As I've said, Swiss and German chemists have a reputation–today and back then–
for being absolutely meticulous. If we had gone into Albert's lab at Sandoz in
1943, we would probably have found everything in its place, organized in an
obsessively neat manner. No dirty glassware, no trash on the floor, meticulous.
How in the world did a meticulous Swiss chemist get 50 to 75 micrograms or
more of LSD into his body? We don't know…

The other fact we need to think about is when Albert was a child, he had a
spontaneous mystical experience. Now depending on whether you're a
psychologist or a psychiatrist or whatever, we could say that Albert had a
predisposition to altered states of consciousness.

Indeed, Hofmann revealed in Basel, in 2006 that: "I had my first mind expansion
as a child, but I didn't tell anyone. But it was so beautiful. I never forgot it."
Hofmann spent a lot of time alone, down by the pond or playing around the ruins
of a castle nearby his home in Baden, a small Swiss town. His experiences with
nature were as intense as his relations with people, and sometimes, out there in
the deep woods, he would spontaneously enter into transcendental states of
consciousness. The light would get brighter, richer and deeper; sounds would
intensify as the young boy-mystic felt a one-ness with Creation... “And I
wondered," he said, this hundred-year old man. "Is this the secret that the adults
know, that they don't tell the children?
Hofmann was sensitive to the soul of the world, and he was well placed in the lab
to receive a nudge from on high. Bear went further than Nichols, suggesting that

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nature herself caused LSD-25 to become psychoactive on April 16, 1943, where
previously it was inert.

Now think about that for a minute. If true, and if the War on Drugs somehow
erradicated every single psychoactive plant on the planet simultaneously, then
nature would–to preserve the balance–no doubt switch on another plant or fruit,
say, for the sake of illustration, the humble tomato. Because nature and the
animating intelligence behind her wants the humans to get high. And connected
back to the Gaian matrix, to the garden…
If Hofmann birthed LSD, Bear was sure as hell the one to seed it, just like that
orchid and the bee pollinating for the greater interspecies good, and the hippies
pollinating the change of consciousness across America–and the world. It’s a
whole systems theory that includes the role of humans in the Gaian mix, that
sees the synergy and interdependence of all species in the energetic organism
that is the web of life.
“We shouldn’t have to hide taking psychedelics–it’s our God-given right,” Bear
said that balmy summer Sunday night up on stage in his second EGA
presentation. “They say entheogens [reveal] a ‘God within’, well God gave you
the right to take the entheogen in the first place! Let’s be reasonable about this:
you either have a free society or you have a control leash. And these guys want
to control every fucking thing you do. And it’s absolutely ridiculous.”

The War on Drugs is quite simply a war on consciousness and on people’s God-
given right to alter it, Bear believed. If the planet herself created these
substances, intending them to form relationships with humans–and many of
these psychoactive plants have very old relationships with us, according to
neuroscience, fitting like keys into the chemical locks of the human brain that
have evolved to host them–than who are we to buck the natural order?

Ironically, whilst entheogens most definitely catalyze a psychedelic reaction in

humans, these substances have recently been proven to merely open the
abilities we have innate within ourselves all along–just like the cosmic scuttlebut
suggested in the 60s.

Using the latest functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scientists have
shown that psilocybin actually acts as a reducing valve for the mind-at-large, as
Huxley called it. Amanda Feilding, Director of the UK-based Beckley Foundation,
told The Guardian in the U.K. in February, 2012 that:

The team looked at the brains of subjects as they received an intravenous dose of
psilocybin, a psychedelic drug found in magic mushrooms … The research in
PNAS showed that psilocybin decreased blood flow to specific regions of the
brain that act as "connector hubs", where information converges and from where
it is disseminated. In the paper, we suggest that these hubs normally facilitate

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efficient communication between brain regions by filtering out the majority of

input in order to avoid over-stimulation and confusion. But the hubs also
constrain brain activity by forcing traffic to use a limited number of well-worn
routes. Psilocybin appears to lift some of these constraints, allowing a freer and
more fluid state of consciousness.

Bear had similar theories about LSD, as he told Eisner in 1998: “I may be right or
I may be wrong, I don’t know, but it was always my opinion that LSD itself wasn’t
the active material, that it was simply a catalyst/agent that caused your body to
release something that actually did the job. That was the reason why you couldn’t
take it several days in a row, because you had to recharge this ‘body-battery’ or
capacitor that you were discharging. The reason that the intensity was
proportional to the amount, was that the larger amounts caused a rapid and more
complete discharge of the stored material.”

Writing on his website [Link], Bear furthermore said:

I always trusted what happened on acid. Everything that happens to you on acid is
real. Everything you see is real, everything you experience is real, everything you
think about is real. The thing about it is, that a lot of the stuff you see is not stuff
you see when you're straight, because when you're straight you're limited. The
acid removes the "filters" and lets the noise through. That "noise" is as real a part
of the universe as the other part that you do allow to pass through, it just hasn't
been important for you. That's a survival issue, we discard a lot of sensory
information to make our daily lives simpler. When you open those floodgates and
let it all pass, you let in a lot of stuff that's as real, and often more interesting than
the stuff you usually let through. The patterns that you see when stoned, for
instance, are an artifact of the way the nerves in your eyes are arranged and
mapped into the brain. Beautiful noise!

Bear may have been aware of results in the scientific literature from the 1950s
and 60s which showed that LSD gathered in the liver, spleen and kidneys, but
only .01% of the chemical actually makes it to the brain itself, where it is
metabolized after only twenty minutes–some time before the actual affects are
even felt by the body.

“Now they used to call psychedelics 'psychomimetics’,” Bear said in his third
lecture at EGA At Melbourne University in 2009:

But they aren't that, anymore than they're entheogens. I don't think they “create
gods within” or duplicate schizophrenia, or bi-polar as they call it these days. I
think [psychedelics] actually let go of the filters and they turn up the gain. So if
you're a good guy you become a really good guy. And for someone like Charles

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Manson...

I used to know a Hell's Angel and he would say to me, ‘Oh, I just love to get in a
fight when I'm on acid’. And I'm thinking that the last thing I want to do is get in a
fight when I'm on acid, and everybody I knew felt the same way. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘the
other guy's moving in slow motion, it's easy.’ And that's his nature–he loves to
fight. The Hell's Angels got into fights with each other all the time, just cause they
loved to fight. They never washed their blue jeans–what do you expect?! But some
of those people were the most psychedelic people I've ever met. I met them at
Kesey's.

And Kesey, boy, once they discovered Kesey and the acid... It just opened 'em up.
They were these guys who were right on the edge of society anyway. If you gave
them a little booze they just went somewhere else. And in the end they wore
uniforms, they had rules, and they were just like cops. Except... if cops are like
dogs, Hell's Angels were like wolves. The cops are the same kind, but you were
much more likely to be choked by an Angel than a cop.

Up on stage, Bear shakes his head and fiddles with his earpiece. “Why don’t
people think about this? Am I the only person that sees this stuff?” he says,
straining into the mic with the geam of righteousness in his eyes. “That’s a curse
of some sort, isn’t it? Like the curse of the immortal in Troy … I wouldn’t like to
feel that I was sitting up here telling stories and you’re thinking, ‘oh, what the
fuck’s that old guy talking about?’ That’s boring, get lost. Who cares?”

Owsley took full advantage of the transformation that LSD created in him and in
the culture in 1965, setting himself up in a new barn-like cottage on Berkeley
Way and living it up in a manner to which he would fast become accustomed. He
was making a lot of money, and his behaviour was becoming, if anything, even
more eccentric than before. As Charles Perry recounted in Rolling Stone:

Every afternoon, after he had arisen and taken an hour-long shower, a regular
retinue of petitioners would present themselves like serfs pleading for boons from
the king. I can still see Owsley there, listening warily but regally to their requests,

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enthroned in the nude on a huge fur-covered chair, drying his hair with the royal
hairdryer.

One of his favorite pastimes was to take his indigent old friends out to dinner–to
places, of course, that wouldn’t clutter up his plate with poisonous vegetables–and
pay with the roll of $20 and $100 bills he kept in his boot. His favorite restaurant
was Original Joe’s in San Francisco, where the steak was so good Owsley was
convinced the chef had to be an acidhead. If Joe’s was closed, he’d take
everybody to a Doggie Diner stand, order a double burger, extract the meat patties
and eat them. Then he’d crumple up the bun, drop it on the table with a dull thud
and announce to the world at large, ‘That’s what you’ve just put in you stomachs.’

To his credit, though, Owsley kept the focus on making high quality acid and
using it to turn on the growing counterculture. During the heyday of the LSD
‘menace’ as the press would dub it in 1966, Owsley would be portrayed as the
‘LSD millionaire’, but decades later he would recant such labels. As he started
his acid distribution he faced a moral dilemma: with tens of thousands of doses of
acid he could make a fortune, but it wasn’t about the money, it was about the r-
evolution, man. Owsley elected to make the drug as widely available as cheaply–
or free–as possible.

“And so what was I to do with it? It'd turn bad–so I gave it away,” he said in 2009:

I sold some to get the money back to buy some more apparatus. And I put some
money aside because I thought I was probably going to get into trouble eventually
and I'd need some lawyers. But I think we gave half of it away and we did that for a
reason–in those days you'd sell it for something like $2500 for 3600 doses, about
80 or 90 cents each. It would have gone to ten dollars a dose on the street, except
someone might give you a free one tomorrow, or later on that day, so it kept the
price down to $2 or $2.50, which is still marketable with general commerce.

So that was a way of sabotaging the black market, which I hated from the minute I
turned on to anything. The black market, you gotta kill it. And you kill a black
market by making it non-profitable for people to jack prices up like that and control
the source.

In conversation with Eisner, Owsley admitted “I never felt it was my money. None
of the money that came from acid I felt was my money. I was like a custodian of
it, and didn’t know what to do with it. It was a real problem for me … I never
bought a decent car even during this time. I certainly didn’t buy any houses or
anything. I just didn’t believe it was mine. What I was doing was something for
the community that had great cosmic significance.” If Leary could be compared to
Lenin, bringing the mental revolution from the ivory towers, then by 1965 Owsley

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was the Che Guevera of the acid generation, bringing freedom (of
consciousness) to the masses. A guerilla artist on a chemical canvas, unwittingly
sculpting a generation. Or as Charles Perry once quoted Owsley: “Leary may be
the king in this little chess game …but what nobody realizes is that I’m the rogue
queen.”

The timing of Owsley’s acid pollination of the West Coast couldn’t have been
more synchronistic. The fruition of some of those CIA-backed research
experiments had blossomed across the underground in clusters of strange fruits
that would soon have need of his services. As the lead proponent of turning on
the intelligentsia, Aldous Huxley, was administered 100 micrograms of LSD by
his wife as he lay dying on Nov 22, 1963, that rough-hewn mountain man, Ken
Kesey, with his piercing blue eyes and brawny physique, was rolling out his bold
new wave approach to psychedelics with the Merry Pranksters.

As Kesey described in Martin Lee’s Acid Dreams: those “first drug trips were, for
most of us, shell-shattering ordeals that left us blinking knee-deep in the cracked
crusts of our pie-in-the-sky personalities. Suddenly people were stripped before
one another and behold: we were beautiful. Naked and helpless and sensitive as
a snake after skinning, but far more human than that shining nightmare that had
stood creaking in previous parade rest. We were alive and life was us."

Through early 1964 the acid-fuelled house parties at Kesey’s place up at La

Honda explored altered states, tribality, group mind and sound and light
technologies of the sacred, with a laissez-faire anything goes approach to what
Owsley later described to Eisner as “ancient magical shit. But they didn’t know it.”
Now Owsley and Kesey were both doing magic, occult magic fueled by acid. And
so by the principle of vibration outlined in the Kybalion, these resonating
vibrations were destined to meet. Moreover, with the benefit of hindsight, we can
now see how their individual paths paralleled, overlapped, and would eventually
flow together like two rivers meeting at the sea.
Flush with money from the success of his novel, Kesey invested in sound and
audio gear, stringing up powerful amplifiers in the trees, as well as lights,
cameras, projectors, sculptures and esoterica to create a sensorium for the acid
parties. “At that point, everything really kicked into gear,” Laird Grant told Robert
Greenfield. “When I look back now at the chronology and the time space that it
happened in, there was so much stuff going on at some point, it seems like it
had to have taken five years. But it was only a matter of eight to twelve months.
Because of the madness. All of the sudden it just exploded.” The word-of-mouth
about the parties became instant legend amongst the emerging counterculture.

On June 17, 1964, Kesey and the Pranksters set out for New York City in a 1939
International Harvester school bus they had painted in lurid day-glo psychedelic
colors and wired with thousands of dollars worth of audio equipment to broacast
from within and also record sounds outside–all part of their attempt to capture the
spiritual essence of the ‘Movie’ of life. Named “Furthur” (with two u’s), the bus

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was like a living psychedelic, blowing the minds of unsuspecting ‘straights’ in the
main streets of America as the Merry Pranksters went in seach of the
psychedelic American dream, and the ‘Way Cool Place’.

Amongst the Pranksters on board was the legendary Neal Cassady–“Speed

Freak”, immortalised as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and a
living bridge to the Beatnik generation; Ken Babbs–“The Intrepid Traveler”–an
ex-helicopter pilot with the marines in Vietnam, and the one whom had coined
the Prankster name and ethos; his future partner, Paula Sundstren was –
“Gretchen Fetchin the Slime Queen”; Mike Hagen–“Mal Function”; Sandy
Lehmann-Haupt–“Dis-mount” and others.

They toured across America in all their neo-superhero finery, wrapping

themselves in day glo paint, masks and American flags like mutants from the
Marvel Comics and settling into their new Prankster names and archetypes. It all
dovetailed with ‘the Movie’ they were filming, always filming, with expensive film-
stock footage that would almost bankrupt Kesey to develop. Kesey believed the
key to each moment was to stay in your own movie, which, like the way Owsley
would manipulate the energy of an encounter for his own advantage using his
acting abilities, was actually an astute psychological tool.

Kesey and the Pranksters kept pushing the envelope with their acid explorations
and the sense that they were exploring a new frontier–one of the mind. And as
they did their group fusion really took off, that “feeling, a ‘synching’ together that
created an atmosphere of ‘creeping religiosity’,” as Martin Lee called it. “As a
group they searched for a unified consciousness that would outstrip once and for
all the pseudo-reality they had left behind,” Lee wrote in Acid Dreams.

In time they would come to call it many things: the “pudding”; the “Unspoken
Thing”; “Cosmo”. As Tom Wolfe quoted Kesey in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test:
“We're under cosmic control and have been for a long long time, and each time it
builds, it's bigger, and it's stronger. And then you find out... about Cosmo, and
you discover that he's running the show.”

The Pranksters quickly learned that labels could not suffice, and that any
conscious attempt to force the Gestalt mind created an equal and opposite
manifestation. It came when it wanted, when the conditions were right–and
cramming a dozen Pranksters on acid all the time into a bus hurtling across
America certainly helped bring on the “great freak forward”.

By the time they reached upstate New York and Tim Leary’s Castalia Institute in
Millbrook, where his ‘League of Spiritual Discovery’ was based, the LSD-fuelled
orange juice that had fueled their altered states was running perilously low. As
Tom Wolfe described, “Before they left, Kesey asked [Richard] Alpert if he could
get them some more acid. He said he couldn't, but he could give them some
morning-glory seeds,” and by the return journey home “there was very little LSD
left”.

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With supplies of pure LSD low, the Pranksters turned to homegrown sources,
including “a fellow called C … [who] was one of the Pranksters' acid contacts.
Another was an old guy known as the Mad Chemist, an amateur chemistry
genius who was also a gun freak,” Tom Wolfe reported. Still, there was an
underlying supply and demand problem with the Pranksters’ growing coterie and
experiments needing a steady supply of acid–and good acid, at that.

The Pranksters got by with whatever they could muster, and their experiments in
consciousness continued, reaching a peak of noterierty when they were raided in
April, 1965 in a marijuana bust. But like Owsley himself and his assertive
approach to the authorities, Kesey, now on bail, turned it around, befriending the
Hell’s Angels biker gang, whom he met through fellow writer Hunter S. Thomson,
and invited them to a party on August 7, 1965. "We're in the same business,"
Kesey told them. "You break people's bones, I break people's heads."

Kesey fed them beer, marijuana, and, importantly, LSD, breaking open their
heads and turning them on to the acid revelation. The two-day sex and drugs
orgy with the Hell’s Angels became the stuff of legend, and the bikers quickly
became feverent converts to psychedelics including LSD and DMT, often
“doubling and trebling doses to 1,000 micrograms in a twelve-hour session,”
according to Stewart Tendler and David May in The Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
The budding hippie counterculture soon had their own unofficial ‘police force’ and
Owsley would eventually have an angelic distribution channel for his LSD that
would far outstrip hippie dealers.

The Hell’s Angels came by to party with Kesey many times over the next six
weeks, and they weren’t alone. A groundswell of Bay Area bohemia came up to
see what the fuss was all about, including Owsley’s friend Gaylord, a tall,
imposing African-American who lived in Berkeley. He was:

…quite a character, and he would tell me I had to come down with him to see
Kesey,” Owsley told Eisner. “I had heard of Kesey, and read his books, and he
says to me, enthusiastically, ‘Fantastic, he’s got these Hells Angels.’ I said, ‘Shit,
man, you’ve got to be out of your mind. And you, a black guy! Those Angels
EAT ‘niggers.’ What are you doing?’”

He says, ‘Ah, I don’t know. It’s pretty interesting. He’s been feeding them all
acid. You wouldn’t believe what’s going on down here, man!’ I said, ‘No, I don’t
want anything to do with Hells Angels. Stay away from those guys, man.’
Because everything I had heard about them was just horrible.

But finally, one day I said, ‘Okay, come on. If it’s important to you, I’ll go down.’
So I went down with him and, Jesus, boy, that was sort of like getting strapped to
a rocket sled. The stuff that those guys would do with your head, and the drugs
and everything else, was nothing like anything else I had experienced before. It

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was absolutely dramatic. And it WAS true. The Angels turned out to be some of
the farthest-out people I ever in my life had met. They were just cut free by this
thing. It was like a key …

The Angels on acid was another serendipitous linkage in the growing

counterculture, one that Owsley took full advantage of in the months ahead. As
Tendler and May recount: “The Angels were not only 'policemen' but also
purveyors of drugs. What the Angels were selling was Owsley's products. He
knew them through Kesey; they offered him a secure network through which to
move his LSD around San Francisco. They might seem unlikely allies but their
reputation was high in the Haight-Ashbury and, on the practical side, the Angels
were renowned for never informing on one another. Nor, for for that matter, were
they an easy group to infiltrate.”

Originally the Angels carried a small proportion of Owsley’s LSD, “cruising San
Francisco offering a little marijuana and LSD in $50-$100 deals.” Things started
to intensify however, when three hippies appeared with a large amount of cash–
$8,000, with which they wanted as much LSD as they could get. Arrangements
were soon made to supply them a constant source of LSD that would eventually
run as high as $70,000 worth a week. By 1967 or so, Tendler and May claim that
“Owsley passed on raw LSD crystals which the Angels tableted themselves at
4,000 doses to the gram, using a formula the chemist supplied. With street prices
now rising to $3-$5 a dose, they were churning out up to 25 grams of LSD worth
$225,000-$375,000.

“The market could bear it,” Tendler and May continued. “Haight-Ashbury was
turning into a drug entrepot. Nothing was organized, but people would drift in
from out of town, make a buy and then take it back to campuses or hippy
enclaves in some comer of a city or town. The streets were like an open-air drug
Bourse, an exchange for Owsley's LSD, and for marijuana, much of it brought up
across the border from Mexico.” This is largely true–even if Owsley did try to
keep the price down initially, once the Angels got hold of their own material, the
market price started to rise.

And as Owsley’s produce started trading far and wide and his reputation grew,
he tred a fine line between anonymity and largesse. He would always turn up to
meetings late, change his plans, and keep in constant motion so as not to be
trailed. He refused to have his photograph taken. He was meticulously careful
with all his arrangements, limiting his business interaction to his chosen
distributors–which now included the Hell’s Angels. He was an intelligent, shewd,
careful acid cook, and yet he was also well on the way to living the life of an Acid
King, with all its excesses and visibility.

As Charles Perry describes: “He was never afraid to be conspicuous. He had

already adopted the turquoise-belt finery that border patrolmen would later call

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‘the dealer look.’ His theory was that cops don’t register outrageousness, only the
furtive attempt to be inconspicuous, so if you don’t give paranoia an inch, you’ll
never get busted. Of course, it helps to have nerves of steel, which Owsley
certainly had. More than once I saw him hypnotize a suspicious Highway
Patrolman with his absolute confidence that the officer couldn’t possibly be
looking for him. It was like the scene in Star Wars where Obi-Wan Kenobi
bollixes an Imperial Stormtrooper. (‘These aren’t the acidheads you want. They
can go.’)”

Yet for all his involvement with LSD, in those early days Owsley still had his
concerns about the scene out at La Honda and the freeform approach that Kesey
championed. Hell, he had some concerns about Kesey himself, as he told David
Gans: “Kesey was the kind of guy who reached out and took your knobs and
tweaked them all the way to ten. All of ‘em. And the whole scene was running at
ten the whole time, it was like a real… almost as sudden and different as
discovering psychedelics themselves for the first time.” Like Owsley, Kesey was
nurturing not just an acid scene, but a tribal one that used music and dance and
trance as a core part of the trip.

One of the early bohemians that tried Kesey’s ‘acid venison’ back in the Perry
Lane days and had been turned on to altered states was a young musician
named Jerry Garcia, a “dead-end kid who used to live in the Chateau in Palo Alto
with Page Browning and other seeming no-counts, lumpenbeatniks, and you had
to throw them out when they came over and tried to crash the parties on Perry
Lane,” as Tom Wolfe described him. In July, 1965, Jerry Garcia (lead guitar and
vocals) had formed the Warlocks, alongside Bob Weir (rhythm guitar, vocals),
Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan (keyboards and harmonica, vocals), Bill Kreutzmann
(drums), and Phil Lesh (bass and vocals). They immediately became the house
band for the Merry Pranksters and the proto-Acid Tests at La Honda, and later
around the West Coast of California.

As Wolfe describes, “They both, Kesey and Garcia, had been heading into the
‘pudding’, from different directions, all that time, and now Garcia was a, yes,
beautiful person, quiet, into the pudding, and a great guitar player. Garcia had
first named his group The Warlocks, meaning sorcerers or wizards, and they had
been eking by playing for the beer drinkers, at jazz joints and the like around
Palo Alto. To the Warlocks, the beer drinker music, even when called jazz, was
just square hip. They were on to that distinction, too. For Kesey—they could just
play, do their thing.”

Owsley told David Gans that he “went down to Kesey’s house, and I found it very
interesting. Interesting enough so that I went down several more times, and one
of the times–I had heard about this band, which the first time I went down there
they were calling the Warlocks, and I didn't pay that much attention to it, except
[the Pranksters] were obviously all excited about it. Next time I went down
someone came in and said they'd just picked the name “Grateful Dead”. I think it

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was Mountain Girl, came in and said that–‘Oh, they’ve got a new name, they’ve
named themselves. They couldn't be the Warlocks, because some band in
Florida had that name.”

“Mountain Girl”, aka Carolyn Adams, was a vivacious, earthy 18-year-old whom
instantly hit it off with Kesey and the Pranksters soon after they returned from
their psychedelic pilgrimage to the East Coast. She quickly gave the boys a run
for their money in the smarts and the pranks department, becoming one of the
foundational Pranksters, as well as romantically entagled with Kesey–and later
Garcia–himself.
"Ken's parties were getting bigger and harder to handle and we got busted and
the Hell's Angels were coming and it was just unwieldly and it was getting
unruly,” Mountain Girl told Robert Greenfield in his biography of Jerry Garcia,
Dark Star. “But Ken's dedication to making a place where people could get
together to get high was unshakable and I fell right into that and became part and
parcel of it and spent all my time splicing film, repairing microphones, plugging
stuff in, packing and unpacking, and making little films."
The “Grateful Dead” was a name that Jerry Garcia chanced across in a Funken
Wagnalls reference book that was said to have been taken from an Egyptian
prayer where a deceased soul offered gratitude to a stranger that had organized
his burial. Yet again it was a magical term that added a depth to the mythos that
would evolve around the band, and draw Owsley into their spell–or viceaversa.

“I didn't actually see [the Grateful Dead] play until I went to the Muir Beach Acid
Test [December 17, 1965], that’s when I saw them play,” Owsley told David
Gans. “Whether or not I ran into Garcia or someone else at Kesey’s during those
visits I don't really recall. The only person other than Mt Girl and George Walker,
maybe Page and Kesey himself [that I remember] was Terry the Tramp, one of
the Angels, I remember him. But I don't remember if Kesey was there; several
times there was a big party of people doing it in every direction at once. Very
difficult to make a whole lot of sense out of it because it was totally different to
the scene I was in, which was relatively quiet up to that point.”

Discrepencies between various accounts and chroniclers exist, notably the Tom
Wolfe story put across in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which place Owsley’s
first dramatic meeting with Kesey after the Beatles concert at the San Francisco
Cow Palace the night of September 2, 1965. By his own admission Owsley
attended some of the La Honda acid parties, but may not have met Kesey at that
time, although his reputation would surely have preceeded him. Knowing Owsley
though, he is just as likely to have gone incognito, just to sniff things out and
know the score.

And what was the score? As Owsley quickly identified, the Pranksters had
“stumbled on a lot of the old stuff that was just buried,” he told Bruce Eisner. “I

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said, ‘I’ve read some old esoteric documents in occult literature, and this stuff is
not visible. You’ve got to be real careful with this shit.’ I thought they were
running kind of loose with it. And that it was dangerous. And in some ways it was.
But it didn’t matter. It was working and they were doing it. This, of course, is
evidence that the ancient doctrines are based on psychedelics.

“How they came upon them… It seemed as though they had rediscovered
something from ancient ways and ancient times… A lot of music that's used in
shamanic rituals does the same thing, which we discovered later. But this was
totally chaotic organisation. None of these people in Kesey’s scene had any roots
in the shamanistic rituals at all … I've never actually seen it, but from the best I
can figure out all those rituals [at Kesey's] contained a lot of the elements which
the Pranksters discovered, or re-discovered or something.”

As Kesey and the Pranksters went deep through the doors of shamanic
perception, it wasn’t just the multi-dimensionality or a sense of spiritual depth that
they plumbed. When their high doses of acid awakened the realization of the ‘All-
in-one’ of alchemical understanding, the Pranksters core contribution to the
evolutionary wave was a rediscovery of group mind–Gestalt consciousness–and
the strange synchronicities and abilities that brought, nurtured not just by the
chemicals, but by rock’n’roll music and the tribal experience.

Case in point: the Beatles concert. The Pranksters set out to draw the Beatles
into their ‘Movie’ for an afterparty up at La Honda, hoping to “work them into the
great flow of acausal connection and then it will happen of its own accord,” Wolfe
wrote. “So few humans have the hubris to exert their wills upon the flow, maybe
not more than forty on the whole planet at any given time.” Owsley knew all
about magical hubris, and he would undoubtedly have gone to that concert
himself, and maybe felt that strange hive mind consciousness that gripped the
Gestalt bio-mass of thousands of screaming teenage girls, as Wolfe describes:

Inside the Cow Palace it is very roaring hell … The teeny freaks, tens of
thousands of little girls, have gone raving mad already, even though the Beatles
have not come on. That sound he thinks cannot get higher, it doubles, his
eardrums ring like stamped metal with it and suddenly
Ghhhhhhwooooooooowwwwww, it is like the whole thing has snapped, and the
whole front section of the arena becomes a writhing, seething mass of little girls
waving their arms in the air, this mass of pink arms, it is all you can see, it is like
a single colonial animal with a thousand waving pink tentacles—it is a single
colonial animal with a thousand waving pink tentacles,—vibrating poison
madness and filling the universe with the teeny agony torn out of them. It dawns
on Kesey: it is one being. They have all been transformed into one being.

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Back at La Honda after a hasty bad vibes exit, Kesey and the Pranksters–
including Warlock band members Phil Lesh and Robert Hunter–got their first
taste of the Owsley glamor amongst a sea of worked up teeny boppers that had
laid siege to the property, expecting the Beatles to be there. As Tom Wolfe
recounts:

A cocky little guy, short, with dark hair, dressed like an acid head, the usual boho
gear, but with a strange wound-up nasal voice, like a head with the instincts of a
roller-skating rink promoter—this little character materializes in front of Kesey
from out of the boho-slub multitudes and announces:
‘I'm Owsley.’

Kesey doesn't say Hi, I'm Kesey. He just looks at him, as if to say, all right, you're
Owsley and you're here—and then what?

Owsley looks stunned—I'm Owsley. In fact, Kesey never heard of him. It was
like, if Owsley suddenly found himself in a place where nobody ever heard of
him, he didn't know what to do. He and Kesey are just standing there trading
eyeballs until finally Owsley produces a little bag he has and opens it and it is full
of capsules of acid. He's Owsley … the world's greatest acid manufacturer, bar
none, standing out in the dark in the middle of nowhere amid the boho-slug
multitudes under the shadowy redwoods.

Two streams of the acid movement came together in that moment, finally,
inevitably, like a process that medieval alchemists used when combining
chemicals called ‘fixing the mercury’. Can you feel it, that synchronous collapse
of probability, of these Western cats dabbling in drugs and magic, in cause and
effect and what you believe to be true becomes true following a great wave if you
can reel it in and anchor it… Kesey and Owsley and the Pranksters and the
soon-to-be Grateful Dead, all facets of a larger organism revealed by the acid
experience as it grounds itself in the culture and the gene pool, all moved by
higher forces folding them in on themselves like dimensional origami. All of it,
perfect, meant to be, a real happening.

Or as Tom Wolfe said: “And suddenly Kesey sees that they, the Pranksters,
already have the expertise and the machinery to create a mindblown state such
as the world has never seen, totally wound up, lit up, amplified and. . .
controlled—plus the most efficient key ever devised to open the doors in the
mind of the world: namely, Owsley's LSD.”

Like Owsley, Kesey’s sense of divine hubris meant that despite everything–the
marijuana bust hanging over him, the constant heat from the cops, you name it–
there was an inner sense of conviction, of evolutionary certainty that what they

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were doing was right, that they were pushing the boundaries of reality and
exploring the raw potential of the human organism. And thanks to Owsley and his
plentiful supply of chemicals, they were going public with it all.

‘CAN
YOU
PASS THE
ACID TEST?—‘
Comes the call
Chiseled on each Prankster eyeball in Lincoln gothic
As we moan
In this graveyard among moonstone tombstones with a philosophic
It's your ass—
Can you pass the Acid Test?
Babbs and Kesey swaying
In a California graveyard, baying deep
In the synch
Zonked on LSD on the brink
freaking steep
Of a missionary quest

Owsley became the Prankster’s chemist, supplying them with enough quality
LSD to take things to the next level–public ‘Acid Tests’ that would switch on
thousands of people in their short prime and seed the modern revival of the
archaic trance dance.

November 27 was the date of the first Acid Test at Babbs's place down near
Santa Cruz. They ran footage of their bus movie and colored light projections;
Neal Cassady was there providing monologues as Kesey and Babbs freaked out
the crowd; and speakers and microphones captured soundbites and added
delays and echo effects to play with the minds of the tribe who had ample access
to Owsley’s LSD, given away freely.

December 4th was the first Acid Test inaguration for the Warlocks, who first
played as the Grateful Dead that night, held at Big Nig’s home in San Jose. As
Charles Perry describes: “The Warlocks were playing blues with a fat, solid beat,
tape machines were hallucinatizing people's voices, lights were projected all over
the walls, fuses were blowing and the Pranksters were playing their mind games
on more people than ever before. It was huge, warm, crowded, intense,
confused—four hundred people!”

The real breakthrough for Owsley, however, was to come at the fourth Acid Test,
held at Muir Beach on December 17. Owsley, the great Acid King, who had by
this time been the reigning acid chemist and philanthropist for the burgeoning
hippie movement for the last six months, was about to freak out in the most

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spectacular way possible. The Pranksters, despite thankfully taking his acid,
always had their doubts about Owsley, especially Mountain Girl. They figured he
might not have even taken the drug, or just once, or they somehow sensed that
he was still holding back around them when it came to the deep ‘pudding’ of the
group mind.

We know of course, that Owsley had tripped–and deeply–but it seems to have

largely been in the set and setting of his choosing, on his terms. As he found at
the La Honda parties, the charged environment and dabblings in magical practice
and group consciousness created a whirlwind that was unpredictable and drew
you in–whether you liked it or not. As Owsley later told David Gans: “The
[Pranksters] did specific things… they made specific sounds and looped tape
machines together with delays and reverberation… the sound reinforcing itself…
There’s certain persistences, like, when you’re really high and you move your
hand and you get a smear. Well there’s also other kinds of persistences and they
reinforced all these things…”

Mountain Girl later recounted that night to Dead chronicler Blair Jackson, when
she said: "The delay machine was also one of the most important things there,
because there was this short lag on your voice; it was just long enough to be
really uncomfortable, and it would really fuck you up. It was exactly the length of
time it would take you to form a thought, so just as your next thought was formed,
you heard your voice speaking the previous thought. It was really hard to make
progress through that. I [also] had a strobe light that my brother Donald, who had
hung with the Pranksters a bit, had borrowed from SRI [Stanford Research
Institute], and that was really great—it had a huge calibrated dial and was worth
thousands of dollars."

A crucial fact that is often overlooked by the history books is that Owsley was
especially sensitive to sound, which is why his later work pioneering sound
systems for the Dead was so meticulous and avant guard. He suffered a diving
accident when doing a clown dive off a high board when he was 19, and “water
went in [his ear] and almost shattered [the] eardrum. It didn't, but it caused a
heavy hemorrhage, which filled the entire inner ear with blood. And there was no
way to get it out,” he told David Gans. Owsley continued:

Antibiotics in those days were pretty primitive. The result is that by the time my
body has absorbed the blot clot some bacteria and mold together had established a
culture in there,” he continued telling Gans. “And the result of the culture was that
it produced something sort of like arthritis in the three little bones that articulate
together. There's nothing wrong with the nerves, but the linkage between the
eardrum and the nerves has to go through this bridge of bones, the articulation of
which was interfered with by the scar tissue caused by the infection.

The result is that the two ears have a slightly different response. So far as my brain

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is concerned, there's absolutely no confusion about which ear is which, just like the
owls, with the two different shaped … ear holes [that] give them a totally different
signal from the two sides of their head, which allows them to pinpoint the mouse,
or whatever it is they're after, very precisely. And if you look at most animals that
need a highly developed stereoscopic sense in their hearing, they have this
imbalance between the two sides. Man's ears are not normally that different, but
due to this injury–it's a funny thing where a handicap becomes an advantage–due to
this injury, and the psychedelics which amplify everything, I was able to sort it all
out, so I produce a sound picture where all of the high-frequency stuff is actually
coming from my left ear because my right ear, above like six thousand cycles, isn't
very sharp.

Owsley’s hearing was amplified on psychedelics, more than human. Whilst

Kesey and the Pranksters would dress in their day-glo superhero best, here was
a real-life superhuman right under their noses the whole time, with the ability to
‘see’ as well as hear sound, and to then to sculpt with vibration. As he told David
Gans: “I like spatiality. One of the earliest things that happened to me in regards
to psychedelics was that the universe became even more three-dimensional. It
seemed to have more dimension and depth and space to it. Colors and things
seemed very intense.”

And there he goes, stepping into the field pattern of the delay machine…
“And the strobe light and the incredible layers of variable lag began rocking and
rippling him and it threw him into a time warp, or parallel time dimension … spun
out of his gourd by all the special effects of the Pranksters' variable lag devices,”
Tom Wolfe wrote.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acd Test recounts the most famous freakout of the 60s like
this:

The world began fragmenting on him. It began coming totally to pieces, breaking
up into component parts, and he wasn't even back in the twentieth century yet, he
was trapped—where?—Paris in 1786? ... The whole world was coming to pieces
molecule by molecule now and swimming like grease bubbles in a cup of coffee,
disappearing into the inter-galactic ooze and gasses all around—including his own
body. He lost his skin, his skeleton, his pulmonary veins—sneaking out into the
ooze like eels, they are, reeking phosphorus, his neural ganglia—unraveling like
hot worms and wiggling down the galactic drain, his whole substance dissolving
into gaseous nothingness until finally he was down to one cell. One human cell:
his; that was all that was left of the entire known world, and if he lost control of
that one cell, there would be nothing left. The world would be, like, o v e r. He
has to rebuild himself and the entire world from that one cell with a gigantic act of
will—too overwhelming. Where does a man start? With California Route 1 so he
can get out of here in his car? or will it turn out to be merely the filthy Rue Ventru

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with the Bastille mobs waiting? or start with the car? the differential? how do they
make the bastards? or the beach? all those freaking grains of sand? the marsh
grass? the tourist cabins? got to put every blue door back? or the ocean? or leave
it dry? save making all those filthy blind bathosphere black animals down there ...
or the sky? how far does it go? the Big Dipper? the Ursa Minor? the Delphinium?
suppose it is really infinite concentric spheres of crystal making infinite
gelatinous submarinal vibrations? The Dead? the Pranksters? Kesey, Kesey's out
for good, Kesey and the bathosphere brutes—but with a superheroic effort he
begins. But by the time he gets himself remade, it is too much. It is
overwhelming. He makes his car. He makes the parking lot and the beginning of
the road out. He'll make the rest of it as he goes along. Freak it! Split! Leave the
rest of the known world to its own devices, out in the gasses. He jumped into the
car and gunned off; and smashed it into a tree. A tree he hadn't even put back yet.
But the crash somehow pops the whole world back. There it is; back from the fat-
bubbling ooze. The car is smashed, but he has survived. Survived!

In Garcia: A Signpost to New Space by Garcia, Reich and Wenner, Jerry and
Mountain Girl describe Owsley’s freakout from an outside perspective:

MOUNTAIN GIRL: One of the highlights … was–dare I, shall I breathe his

name?–Owsley pushing a chair along this wooden floor, this old wooden chair,
running it along the floor making this noise, the most horrible screeching and
scraping. It went on for hours. I'm not exaggerating, it just drove everybody
completely up the wall. That was really an incredible exhibition of making
yourself… uncomfortable, making other people uncomfortable.

JERRY GARCIA: No, man, it was just the guy completely freaked out with his
body, running around… that's what that was, I mean he was completely freaked
out.

MG: He was scraping that chair and listening to the noise and loving' it. I guess that
was what was happening.

JG: How do you know?

MG: Oh, I watched him for a really long time.

JG: That wasn't it. I talked to him about that a lot and he just–his mind was
completely shot, he thought that they'd come and taken it from him.

 
In conversation with David Gans, Owsley played down the hype Wolfe wrote

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about, saying that:

Yeah I made some noise. Everything was making noise–it was a very noisy place. I
remember pushing the chair around. I remember all kinds of different things. I
remember all kinds of noises and sounds and things. The Pranksters would make
these noises and the noises would seem to get inside your nervous system, as if it
was some kind of a plug or something in your head… like they were scrapping
away some kind of cap to make the connection available to be plugged into
something, a psychic cable you might say, like a hymen, perhaps.

And then the connection would be made and all the people would be linked up and
sharing thoughts and images and ideas. It was like, not just thoughts, but little
thoughts and concepts–you saw a patchwork of images and felt a patchwork of
body sensations and everything else. It was very definitely a Gestalt, multiple-
mind kind of phenomenon … That was the first time anything like that had actually
happened to me. It was very weird and scary.

It drove Owsley right to the edge–Edge City, as the Pranksters called it, the next
step beyond humanity, like an insectoid ability to be wired up to the collective. It
was the ground zero for all that was to come later, the last great and central
revelation of the 60s counterculture, this very thing that was birthed in the Acid
Tests and pollinated in the Grateful Dead gigs, the Human Be-Ins and Summer of
Love to come, and down through the gene pool and the history books, which still
manifests at certain moments in the psychic moshpit of the dancefloor at
electronic trance festivals across the globe: Gestalt consciousness.

“Gestalts are not always composed of everyone,” Owsley explained to David

Gans. “The presence of every kind of person, the presence of every kind of level
of engagement and disengagement, is more important. It’s like a reaction vessel
that has all the pieces of whatever can be made. And it makes something. But it
doesn't use all the pieces all the time.” The ‘it’ which works through the individual
pieces might be some macro-collective consciousness, as with a flock of geese
all moving forward and no one leading, but it also touches on the ‘higher
intelligence’ the Owsley believed shaped LSD itself coming into the culture.
Larger forces work through the group organism in Gestalt form, and Owsley was
uniquely placed with the mind and ability to see it at work.

“It’s like a sculpture, when you see a sculpture what you're looking at is the
surface,” he told David Gans. “You don't know what's inside it. But there's more
inside than there is surface. So most of what a sculpture is when you look at it is
indeterminate. It could be nothing or it could be something. Or it could be another
sculpture or dozens of scultpures or just random noise. Because all you perceive
in the sculpture is the form itself, not the substance within. Gestalt consciousness
is also like that. I have a strong tendency to use sculptural viewpoints for most

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things. When I'm working with sound I work with it in a three-dimensional

fashion.”

Those realizations took a lifetime to integrate, however, and at the Muir Beach
Acid Test Owsley was stripped raw and defenseless. Now the main drawback to
being hooked up to a psychic network was feedback, and as Owsley told Gans:
“There was this one paranoid little sucker in there, and he thought something,
and I picked up his thought–because we were all linked in together, it was this
total telepathic loop, which meant that it was like being at a very noisy cocktail
party inside your head. This guy saw someone come into the place that he
thought was a narc … I thought, ‘Narcs!’ I went right out the side door. I was
gone. There were all kinds of drugs going on there. It didn't matter [that LSD was
still legal]. This guy’s paranoia came in on my partyline and out I went. The thing
about me pushing the chair around was maybe ten or fifteen minutes. And I saw
one set of the Grateful Dead, and some other stuff, and I was gone. I was
running up the road.”

For perhaps the second time in his brief alchemical career, Owsley appeared to
have undergone a classic shamanic initiation, broken down to pure
consciousness and forced to rebuild himself atom by atom. “I lost control of that
cell as well," Owsley says. "They were all gone. That was the initiation. The price
I had to pay to get through the gate. Ego death. I thought I was going to die, and I
said, 'Fuck it.' And that was good," he told Robert Greenfield.

Where the first time it was the acid that brought his death and rebirth, this time it
was the rock’n’roll–and the acid, both of them sacred vibration. And the
messengers of that vibration were the Grateful Dead. They had made such a
huge imprint on Owsley that nothing would ever be the same again–for either of
them.

“I thought–these guys are fantastic,” he told David Gans, “but [that first night
hearing them at the Muir Beach Acid Test] was scary, the music was scary. It
pushed me to the edge and I thought the sound of Garcia’s guitar was like the
claws of a tiger. Dangerously scary. Very, very to the point. And you can’t talk
about this stuff … And I thought to myself, one day these guys are going to be
greater than the Beatles, someday. It wasn't as if I just thought that, it was almost
like a revelation, looking into the future. I just instinctively knew that there was
something like that … And in a way they are.

“The next day or a few days later I saw Kesey and said hey, you're messing with
ancient stuff, right, without any maps. You maybe need to be careful about this,
it’s kind of scary. And he laughed at me … [Yet] it was the Prankster thing [that
was the scary part]. The [Group Mind] which the Grateful Dead were part of. The
Grateful Dead were Pranksters. They were musicians and they were also
Pranksters.” And so if Owsley wanted to hang with the Grateful Dead, then he

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was also going to have to return to the Acid Tests in all their mutagenic intensity.

As Tom Wolfe wrote: “The Acid Tests were the epoch of the psychedelic style
and practically everything that has gone into it. I don't mean merely that the
Pranksters did it first but, rather, that it all came straight out of the Acid Tests in a
direct line leading to the Trips Festival of January 1966. That brought the whole
thing full out in the open. ‘Mixed media’ entertainment—this came straight out of
the Acid Tests' combination of light and movie projections, strobes, tapes, rock 'n'
roll, black light. ‘Acid rock’—the sound of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper album
and the high-vibrato electronic sounds of the Jefferson Airplane, the Mothers of
Invention and many other groups—the mothers of it all were the Grateful Dead at
the Acid Tests.”

If only Owsley could have arranged people like speakers, tweaking their spatial
resonance to see what type of Gestalt mind could be created from the neural riffs
of heads fused in a ciruit with each other. But then, that essentially was the Acid
Test; he grokked it on some level and ran flailing and mad from that “rough beast
slouching toward Jerusalem to be born”.

And that was it: something new was being born.

1966 was the year of the Chinese Fire Horse, known as one of the most intense
and disruptive energies in their zodiac. “For me it was very much a unique and
strange year,” Owsley wrote on his website. “I met the Grateful Dead that year
and became their soundman. Of all the interesting and wonderful things that I
have had an opportunity to do in my life so far, it ranks at the very top of the list.
The Dead were young and raw, full of a special kind of energy. They had been a
band for only about six months and most of their repertoire was covers–but what
an eclectic and odd bunch of covers they were. I don't think there has ever been
anything quite like them, before or since.”

The actual meeting went something like this: the fifth Acid Test was held at the
Fillmore Auditorium on Jan 8, 1966–which was also the first of nearly 2,000

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concerts recorded by fans of the Grateful Dead. This was the big time–the
Fillmore was one of the premier local venues alongside the Carousel and the
Avalon Ballroom for the nascent acid rock sound that was coming out of San
Francisco, and the Pranksters had never been so public with their consciousness
experiments before. Despite cries after the Muir Beach Test that what Kesey and
the Pranksters were doing was wild magic that had to be curtailed, Owsley was
on the bus again and deep in the pudding, supplying free LSD for the event,
distributed for the first time in cups of kool-aid–electric kool-aid, a medium of
transmission devised by Hugh Romney, the future Wavy Gravy.

“The costumes were, wow!” wrote Michael Rossman in the San Francisco
Chronicle review of the night. “A strobe light was flickering at a very high
frequency in one corner of the hall and a group of people were bouncing a
golden balloon up and down in it. It was a most peturbing frquency. It hurt to look
at them. In one corner there was a piece of metal, tubular sculpture by Ron
Boise, a thumping machine … There was a lot of electronic equipment which
sent out a low reverberation that resonated through the hall. And the whole place
was filled with streamers and balloons … On stage there was a rock group [the
Grateful Dead]; anybody could play with them. It was a kind of social jam
session.”

Jerry Garcia captured the psychic slapstick of the Fillmore Acid Test in a radio
interview documentary about ‘Fillmore ‘66’ hosted on [Link], when he said:

I remember the one at the old Fillmore was tremendously successful because they
had all those little cubbyholes, back rooms and little scenes and a bar out the back,
all kinds of different levels and stuff going on in there. In the later days a lot of that
stuff got opened up and boarded up but originally it was segmented. And so the
little rooms and the big rooms were microphoned there were microphones
distributed all over the place and all of the people were mixed in with tape
recorders and all that and speakers all over the place…

Somebody would find a microphone on the floor and say 'hey is anybody there?'
and all of a sudden they would hear their voice, huge, coming from all over… It
was continuous weirdness, y'know… so funny.. and everybody’s reactions to it
were so funny. And then the cops came and busted us into the whole cop’s show.
The cops came in and looked around and there’s one of Ron Boyce’s big
sculptures–Thunder machines–making this incredible din resonating and weird
sounds going on and people running around, just totally bananas shit going on…

There’s these straight, good old-fashioned, four square, San Francisco Irish cops, a
whole bunch of ‘em, a dozen or so and they’re like, ‘Who’s in charge here?' The
limit of the absurd. There’s cops standing in the middle of the floor with half a
dozen freaks around them raving strange things. There was an amazing scene with
Weir and Phil, both tremendous anti-authoritarian guys–they hate any authority

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figures and there’s this cop, a lieutenant, up there on the stage trying to make an
announcement over the microphone whilst the dials are being run by some madman
up on the balcony so the cop’s voice is coming in and out and Kesey is running
some semi-patriotic slogans over the top of the cop’s rant about 'We have to clear
the place out!’ and they cut him off in the middle of his rap…

Phil and Weir are there arm in arm around each other and they’re singing
something like the Star Spangled Banner real loud in the cops ear while some big
bear of a freak is banging his hand with a tambourine. It was just so funny... All this
funny stuff was like a huge Marx Brothers movie. That’s what I loved about those
things–they couldn't bust you for anything but weirdness.

And in the midst of all those police Babbs comes down and he looks like… At that
time Kesey and the others all have these kind of superhero costumes that they wore,
and they just looked incredible. Babbs looked like Captain Marvel in the midst of
these cops. And he has this expansive style, 'Well what IS IT fellows?' y'know,
'Whats going on gentlemen? Can I be of some assistance?' And he’s tall and
commanding and all that–he was an officer in Vietnam, so he had all the shtick,
y'know, the officer shtick, and he could always really come on to the cops just
great…

The Fillmore Acid Test was, says Phil Lesh, “a manifestation of the group mind in
a large crowd. For the first time, the physical, luminous, and sonic spaces were
unified–the dancers moving, the musical sound breathing, the lights pulsing–as
one being, limited only by the inscrutable laws of probability.” It was also the
Dead’s second encounter with Owsley, as Lesh describes in his biography,
Searching for the Sound:

We've loaded our gear into the Fillmore, we're all set up, the people are arriving,
the Pranksters are firing up the Moebius loops, and, like a conquering hero or some
Robin Hood figure out of swashbuckling antiquity, in comes Owsley, wearing a
Aussie digger hat and a leather cape. Every inch the figure of the psychedelic
warrior, here's a man who knows that he's onto something, something cosmic and
eternal. It's hard to reconcile this vision with the freaked-out dude from Muir
Beach. I walk up and shake his hand.

‘So you're Owsley,’ I say. ‘I feel as if I've known you through many lifetimes.’

‘You have,’ he replies, ‘and you will through many more to come.’

‘Indeed, I felt as if I'd been living inside his head; maybe that was the result of all
the trips I'd taken using his product.’

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Bob Weir told Rolling Stone that: “My first recollection is that he showed up there
and smelled like patchouli. I didn’t know who he was or what he was about, but
he was bright and engaging. We were both cranked up on LSD.”
 
Owsley expressed he would like to help the band in whatever way he could, and
Lesh offered him the manager role. He declined. They also needed a soundman,
however, and with his background as a audio engineer and his ear for sound,
Owsley readily agreed. And like all things he turned his full attention to, he was
destined to become one of the greatest soundmen there was, helping to reinvent
the acid rock scene through better technology. He started off by dragging round
his suitcase-size Ampex 602 tape recorder to gigs and plugging it into the sound
board, capturing each show for training and posterity in his infamous ‘sonic
journals’.

It must have been a strange meeting, even for hippies. Here was Owsley, the
legendary acid cook and counterculture patron, the man who shunned the
limelight and used spy game techniques to never be pinned down, rocking up
reeking of patchouli oil and agreeing to work for a fledgling band because he was
so enamoured by their music. Ever since the Muir Beach freakout, Owsley had
been obsessed with the Dead. But it wasn’t just them–it was the new acid rock
sound itself that was anchoring in that time, the vibration coming through them
that excited him. And with the Dead, Owsley had access to his very own rock
band to experiment with.

As Charles Perry wrote: “Owsley had a personal campaign to turn on musicians,

whom he considered the key element of the psychedelic revolution. He was
always backstage at the Fillmore and the Avalon trying to get them on his
psychedelic wavelength. I even heard about a time when he chatted with Earl
Scruggs, the bluegrass banjoist, using his best good-old-boy Southern manner,
and then startled Scruggs by offering him LSD. On another occasion he returned
from New York crowing that he’d met ‘Bobby Dylan,’ and that Dylan hadn’t gotten
upset ‘until I mentioned acid.’ Somebody who was there at the time later told me
how it went: He introduced himself by saying, ‘Hi, Bob, I’m Owsley. Want some
acid?’ and Dylan responded, ‘Who is this freak? Get him out of here!’”

As Tendler and May wrote in The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, “the core of the
cultural change was on neither the screen nor the stage. Music was the essential
tool, reaching out to millions on records, tapes and radios. Tim Scully, who was
[about to become] an electronic adviser to the Grateful Dead as well as an LSD
chemist, once said there was a great interest in 'what could be done with music
as a tool for altering consciousness and changing the culture. That became part
of the general belief system, that psychedelic drugs and music were both very
powerful for cultural change and most of the people involved, well everybody I
ever met in the music scene was very involved in the drug scene and vice versa.
Generally most of these people were aggressively interested in changing our

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culture.’”

Owsley didn’t join the Dead for a monetary return–they didn’t have any. Like
other community artists in the Haight, the band played numerous free concerts
as they practised their art and got high, day in, day out. It didn’t really pay the
rent. But like Owsley, they weren’t in it for the money. And again, inevitably,
these two sympathetic vibrations found each other and became one. Owsley
became the Grateful Dead’s soundman, their driving visionary behind the
scenes–and so much more.

As Phil Lesh told Blair Jackson: "He was our patron, in the ultimate sense of the
word. He didn't send us a check–we lived together. He paid the bills… Bear
bought us time, and space–well he didn't buy it for us, we all bought it together.
Bear will be the first one to tell you that. It was patronage in the finest sense: he
never once thought about the money. We were able to be the Grateful Dead, and
if they hired us, great. But we could at least eat."

In a rare interview with the Associated Press in 1996, Owsley said: “I was
responsible for the Grateful Dead? No, come on. This was something the
universe did, not me. I think I did as much as I could. In the old days I had a few
bucks, and I was able to keep them away from the market long enough for the
market to realize…''

Writing about those early days with the Dead on his website, Owsley said: “In the
beginning we were hanging on to what seemed like a rocket sled, everything
needed work and no-one knew much about what to do. But we were determined
to bring R&R music technology into the modern age.” One of the first things
Owsley did was bequeath the band his personal stereo, an ugly, utilitarian,
$10,000 state-of-the-art Voice of the Theatre system with a McIntosh amp. “It
had a cabinet in the bottom with a front loading horn… a 15" speaker and it was
in a large box about the size of a small fridge,” he told David Gans.

The PA was revolutionary for its time, although it was going to get pushed to new
extremes in Owsley’s quest to help the Dead be the greatest rock n’ roll band of
all time. On his website, Owsley wrote that:

At the time I volunteered to be soundman there was no such thing as a dedicated

music PA. Musicians either plugged their mic into their guitar amp, or used
whatever was at the venue, usually nothing, but sometimes a church or stadium or
small theatre might furnish the venue, and there was something. Most bands did
not have soundmen anyway. I decided that we had to build a real system to
furnish good sound. I asked a friend, Tim Scully, who was heavy into electronics
to come aboard and help us. He designed a central preamp and distribution system
for all the instruments as well as the vocal channel, and we used McIntosh HiFi

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amps to power Voice of the Theatre speakers.

At the time there were only really three kinds of PA systems all primarily used for
voice rather than music–there were small systems in churches, and in movie
theatres, lastly in large baseball and basketball stadiums. Needless to say, they did
not have either the power handling capability or the frequency range needed. The
PA became a long-term project which would lead over the years to such
innovations as the Wall of Sound, and the founding of Meyer Sound Laboratories.
The instrument struggles would lead to the creation of Alembic Guitars.

At the time, however, the band were playing their instruments through this weird
unitized system which was very horn heavy–each speaker setup had a bass cabinet
and a small HF horn. The sound was thick and 'horny', which was (and is) like
nothing else. Garcia at that time preferred a hollow body Gibson electric and
coupled with the speakers it has a sound I have never heard any other guitars
make.

For a while we had a bass augmentation speaker, called a 'Superbass', which we

hooked up to Phil. It had an 18" dual voice coil Electrovoice speaker on the
bottom pointing down and had passive moving sides made of stiffened styrofoam.
We all felt this gadget made a huge effect putting out ultralow frequencies, but it
may just have been our imagination–no one saved the box for us to measure later
on when we got to the stage we were doing that sort of thing. We may have
literally used it up, wore it out, it was intended for the living room Hi Fi…

Like Owsley himself, Tim Scully was a young boy genius destined to make more
than musical instruments. An electronics whiz from an early age, Scully was
always interested in computers, earning an honorable second place whilst still in
the eighth grade at a San Francisco Bay Area science fair. He had built a
working computer that analyzed game strategies out of scrap parts, reportedly,
for just over a dollar. At 15 he was given a part-time job by scientists working in
the radiation labs at Berkeley, analyzing data from high energy physics
experiments. In his first year at Pleasant Hill High, across the bay from San
Francisco, Scully built a linear accelerator as part of a two-year science project.
His aim was to make gold atoms from mercury.

Scully first took LSD in April, 1965–probably Owsley's–and, wrote Tendler and
May, “he felt afterwards as though he had been hit by a revelation, 'a sense that
this was a way of communicating by natural knowing to people the delicateness
of our environment, a sense of the worth and value of other human beings, the
need for being gentle both with the environment and each other.’” He continued
saying that ‘LSD is like a virus. Viruses don't reproduce themselves but they
enter into a cell and cause the cell to produce more of the virus. That was the
effect on me. I wanted to make some more LSD and give it away to a lot of

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people.’”

By early 1966 Scully was living in Berkeley in a house he owned and filled with
other young boarders when Owsley got wind of him; by this time the boy genius
was also trying to connect to Owsley. He had looked into making his own LSD,
researching it at the same University of California library in Berkeley that Owsley
first approached, but was stymied by the lack of base materials. And then, yet
again, the alchemy of the age brought together the players, although sometimes,
like now, it was an odd fit.

Scully was almost ten years Owsley’s junior, a “tall, lean, serious young man with
a dry sense of humour,” Tendler and May wrote. They spoke for hours that first
meeting, sizing each other up, and for all his acid nerdiness, Owsley sensed
Scully did get what was going down on the cosmic horizon, it’s just that he was
so young and inexperienced, in more ways than one.

“I said Tim, I can't figure out why you would want to do this?” Owsley told me in
2009. “I couldn't figure out his motivations and I don't think he knew either.”
Owsley didn’t trust Scully outright–he was too transparent to be a narc–but there
was no way he would just let this 21-year old gangly teenager into his alchemical
Sanctum Sanctorum straight off the bat. If he wanted to make LSD then like all
good apprentices he was going to have to wax on, wax off, first. Owsley tested
him out first on his other work-in-progress–the band, who needed a serious lift in
technology if they were going to live up to the vision he had had of them, and the
role of their music in transforming consciousness.

“I knew nothing when I started,” Owsley told David Gans in 1991:

I just said, ‘Hey, yeah, I'll be the sound man, and we can use my hi-fi.’ I didn't
know anything about it, but I did notice one thing straight away, and that was that
the instruments that they were using looked like somebody built them in their
garage. When you opened them up they had parts that came out of a 1932 radio.
And in fact, that was about right. It was Les Paul who took apart a radio and put the
parts in his guitar… Put a magnet with a coil of wire wound around it in a guitar
and plugged it into an amplifier. And that's where it all started. Basically, the
guitars in 1966 were identical. They still had a magnet with a coil of wire around it,
six screws in the top of the magnet–and sometimes not even the screws–and a wax
capacitor and a cheap potentiometer. That was is. Crude, very crude. The wiring
looked like the wiring I used to take out of old radios from World War II and from
old wooden house radios.

And the bodies themselves didn't seem to be all that well constructed. I thought,
Here we are with the technology that is putting things in orbit around the earth, and
what has changed? In the days of Bach, the highest technology that man could

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produce built the organs that he played, and here the musicians that are writing and
playing music, are forced to play on something that looks like it belongs to the
World War I and World War II period. This is wrong.

But I'm not an engineer, and never was, so I thought we gotta do something about
this, and so I started looking around for someone that could help. I ran into this kid
Tim Scully, and he seemed to know about electronics. I thought, ‘Hey, I need
somebody. Do you want to do it?’ and he said ‘OK.’ He was a bright kid and he
knew enough about electronics, how to wire two or three parts together.

All I knew, basically, was what I had learned to be an electronic technician in my

Air Force period. I was a ham radio operator and I knew something about the
theory of the operation of radios, and I had worked as a broadcast technician, but I
wasn't a design engineer. I more or less understood how things worked and I knew
how to solder stuff together so I could build things, but I didn't consider myself a
design engineer in any way, shape, or form.

I knew we had to do something, because the technology was so primitive that it

seemed like it was holding the music back, that we could go to another level if we
had better instruments. Half the time they'd crackle and pop and hum and there
would be distortion out of the speakers, it wouldn't be controllable and the guys
would make a sound not what they wanted. So we went wholly the other way and
we tried using hi-fi stuff…

Tom Wolfe says Owsley “started buying the Dead equipment such as no rock
'n' roll band ever had before, the Beatles included, all manner of tuners,
amplifiers, receivers, loudspeakers, microphones, cartridges, tapes, theatre
horns, booms, lights, turntables, instruments, mixers, muters, servile
mesochroics, whatever was on the market. The sound went down through so
many microphones and hooked through so many mixers and variable lags and
blew up in so many amplifiers and roiled around in so many speakers and fed
back down so many microphones, it came on like a chemical refinery. There was
something wholly new and deliriously weird in the Dead's sound, and practically
everything new in rock 'n' roll, rock jazz I have heard it called, came out of it.”

Phil Lesh told Rolling Stone that he, “started talking to Bear about our sound
problems. There was no technology for electric instruments. We started talking
about how to get around distortion and get a pure musical tone. He did some
research and said, ‘Let’s use Altec speakers and hi-fi amps and four-tube amps,
one for each instrument, and put them on a piece of wood.’ Three months later
we were playing through Bear’s sound system.”

In what has proved one of his lasting historical contributions, Owsley also began
recording those early Grateful Dead shows, both to preserve the sound and train
the band by playing back their performance. Again on [Link]’s music page,

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he wrote:

I could play you tapes of the early Dead that would make you cringe they're so
bad. They couldn't sing for shit. Any one of them could sing on his own okay, but
they sounded terrible together, and I think part of that was the fact that the
technology of on-stage monitors was pitiful. It's absolutely essential that
musicians clearly hear themselves in order to blend their voices together. While
they were sitting around practicing their vocal harmonies without instruments it
was fine, but once they were on stage with the instruments going, each one would
hear something else and they'd all be off-key. It was sometimes painful. In fact, at
the beginning I remember saying to them, 'Gee, guys, maybe you should stick to
instrumentals, or songs where only one person sings.' Fortunately they didn't
listen to me.

The one thing I insisted on that they did listen to me about was, I insisted on
sound checks, and I encouraged them to listen to tapes of their performances, not
just so they could hear how they sounded, but also to correct me on what I was
doing, because I tried to make the tapes as much like the way it sounded in the
hall as possible. This way I learned to mix sound. They also learned to use
dynamics, which many electric bands never do. I developed my recording skills at
the same time.

I used a stereo reel to reel recorder with the (mono) PA signal in the left channel,
principally vocals and drums and a few instruments, with the instruments which
were not in the PA–that is, most of them–in the right. The PA was flat out just
managing the drums and vocals in those early days. This resembled the Beatles
first 'stereo' record, and had a lot of 'space' or 3D effect.

I later had to put the vocals into both channels because, as the band started to
listen more and more to my tapes, they wanted it to sound more 'conventional'.
But panning the vocals destroys most of the space, unfortunately. Floor or ear
monitors were still in the future, so the band had trouble keeping the vocals tight
and together, and like most young bands, had a distinct habit of rushing the beat,
both of which are evident on the tracks. But in my opinion the sound they made in
those early days was very special.

It was–and so was the kool-aid. And when the ‘pudding’ of music and drugs
came together it was very special, indeed. Interviewed by Jerilyn Brandelius for
the Grateful Dead Family Album, Jerry Garcia remembered that:

"The nice thing about the Acid Test was that we could play or not. And a lot of
times we'd really be too high to play, and we'd play for maybe a minute and then
we'd lose it and have to leave–'This is too weird for me!' On the other hand,

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sometimes we'd play, and there was no pressure on us because people didn't
come to see the Grateful Dead, they came for the Acid Test; it was the whole
event that counted. Therefore we weren't in the spotlight, so when we did play,
we played with a certain kind of freedom you rarely get as a musician. Not only
did we not have to fulfill expectations about us, we didn't have to fulfill
expectations about music either. So in terms of being able to experiment freely
with music, it was amazing.”

It was something akin to a shamanic therapy session, where the musicans

plumbed the psychic depths through their music, jamming with their instruments
and the crowd in a Gestalt feedback loop of higher consciousness. Bob Weir was
quoted in the Acid Test Chronicles as saying: "There was a lot of straightahead
telepathy that went on during those sessions. We learned during those sessions
to trust our intuitions, because that was about all we had to go on. When you
learn to trust your intuitions, you're going to be more given to try things, to
experiment. And you're going to be more given to extemporaneous assaults of
one sort or another. We learned to start improvising on just about anything … We
were participants, and so were they. We were all just making waves, as big and
bold as we could, and seeing where they rippled against each other and what
kinds of shimmers that all caused."

The Acid Tests were gaining momentum and the eighth event was held at the
three-day Trips Festival in Longshoremen's Hall, January 21-23, organised by
Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalogue and ‘America Needs Indians’ fame.
In A Long Strange Trip, Dennis McNally quotes Jerry Garcia as saying:
“Thousands of people, man, all helplessly stoned, all finding themselves in a
roomful of other thousands of people, none of whom any of them were afraid of.
It was magic, far out, beautiful magic.”

In Searching for the Sound, Phil Lesh explained: “When a large crowd is present,
as as the Fillmore or the Trips Festival, the experience of the group mind
becomes much more intense, and much larger-scale; see how the entire wildly
dancing audience behaves like waves in the ocean: whole groups of dancers
rising and falling, lifting their arms or spinning rapidly in synchonized movement,
darting swiftly through the crowd or languidly undulating in place–manifesting the
same sort of spontaneous consensus seen in flocks of birds, schools of fish, or
clusters of galaxies.

“To make music for dancers like these is the rarest honor,” Lesh continued, “to
be co-responsible for what really is the dance of the cosmos. If, as some savants
of consciousness suggest, we are actually agreeing to create, from moment to
moment, everything we perceive as real, then it stands to reason that we're also
responsible for keeping it going in some harmonious manner. The fervent belief
we shared then, and that perseveres today, is that the energy liberated by this
combination of music and ecstatic dancing is somehow making the world better,
or at least holding the line against the depradations of entropy and ignorance."

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Jerry Garcia was equally evangelical about the Acid Test initiative, saying: “I
thought that was it… If the Acid Tests could continue in its own natural
progression without all that confusion and stuff with Kesey, the loss and ... I think
it would have been just incredible in about four or five months. It would have
been the biggest thing on earth. It was increasing now at an exponential rate with
each successive Acid [Link] first one it was only maybe 50 or 60 people. The
next one there was 150, the next 3-400, y’know. At the Trips Festival there were
a couple of thousand, thousands. It was just gaining an incredible momentum
and each time it was tremendously funny and good and entertaining. What life
should be, really. There’s been nothing that equals that for weirdness, and the
Grateful Dead has played some incredible weird scenes...”

By the time of the Trips Festival, Owsley had been pumping out his high quality
acid on the Californian scene for over six months, and “everyone in the band,
except for Pigpen, had been taking acid at least once a week for more than six
months,” Phil Lesh says in Searching for the Sound. “It's safe to say that in the
ninety days or so that the Acid Tests existed,” Lesh continued, “our band took
more and longer strides into another realm of musical consciousness, not to
mention pure awareness, than ever before or since. At the beginning, we were a
band playing a gig. At the end, we had become shamans helping to channel the
transcendent into our mundane lives and those of our listeners. We felt, all of us–
band, Pranksters, participants–privileged to be at the arrow's point in human
evolution; and from that standpoint, everything was possible."

But events were conspiring within the scene and without, culminating in the
dramatic fake suicide of Kesey and subsequent fleeing to Mexico to avoid drug
charges, leaving Babbs in charge of the Tests, at least in his own mind. The
Pranksters were like a flock of geese sometimes heading in the same direction,
but with no one leading. Even without Kesey, though, the group mind was still
coming through strong, and the Dead were still the house band anchoring it all
together–or not.

Just before Kesey left the scene the Pranksters and the Dead, including Owsley,
did perhaps the strangest Acid Test of all–at the Sound City Recording Studio, on
January 29, 1966. “The purpose of the recording was to produce an album of the
unusual sounds, mental manipulations of the sometimes considered genius of
Mr. Kesey and his cohorts during the actual happenings of a ‘sugar’ party,” wrote
Jim Seagrave, Owner & Head Manipulator of Sound City in a letter to Billboard
magazine in March, when the Acid Test record was released.

Dennis McNally quotes Ray Anderson, the soundman from the Matrix club, who
helped with the recording, that “Kreutzmann and his wife were fighting … Bear
was irritating everyone not in the Dead and seemed primarily concerned with
making sure that the man who owned the studio did not get a copy of anything
recorded … Lesh spent the best part of the evening sitting with Owsley, with

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whom he fell in love. ‘Hanging around with him was like being in a science-fiction
movie’,” Lesh said.

If the Trips Festival was the peak of the wave, the downward arc was about to
begin in Los Angeles with the Watts Acid Test. Watts had received nation-wide
exposure five months previously when riots had broken out in the black ghettos
and widespread looting and arson touched off a full-scale race war. Yet it was
here that the Dead and their girlfriends moved in early 1966 after the Trips
Festival, following Babbs and the other Pranksters as the Acid Tests seeped out
of San Francisco to slowly turn on L.A.–and the world.

“The Acid Test went to L.A. and the Grateful Dead felt obligated,” Owsley told
Blair Jackson in Garcia: An American Life. “I argued long and strongly that it
wasn't really a good idea to do it because I didn't see any point in it. It was going
to be expensive, none of us had a place down there to stay and there were no
assurances there was any income; I had limited amounts of money. When I first
met those guys they couldn't make enough to live on. If they went out and worked
a show, there were five of them and they were lucky to get $125 a night. So there
was no money in it; it was more like a hobby.” Owsley agreed to finance the deal,
but he was also between batches of LSD and had agreed, at first, not to make
any while he was patronizing the Dead–so money was tight.

“We arrived in L.A., a motley group of about ten or twelve people with no place to
stay and very little money to live on,” Owsley told Relix magazine in 2005. “We
were helped out of our critical need for shelter by a real estate agent one of the
Pranksters knew or had met, and settled into a large pink house in the area
called Watts, right next to a brothel. We had nowhere else to practice, so we set
up in the living room.” The house was a three storey mansion located off Western
Avenue in Compton, near Watts. It was totally bereft on any furniture and
because it was essentially a giant temporary jam room, nobody bought any;
everyone just slept on mats on the floor.

“I thought, 'Who the fuck wants to go there?' Owsley told Blair Jackson. “It turned
out it was right next door to a whorehouse, and the whorehouse patrons would
throw pot seeds out the windows, there were little pot plants growing all around–
that's all we needed, since we were bringing the cops there almost every day
because of the noise." As Owsley told Relix:

The Acid Test was the first reason for us to be there, but I looked at it as a great
way for the musicians to do a lot of practice and for me to learn what it meant to be
a soundman. So practice we did, even though it caused a bit of friction with our
next-door neighbors.

Once Barbara, a friend, made us up a batch of her specialty: B. Toklas’ original

recipe marijuana brownies. Unaware of what was happening, she had just gotten

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out of her car and was walking up the path to the door when a cop stopped her on
one of their visits to get us to turn down the music. ‘What’s in the bag?’ asked the
cop. Not flustered in the least, Barbara answered, ‘Homemade brownies, would you
like one?’ The cop declined her generous offer and let her pass. I often wondered
what would have happened if he had taken her up. The recipe used broken up,
whole bud mixed up into a paste with dates, nuts, figs and other fruit plus a touch of
rum or brandy—sort of like a fruitcake mix, but not actually cooked. It had a
distinctive taste, to say the least, and got you well and truly stoned.

Owsley concentrated on designing the Dead new musical instruments with

Scully–the instruments took up the living room, the band had the second floor
and Owsley dominated the top level as they jamed all day on acid and not, and
lived the high life. They were about to get very close in that house–much closer
than most bands, even living on the road toether, and sometimes that intimacy
was more than they wanted to share. Bob Weir remembers hearing a
“combination of a flying saucer invasion and some sort of demonic hoedown”
coming from the top floor as Owsley made love with Melissa, which just
reinforced his perception of the Bear as a “Bearzeebub” guy.

Owsley was “over-the-top." Jerry Garcia told Sandy Troy that: "We were living
solely off of Owsley's good graces at that time.... [His] trip was he wanted to
design equipment for us, and we were going to have to be in sort of a lab
situation for him to do it.” They were also going to have to follow a few house
rules–there was to be no vegetable matter brought into the house, and like
Owsley, the band was going to have to solely eat meat: for breakfast, lunch and
dinner, to regain their carnivorous edge. “I tried to get people to eat meat
because it was cheaper,” Owsley told Robert Greenfield. “That was not a good
idea. It was okay for me but not for others.”

Rosie McGee, Phil Lesh's girlfriend at the time told Blair Jackson: "That whole
scene down there was totally controlled by Owsley … Because Owsley was in
charge of it and paying for it and was the massive control freak he was, he
controlled every single thing, down to what we ate. I'll never forget that when
you'd open the refrigerator, there were big slabs of beef in there. The shelves
weren't even in there — just these big hunks of meat. So of course behind his
back, people were sneaking candy bars in. There were no greens or anything —
he called it 'rabbit food.'” Owsley countered by telling Jackson that, "I tend to be a
control freak. I've had that epithet thrown at me a bunch. [But] I like to see things
done right."

Still, with all the acid being dropped, who had time to eat? Garcia was quoted by
Robert Greenfield as saying: “So we ended up living with Owsley while he was
tabbing up the acid in the place we lived. We had enough acid to blow the world
apart. And we were just musicians in this house, and we were guinea-pigging

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more or less continually. Tripping frequently if not constantly. That got good and
weird."

The tabbing didn’t happen until late March through early April, when the money
started running out and Owsley was forced to make another batch of LSD from
his stash of crystal lysergic monohydrate. Because there was no capping
machine available at the time, Owsley tableted close to three thousand hits of
‘Blue Cheer’ acid by rubbing the crystalline paste onto titrate boards, by hand.

Owsley was a comandeering personality, and often times he grated on people.

Dennis McNally quotes Sara Ruppenthal, Jerry Garcia’s love interest at the time,
as saying that the Dead were “in captivity” in an arrangement that was “peverse,
evil”. Owsley was “a wizard, obviously a madman” and at times his relentless
quest for perfection–his way, was overbearing. Rosie McGee remembers him
pressuring Lesh to take acid with the group one night, and when he declined
Owsley reportedly replied, “The band is my body. You are my left leg. My left leg
is asleep. You must get high.” Lesh, who was particularly fond of Owsley and his
out there, almost sci-fi theories, obliged. Bob Weir also held his ground with
Owsley: “As far as I was concerned Owsley was the devil,” he told Dennis
McNally. “I’d just as soon have him living on the top floor than not know where he
is.”

But while Owsley attempted to steer the Dead, the band also steered him,
straight back to where he was reluctant to go–the Acid Tests. He’d missed the
first L.A. Acid Test due to business in San Francisco, but when the Watts Acid
Test rolled out on February 12, 1966–Lincoln’s birthday–at the Youth
Opportunities Center in Compton, Owsley was there.

The Watts Acid Test had a number of variables going for it that set it apart from
what had gone before: It was Tim Scully’s first Acid Test working with Owsley to
roll out the new sound equipment for the band (he had previously gone to the
Trips Festival so Owsley could make sure he wasn’t going to freak out or
anything in an actual Acid Test environment). Kesey was absent, on the lam in
Mexico. Some things remained the same: Owsley’s “sound system was
essentially experimental and usually caused long delays in the setup process,
Dennis McNally wrote. “This was the case at Watts, and everyone got terrifically
high while waiting for the band to play.”

A strange psychic vibe settled as they tripped hard in the ghetto, amongst the
continued racial strife and growing unease of law enforcement and the
mainstream. Moreover, “Owsley had a couple of glass ampules with pure LSD in
them and he poured it into the Kool-Aid," said Lee Quaarnstrom, in On the Bus.
And, unbeknownest to each other, several Pranksters liberally dosed the kool-
aid, making it so super potent that even the Dead lost the plot at times. There
were invariably a number of freak outs, including a young woman immortalized
by Tom Wolfe as the ‘Who Cares Girl?’ in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, who

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kept screaming "Whooooooo cares? LSD! LSD!" into the microphone Babbs
gave her to bring her into the movie. It had the opposite effect, bringing her
movie to the masses and sending the whole Test into a bad trip spiral over the
sound system and into the psychic ether.

“I certainly cared, at least to get her to shut the fuck up," said Wavy Gravy in Paul
Perry’s On the Bus. "If she was unglued, I might at least find some way to get her
glued back together. I went looking for her — 20 minutes, 20 years, who knows
how long it took to find her? — and found her standing in the middle of a circle of
Pranksters and people I didn't know still saying 'Who cares? Who cares?' I got
everybody to join hands, which caused the woman to laugh and turn into jewels
and light. That was when I passed the Acid Test. I realized that when you get to
the very bottom of the human soul and you're sinking, but you'll still reach for
someone who is sinking worse than you are, everybody's going to get high. You
don't need acid to get there."

The cops came like moths to a flame, both the L.A.P.D. and California Highway
Patrol officers, but held back from stepping into the freaking meltdown for fear of
causing the psychic powderkeg to explode like it had with the negroes–and for
the fact that there was no actual law broken, no alcohol served, LSD was legal
and they had their event permit. Yet as they herded on home the Acid Test
graduates in the dawn’s early light, they undoubtedly felt that everything about
this sensory orgy was wrong, a crime, and sometime soon the law was going to
agree.

"Some of the Acid Tests were up and going and fun and some of them were real
dark," Owsley told Blair Jackson. "It was the full gamut."

What may have also added to the psychic mix was the DMT
(Dimethyltryptamine), a fast-acting superhallucinogen even more powerful than
acid, that had incredible out-of-body and mystical effects. “At one of the Acid
Tests … it might have been Watts, actually,” Owsley said in Conversations With
the Dead, [elsewhere he claimed it was during a rehearsal for the Watts test] “[I
had] a very strange experience where all of a sudden I was looking at sound
coming out of the speakers. This happened on several occasions. It happened in
the house we were staying in in Watts, too. I actually SAW sound coming out of
the speakers. It’s a thing called synasthesia. I've never met anyone else who has
actually had that experience. It was funny because I was looking at this sound
and I’m really out there. And all kinds of other things are going on and I was
thinking, now, that doesn’t look the way I thought sound should look!”

At his second lecture at EGA in 2009, Owsley went further, revealing he believed
there was a causal connection between the amplification of consciousness DMT
evoked and its abilty to specifically alter sound frequencies:

I’ll tell you something very strange about DMT… Besides the tinkertoymen and all

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those other DMT alien creatures you meet, we found that if anyone smoked DMT
and if they could hear a muscian playing, the instrument, the sound … everything
changed. It would get much louder and more strident and whatnot.

And we found that this was weird, this smoking DMT. It was blowing out speakers
and blowing out tubes and we thought this was funny. So one day I got some
instruments and measurement meters and stuff, and we found out the absolute
maximum level of gain you could get out of a guitar, a fender. The maximum. No
matter what you did you couldn’t get anymore level. And then somebody smoked
some DMT.

So some kind of thing happens when you listen to the music and you’ve got the
DMT running around in your brain. It makes up an electronic circuit in the ampifier
and changes things. The guitar sounds different, it goes slimy, sort of reptilian, and
seems to be a little out of your control. The strings feel silky and the sound feels
strange all that sort of thing. But, bottom line, somehow you’re changing the gain
structures in a circuitry that no other mechanical means will do. Your brain is
influencing electronics. Your mind is communicating with that amplifier in some
way. That’s very strange…

Now we don’t know, but let’s assume that some circuits are more perceptible.
Maybe you can build a circuit to meaure instead of 20 milligrams of DMT, one. So
you just get a buzz on that one. And maybe you could keep on following that trail
until you get the circuit and you can effectively... Well, you wouldn’t have to take a
drug. You could optimize the circuitry to wire that part of the brain that hooks into
DMT… [This could be] a way of communicating with our minds to electronics, and
that includes getting into our computers.

I’ve talked about this for 40 years. And people would think ‘oh this guy’s taking
too much of something…’ Hey. It happened. I was there and it happened a lot, and
we were quite aware of it. Listen to the Stones record, I think it was Wheels of Fire.
People went to their shows one day at the old Filmore, at Winterland, and
somebody every night smoked some DMT. And when I listen to that tone, ‘oh–
youre listening to people smoking DMT.’

“If there was some type of circuit that was more sensitive to [DMT] than others,
you could measure different circuit sensitivity,” Owsley told David Gans. “Then
you could optimize that, and perhaps you might even be able to develop a circuit
that had that property to such an extent that a person could affect it without
having to take the psychedelic. And it wouldn’t matter what–any interaction of
any kind that you could initiate with your mind would enable you to build
something that would directly control a machine … Which is what we need–we
need a way of controlling machines directly.”

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Owsley must have spoken to Scully about this, because it was a line of
transhuman psychedelic inquiry that Scully was to run with in his later career
building biofeedback devices to enable people with disabilities to communicate
via machine interfaces.

Poor Scully, he must have been hammered in all directions by the ideas and
experiences he was exposed to in those first months as Owsley’s apprentice.
Being around the Dead and the Pranksters at the Acid Tests reinforced Scully’s
already messianic intuitions, and as he later told Nicholas Schou, author of
Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread
Peace, Love, and Acid to the World: "Sometimes when the Pranksters and the
Dead took acid together and the Dead played, it felt to us as though a … gestalt
organism was formed. One of the reasons for the Acid Tests was for the group to
get high with lots of people to find missing parts of the gestalt that sometimes
formed. One joke was that we'd all leave the planet together when we found the
right people."

Time was running out to find that right gestalt, though, as Watts was the
beginning of the end for the Acid Tests. Although there were two more Tests in
L.A., and one more in October at San Francisco State before the final Acid Test
Graduation at Winterland on Halloween night, 1966, the mood was shifting. “The
final [L.A. Acid Test] at a sound set on Pico Boulevard was stopped before
midnight by the owner, who was rightfully freaked out by all the magic and
weirdness,” Owsley told Relix magazine.

“After about three months we ran totally out of money and it was well and truly
time to return home,” he continued. “During our ‘woodshedding’ time in L.A.,
Rock Scully, our manager, had been turning down offers of gigs from the various
clubs in the Bay Area because not enough money was on offer. The prices the
band worked for when we left was only $125/night, which works out to $25 (gas
money and a sandwich) for each musician, leaving no money for the soundman
or roadie. Most bands had neither one at that stage in their career. The Dead had
begun as a band only about ten months earlier and had owned the name
Grateful Dead for just four months. Finally an offer in the princely sum of $375
came for a gig at the Longshoreman’s Hall with several other bands, including
the Oakland band Loading Zone. Just in time, as the old saying goes, and we
accepted it with thanks.”

The Grateful Dead had had enough of being cooped up with Owsley in L.A.
When the band moved back to San Francisco in April, they told a roommate of
Charles Perry’s it was because they were “tired of living with Superman.”

“For a long time it was like no matter what else we were doing we had to be at
the Acid Tests every weekend,” Owsley told David Gans:

That was it, as a totally committed part of it. No matter what other shows we did,

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Saturday night we were there. And other than that I don't know how many of those
I would have gone to. I didn't actually think of myself as a Prankster, per se. I found
it all kind of scary. … It [took] days and days and days of sorting it out and putting
it together. It was sort of a crash course in how to become a jet pilot when you've
never seen a jet before. And the way they did it was they drop you in there, took
you up and whoah… barrel rolls… tailspins right into the ground sometimes. But
psychically you recover from all this if you’re tough, and I guess most of us were.
Occasionally some people weren't, and that’s unfortunate, but because of the way
that it was undertaken in those days, the fact that we used to take huge amounts of
acid…

We used to take 250-300 mcs or more. Kesey preferred 400 mcs or more. Albert
Hofmann [later] told me that that was a substantial overdose, and I said yes, in
retrospect, I realize it was. People nowadays seem to take 100-150 mcs, about that.
All I know is that the result is that people... Well, first you have training wheels for
your bike before you get the 1000cc Yamaha… It’s a little different and I guess the
result is that people don't get so crazy, I guess.

But in those days everybody got kind of crazy and some people crash landed and
other people managed to make it further down the road. But the whole scene
became very loud and very weird and attracted a lot of attention. It attracted a lot of
social concern because a lot of people were experimenting with a lot of different
social matrices which were frightening to our cultural leaders. The police, the
legislators, the business community; basically the people that are concerned with
maintaining a stable society. They saw this as a very threatening phenomenon with
a lot of people doing things that were very weird and just didn't fit.

This is where the perennial analysis of the different strands of the psychedelic
movement differ, from the Huxley ‘turn on the intelligentsia’ to the Keseyian
‘revolution of the masses’, which is how Leary ended up after Harvard and
Millbrook, as well. As Leary’s colleague Dick Albert, later Ram Dass says in Paul
Perry’s On the Bus:

"I remember the first time that I saw, in the San Jose Mercury, a story about a
‘drug orgy’. I realized at that point that Ken and the group were forcing society to
reckon with this stuff that we had hoped would stay underground a little longer. I
felt that the Acid Tests forced drug legislation. It was our whole hope that before
society caught onto the heresy that was inherent in acid, we could get more
entrenched into the policy-making levels. We were spending time meeting with
psychiatrists and turning on people connected with the government–as well as
major philosophers and poets–people who could be a voice for this stuff that
undercut established societal structures. Kesey brought it to the surface too fast."

Well, Kesey, and Owsley, and the Dead, that whole gestalt creature that they and
the Pranksters and the hippies themselves formed. But Owsley had his doubts,

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too, if not about the long and beautiful wave they were riding straight from the
planetary intelligence, the management, into the heart of the culture, then at least
about the speed and efficiacy of the delivery. I cycled in and out of it for a long
time,” Owsley told David Gans.

Eventually I decided that it was just getting too weird to handle … Kesey said 'all
this [acid] does is turn up your volume'. The basic nature of the person is simply
amplified. In a social context you can understand those who feel responsible for the
social matrix itself don't want something being produced like these kind of
effects…

I don’t know how it relate to psychedelics. All I know is that at one point I joined
up with the band they were Pranksters; they were part of a scene that was doing
something right out there on the edge. The edge of consciousness of social, the
edge of magic, the edge of music, that was very dynamic. A band composed of five
guys that were amongst the smartest people I've ever run across...

[But the Prankster scene] was sort of like if you set fire to a sky rocket… It’s going
to be brilliant as hell but it doesn't go very far and it doesn't last very long. It
attracted so much social pressure on the individuals that had it not been for Kesey
getting busted and all these other things happening, and the intense amount of
social and police pressure on him, then who knows how far and where it would
have gone. But as it was it did its thing ultraspectacularly, but by necessity it had to
follow that old Prankster saying, ‘nothing lasts’. It lasted as long as it did and then
that was it.

It was a little too weird and a little too heavy. It was hard to control and it looked
like too much exposure and too much heat, all those things, right. I was not a real
loud thing at that point and I didn't want to be a loud thing or attract a lot of
attention for any reason, and here’s a scene that was so loud that if you put it on the
moon it would attract attention. And here was this band of incredible musicians
making this music that I thought was more important.

As the Acid tests finally fizzled out, the band continued, spreading the acid-
inspired San Fransciso rock sound to the world. As Tim Leary said in On the Bus:
“Out of those Acid Tests we have a living, growing flower known as the
Grateful Dead. Several hundred thousand people go to see them each year. It is
almost like the bus. They just keep traveling." The vibe continued to spread in a
more palatable form for the mainstream, and the group mind would grow until it
became a countercultual phenomenon united by Deadheads and trance dancers
across the world.

"In order to keep on playing, we had to go with whatever form was there, “Garcia

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told Blair Jackson in Garcia: An American Life. “Because for one thing, the form
that we liked [the Acid Test] always scared everybody. It scared the people who
owned the building that we'd rent, so they'd never rent twice to us. It scared the
people who came, a lot of time. It scared the cops. It scared everybody. Because
it represented total and utter anarchy. Indoor anarchy. That's something people
haven't learned to get off with. But our experience with those things is that's
where you get the highest...

“The Acid Test was the prototype for our whole basic trip. But nothing has ever
come up to the level of the way the Acid Test was. It's just never been equalled,
really.”

As well as being the soundman and patron of the Dead, Owsley kep his hand in
the acid scene right up to the point it was declared illegal in October,1966–and
beyond. The vibe had spread from the Acid Tests and the parties to the youth
culture itself, which was now turning on in such large numbers that the
establishment had gone into flight and fear mode as it attempted to subdue it’s
recalcintrant mutant children.

The first public signs were in the music and the fashion, but also in the attitude of
this new wave of psychedleic beatniks that ran under the name ‘hippies’. The
times they were a-changing, and something was blowing in the wind. It’s
estimated that 15,000 young people from across the country, many runaways,
began descending on San Francisco, and specifically the Haight. “The police in
San Francisco made 8831 contacts with juveniles during the first six months of
the year, a whopping increase over the previous year,” wrote Gene Anthony in
The Summer of Love. “Twelve hundred thirty-one teens under sixteen had been
reported as runaways in San Francisco. Thousands more were soon to be on the
mach to join the legions of flower children.”

They came, Anthony Ashbolt said in his essay ‘Go ask Alice’: Remembering the
Summer of Love Forty Years On’ in the Australasian Journal of American
Studies, “In search of love, peace, community and self. They sought refuge from
an American dream that was crumbling quickly in suburban wastelands and
urban hothouses, as well as the jungles of Vietnam … Philosophies of love and
community were underpinned by drug usage and involvement with rock music,”
Ashbolt continued. “A veritable psychedelic lifestyle was growing. As one hippie
put it: ‘the street scene and its extensions into the art and living patterns that are

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being developed is in large part due to what is first envisioned and then
consciously applied through the use of LSD and other drugs’… Acid Rock was a
synthesis of the twin foundations of hippie lifestyle. It was a musical form that
paralleled the psychedelic experience.”

The music scene had evolved from the Acid Tests and other proto-parties held
as benefit gigs that unifed the local musicans and the burgeoning audiences
hungry for their sound. In early 1966 the Family Dog band, under the
management of Chet Helms, became Family Dog Productions and started
promoting ‘happenings’ at local venues like the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore
Auditorium alongside Bill Graham, who used to be the business manager of the
San Francisco Mime Troupe. Bands like the Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother
and the Holding Company (with singer Janis Joplin) shot to prominence,
alongside technological developments in the visual arena, as Bill Hamm, the
‘lightshow man’ made his debut at the Avalon projecting liquid light on the walls
and dancers juxtaposed with films, birthing the full sensorary psychedelic
experience.

Owsley was an active part of the music scene in 1966, as he describes on his
website, [Link]: “Even after I was involved with the Dead, I always checked
out the other bands. I was never one of those insular people like a lot of the folks
in the Grateful Dead scene. There's a huge world of music out there and I always
like to listen to everything from opera to rock'n'roll. There were a lot of good local
bands. Big Brother & the Holding Company, for instance, could be amazing one
night and make you cringe the next. The Sons of Champlin were that way, too.
When they were on, though, they were great. Quicksilver, the Airplane, Big
Brother and the Dead were sort of the Big Four, and I liked all of them. I also
liked The Charlatans, not that they were great musicians, but they were a helluva
lot of fun. There were a lot of little bands that were pretty good, and a lot that
weren't so good.”

Owsley cut a strange archetype in those days–the soundman to the Dead, he

was also the premier underground acid cook and fast becoming an alchemical
guru, freely giving away his consciousness raising product in massive doses in
an attempt to feed the flames of the smouldering counterculture movement. As
Charles Perry describes, “Owsley's marketing technique included passing out a
lot of free samples. A new batch would be announced with people walking up
and down Haight Street passing out the Blue Dots, Green Flats or whatever was
the latest model. He made a particular point of trying to get his LSD to all the
musicians he could, and his intense figure was a familiar sight backstage even at
the Fillmore, despite Bill Graham's distaste for dope dealers. At the Avalon he
regularly stirred a ripple of awed whispering when he appeared on the dance
floor.”

In his relentless quest to make the best, purest LSD possible, Owsley was also
busy looking at ways to improve the delivery mechanism. He experimented with
multiple food dyes, to keep one step ahead of competitors copying him, and to

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see the psychic effect on his consumer base, who quickly ascribed different
emotional results from the different colored batches. Sometimes he sold liquid
LSD tinted with a light blue dye–such the Blue Cheers–released towards the end
of the Dead’s stay in L.A., so users would know which sugar cubes had been
dropped, but that also made it harder to accurately gauge the dose.

Usually Owsley dealt white LSD powder that was placed into gelatin capsules–a
time consuming and dangerous way of packing the material, as the packers
invariably inhaled or touched the fine LSD dust and got dosed. While he was still
down in L.A., Owsley had finally secured a tablet making machine and with the
help of Cargill and Scully, successfully tableted LSD. He was well on the way to
earning the epithet that government authorities would later give him, “the man
who did for LSD what Henry Ford did for the motorcar”.

According to Tendler and May in The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Owsley,

Cargill and Scully had just dropped a sample of their LSD tablets when a phone
call came through from one of the drug distributors in L.A., who had witnessed
Owsey’s first batch of purple pills hit the market under the watchful eye of a Life
magazine reporter. Life magazine readers in the millions would now know
Owsley made them, and surely the cops would be descending on them at any
moment, he feared. The stoned trio combed the house for drugs and disposed of
anything incriminating–including themselves, hiding away in Venice Beach before
assuring the young distributors that these new tablets were indeed the real deal.

All of Owsley’s material was the real deal, no matter what color of form it came
in. Ken Kesey said that in Kesey’s Garage Sale: “With perhaps the exception of
Owsley's work, every bootleg batch I've tried [of LSD] from then on down has
been interesting, enlightening, agonizing, bizarre, etc., but never anything as
pure." In 1991 Owsley told David Gans that “I put my hand on the reaction vessel
during the procedures, to put my energy in, to focus it, so that it could be the best
it could be, and then I would work very, very carefully to purify it to the point
where I’d throw away twenty percent, because to get the cleanest out some of it
couldn’t be recovered.”

Owsley’s preoccupations with purity center on the alchemical magic of his art,
and the understanding that at a certain point it crossed over from pure chemistry
to something else entirely. As he told Bruce Eisner in 1998:

There’re all kinds of derivatives of ergot containing various derivatives of

lysergic acid that are active in some way in the body. St. Anthony’s fire, do you
know about that? It was the result of ergotamine in the ergot growing on rye
which was made into bread in the Middle Ages, made your fingers and toes drop
off. They are very complex, many of the derivatives, and most of them are active
— and when you are doing a synthesis you get all kinds of things that hook up to
the lysergic acid molecule. Breakdown products, isomerization — who knows

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what’s in there?

I’ve had this conversation with Sasha [Shulgin] many, many times. I’ve said:
‘Sasha, as you approach higher and higher purity, you get more and more
magical.’ He said, ‘Well, you’re ascribing a very high activity to very minute
amounts of impurity.’ I said, ‘I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but there’s
something going on there.’ Then later I got to thinking about this, and realized
that perhaps the impurities are like a kind of catalyst. A catalyst can catalyze a
reaction at extremely minute quantities, and often these catalysts are not affected
by the reaction. Who knows that there isn’t some catalytic/synergistic effect that
occurs? Where you have 100 mcg. of LSD and you have nanograms of some
strange fellow-traveler impurity that actually catalyzes the effect of the LSD on
the nervous system into something else.

I’m not going to say that this is what’s happening, or that I necessarily believe
this, but I do know that as you purify LSD you very quickly come to a point
where it will not dissolve in the solvent from which you have crystallized it. It
gets to a point where it’s insoluble in the methanol, and you have to heat this for
such a long period of time in fresh methanol that some of it breaks down. And
once it has broken down, only then will it dissolve. So there’s a lot of strange stuff
going on with this ‘chemical’ that doesn’t necessarily work according to the usual
principles of chemistry.

The purity issue went to the heart of the psychedelic experience and the safety of
the burgeoning acid movement. Even Tim Leary would make an issue of it at the
Senate Committee Hearings later in 1966 during an exchange with Ted Kennedy:

Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts: "What is it in the quality that you are

frightened about?"

Dr. Leary: "We do not want amateur or black-market sale or distribution of LSD."

Senator Kennedy: "Why not?"

Dr. Leary: "Or the barbiturates or liquor. When you buy a bottle of liquor–"

Senator Kennedy: "This is not responsive. As to LSD, why do you not want it?"

Dr. Leary: "On possession?"

Senator Kennedy: "Why do you not want the indiscriminate manufacture and
distribution? Is it because it is dangerous?"

Dr. Leary: "Because you do not know what you are getting..."

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Whatever the hippies were getting it was working, thanks to Owsley’s adamant
commitment to purity. But it was increasingly impossible to be the Acid King and
the soundman for the Dead at the same time. When the band returned to San
Francisco from L.A. they moved into a 26-room adobe house in Olompali, Marin
County for six weeks. It was the closest thing to a rock star mansion the band
had ever seen–and at their frequent parties, fueled by Owsley’s acid, the pool
was filled with “naked [people] hanging around.” Owsley moved back to Berkeley
but he had a room in the adobe mansion, and mountains of his sound gear there
as well. Virtually the whole San Francico rock scene-all the friends of the Dead–
from Janis Joplin to Jorma Kaukonen and many more, partied in those six weeks
at Olompali, before the Dead moved later in the summer to an old Victorian
townhouse at 710 Haight St run by Danny Rifkin, who alongside Rock Scully was
now managing the band.

The Dead played gigs in Vancouver in June that didn’t go well, and Owsley and
his equipment was getting the blame. As the band jammed and worked on their
music–their first single–‘Stealin’, with ‘Don’t Ease Me In’ as the B-side would be
out by July–they expressed their frustration with the endless delays that would
invariably occur with their equipment under Owsley’s direction. “Their tolerance
for … his sound experiments had run out,” said Dennis McNally. “Finally one day
they came out and said, ‘Hey, we can’t handle it anymore,’ so it changed,”
Owsley told David Gans.

“I parted from the Grateful Dead in the fall of ’66,” Owsley confessed in the
Taping Compendium. “They had decided that the system that Tim Scully and I
built was too clumsy and wasn’t doing what they wanted. So they wanted to go
back to using standard amplifiers. I said: ‘Go pick out any amps you want from
Leo’s music and I’ll trade you for the stuff you’re using.’ They did, and I ended up
giving most of the old stuff away to places like the Straight Theatre. At any rate,
by then I was out of money, and the scene was in need of other things…”

Owsley himself had enough of just getting by, and he wanted to get back into the
acid business as the San Francisco scene flourished. And so it was that he,
Scully and Cargill would set out to find a new lab and focus on the business of
enlightenment.

Owsley chose the picturesque, middle class suburb of Point Richmond, across
the bay from San Francisco, occupied by professors and artists and home to a
large chemical refinery that regularly spilled out noxious fumes. He figured the
smell in the air would be good in case the lab had any accidents, and he was
also taken by the layout of the house, with the living area upstairs from the
garage/ basement. This meant that deliveries could be integrated smoothly–as
part of the acid production process they had to bring in 100 lbs of dry ice every
week. Owsley was thinking ahead and using his prodigious intellect to stay one

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step ahead of the long arm of the law that he knew were now looking for him.
LSD possession and use was still unlegislated, but manufacture was another
matter entirely.

As the Los Angeles Times wrote on April 10, 1966 in an article entitled ‘U.S.
Plans Intensive Campaign Against LSD’, they noted that the drug was enjoying
soaring popularity on college campuses across the nation. The newly formed
“Bureau of Drug Abuse Control [BDAC] is now training its brigade of drug agents
who will fan out across the United States to fight illegal traffic in all the dangerous
drugs under the agency’s jurisdiction … They will work closely with local law
enforcement agencies all over the country trying to shut off sources of illegal
drugs … Much of their work will be on an undercover basis. John Finlator, head
of the bureau, said one of the first big tasks ‘is to assess just how deep our
problem is and how big it is.’”

How big it is? It was hard to say. Within the culture the hippies were sure they
were part of an evolutionary wave turning on the world. Outside, the mainstream
looked at them with growing horror, even as their cultural virus infected and
created more of them. Time magazine had run a salacious feature in March that
suggested America was in the grip of a full-scale LSD epidemic: “The disease is
striking in beachside beatnik pads and in the dormitories of expensive prep
schools; it has grown into an alarming problem at UCLA and on the UC campus
at Berkeley. And everywhere the diagnosis is the same: psychotic illness
resulting from the unauthorized, nonmedical use of the drug LSD-25.”

By this time Owsley and Cargill, as well as being partners-in-alchemy, were also
still very much a couple, and the young Scully was the third-wheel living in the
lounge room, but quickly proving himself adept in the lab. But more than that,
Scully was now part of the underground alchemy scene in all its paranoiac
intensity, tagging along with Owsley as they made their chemical purchases at
companies around San Francisco and driving home via labyrinthal routes to
shake off any potential law enforcement, the windows down on their truck to
safely release carbon dioxide fumes from melting dry ice.

It was at times a ramshackle affair that threatened to end in disaster. During the
production of the first batch of LSD Owsley had concocted a DIY way of exposing
sulfur trioxide as a reagent with dry nitrogen in a clear plastic laundry bag. Sulfur
trioxide reacts with mositure in the air to become deadly sulfuric acid, and a drop
of it escaped and formed a posionous cloud that sent them into fits of choking
and gagging outside the garage, trailed by the noxious cloud as it dispersed over
Point Richmond. Nobody noticed, but it was a hair-raising incident that
highlighted the dangers of being an LSD cook to Scully, dangers that were all
part-and-parcel of the life of a professional alchemist.

Still, Scully told Jay Stevens in Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream
that it was also “incredibly addictive. It’s certainly got to be one of the most

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exciting things going. Here you are, you think you are doing something that could
be pivotal in the history of the world. That this may be the thing that saves the
world from destruction. And of course its real neat being a cultural hero.”

Scully had a steep learning curve with Owsley but he tackled it with passion, and
together with Cargill they applied themselves to cracking the public LSD formula
originally published by Eli Lilly in the 1950s, which had omitted strategic steps
around the purification and decay prevention process to secure their commerical
interests. Owsley had already produced a yellowish crystal LSD of a high purity
at least equal to that of Sandoz, but the coloring indicated it still contained
impurities, and Owsley would settle for nothing less than the purest of the pure.

During the first phase of transubstination in the early summer of 1966, Owsley,
Scully and Cargill produced around 30 grams of the purest LSD ever produced,
bar none. It was snow white but when you shook it under a fluorescent lamp it
magically gave off flashes of blue light via a chemical process known as
piezoluminescence. Owsley named it ‘White Lightning’.

In conversation with Nick Sand at the MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference in

2010–Sand, who was soon to come into Owsley’s alchemical orbit–told me that:

The process of producing LSD or any transformative substance is in itself a

spiritual path. That moment of realization when looking into a cloudy solution
and you start to see the creation of rainbow white crystals that emit light on their
own accord… Bear Owsley discovered that this highly purified production of
LSD–that was the first in the world–was piezoluminescent.

When I learned that,” Sand continued, “I began to realize that the light that is
produced by these substances is an inward light as well as an outward light that
we are perceiving through our sensorary perception. It’s actually being generated
from the inside. When I went deeper with this with ibogaine, I discovered that this
light actually comes from the DNA. And DNA is actually the creative principle in
the universe through which we are all propagated universally. And it is also
piezoluminescent.

And then I discovered, later on in the 1990s, that DMT is also piezoluminescent. I
took a jar of crystals I had just crystalized and banged them in a dark room and
the whole room lit up with this eerie blue luminescence. So when you are
producing these sacraments, and there is the fact that there is a little bit of
leakage, especially with LSD–it’s very hard to make LSD without becoming
affected by it–so you are often on a constant LSD high while you’re
manufacturing it. DMT is another story, but still the creation of a psychedelic
substance is a path to enlightenment…

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Various sources say that Owsley also produced DMT himself whilst at Point
Richmond, although in an internet interview in August 1997, he claimed that what
he was involved with was actually “DMT taking, not making. I have never done a
synthesis of DMT. Nick Sand was a prolific producer of the material in the old
days, and all I had to do was purify and crystallize it.”

Still, Owsley and co. had succeeded in making the purest of the pure, fixing the
mercury and anchoring heaven on earth, all in a white LSD powder than glowed
pizioluminescent blue under the right conditions. It was the equivalent of turning
lead into gold, as the medieval alchemists had tried to do. It was White Lightning,
and thanks to Owsley’s compression-moulded tableting machine, this most holy
of holies hit the street in pill form just before Californian law outlawed the
sacrament on Oct 6, 1966.

As Tendler and May reported, “Between midsummer and October 1966 when the
new California law banning LSD came into effect, the chemist and his apprentice
produced between 200 and 300 grams of LSD, or approximately one million
doses, worth $1 million on the street.”

One million doses of White Lightning, flashing their alchemical activation deep
into the heart of The world.

Whatever the actual number a critical mass was activated by Owsley’s White
Lightning and a quickening stirred in the culture from it; a vibrant, life-affirming,
love-centered culture tuned in and would imminently brim over into mass
gatherings like the Love Pageant Rally, where thousands of hippies in rainbow
colors gathered in the Panhandle park near Haight Street on Oct 6, 1966, the day
California made LSD illegal.

“Instead of protesting the moratorium of LSD,” wrote Allen Cohen, editor of the
newly-formed San Francisco Oracle, the hippie’s own rainbow-colored ink
newspaper, “instead of protesting the law that was going into effect, our idea was
to make a demonstration which would show the law’s falsity. Without
confrontation. We wanted to create a celebration of innocence. We were not
guilty of using illegal substances. We were celebrating transcendental
consciousness. The beauty of the universe. The beauty of being.”

“Perhaps it was a consequence of all the LSD,” Jay Stevens wrote in Storming
Heaven, “but from the Love Pageant on, a naïve optimism permeated the Haight,
combined with a mystical faith that whatever was needed would be provided.”
And while the Haight was culturally blooming, what was also metastasizing in the
petri dish of the hippie enclaves was that same thing that had come through in
the Acid Tests and the acid-rock music: a sense of group identity and gestalt
belonging that transcended the individual ego, and pointed towards a hive mind
consciousness, the next step that Kesey had been on about.

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With typical aplomb, by the turn of 1967 it would even have a name: The
Gathering of the Tribes for the first Human Be-In.

We began our trek at about noon from Stanyan Street on the edge of Golden Gate
Park and walked into the Polo Field where the gathering was to take place,” wrote
Helen Parish in her book, The Human Be-In. “By that time, there was a steady
stream of people walking in, winding over the hillocks and through the glades as
far as the eye could see. Their costumes were varied and imaginative, or again
they wore ordinary street clothes; but each person had his sign of participation
somewhere upon him—a young boy with a nasturium stuck behind his ear, a
gray-haired woman with a flower tied on her cane with a ribbon.

But it was the Polo Field itself that presented a new world. It was a medieval
scene, with banners flying, bright and uncommitted; the day was miraculous, as
days can be in San Francisco at their best, and the world was new and clean and
pastoral. Children wandered around in the nude. People sat on the grass with
nothing to do, sometimes moving up near to the small platform where a poetry-
reading might be going on, or where a band might be playing. There was no
program; it was a happening. Sounds and sights turned me on, so that I had the
sensation of dreaming. The air seemed heady and mystical. Dogs and children
pranced around in blissful abandon, and I became aware of a phenomenon that
still piques my curiosity: The dogs did not get into fights, and the children did not
cry.

All the branching facets of the emerging counterculture were present, from Tim
Leary, Dick Alpert, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, the Grateful Dead, students, anti-
war activists, Hells Angels, lovers, poets, children–you name it, they were all
there. Rumors abounded that a parachutist freefalling down into the crowd was
Owsley, but they were only rumors.

The Human Be-In was the ground zero of the r-evolution, the atom bomb of
consciousness that LSD evoked, exploded upon the world and made manifest for
all to see. It was, as Charles Perry describes, “A seemingly endless sea of
people, tens of thousands. And all were present for a purpose too important for
words, though a steady stream of words issued from the speakers' platform, at
the east end of the field. The Diggers had set up tables to pass out thousands of
turkey sandwiches, made from several dozen turkeys donated by Owsley
Stanley. Owsley had also donated a lot of his latest LSD, White Lightning, and
people were walking around in the crowd handing out these tiny white tablets, the
most professional-looking and also the strongest LSD tablets yet.

The Human Be-In was the group mind made manifest, the Word made flesh.
From here on in, the hippie culture was about to jump from the petri dish of the
Haight and infect the body politic. The Be-In showed not just strength of

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numbers, but a sense of common unity–community–that went beyond the

statistics and was evident in the people themselves and the psychic sense of
love and joy.

Much speculation is made on the role LSD played in detourning the burgeoning
American anti-war movement in the early 1960s (the Rand Corporation had
published a study on that theme), but here, now, was the antidote to that fear. A
living, breathing, joyous critical mass of human be-ings gathered to celebrate life
and love, not the dichotomy of war or peace. Acid was the catalyst, but all it was
really doing was amplifying what they had within them all along: the power of the
tribe, of unity consciousness.

As Tim Leary came to the microphone to address the crowd before him, he
curtailed his planned speech and instead delivered what was to become his most
famous trademark: “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out!” It meant, as he described, that
the plan was to “get Western man out of the cities and back into the tribes and
villages.” To become a real community once more.

As Gene Anthony wrote: “A great butterfly had emerged and taken wing in the
setting sun of the San Francisco Human Be-In. It flew across the land, then on
across the seas to other continents. Wherever that psychedelic butterfly touched
down to earth its spirit captured the consciousness of masses of young people.
Its being so influenced those that were touched by it that the essence became
the life force of a revolution. A non-violent revolution had begun.” The next
edition of the Oracle was to announce the revolution to the world, but they didn’t
call it a revolution.

They called it the Summer of Love, and everyone was invited.

Owsley should have been proud of his role in helping the gestalt-beast discover
itself, but on a practical level, however, things had changed for his band of merry
alchemists with the new Californian law making LSD possession itself illegal. The
endless game of cat and mouse that they played with the authorities was
previously underscored with a safety net of legality with regards to possessing
LSD, even if manufacturing it had its own penalties.

But by October 1966 it meant jail time for sure if caught, and it was a risk that
Owsley, as the culture’s pre-eminent LSD cook, simply didn’t want to take, nor
did Cargill. There were over 100 BDAC police agents looking to crack LSD

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manufacturing, and all of them were after Owsley’s blood. “In May, federal laws
became effective and Stanley dropped from sight,” wrote the Los Angeles Times,
under the provocative headline: ‘Mr. LSD’ Makes Million Without Breaking the
Law. “Police say they don’t know where he is and wonder if he is still in business.
One officer says he doubts it. ‘With all that money why should he take the
chance?’”

Why should he, indeed? With the crowning glory of White Lightning in the bag,
and other LSD chemists like Scully to take over, Owsley had decided it was the
prudent thing to do to retire from the game and enjoy some of the strange cultural
fruits the Haight had blossomed, and tour with the Dead. And so it was by the
end of 1966 he closed down the Point Richmond lab. He had enough remaining
lysergic monohydrate in a safe deposit box in Arizona to keep the scene going
into 1967, at the least, he thought.

Scully, however, had other ideas. With his mentor’s permission he used some of
the proceeds of the first wave of White Lightning sales to invest in equipment for
a new lab, which he would eventually open in Denver (LSD was at this time only
legislated against in California), opposite the zoo. Problems arose however,
when Owsley took Scully round to his chemical supply companies around San
Francisco, who had been alerted by the BDAC to be on the lookout for ‘irregular
customers’. These companies knew Owsley and wouldn’t turn him in; Scully,
however, was ripe for the picking. “He was so wrong that the first time I
introduced him to one of my suppliers they turned him in,” Owsley told me in
2009. “Every time he turned around he did something to get into trouble.”

Still, Scully managed to evade BDAC agents trailing him and with his lab set up
but bereft of his own supply of lysergic monohydrate, he asked Owsley for help.
Owsley demurred; there was a problem, or a series of them, but he didn’t want to
tell that to Scully. Cargill had forgotten the contact name she had used when she
stashed the supply of lysergic monohydrate in the Arizona safe deposit box, Jay
Stevens claims in Storming Heaven. What’s worse, no amount of jogging her
memory could get it back, not even hypnosis.

Secondly, according to Charles Perry, “the source for raw lysergic acid had dried
up. The president of the Cycio Chemical Company … Milan Panic, had informed
Bear Research Group that he could no longer fill orders for lysergic acid.” But in
the fall of 1966 in the lead up to the Human Be-In, the supply and demand had
grown exponentially for the acid sacrament. As 1967 approached it was time for
a new batch of product, but without access to his existing stash of material, or
fresh sources, they were in a pickle.

Owsley thought he had a way out of their predicament. It was called 2,5-
dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine, or DOM–an amphetamine-based psychedelic
similar to mescaline. The catch was it wasn’t broken down in the body as quickly
as LSD, and would persist in its intensity for up to three days, making it a
rollercoaster trip. The strategic thing about STP was it wasn’t illegal–indeed, the

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authorities knew nothing about it because it didn’t exist on the street yet, having
only been created in 1964 by chemist Alexander ‘Sasha’ Shulgin of the Dow
Chemical Company.

Shulgin was a quixotic figure straddling the mainstream world and the
psychedelic underground. He told the Los Angeles Times in 1995 that “I first
explored mescaline in the late '50s, three-hundred-fifty to 400 milligrams. I
learned there was a great deal inside me.” Shulgin would later rise to fame as the
‘godfather of Ecstasy’ in the 1970s and 80s. As New York Times magazine
quotes from 2005, Shulgin was definitely on the same wavelength as the
emerging drug counterculture: “I understood that our entire universe is contained
in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even
deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that
can catalyze its availability."

After leaving Dow in 1965, Shulgin’s interest in psychedelics saw him lean
towards commercial psychopharmacology, which he eventually pursued on
behalf of none other than the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency formed in
1973 by Richard Nixon that absorbed and superseded BDAC and other divisions
of drug law enforcement. Shulgin taught pharmacology seminars to the DEA
agents and supplied the organization with samples of various psychedelic
compounds under legal immunity, sometimes appearing as a witness in court.
But while Shulgin worked for the law he lived for the thrill of molecular discovery,
and he quietly supported the burgeoning psychedelic movement.

Dow Chemicals, however, was part of the establishment, and they had supplied
samples of DOM to the US Army Chemical Corps for testing at the Edgewood
Arsenal, to see if it would serve as an incapacitating agent in war. The CIA also
experimented with it in their ongoing MK-ULTRA ‘behaviour modification’ tests.
And just as the lysergic acid dried up thanks to the feds closing off sales from
European chamical companies, DOM stepped into the vacuum and was
published in the scientific literature. Whether this was a race by Shulgin to offset
the military testing, or a sly psy-ops to push this powerful substance on the
testbed of the hippies, we may never know. But Nick Sand claimed in his 2010
lecture at the MAPS Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century conference that
Owsley told him “we have an ally” who passed them the synthesis for DOM. That
ally was Sasha Shulgin.

What we do know is that in the early days of 1967, after Owsley wound Point
Richmond down, he passed on the task of making and testing DOM to Scully. As
Charles Perry recounts: “He handed him a 3 x 5 card with several lines of notes.
This was the next step, he assured Scully, the superdrug they had been waiting
for. All Tim had to do was figure out how to synthesize it.

In time, the next step would aquire a name, STP [Serenity, Tranquility and
Peace], and a reputation: “…a maelstrom of relentless energy…‘You feel like
your body is a conductor for tens of thousands of volts…’ People tripping on STP

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physically tremble with the energy sensation. It is a stretching, quivering, shaking

experience… ‘Like being shot out of a gun. There’s no slowing down or backing
up. You feel like your brakes have given out…’ surrender to the enery flow…”
wrote Don McNeill in the Village Voice. STP was to have varied effects according
to the dosage as well as the mindset of the user. And, it must be remembered, it
was tested as a psychoactive weapon by the military and the CIA, before it was
serendipitously rolled out on the hippies.

"He [Shulgin] had this stuff, and we thought it might be good," Owsley told Robert
Greenfield decades later. "It turned out that it wasn't." It remains to be seen what
Owsley himself thought of it at the time, although Scully was reputed to be less
than enthusiastic about it, preferring the quality LSD they had been making
originally, and wanted to make again. Yet both men realized they had to do
something to fill the growing gap in the countercultural consciousness, and just
as psilocybin and mescaline had made way for LSD, perhaps STP could be the
next step.

Scully went to work in the libraries at Berkeley once more to flesh out the
chemical sketch that Owsley provided him, with the privisio that whatever
quantities they made of STP would remain off the market till he had finished
production in his Denver lab. And with Scully thus busy in the early months of
1967, Owsley went on to see to further business matters, this time out on the
East Coast, at Tim Leary’s Millbrook. If he was getting out of the acid game there
was a lot of things to tie up, incuding the funds, and the future of the scene.

Leary had been based in the rambling mansion at Millbrook since he’d left
Harvard years before, where the Hitchcock heirs to the Mellon fortune, including
siblings Peggy, Billy, and Tommy Hitchcock had supported him and his coterie of
like minded scientists (including Ralph Metzner and Dick Alpert, artists and
bohemians) as they explored their psychedelic potential. By September of 1966
Leary had announced the formation of the League of Spiritual Discovery, a
religion that used LSD as its sacrament. Jay Stevens quotes Leary as saying:
“We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the 21st century inhabiting a time
module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we
were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.”

Owsley arrived just in time for Easter, 1967, and proceeded to shake things up a
bit in the staid, academic-religious milieu of the Millbrook mansion. Art Kleps,
who had founded the Neo-American Church as a way of protecting citizens'
rights to use psychedelic drugs to explore consciousness, describes meeting
Owsley in his book, Millbrook: A Narrative of the Early Years of American
Psychedelianism:

Although we were now dispersed in three distinct centers, everyone got together
again for a three-day party in the Big House and on its sunny porch roofs. A
variety of psychedelic sacraments were available, many manufactured and

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distributed by Owsley, a California underground chemist who was visiting Tim at

the time. Owsley, a scrawny specimen, walked around naked, although his two
dim and dusty-looking girlfriends did not. With Tim's blessings, the Ashram
settled down in the old common room of the Big House they had recently
officially vacated, for what everyone thought would be a one-night trip on STP,
the new wonder drug Owsley was pushing. He had recommended 30 milligrams
per person, so that's what they took. The consequences, as those of us who
declined to try it had feared, were much crazier and more unpredictable than trips
on the New Reliable.

For three days and two nights, meals had to be served on trays, because no
participant could do anything much more complicated than visit a toilet and
return. Even on such short excursions, they often strayed, got lost, and had to be
led back by whoever was playing nurse. ‘I don't know how to explain this stuff,
Kleps,’ Bill said to me as things were winding down. ‘The main problem is it
comes and goes. You think you're down and then three seconds later you're high
as a kite again.’

Owsley was testing out his initial stash of STP and seeding the samples to some
of the core demographics in the scene. But he didn’t wait around to hear their
feedback, which may have saved a lot of heartache down the track. He wasn’t at
Millbrook just to shoot the breeze with Leary; instead Owsley seemed more intent
on dealing with business, and that meant the Hitchcocks and their money–and
the world that opened up. As Kleps went on to write:

One night, Wendy and I, driving back to the Gatehouse … found Owsley
wandering along the road, clothed, toward the west gate. He was looking for
Hitchcock's house. ‘I thought it was one of those houses over there’, he said, after
we picked him up, swung around, and headed up the road in the other direction.
He pointed to the lights of a couple of small houses which were located outside
the sacred precincts, and just barely visible from the Big House.

’No, he has a little place up the road this way,’ Wendy said.

’He owns the whole scene, huh?’ Owsley asked. He sounded much less confident
than usual.

’Fifty-fifty with his twin brother,’ I replied.

’Really?’ Owsley asked. ‘They're twins?’

The twins were fraternal, not identical. Billy was lighthaired, Tommy was dark-
haired; Billy was right-handed, Tommy was left-handed; Billy was an extrovert,
Tommy an introvert, and so on. She ticked off all these differences on her fingers,

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while Owsley, so to speak, licked them off with tail-wagging gratitude. When we
stopped at the entrance of the Bungalow, which seemed even more enchanted
than usual in the moonlit, scented, spring night, Owsley froze and his mouth fell
open for a moment, but he pulled himself together quickly, bounced up the steps,
and rang the bell. I could see Jack coming to open the door, so we drove away.

Owsley was busy making connections to the world of high finance, in more ways
than one. According to Stewart and May in their book, The Brotherhood of
Eternal Love, which goes into a lot more detail about the money laundering
activities of the Hitchcock brothers and their intimate connections to the
Brotherhood and the future LSD market, Owsley had, “by the winter of 1967 over
$320,000 … salted away in safe-deposit boxes around San Francisco. Another
$225,000 had been moved abroad, courtesy of Billy Hitchcock. The trip to
Millbrook had not been uneventful.” Exact figures have always been subjective
when it came to Owsley and his LSD manufacturing business, and many writers,
perhaps basing their views on the erroneous Los Angeles Times millionaire
article from Oct 3, 1966, have exaggerated his interests.

Owsley clarified the matter in interview with David Gans in 1991, when he said:
“We gave away probably more [LSD] than was sold. We sold what we had to
keep the thing going. And it provided a fund for the inevitable, which was in case
we got into trouble. And the lawyers ate it all and everybody else ate it all. And it
was all gone. The powers that be don't believe that. The powers that be are sure
I made millions. Millions.”

It was prescient to keep the lawyers fund well supplied, because on April 4, as
Owsley was leaving Millbrook, he was stopped by the local police for apparently
changing lanes without a signal. The resulting search of his car found marijuana,
psychedelics and other drugs. Urban legend suggests Owsley simply offered the
arresting officer $10,000 to drop the charges, but the truth was the officer had
grossly overstepped the mark, and Owsley’s lawyers were able to quash the
case on grounds of improper search and seizure. As part of that search they
found, however, according to Tendler and May, a safe deposit key to a New York
account.

The Brotherhood of Eternal Love recounts, dramatically, that “a panic-stricken

Owsley contacted Hitchcock... who knew just what to do. Since the 1960s, he
had acted as a broker for the Fiduciary Trust Company, based in the Bahamas
and an offshoot of Bernie Cornfeld's ill-starred Investors' Overseas Services
empire. Charles Rumsey, Hitchcock's friend, was the New York lawyer for
Fiduciary. The two opened the safe-deposit on behalf of Owsley, and in the
bedroom of Hitchcock's New York apartment the money was passed over to the
general manager of Fiduciary to open the 'Robin Goodfellow' account. Owsley
also had an account in London, contents never revealed.”

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Millbrook was a turning point in other ways, as well, case in point: Nick Sand,
who is often referred to as Owsley’s second apprentice, although both would
have probably begged to differ. Sand was a young, energetic twenty-six-year-old
and already a devotee of Gurdjieff and the Greenwich Village LSD scene. He had
turned his hand to chemistry and like Owsley, was officially untrained but gutsy
enough to try anything. After finishing college in 1966 he set out to make
mescaline, DMT and DET, all do-able on a smaller budget and with accessible
precursors, even if, as the results of his bathtub DMT making experiments
proved, the results were less than pure. But his real mission was to be an LSD
chemist, which is how he ended up at Millbrook when Owsley was visiting.

Sand was a Brooklyn-raised New Yorker and was a lot more worldwise than
Scully, or so it seemed to Owsley. Somewhere along the way both men sized up
the opportunity in their meeting, and decided to take the plunge. Sand was keen
to get out of New York State because of a marijuana possession charge hanging
over him, and Owsley was, no doubt, keen to have another alchemist on board
taking point making LSD under his watch, but without needing him to take full
responsibility on the front lines of the escalting drug war.

So it was that Owsley lined it up for Sand to be brought into the STP operations
alongside Scully. Sand would run a lab on the east side of San Francisco, and
Scully would finish up his STP production in Denver (eventually making two
pounds of material), with the output from both labs tableted by Owsley and
distributed through Owsley’s usual channels–the Hell’s Angels.

But before STP hit the scene, there was to be a last hurrah of Owsley’s acid,
when he finally recovered the lysergic acid from the Arizona safe deposit box. He
made another small batch–dyed purple and carefully tablet pressed. They were
created specially to be given away at the upcoming Monterey International Pop
Festival, and he called them ‘Monterey Purple’.

The Herald, Monterey Country newspaper described, 40 years later, the future
impact of the event when it said, “the lineup brought together in one place the
polarized California music communities of San Francisco and Los Angeles,
introduced promising new acts alongside established stars, bridged the worlds of
Indian classical music with the swinging London scene, and integrated American
soul music and the blues with rock 'n' roll and folk music.” The whole festival was
“dependent on the San Francisco scene, where the vanguard of rock was
coalescing organically [around] bands [that] were like pied pipers of the
counterculture.”

Owsley knew it, he could just smell it on the wind–Monterey was going to be
something special. Where the Be-In had shown the acid key opening the
consciousness of a critical mass within the tribe, Monterey, with all its
international and inter-tribal blendings, could be a vehicle of transmission for the
acid-rock vibe out into the wider world. That was why he had to be there, and

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even more importantly, why his acid had to be there, too. To turn on the world.
One musican at a time.

As Charles Perry recounted in his book, the Haight Ashbury:

Saturday morning, June 17, the number of people at the festival nearly doubled,
and the main event was walking around in the high-spirited crowd, which
included Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones (Mick Jagger was denied a work
permit in the United States because of his pending drug case, so the Stones were
not scheduled to play). A group of Los Angeles Diggers gave away free fruit and
Hell's Angels were said to be guarding the fences, despite the city of Monterey's
horror of the gang. A souvenir program carried messages from various bands,
including a mind-blowing direct communication from the Beatles: ‘Love to
Monterey from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.’ Above all, there was a
special batch of LSD from Owsley's Denver lab, the Monterey Purple or Purple
Haze tabs.

On Sunday June 18, on the closing night: “The Who played a dramatic set that
ended with Pete Townshend's ritual destruction of his guitar,” wrote Charles
Perry. “Then the Grateful Dead came on, upholding the San Francisco style.
Rhythm guitarist Bob Weir told the audience, ‘You know what folding chairs are
for, don't you? They're for folding up and dancing on.’ Between numbers the MC,
Peter Tork of the Monkees, bantered with bassist Phil Lesh and heard Lesh
suggest to him, over the microphones, that since this was the last night and there
were a lot of people outside the stadium, it made sense to open the gates and let
them in. All of a sudden it didn't feel like banter but something backed up with
crowd menace. Tork nervously asked that the gates be opened, and a huge
mass of people from outside joined the stadium audience,” Perry wrote in Haight
Ashbury. Later estimates put the overall crowd over the weekend at 200,000,
presaging the mega-festivals to come, especially Woodstock just two years later.

A slew of careers were made that weekend at Monterey, but the brightest of
them all was that of guitarist Jimi Hendrix, in his first American appearance.
Hendrix came on after the Grateful Dead and stole the show–high on Owsley’s
acid. In an interview in the 2006 documentary The Drug Years, Charles Perry
admitted that “the interesting thing is that Hendrix took two hits of Monterrey
Purple before he even went out onto the stage… So whatever he did out on that
stage he was in a highly psychedelicized state. It’s just remarkable thinking of
Hendrix being out on the stage so high and all those people in the audience in
the same state. It just was … unprecedented.”

It ended, of course, with Hendrix high as a kite and making love to his guitar as
he wooed it during a freeform rendition of Wild Thing, climaxing in reverb and
lighter fluid as he kneeled in front of the instrument and set in ablaze. It was,

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perhaps, one of the most out there acid-soul-drenched moments of the 60s,
captured and broadcast to the world in the documentary movie Monterey Pop.

In the comments section on the San Francisco Chronicle article on the Acid King
in 2007, Owsley confirmed he gave Hendrix acid, saying that “Jimi did seem to
enjoy it–he jammed all night long in the long shed after I was able to organize a
guitar and restrung it for him… [But] this whole ‘purple haze’ thing is nonsense. I
have no idea what Jimi meant by the line, nor when he wrote it, but I do know the
acid at Monterey was not it.”

For decades after, LSD aficianados would mistakenly call that purple batch of
Owsley’s acid ‘Purple Haze’, after the Hendrix song, forevermore entwinned with
the footage of him high at Monterey. “I cannot speak of acid today,” Owsley
continued in his comments to the San Francisco Chronicle, “but in our time, acid
of this quality is not the kind of thing which would attract the term ‘haze’. To call it
that would have been misleading. It was CLARITY–squared.” In 1969, when Jimi
Hendrix recorded a live version of the Beatles song ‘Day Tripper’ for the BBC, he
can clearly be heard crying “Oh, Owsley, can you hear me now?”  

Owsley had successfully switched on Jimi Hendrix, but Monterey was special
because of the international flavor, and it would lead to Owsley’s acid reaching
even further up the pop hierarchy of the 60s, all the way to the world’s premier
rock group of the time, the Beatles. Numerous biographies on the Beatles,
including The Love You Make by authors Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, claim
that the band sent a film crew to the Monterey Pop festival in search of Owsley’s
LSD, and smuggled it back into Britain in the film equipment. Legend has it the
acid made its way specifically to John Lennon, who now had a lifetime’s supply at
his disposal.

The Beatles had just released their eighth studio album, the crowning
psychedelic masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band two weeks
previously, on June 1, 1967. It was a watershed moment for the nascent
psychedelic rock sound that Owsley had long suspected was part of the
planetary vibration that was being pulsed out into the world. Decades after its
release, it is now recognized as one of the most important albums in the history
of popular music, coming in at number one on the Rolling Stone ‘500 Greatest
Albums of All Time’.

By June 25, the week after Monterey, the Beatles sang All You Need Is Love on
Our World, the first live global television satellite link-up to an estimated 400
million people in over 26 countries. "It was an inspired song and they really
wanted to give the world a message," said the Beatles manager, Brian Epstein.
"The nice thing about it is that it cannot be misinterpreted. It is a clear message
saying that love is everything."

The Summer of Love had just gone global and it seemed that nothing could stop

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the evolutionary wave of psychedelic consciousness from turning on the world.

But back in San Francisco where it all began, there was about to be a backlash,
and as usual, Owsley was in the thick of things.

No one can say exactly why, but with LSD supplies running out and the demand
from the now psychedelicized world more ferverent every day, Owsley ignored
his promise to Scully to wait and released 5,000 doses of the STP to help buoy
the Summer Solstice festival in the Panhandle area of the Haight on June 21.
The STP was strong–20-30 millagrams–the same intensity that had tripped out
the expert heads at Millbrook, and to make matters worse, no one seemed to
explain the differences between STP and LSD to the hungry hippie hordes at the
Solstice festival.

In his 1991 book PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story, Shulgin describes the situation
that quickly enveloped the Haight:

Two complications became apparent during this first appearance and they led to
serious difficulties. One, there was no equation made between STP and DOM. No
one knew what this drug was which had been distributed in a cavalier way
throughout the city. There could be no educated guess as to the best treatment of
overdose emergencies. And secondly, the initial tablets that had been distributed
apparently contained 20 milligrams of DOM per tablet; later, it was dropped to 10
milligrams. Either of these, in retrospect, is now known to be a thoroughly
whopping dose. The overdose situation was aggravated by the slow onset of
DOM. The user may be aware of some initial effects at the half-hour point, there
will be what might be called a + or ++ at the end of the first hour, and the full
impact of the drug is not appreciated until some two hours have elapsed.

But many of the recipients of the free handouts of DOM were familiar with LSD
which can show its alert in 15 to 20 minutes, or even sooner with a large dose,
and there is already a deep and compelling intoxication felt at the half-hour point.
They, quite reasonably, expected this familiar activity pattern with STP and
assumed, when there was little if any activity noted at the half-hour point, that the
potency was less than expected. They took one or even two additional dosage
units. Thus, some of the overdose victims of that period may well have taken as
much as 30 mg of DOM. The slow onset of action, coupled with the remarkably
long duration, caught many innocent users unprepared.

Hundreds of people freaked out in the most agonizing way, flooding hospital
emergency rooms where many were administered the tranquilizing drug
thorazine, which usually calmed LSD users, but synergistically exacerbated the
effects of STP. Word spread like wildfire around the Haight to beware the new
superhallucinogen. Within a week the New York Times was reporting on ‘A Drug
More Potent Than LSD Widely Distributed in California; Dangerous Drug Being

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Sold on Coast’. The June 28th article claimed that “a new hallucinogenic drug,
described as much more powerful then LSD and similar in effect to a secret
military nerve gas, is in widespread distribution in California.”

Tendler and May report in the Brotherhood of Eternal Love that “finally 'the
Alchemist' appeared in the offices of the Berkeley Barb to put the record straight.
STP, he understood, was made 'by people who considered it a sacrament and if
it was not free it was not STP.’” Owsley was in damage control but it was too
little, too late. The energies had shifted and the tribe-soul was weary and under
seige from the psychic bombardment and media glare. STP was, perhaps, the
straw that broke the camel’s back.

Anthony Ashbolt wrote in the Australasian Journal of American Studies that, “The
Summer of Love itself propelled an unsustainable population explosion and this,
together with the steady gaze of media spotlights, placed almost unbearable
pressure on the community. Simply too many with flowers in their hair flocked to
the Haight and the chilly winds off the Bay fuelled a culture of despair more than
one of hope. Moreover, the categorical imperative of drug taking provided
criminal elements with a mass market to manipulate, whereas internal dealing
characterized the early community experience.”

The genie was out of the bottle–the great social gestalt that was culture itself
could be transformed by the psychedelic experience–but the powers that be
realized it could also be controlled by going with the social flow and then
detourning it.

According to Acid Dreams, both the mafia and the CIA had labs supplying drugs
to the hippies during the summer of 1967, and the natural evolution of the peace-
love-and mungbeans mentality was soon swamped with amphetamines, PCP
(Angel Dust) and dirty acid. That flowering ‘psychedelic butterfly’ that had taken
off at the Human Be-In back in January was wiltering under the concerted drug
barrage of social engineering and profiteering. And as the Summer of Love was
becoming a drug-fueled spectacle, many of the original Haight hippies left the city
for communes across California and greener pastures.

In their absence, “The neighborhood was clotted with youngsters whose minds
had been jerked around ruthlessly by chemicals touted for their euphoric
properties,” wrote Martin A. Lee in Acid Dreams. He went on write: “Much of the
LSD turning up on the street was fortified with some sort of additive, usually
speed or strychnine, or in some cases insecticide. But where did this
contaminated acid come from? Originally the main source of LSD in the Haight
was Owsley, but the scene got totally out of hand with all the media fanfare after
the be-in, and renegade chemists started moving in on the drug trade. The mafia
exploited the situation by setting up its own production and distribution networks.
In June 1967 James Finlator, chief of the FDA's Bureau of Drug Abuse and
Control, announced that ‘hard core Cosa Nostra-type criminal figures’ were
behind ‘an extremely well-organized traffic in hallucinogenic drugs.’

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Consequently the quality of black market LSD began to deteriorate. Signs posted
in the Haight expressed the consensus among hippies: ‘Syndicate acid stinks’."

And what was Owsley to make, or do with regards to all of this? With one foot still
in the acid game and one foot out, he had to make a choice. The psychedelic
butterfly was fresh out of its alchemical chrysalis, and he believed the scene
desperately needed a big batch of good, clean acid. He was the alchemist, and
he was going to have to head back into the lab, law or no law.

As he told interviewer David Gans: “The law said it's no longer legal to make
[LSD]… It's a misdemeanour to make or possess it or sell or anything else, it's a
misdemeanour, mustn't do it. So we finished it all up, and I had a stash of
material that was crystalline and couldn't be sold or anything. It couldn't be given
away–I couldn't do anything with it because it was in a form that you couldn't
handle. So I was thinking, I gotta put it into tabs, but I didn't want to do it because
it was illegal. Then the whole scene would run out. Nobody had any, so I thought,
‘Well I've got to put it up..’”

Owsley kept his stash in a simple footlocker that he kept in motion, traveling
between cities from Oakland, San Jose and San Francisco on Greyhound buses.
"I could leave it for up to thirty days in the bus station and I would go to it
wherever it was, take out whatever I needed, take it back in, and send it to myself
in the next city,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 2007. “It was always in a safe
place, and nobody had a clue, because I never told anyone I did that."

Owsley had a base of operations at 69 La Espiral Street, Orinda, California,

where he was tableting up the STP Scully had made in Denver, and it was here
he retreated for one last stint at the coalface of the Divine. He had approximately
100 grams of lysergic acid base material to work with, and after a few small
batchs to get back into the swing of things, by November he was ready for a full
load.  

So too, were the cops. In late 1966 the first wave of undercover BDAC agents
swept through the Haight on a search and destroy mission into the world of
suspected illegal drug activities. The BDAC men had been playing cat and
mouse with Tim Scully for months, but had been unable to find Owsley through
him or any of their other street contacts. Owsley’s distribution channels–the Hell’s
Angels–were still water-tight, and had the extra protection of being notoriously
hard to infiltrate. But the BDAC-boys kept trying. They bought drugs and
established contacts, they gained trust, and they always had the money for more
deals.

By late 1967 their persistance was paying off, as cracks appeared in Owsley’s
armor. As Charles Perry recalled, “One time in 1967 Owsley took some of us to
visit his favorite chemical glass-maker, who was about to retire on what Owsley
was paying him to make some highly specialized lab equipment. "Oh, Owsley,"

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the guy said, ‘some federal agents were here the other day showing me pictures
of you and asking whether I'd ever seen this person. They were a rather good
likeness. You were in them too,’ he added, nodding at a denizen of my current
commune.”

Perry may have meant Will Spires, who was one of Owsley’s old friends from the
Brown Shoe days in Berkeley, the folkie who first turned him on to the Beatles in
1964. He was part of the family, like Bob Thomas, who would later in 1969
design with Owsley the infamous lightning bolt in the skull sigil of the Grateful
Dead. Owsley trusted them both by letting a few of his fellow tableters have a
small stash of product to sell and spread amongst their private networks, and that
was where his vulnerability lay.

According to the legal transcript from the lengthy court case that would ensue:

“During the period of surveillance one Krusko, a government undercover agent,

became acquainted with petitioner Spires, twice purchased LSD from him (once
for $3400), and had frequent conversations with him. These conversations
revealed that petitioner Stanley was engaged in manufacturing and distributing
various drugs including LSD. A frequent topic of these conversations pertained to
the purchase of LSD.

On November 15, 1967, during a conversation, Spires informed Krusko that

'some of the boys' were going to set up a laboratory and had found a location 'way
out in the sticks.' Spires also informed him that of the 100 grams of LSD which
Stanley had previously possessed, 10 had been distributed in the form of tablets.
Spires said that Stanley normally sold large quantities for $2500 per gram. On
December 19 Spires stated he was going to the laboratory and would attempt to
get some LSD for Krusko, saying that Stanley intended to produce 25 grams of
LSD before Christmas.

Spires told Agent Krusko that he would be able to provide one gram of LSD
tablets. On that occasion, Spires told Agent Krusko that he would be
manufacturing LSD until at least December 21, and asked Krusko to contact him
at home. (3) Agent Barron has observed the premises at 69 La Espiral for a period
of eleven hours on December 20 and had seen no one enter the premises. (4)
Approximately four hours after beginning his surveillance, Agent Barron had seen
appellant Spires inside the house.

Operating under a search warrant, [thirteen] law enforcement officers entered the
premises at 69 La Espiral Street, Orinda, California. Inside the house they found
what can fairly be described as a small factory for the manufacture of LSD.
Several appellants found on the premises were taken into custody.

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The Orinda bust went down on Thursday, December 21, 1967–the summer
solstice. The San Mateo Times for that day said that four others were also
arrested, including “Owsley’s girlfriend” Melissa Cargill, who "provided the
scientific know-how” for the operation. When the knock came at the door–and
allegedly it was less a knock than the door being broken down entirely–Owsley
was, according to reports, getting the barbeque ready for a solstice get together.

When the BDAC agents came storming in they conducted a room-by-room

search of the house and found the tableting rooms, covered with plastic sheeting
to catch the fine clouds of hallucinogenic dust that would fall during tableting. And
there they also found, according to Tendler and May in The Brotherhood of
Eternal Love, approximately 161 grams of STP and 217 grams of LSD, which
according to some sources would fetch around $11 million on the street.

In USSC 400 U.S. 936: Owsley STANLEY et al. v. UNITED STATES.,

however, the appeal judge’s statement suggests that figure may be hyperbole:

A large brown bottle was found on a table in one room. On analysis its 472 grams
of white powder were found to be 5.3% LSD. On a shelf in a closet across from
the bathroom was a plastic bottle containing 42 grams of 95% pure LSD. The 42
grams of 95% pure LSD at the price quoted by Spires would bring in $105,000
and if sold in lesser quantities would bring in more.

At the time of arrest, Stanley was given a full Miranda warning. He stated he
understood his rights and desired to call an attorney. He was told that he would be
able to do so when he was booked at the police station. Before being booked,
Stanley remained several hours at 69 La Espiral to aid in and observe the police
collection of contraband. During this time he made the following statements to
Federal Bureau of Narcotics Chief Warner. (1) He asked how the officers had
found the laboratory. (2) He told Warner that he "was missing the boat" by not
trying LSD and other psychedelic drugs. (3) He stated that he would cooperate
with the government. (4) He stated that the government should regulate and
license LSD laboratories so that only clean and pure acid would be distributed on
the streets.

“Chief Warner testified that all of these statements were volunteered by

Stanley and were not in response to anyone's questioning,” continued USSC 400
U.S. 936: Owsley STANLEY et al. v. UNITED STATES. “Warner also testified
that he asked Stanley if his laboratory was the source of pure LSD, and Stanley
replied that ‘he only distributed or made the purest and cleanest LSD for his
family and friends’.” This was the biggest drug manufacturing bust in the history
of the newly formed BDAC, and Chief Warner couldn’t help but add some further

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comments to the press. He suggested that the bust might cause “panic in the
streets” as the hippies "idol has fallen." He also couldn’t help taking a swipe,
saying that Owsley was "actually a psychedelic missionary" who gave "the
impression that he feels the average person can never actually know himself
without turning on with LSD.”

In conversation with Eisner in 1991, Owsley admitted that: “One of the reasons I
did it as carefully as I did was the thought/fantasy that if the authorities were to
have come to me and said, ‘We want to see how you are doing this’ (the
imaginary FDA Inspector), they wouldn’t have been able to find a single flaw with
the way I was doing it. I was doing it absolutely by the book. The tablets were
clean and pure and were of uniform dosage. The material itself to start with was,
in fact, more highly purified than the commercial product from Sandoz, the patent
holder. We were trying to do it right, because anything else is a rip-off. After all,
people are taking this into their bodies, and shouldn’t have to take a risk with
their health.”

With moral certitude like that, Owsley was standing his ground and wasn’t
phased by the police presence. When they started to confiscate items–all in all
they seized 126 pieces of evidence–he told them brusquely, “You're uninvited
guests. Please take only the contraband.”

In the ensuing Supreme Court judgement USSC 400 U.S. 936: Owsley
STANLEY et al. v. UNITED STATES, the record reads: “The government
charged each petitioner with manufacture of LSD, possession of LSD, and
conspiracy to manufacture, compound, process, sell and deliver LSD. Petitioner
Spires was also charged with two counts of selling LSD. All petitioners were
found guilty on each count charged against them. The District Judge did not
make a specific finding that the possession of LSD was for the purposes of sale,
but the Court of Appeals concluded that the evidence was overwhelming that the
possession was for purposes of sale. 427 F.2d 1066, 1071. …”

Owsley knew there were loopholes in the law and his shrewd mind was
determined to use them. USSC 400 U.S. 936: Owsley STANLEY et al. v.
UNITED STATES would ultimately find that, “While petitioners were tried after
the enactment of Oct 24, 1968 amendments, their offenses were committed
earlier. The 1968 amendments apply 'only with respect to violations * * *
committed after the date of the enactment of this Act.'” So it was that Owsley and
his coterie would be charged under the 1965 amendments that brought
'depressant or stimulant' drugs, including LSD, under the coverage of the Federal
Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. Manufacture and sale were prohibited but simple
possession was regulated in the following manner under 21 U.S.C. 360a(c):

“The statute at the time of conviction made manufacture [of LSD] a crime, 21
U.S.C. § 360a. It also made 'possession' a crime in the following words—'No
person * * * shall possess* any depressant or stimulant drug otherwise than (1)

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for the personal use of himself or of a member of his household, or (2) for
administration to an animal owned by him or a member of his household.' 21
U.S.C. § 360a(c).”

This is why when busted, Owsley made the audacious claim that the huge
amounts of LSD and STP found were for his own personal use. It wasn’t till
further amendments to the law in 1968 made all possession criminal—
possession for sale and 'other possession’ that the law stitched up all the
loopholes with regards to LSD and the war on consciousness could really start to
amp up.

STP had similarly been placed on the restricted substances list by the FDA in
record time after the freakouts on the street. The Los Angeles Times reported on
Nov 23, 1967 ... “The Food and Drug Administration proposed Wednesday to
place STP, … under the same controls as LSD. The FDA would include STP
under the drug abuse control act [and provide] penalties for unauthorized sale
and distribution. These range from a year in prison, $1000 fine or [other
sanctions]...”

“It was an unfortunate event, and unfortunate circumstances,” Owsley told David
Gans in 1991. “But I always looked at it this way: what I was doing wasn't for
personal gain. And, in fact, I wound up with nothing in the end. We gave away
probably more than was sold. We sold what we had to keep the thing going.”

When Owsley rang his criminal lawyer in L.A. to tell him of the bust, Tim Scully,
paranoid about the swarm of BDAC men tracking him around Berkeley, had fled
to L.A. and the same lawyer to engage legal assistance. While Owsley would
make bail and cash in his safety deposit boxes hidden across the country, the
court case would drag on inexorably for the almost three years, chewing through
all his remaining drug money that was fed to the lawyers.

The Grateful Dead song Alice D. Millionaire, inspired by the headline article of
‘LSD Millionaire’ from Oct 3, 1966 in the Los Angeles Times, said:

You say you're living in a world of trouble

All your schemes have popped like a bubble
Your mother told your sister
And your brother told your friend
Now your secret's out, and you don't have to pretend
You can see for yourself, it's really not the end

But that wasn’t true, it was the end. The age of Owsley acid was over. The Bear

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had just been caged.

And as Tim Scully sat there in the lawyer’s office in L.A., the mantle of alchemist
to the hippie generation fell to him.

While Owsley was forced out of the business of enlightenment, he couldn’t just
cut the cord entirely to the thing he had helped birth. As he told the San
Francisco Chronicle in 2007: “I [was] sort of embedded in this thing that I'm
tangled up in ... Just as soon as it became illegal, I wanted out. Then, of course, I
felt an obligation … I wound up doing time for something I should have been
rewarded for. What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was
punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I
was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are
different."

The Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia Library wrote, “After [Owsley’s]
arrest just prior to Christmas, a pall enveloped the hippie community in the San
Francisco area. There is apprehension that because of Mr. Owsley's arrest the
Mafia will take control in the selling of LSD. Most hippies believe that the acid
would necessarily be of a lower quality.” And they would be right.

Michael Hollingshead, the Englishman who first turned on Timothy Leary to acid
in 1960, later wrote in his autobiography, The Man Who Turned on the World:
“There was now (1968) little good acid around, and what there was–the so-called
‘street acid’–came mainly from California. There was something wrong with the
synthesis; it was not pure. And you were never sure what it was exactly that you
were taking, so I only dropped it on those rare occasions when someone gave
me ‘Sandoz’ or ‘crystal’ acid...”

Between the bad acid, the amphetamines, heroin, swarms of street kids and
runaways, mafia, CIA, police harrassment, media and psychic overload, the LSD-
consciousness movement that had shown such proleteriat promise in the hippies
was being derailed. But what to do? According to Tendler and May in the
Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Owsley bestowed “a cache of LSD crystals the
BDAC men had missed and a new connection for their drug supplies” to the
Hell’s Angels as a parting gift. That connection was Nick Sand, who was “more
than eager to fill the breach, offering a weekly supply of LSD worth $50,000 in
exchange for $40,000 …”

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Tendler and May further say that “[Billy] Hitchcock warmed to Owsley's
suggestion that perhaps he, Hitchcock, might like to move in. He moved another
$90,000 for the chemist to the Bahamas. Short of cash to operate, Scully
borrowed from Hitchcock on behalf of Owsley–whose credit was clearly good—
and then Sand, Scully and Hitchcock got together for a conference … Owsley
turned his back on the acid scene; from here on in it was all out of his hands.”

Other players took up LSD manufacture and distribution of the late 60s through
to the early 70s–notably the Brotherhood of Eternal Love–which became a major
international drug supply organization. Owsley, meanwhile, was out on bail and
was still being hounded by the cops. He was arrested again at the Los Angeles
international airport on Jan 24, arriving from San Francisco in the vicinity of
Jessie L. Clifton, 21, who, mysteriously, sold 500 capsules of LSD to an
undercover officer at the airport. A Los Angeles Superior Judge later dismissed
the charges against him on insufficient evidence, after Clifton testified he had “no
connection with Stanley”. But the heat was on.

Owsley was coming down to earth from the acid highs of years before, and the
first thing he had to do was find legitimate work. In Febuary, 1968 he offered his
services as a soundman to the Carousel Ballroom, where he worked with Bob
Matthews. He told interviewer David Gans that, “I was running the sound system.
I was the sound mixer. Which was something I knew how to do. I was looking for
something. I needed to do something.” And so as the acid wore off, the rock’n’roll
went on, and on, and on. Owsley–he had legally shortened his name to Owsley
Stanley in 1967, dropping ‘Augustus’ and the ‘III’–settled down jerry rigging hot
rod custom guitars for musicans like Jerry Garcia, Jorma Kaukonen and others,
and mixing music for what would, with the benefit of hindsight, be the crème de
crème of the rock’n’roll industry, bands that would become legends in their own
time.

Between March and late June of 1968, when the Carousel closed, Owsley
recorded dozens of bands, including: the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane,
Chuck Berry, John Lee Hooker, Big Brother and the Holding Company (with
Janis Joplin on vocals), Johnny Cash, the Steve Miller Blues Band, Thelonius
Monk, Fleetwood Mac, and many more. The quality of his two-track live
recordings was special, and would eventually prove to be a robust cultural
contribution almost equal to his alchemical endeavors.

In a rare interview to publicize two of his Dead recordings released in 1996,

Owsley told the San Jose Mercury News that ''the Grateful Dead is the most
documented musical group in history. Virtually every show, sound check, practice
session and studio rehearsal that they have done is on tape. Some are good and
many are not so good, but they exist, and the legacy of Jerry Garcia's music is all
in there. This simple thing may be one of my most important accomplishments.''

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As the Owsley Stanley Foundation, formed Aug 25, 2011, states on its website, it
was: “a simple and clean approach, one based on solid scientific principal. He
never used equalization (electronic tone control) on individual microphones or on
the PA output to correct a poor sound. Instead, if the sound wasn’t just “right,” he
repositioned the microphone or replaced it with a different type of mic until the
sound met his standard. As a result, his live sounds were clean, clear, and pure-
not electronically corrected.”

In an admission online in 2006, Owsley said that: “I cannot tell you how I mix, it is
just a talent I seem to have. Other people do not seem to 'hear' things quite the
way I do. I have never been able to teach anyone how to do what I do–they can't
hear the difference until I make the mix. They are never able later on to get that
place by themselves, even after careful observation. My conclusion is that I can
hear something about 'sound in space', that others apparently are not aware of.
Probably not in the ear so much as in the way my brain processes the ear's
signals.”

In Conversations with the Dead, Owsley elucidated further about his unique
approach to sound engineering when he said: “I work with sound in three-
dimensional fashion, which to me is palpably three-dimensional. I do that in the
way in which I set up stages for a live show, in which I orient speakers, the kind
of electrical things that I do to the sound. To me it is physical, and you can walk
through the hall and feel its shape and change … It seems real, like a sculpture.”
And all of that tangible physicality of sound was captured, embedded in his
recordings like a time capsule to an era now passed.

The Owsley Stanley Foundation sums it up when they say: “The Sonic Journals
capture vital, unique, and invaluable auditory snapshots from one of the most
fertile, influential, and explosively transformative epochs in American musical and
cultural history. Not only are these high-quality soundboard recordings the only
source of many of these historic live concert performances of now well-known
and revered artists, but they also document the development of the innovative
approaches to live sound recording pioneered by Owsley Stanley.”

Owsley stored the tapes "in the basement of the house I was renting for a while,”
he recounted in an interview for the Taping Compendium in 1998. “They were
moved to Alembic studios when I went off to jail. I came back and found them on
a huge pallet in the middle of a storage room with some other stuff. Tapes were
missing. I've never recovered some of them. I'm now missing other tapes that
were around for a while. I'm missing Fleetwood Mac and Thelonious Monk, both
from the Carousel. I'm also missing the original tape of Johnny Cash from when
he appeared there. If any of these tapes turn up, they will be easy to identify, as
I recorded the vocals in the left channel and the instruments in the right, Beatles
style."

Owsley also told the Taping Compendium that the Ampex reel tapes he started

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using in late 1968 had a serious preservation problem: "The adhesive that was
used to glue the oxide particles onto the backing turned to snot over the years,
and would rub off on your hands. Subsequently, there were many tapes that you
couldn't play. Somewhere along the line, someone discovered that if you heated
them up to about 130, it would reset this adhesive for a while, but not
permanently. Of course, high temperature randomizes the particles, so you're
basically erasing the highs off the tape while you're cooking them, reducing the
highest frequency sounds while recovering the rest... Mistakes made now may
not be apparent until much too late. I later decided I didn't really like the Ampex
product and returned (thank God) to Scotch. So almost all of my later tapes are
OK, like Old & in the Way and the 1970 Fillmore East shows."

Owsley’s next great contribution to music history–apart from the Greatful Dead–
would arguably be taping Janis Joplin, who’s legendary boozing, and x-rated
stories from her dressing room at the Carousel still echo on the internet today.
Joplin didn’t trust acidheads and when she hung with the Dead it was Pigpen that
proved the kindred soul. But she could trust Owsley–at least when it came to
capturing the essence of her sound. Owsley’s June 23, 1968 recording of Joplin
fronting Big Brother and the Holding Company would be released decades later
as "Live at the Carousel Ballroom 1968” on March 13, 2012, to critical acclaim.

In the album notes on his website, Owsley says that “I believe this album will be
hailed as the definite Big Brother live album of all time. Perhaps on some other
night they gave a better and more energetic performance, I don't know–I wasn't
lucky enough to be present at it. I was at this one, and I thought at the time it was
exceptional. The important thing is, these tapes survived. This is Janis at her
absolute peak, and the band was rarely so ‘on’ as they were at these shows.
They were kicking ass and having a hell of a good time.”

After the Carousel closed in mid-1968, Owsley was invited back into the fold with
the Grateful Dead to work as their soundman. Dan Healy, who had taken the
sound reins for the band while Owsley was previously indisposed in the acid
world, had moved on to work for the Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Owsley
was eager to get back in the saddle with ‘his’ band. He told Robert Greenfield
that, "they wanted to play bigger shows and they had to keep renting sound
systems that didn't coordinate very well with the gear that was there. They turned
to me and said, 'Do something'."

The Dead were in the studio recording their album Aoxomoxoa during this time,
so Owsley started retrofitting and improving the basic sound technology,
bemoaning the primitive instruments, “improving the gear … [and] trying to add
the stuff I’d learned and bring it up to snuff,” he told David Gans. The bass,
especially, had been an ongoing issue as far back as the Acid Test days, when
Owsley used the infamous Super Bass system with an Electro-Voice speaker
with two voice coils that filtered frequencies, providing enough power to feel the
sound in your gut. Everybody loved it, but it was a hugely awkward machine and

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so the problem of how to best improve the bass output remained. To solve that
Owsley had to push the state-of-the-art technology of 1968 and literally forge a
new business that would make superior sound equipment: Alembic Sound.

Owsley had met Ron Wickersham, who was an audio expert working at Ampex
as a design engineer, and in mid-1968 was working on the recording of
Aoxomoxoa with the Dead. Like the way he sculpted sound, Owsley brought
Wickersham together with Rick Turner, an “absolutely beautiful maker of acoustic
instruments”, and convinced them to try and find a solution to his bass problem.
“Neither of them really wanted to do it,” Owsley told David Gans. “I sort of took
them and stuck them together in the same pot, and said, ‘We gotta build better
instruments and we gotta get the electronics together.’ I thought it should be
called the Alembic, because the Alembic was the vessel in which chemical
verification takes place. First everything breaks down and then it’s built back up.
It’s distilled into the right thing. That’s what we were trying to do, we were trying
to take all of the technology and all of the experience and put it into a vessel.”

As with his acid excursions, Owsley was drawn to the endeavor by a sense of
duty that the job needed to be done, not for monetary reward. While Alembic
would quickly become the world’s premier instrument makers for the blossoming
rock’n’roll industry, Owsley received none of the proceeds, and it was a situation
of his own choosing, he told David Gans: “They wanted to give me a part of it,
and I said, ‘No … I just want it to be, I want it to exist, I want to do this thing with
this idea: that we’re going to make the kind of tool, so that a musician can go and
get the finest.’”

The Dead, too, were pushed to be a better band because of Owsley’s insistent
manner. He did regular sound checks and rehearsals before each show, both to
check the equipment worked–it had malfunctioned enough times to be a source
of continued embarrassment–and to strengthen the band members feedback.
After the show they would all listen back to the night’s recording, critiquing their
performances and learning from listening to their own sound, growing as a band–
and as a brotherhood. It was, Owsley told David Gans, “an almost tribal thing in
everybody sharing in all of the work and all of the obligations, and helping each
other like a bunch of brothers.”

As the Dead grew in stature and ability, so to did their entourage and road crew,
touring to bigger and bigger festivals as they rose to fame. But that sense of
brotherhood still bonded them–and Owsley, as it grew into something bigger over
the years–a sense of family.

“If you tried to delineate a Grateful Dead Family Tree, it would not be effective to
use the traditional bloodline progression, descending through the ‘begats’ to get
to the wider branches,’ said Rosie McGee in the Grateful Dead Family Album.
“Rather, this family tree, not only of birth and marriage, would have to be felled,
its great trunk sliced open and the cocentric rings examined to define the

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widening circles that shape it. At the core you would find the musicians, and with
them, their wives and children and other blood relatives–the families within the
Family. But how far do the rings go outward, who is included and in what order?
Do you count ALL THOSE PEOPLE? The truck drivers, ex-wives, ranch hands,
lighting designers, jugglers, road crew, housekeepers, photographers, past band
members, carpenters, shadow people, tie-dyers, medicine men, lyricists, sound
mixers, office staff, lawyers, jewelers, managers, pleasure crew, chiropractors,
travel agents, lovers, friends and neighbors, present AND past?”

The Dead was evolving into a rock’n’roll tribe with music and touring as the glue
that bound them together. And as it evolved so too did Owsley’s relationship with
the band. It had changed a lot since the early days, but in many ways the
relationship had strengthened. When he found the Grateful Dead they were a
raw and promising band that had that quintissential vibration the new rock’n’roll
carried, a sound that Owsley intuited on his deep Muir Beach Acid Test was part
of the planetary awakening. When he became their patron they were still
finessing their style, fueled by acid and the irrepressible synergy of the times,
experimenting with group mind and the tribal revival that helped anchor it.

But by the time Owsley rejoined the band full time as their soundman in mid-
1968, the Dead were a band on the rise, at the crest of the San Francisco acid
rock wave. They were playing bigger venues and their albums were climbing the
billboard charts, as the psychedelic rock they championed starting turning on the
mainstream. Owsley started off being their patron–and a hard assed,
perfectionist, everything must be done my-way-or-the-highway benefactor–or as
lyricist John Perry Barlow later described: "If you wanted to be an idiot and do
something any way but his, that was your decision. And he was not surprised you
would choose to be an idiot. Because you were. And he was probably right."    
 
But Owsley was now part of the team and had come down a few pegs in the
pecking order. It was a brotherhood, a tribe, but he was now working for them,
not the other way round. Either way, with the acid manufacturing behind him,
Owsley was happy to be doing the other thing he was good at–sound.  

Between late January and early March 1969, Owsley was working on the Live
Album by the Grateful Dead, alongside Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor,
recorded over a number of live concerts with a mobile 16-track studio. When it
was released in November, 1969, music critic Robert Christgau effused that side
two of the double album "contains the finest rock improvisation ever recorded."
The album is also noteworthy for the fact that Owsley asked Ron Wickersham to
make the first microphone splitter that would feed simultaneously into the PA and
the record inputs without losing sound quality.

Mickey Hart, in conversation with Rolling Stone in 2011, remembered another

side of him: “He cared so much about sound. One night we were at Winterland [it
may have been the New Year’s Eve show 1968] and Bear was mixing. Everyone

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had left except me and Bill Graham. We heard somebody sobbing and we went
over to the side of the stage and Bear was talking to the amplifiers: ‘I love you
and you love me—how could you fail me?’ He was addressing these electronics
as if they were a person. At first Bill and I were laughing, but then we said, ‘Wow,
he’s really serious.’”

There were other things Owsley was famous for around this time, and one was
his sense of style. It’s said he perfected the modern drug dealer look, and as
roadie Steve Parish, who joined the band in July, 1969, recalls, Owsley “set the
pace for dressing. He would wear Afghan vests, fur on the inside and beautiful
gold embroidery on the outside. He had us all wearing boots and boot-cut jeans.
He said it gave us better lines. It all had to do with his ballet career. He was
conscious of how people moved and walked.”

By 1969 Owsley was sharing “a beautiful, rambling home in the Oakland hills
[with fellow Dead roadie Ram Rod], with lots of land and a neighbor whose pet
cogar wailed incessantly,” Parrish says in his autobiography, Home Before
Daylight: My Life on the Road with the Grateful Dead. He also gives insight into
the pressure Owsley was going through both inside and outside the band.
Because of all the heat from law enforcement and the stress from fighting his
appeals to stay out of jail, Owsley was “a bit paranoid; understandably, he wasn’t
thrilled with the idea of strangers hanging out at his home,” Parrish writes. “In the
coming months we became very good friends, but at that moment he wasn’t
happy to have me in his house.”

There were frictions within the band, too, especially with new manager Lenny
Hart, the father of drummer Mickey, who was also a minister who was sure it was
God’s will that he clean up the band’s financial problems–and more. Lenny and
Owsley hated each other immediately the way nemeses do, and Hart would soon
embezzle $150,000 from the Grateful Dead and spend a year on the run in 1970.

Michael Lyndon, the first editor of Rolling Stone, describes the tense relationship
between Lenny Hart and Owsley in his book, Flashbacks: Eyewitness Accounts
of the Rock Revolution, claiming they were “like two selves of the Dead at war,
with the Dead themselves sitting as judges. . . . The Bear, says Jerry [Garcia], is
'Satan in our midst,' 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.’"

That psychedelic foundation was what made the Dead the Dead, but by 1969 it
was becoming apparent to some that the counterculture’s first blush of
psychedelic virginity had been taken. As the white-picket-fence-domesticated
consciousness of 1950s America was awakened by LSD and the parallelling
social pressure for transformation in the culture, that tide itself was played and
spent quite dramatically on the world stage as the hippie movement engulfed a
generation.

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To fully grok this one must look at the situation from a cosmic perspective, taking
Owsley’s ideas about LSD as a planetary activator disseminating through the
cultural rockbed, which would make the hippies the ground-zero critical mass of
an awakened human species. It didn’t mean they could levitate the Pentagon, as
the Yippies masterfully propagandizied, but it did mean they could turn on and
tune into the true planetary vibration, make love, grow food, raise children, create
music, art–and drop out and get back to the earth and the joys of simply living.

And if acid was awakening the masses, rock’n’roll was meant to be the rallying
cry for revolution, the crucible that held the group mind together. As Plato himself
is attributed to have said in his Republic: “[A ruler] must beware of changing to a
new kind of music, for the change always involves far-reaching danger. Any
alteration in the modes of music is always followed by alteration in the most
fundemental laws of the state.” Rock’n’roll, as much as the acid, was mutating a
generation.

Kesey had grokked this while high on acid in Mexico, chronicled by Tom Wolfe in
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: "I believe that man is changing...in a radical
basic way...The waves are building, and every time they build, they're stronger.
Our concept of reality is changing. It's been happening here in San
Francisco...I believe there's a whole new generation of kids. They walk different.
...I can hear it in the music...It used to go...life–death, life–death...but now it's
....death–life...death–life..." And the thing with waves is they come and go, boom
and bust, following the same natural cycles that permeate all of nature.

Anthropologists, media commentators, cosmic gurus and the hippies themselves

could all see that first wave was about to bust by 1969, if not earlier. Under the
weight of human debris from the media coverage of the Haight, the original
hippies and Diggers had conducted the ‘Death of Hippie’ ritual on Oct 6, 1967
when they buried the Psychedelic Shop store sign, had a last flower-power
parade and dispersed into the proto-communes of America to keep it real.

But the wave kept going and by the late 60s the group mind engendered by
rock’n’roll concerts and LSD had become a species level swarm. As the LSD
phenomenon penetrated deeper into the species genepool, awakening and
shifting the vectors of individuals and the culture itself, it diluted in intensity, but
that was the nature of the gestalt. The more minds there were in the circuit, the
more unwieldy it would become.

And as the Acid Tests birthed the Love Pageant Rally, and the Be-In, and
Monterey, and more and more heads joined the wave, that intensity would
culminate in late 1969, at Woodstock.

The Woodstock Music & Art Fair ran from Friday, Aug. 15 through to an
unplanned early Monday morning, Aug. 18 on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in the

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town of Bethel, in upstate New York. Woodstock was perhaps the inevitable
collision of all the 60s represented–the peace, love, acid and hippie idealism,
married with the rock’n’roll marketing and business acumen of the organizers and
record companies trying to channel that generational communitas into dollars.

An estimated 500,000 people attended the festival; organizers had envisaged the
event as a commercial veture and had sold approximately 186,000 tickets
beforehand. Due to the size of the festival and local politics the venue had
changed at the last minute, with little time to accommodate on the ground
logistics, and as the crowd arrived in greater than expected numbers, the
temporary fencing went down. Woodstock became a free concert. By the Sunday
the human tide was so overwhelming and uncontrolled that the county declared
the site a state of emergency, and the governor had to be talked out of sending in
the national guard.
 
Singer Joni Mitchell said, "Woodstock was a spark of beauty" where half-a-million
kids "saw that they were part of a greater organism." They achieved this act of
self awareness despite, or maybe because of the circumstances: As rain poured
down, the site, and the roads leading to it became muddy craters, the food
started running out, the toilets overflowed with effluent, and campsites became
liquid garbage dumps for hundreds of thousands of people. But still, there was
plenty of dope for all–and that Orange Sunshine acid that Tim Scully and Nick
Sand had been busy making since parting ways with Owsley–enough to keep
half a million people psychically lubricated despite the adverse conditions. That,
and the music…
 
The Greatful Dead were there, of course, as were other established acts like the
Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, the Jefferson Airplane,
Janis Joplin and Joan Baez, and new wave performers like Crosby, Stills and
Nash, Joe Cocker, Santana, Sly and the Family Stone and Melanie. The Merry
Pranksters were present in all their day-glo finery–and with the bus, sans Kesey,
who was out of jail but still on probabtion back on the farm in Oregon. And
Owsley was there, in his role as soundman to the Dead. But surely as he looked
out from that main stage at the sea of hundreds of thousands of people, the
majority stoned and tripping, a “moving ocean of flesh … an ocean of collars,
hair, teeth, eyes and hands,” as Carlos Santana called it, he might have
recognized that strange beast as his own child.

Almost half a million people, a critical mass there in the rain and wet and mud,
overwhelming the on the ground facilities, the fences, the capitalist
establishment, the times, the odds themselves; a huge bio-organism gathered in
the pursuit of pleasure, music, the vibe–and yes, the acid experience ( "[We're
told] that the brown acid is not specifically too good" MC Hugh Romney–the
future Wavy Gravy–warned the crowd). Homo Gestalt had been born.

"The weather turned Woodstock into a national disaster area," Wavy Gravy said

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in Saint Misbehavin’, "and we had a chance to show the world how it would be if
we ran the show, so we pulled ourselves up by our collective bootstraps and
were amazing – by surrendering ourselves to this interesting energy that enabled
us to work days without sleep and intuitively pull off stuff that we couldn't have
thought about in our wildest dreams. And the minute we thought that it was us
doing it, we'd fall on our butt in the mud. So I think that the universe was acting
out these archetypes. I've puzzled over it for decades, and that's the best I can
come up with, that there was this amazing energy that you could surrender to,
and it would move you."

Hundreds of thousands of hippies and yippies, crazies, activists, cops, lovers,

human be-ings–all the fractaling strands of the counterculture movement all there
in one place, all of them there to grok the same essential vibration Owsley
himself had first tweaked to back at Muir Beach with the Dead, and the group
mind that had come through then and been building in waves across the years
and the parties. All of them high and like pieces in a reaction vessel fused
together by the intensity of the alchemical experience, the group trance-dance
that made them something bigger than the sum of its parts.

If Owsley did glimpse that, he didn’t have time to sit with it very long, as things
were coming to a head down on stage. Woodstock was to be one of the Grateful
Dead’s worst performances and Owsley bore the brunt of the blame, if not the
responsibility. Saturday was a stormy night, and 60-mile an hour winds
threatened to blow down the wooden stage set on muddy foundations as they
keened through the air. “Several things went wrong. First of all, the band’s
entrance and exit from the stage depended on risers. And when the Dead were
supposed to go on, the wheels on their risers failed,” Jerilyn Lee Brandelius said
in the Grateful Dead Family Album.

Owsley told Robert Greenfield in his book, Dark Star: "On stage, they had four of
these large plywood cookies with two-by-four structure and casters underneath.
They would set up two bands back-to-back on the cookies, roll them into place,
and that was their way of getting rid of the time lag between sets. Ram Rod [the
Dead’s roadie] and I looked at this and we said, 'This is not going to work. Our
equipment is too heavy. We're going to have to set up on stage.' They told us,
'Absolutely not. You have to do it this way.' The time came for our set. The guys
hooked up the ropes. The plywood moved approximately one foot and all the
casters broke. Wham. Down the thing came on the floor. We had to take
everything down and set it up again … It was not a great show.”

Jerry Garcia agreed, confessing in the Grateful Dead Family Album that,
“Generally speaking, the more that people expect, the worse we are. The
paramount example was Woodstock.” Bob Weir added that “We had a sound
man who insisted that everything was being done wrong so he was gonna set up
his whole PA, and proceeded to go about doing so.” “Hanging up the audience
for four or five hours!” roared Garcia, wiping back tears of laughter. “When you

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multiply that by the number of people at Woodstock you get several human
years.”

Perhaps it was the bad acid that was going around that weirded everybody out
and frazzled the group vibe. “All day long people were saying, ‘Do not take the
brown acid.’ Some guy had a brown paper bag full of bum acid,” Brandelius
wrote. “Then this guy comes bouncing across the stage in the middle of the
Dead’s set and he’s throwing out brown acid to the crowd. That was a nightmare
in itself.” And the nightmare was to continue, because even when the band was
set up, more problems arose with the equipment. Owsley was under the hammer
again–but it still wasn’t his fault.

“The reason we had a problem at Woodstock was that the transmitter that they
were using for the radio signal for their helicopters was grounded in one place,
and the stage was grounded in another place,” Owsley told David Gans. “The
result was that the ground system on the stage was not at the same ground
potential as the transmitter. So all of the equipment on the stage was acting as a
supplemental antenna, receiving the signal from the transmitter. And it was in
everything! But worse of all, it was in Phil’s bass.”

"Nothing was grounded, so any time any of the guitarists touched their
instrument, they were getting a low-voltage shock, about 15 volts,” Bob Weir told
the New York Times in 2009, on the 40th anniversary of the landmark rock
festival that became a symbol for the hippie generation. “It [was] enough to rattle
your nervous system." Owsley paired with the house electrician in search of the
problem and found the separate ground rods and clipped them to the same
transmitter rod, fixing the problem in ten to fifteen minutes, he claims. And yet, as
history remembers, the Dead were stalled from playing for nearly three hours due
to the multiple problems–and as some band member’s still irrate memories
testify, Owsley is invoked as the reason.

But as Garcia himself admitted, the greater the expectation or order, the greater
the chaos, as the slippery Gestalt-magic-moment-when-the-whole-unspoken-
thing-comes-together refused to be coraled. Still, it meant a terrible showing by
the Dead, who just couldn’t get into the swing of things on stage. But in terms of
the larger flowering, Woodstock itself was a watershed event for the culture
overall, a group-mind mosh-pit for species activation and a permanent spectacle
of hippiedom for mainstream consumption.

Another good thing that came out of Woodstock, however, was the iconic
Grateful Dead lightning bolt skull logo, also known to many fans as ‘Steal Your
Face’, that Owsley designed with Bob Thomas:

The Dead in those days had to play in a lot of festival style shows where the
equipment would all wind up at the back of the stage in a muddle,” Owsley wrote

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on his website. “Since every band used pretty much the same type of gear it all
looked alike. We would spend a fair amount of time moving the pieces around so
that we could read the name on the boxes. I decided that we needed some sort of
marking that we could identify from a distance.

I was in the habit of driving from Oakland to Novato in a little MGTF which had
plastic side curtains, which were not very transparent, due to aging of the plastic.
One day in the rain, I looked out the side and saw a sign along the freeway which
was a circle with a white bar across it, the top of the circle was orange and the
bottom blue. I couldn't read the name of the firm, and so was just looking at the
shape. A thought occurred to me: if the orange were red and the bar across were a
lightning bolt cutting across at an angle, then we would have a very nice, unique
and highly identifiable mark to put on the equipment.

At the [Dead’s Novarto] warehouse I told Bob the idea that I had, and he made a
quick sketch. A mutual friend, Ernie Fischbach, who was visiting with Bob, said
‘Give it to me, I'll show you an easy way to put it on the boxes.’ Whereupon he
proceeded to cut holes in a couple of pieces of stencil paper …then he held the
stencil to an amp and sprayed a circle of white paint. Then with one side up, the
red half circle went on top of the dried white paint and after wiping off the red
and turning the stencil over, the blue was applied. This was the first version, and
we put it on to all our gear. It helped make it easier to find our stuff in the crunch.
I still have an old toolbox with one of the stencils on it.

The ‘Stealie’ debuted at Woodstock and would become one of the most iconic
symbols of the Grateful Dead and the psychedelic music and culture they
represented, plastered on every VW van and hippiemobile throughout the 1970s
to the present day. Thomas sold it to the Dead for $250 and neither he nor
Owsley saw any royalties from the logo’s sale over the decades.
 
Even as Woodstock passed, the free festival vibe was gaining momentum in the
States. But then–just as Owsley and Kesey had groked on acid about the nature
of waves–for every high there would be a low–came Altamont. And yet again
Owsley was in the thick of it.

The Rolling Stones had been touring the U.S. that summer, their first visit in three
years, and expectations were high. On Sunday, November 9, 1969, the Stones
played the Oakland Coliseum Arena, and as Owsley says on his website album
notes to one of his Grateful Dead recordings, Dick’s Pick’s v.16: “We all went to
the Stones show … They blew up all their Ampeg amps during their first set. The
Dead offered to help them in their need, and Ram Rod, Jackson and Sonny Herd
drove into the city and brought the band's souped-up Fender amps back over to
the Coliseum, arriving just in the nick of time for the Stones to go on after Ike and
Tina's opener. Personally, I thought they sounded much better on the Fenders
than on their somewhat wimpy Ampegs. (What ever happened to Ampeg?)”

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The free festival vibe had been proliferating since Woodstock and the Stones
wanted to tap into that energy and throw a free party to see out the 60s. So they
turned to their newfound friends in the Grateful Dead with the idea of doing a
mini-‘Woodstock West’. The Stones lent lanky Englishman Sam Cutler, their
American tour manager and the Dead got their manager, Rock Scully, to pool
resources and make it all happen. Scully was originally accompanied by Emmett
Grogan, one of the founders of the Diggers, the radical free activists who had
provided ongoing free food, clothes and shelter during the height of the Haight
Ashbury hippie experiment, and their free-ethos infused the early planning
sessions.

Woodstock had been a massive organizational challenge drawing upon the

resources of record labels and big money; this free festival was a bit more
haphazard–and understaffed. “Sam Cutler took charge. I was a measly
secretary,” said Rhoney Stanley, an attractive, chestnut-haired maker and shaker
who was also Owsley’s girlfriend at the time, in her online account in Altamont
Stories. The two bands and their management were committed to uniting the
dual strands of rock–UK mainstream and San Francisco psychedelic–in a free
festival, and would eventually entice other headline acts like Santana, the
Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers and Crosby, Stills, Nash and
Young to appear. The only real question was where? “Permits, true to Bear’s
prediction, were harder to get. Law enforcement was cracking down on free
festivals,” Rhoney wrote.

The team considered numerous options before settling on Sears Point Raceway,
which Owsley considered perfect for logistics: “Sears Point is only 20 minutes
from Alembic. We’re building the PA; we’re setting up the system. The less
distance from Alembic the better,” Rhoney remembers him saying. The location
was kept secret, although the idea of it was rippling through the underground.

Now it was the custom with the Grateful Dead when they played their numerous
free gigs to have their old buddies from the Acid Test days, the Hell’s Angels,
handle the security–which basically meant guarding the stage and watching the
generators. The problem was territorial–the Oakland Hell’s Angels had years of
symbiosis with the hippies and experience with psychedelics under their belt.
They had distributed acid for Owsley in significant quantities and some had
formed friendships with the band. They might be menacing, but at least they
knew the score.

The Oakland Angels couldn’t run at Sear’s Point, that was another chapter’s turf.
And those Angel’s didn’t like psychedelics, or hippies, although for $500 worth of
beer (as a ‘gratuity’) they reportedly agreed to handle security nonetheless. “The
only agreement there ever was ... the Angels would make sure nobody fucked
with the generators, but that was the extent of it,” Sam Cutler told Dennis
McNally in A Long Strange Trip. “But there was no 'They're going to be the police

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force' or anything like that. That's all bollocks.”

“Bear and the crew hauled the equipment up to Sears Point and spent hours
building the massive towers for the speakers,” Rhoney Stanley wrote. “Then we
got the word: permit denied. The media had gotten the information in the papers,
radio, and TV and the show at Sears Point Raceway was off.” Mick Jagger had
leaked the news himself to the press, and two days before the scheduled concert
the race for another venue began. And the only one that presented itself was
Altamont Speedway, 60 miles east of San Francisco.

“We had no choice,” Rhoney Stanley wrote. “It was either go with Altamont or
cancel the show, and the show must go on. We tore down the towers at Sears
Point, loaded the trucks, and started the transport to Altamont, like a hippy D-Day
invasion. Bear was spending his own money to move his own equipment and
was the last to leave. He did not stop working for a minute. He headed straight to
Altamont. He had no time to distribute LSD. He was 100% focused on the sound.
No Owsley acid for Altamont.”

“We were driving to Altamont in a sports car that I had,” Owsley told Robert
Greenfield. “All of a sudden, we looked up and there was this rocket blowing up
in the sky. I said, ‘That’s got to be some sort of strange sign.’ As we drove along,
we looked over to the left and we saw this place that looked like a skull. It was
the actual arena in which they had these demolition derbies. And I thought, ‘Oh,
my God. This place smells of death … This is the worst possible place to hold
something like this.’ I realized that if you took acid at this show, you were going to
have a trip you didn’t really want to do.”

The Altamont Speedway was situated on desolate, barren land, “like a wipeout
in an alien time, like a barren airstrip,” Rhoney Stanley wrote:

The landscape of Altamont was wrong for a show, the slope of the hill, the
dryness of the earth, the lack of any cover, but it was safe for landing helicopters.
The helicopters came in and out; sound equipment arrived on trucks; cases of beer
and port-a-potties showed up. All night long the crew struggled to set up in the
dark, the artificial light glaring in spots. I’d catch glimpses of Bear always
occupied with the sound system.

There was no right place to put the stage. Every location was wrong. I felt the
vibe change from one of jubilation to terror. The stage was too low in the front
and sloped up in the back, and the audience was on a hill rising from the front of
the stage. It was not safe for the musicians. We had thought we could duplicate
the community spirit of Woodstock west coast style by presenting a free concert,
spontaneously announced close to the day of the show. In the spirit of the
Diggers, we wanted everything to be free, but we were wishful thinkers and
headed for a wall. Built into the system was already a colossal need for correction,

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by virtue of the last minute permit denial and the change in location.

By the Saturday morning, as an estimated 300,000 people coalesced, high on

acid and metamphetamines, things started to go from bad to worse. David L.
Maher, who was 18 at the time, said online in Altamont Stories:

The stage seemed as if was surrounded by hangers on and the Angels were
already a huge presence. An old yellow school bus was parked down to the right
of the stage and the ‘security forces’ pranced on it, yelling and drinking beer. Beer
cans were flying out into the audience. I remember shivering early and often. We
had taken yellow sunshine acid and I squirmed, feeling myself come on to it. It
already felt as my friends and me were our own little group, circling our wagons
against something. We didn’t know what, but things just seemed so WRONG.

When the sound system was finally cleared we breathed a sigh of relief. It
WAS going to be alright, wasn’t it? Santana came on and the percussion kicked in
and we stood up and leaned forward, ready to ‘get it on’. But through the music
there was yelling and confusion behind us and we jerked our head around to see a
giant naked Chicano dude running down the hill, over people and through groups
yelling, ‘I’m going to the front. I’m going to the front’. And so he was until about
twenty feet from the stage a Hell’s Angel jumped forward, swung a pool cue like
a baseball bat and dropped the guy in his tracks.

We gaped, jaws slack. Did that really happen? Did we see that? We stared as one,
but a crowd had gathered round and the mass of people kept pushing forward, as
it would all day. It seemed as if the naked fat man had been swallowed up by the
crowd. I don’t remember much more about Santana except that I was truly
frightened. I kept turning 360 degrees to look at the crowd gathered and that was
when I began having those bad trip feelings that the US government had gathered
us all here in this one place; all these hippies and druggies and rock and rollers so
they could eliminate us; wipe us out, all in one fell swoop. ‘Just the acid, just the
acid’, I said over and over to myself.

Altamont was, according to Sam Cutler in his book, You Can’t Always Get What
You Want, flooded with doses of extremely strong acid estimated at 1600
micrograms per dose–over five times stronger than Owsley’s original batch!
Curiously, the acid was also created using a pill press–which cost a fortune and
were notoriously hard to source. So where did that acid come from? Sandoz had
stopped making LSD in 1965 but the CIA still had their sources with Eli Lily for
their own domestic use. There was such a dearth of lysergic monohydrate, the
vital precursor amongst the known chemists of the time, that one wonders where
else it could have come from. Owsley was long out of the acid game by then, and
so too, was his apprentice, Tim Scully, who had a falling out with the Brotherhood

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of Eternal Love and their new financial backer and supplier of lysergic
monohydrate, the elusive Ronald Stark, who would eventually be revealed as a
CIA operative.

Cutler argues that John Jaymes, a mafioso figure who had insinuated himself
into the Stones entourage and was ostensibly in charge of security–which
seemed to also include the presence of a dealer to supply the band with
cocaine–had ties with the FBI. Cutler further asserts that the reason the FBI
engaged Jaymes was to defuse the growing popularity of the Woodstock-style
free concerts that were starting to proliferate.

According to The Covert War Against Rock, by Alex Constantine, “A supplier

from Berkeley donated 1,000 hits of LSD laced with speed to Barger's Altamont
security force, and the Angels toted along several cases of red wine and a
generous supply of barbiturates. The concert commenced at 1 p.m. with a set by
Santana, and before long the beatings began. By the time Santana ripped to a
close, the first casualties limped into the first aid station. There were broken
arms, open wounds, shattered jaws and ribs, and bad LSD trips that left joy-
seekers screaming in terror. There were so many of these that the Thorazine
cache ran dry within a few hours, leaving the overdosed untreated."

David L. Maher wrote in Altamont Stories:

Finally my favorite band, Jefferson Airplane took the stage and I was sure it was
going to get better. But oh my fucking Lord, it dissolved into chaos. The Angels
were beating up anyone who got close to the stage and we were close enough to
see fists swinging and heads fling back from being struck. Grace was pleading
with the crowd to back up, but there was nowhere to go.

Marty Balin was yelling from the stage at the Angels to stop beating people and
then suddenly he was airborne, leaping off the stage into the middle of a melee.
This was hideous, this was Hell, this was the very definition of “chaos and
anarchy” to quote from the Airplane themselves. The band ground to a halt. Paul
Kantner was yelling into the crowd. Marty was getting beaten up and the stage
was so low, it was impossible to see anything over the heads of the crowd. All I
could think of was how badly I wanted out, but there was no way at all through
the crowd and once out, then what would I do?

It was just after this that Mick Jagger arrived on site in a helicopter, smiling and
waving and accompanied by everyone’s favourite acid prophet, Timothy Leary.
Leary had himself been living with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love whilst dealing
with his own legal issues over a 1965 marijuana bust, and after that conviction
was overturned he announced his candidacy for Governor of California, for which
John Lennon and Yoko Ono has written him the song “Come Together” for his
campaign. The crowd went wild and surged forward as Leary flashed them the

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peace symbol, and the Hell’s Angel’s flared into action, holding back the crowd in
a violent counteraction.

Mick and Keith and the rest “were sequestered in their trailers,” Rhoney Stanley
wrote, “and we had no contact with them. Our dream of Garcia and Mick and
Keith getting together was not happening. The Grateful Dead convened in the
narrow backstage area between two equipment trucks. Most of the crew,
including Bear, were working with the sound equipment somewhere on the site.
and were not present at the meeting. The band did not want to go on. The vibes
were off; they were supposed to play an acid test in San Francisco and only if
they left immediately would they make it. MG was loud in her support of leaving. I
agreed, and I had been there since the beginning. ‘Don’t play.’ There was no
dispute. ‘Not to play,’ was the decision. The Grateful Dead walked in the opposite
direction of the stage carrying their guitars and took off in a helicopter before the
Rolling Stones went on … Where was Bear? If only he had concentrated on
getting everyone high on pure LSD instead of devoting himself to the sound,
Altamont may have been another celebration of life. Instead it was the end of the
60’s dream.”

David L. Maher continues:

It seemed like hours but then the stage lights were glowing bright and there was
Mick in his Jack Flash suit. There was Keith and Mick Taylor and they were
actually onstage and trying to work their way into position to play. It seemed as if
they were jockeying with the Angels for center-stage. It was easy to see at this
point that the Angels were relishing their power-grip on the situation and they
seemed to almost sneer at the skinny English rockers.

The first chords of ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ were powered out and the massive wall
of flesh pushed forward even harder. I was sure I was going to be crushed. As the
crowd literally fell into and onto the stage you could see the Angels’ fists rising
and falling into the mass of people, connecting over and over again. Horrifying,
just horrifying and the Stones ground on. They sounded ragged and tinny and
were at best a sideshow to the violence in the front.

Chill out , everyone just chill out’, called Mick, in his proper British accent. ‘Why
are we fighting?’ he said again and again, oh so cluelessly. And he pouted and it
seemed as if the band was going to refuse to play if the fighting didn’t stop. [As
they] launched into ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ … that’s when the shit really broke
loose.

The Hell’s Angels broke into an altercation with an 18-year-old black man, a
flashy dresser in a lime suit with a big afro named Meredith Hunter. Hunter, "so
high he could barely walk", brandished a long barreled black revolver and was

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attempting to shoot Mick Jagger. He was stopped by Alan Passaro, one of the
Hell’s Angels, who descended on him with a knive and stabbed him to death
directly in front of the stage, while the Stones sang on. All in all, four concert-
goers died (two others were run over and another drowned) and over 850 people
were injured–largely by Hell’s Angels swinging leaded pool cues and chains.

The media quickly declared it was “The Death of Rock”, and “The End of the
Hippies”, and in a very real sense, it was. The grand experiment in group mind,
with hundreds of thousands of people all high at once, all sensitive to the psychic
vibes of the tribe, came crashing to an end, although mainstream, commodified
rock’n’roll continued to dominate. The bad acid, the speed, the Zeitgeist, the
cause and effect and everything becomes it’s opposite according to the principle
of polarity, all of this and more came to a head at Altamont. Without alchemists
like Owsley keeping the psychedelic vibe pure–and the sacrament as well–the
fragile psychedelic butterfly launched at the Be-In came crashing to earth.

Or as Tim Leary later wrote: “In a sense Altamont was a microcosm of the overall
political situation since 99 per cent of everybody wants to get high and groove
and love, while less than 1 per cent get their kicks from violence...”

As the 1970’s dawned the forces of oppression, it seemed, were winning.

Owsley still had his personal stash of LSD and was, as always, sharing it liberally
with his friends–whether they wanted it or not. He had a habit of dosing everyone
with acid and he was notorious at it, so much so that those in the know would
never accept food or drink from him–or even leave a drink exposed when he was
around. Michael Lydon describes a typical pre-show ritual from the Springer’s Inn
concert in Portland on January 16, 1970: “The band stands around the
equipment truck waiting for the Bear to finish his preparations. Someone donates
Cokes, Bear laces them with his concoction, and they make the rounds. ‘Anyone
for a lube job?’ Bill calls to the hangers-on. ‘Dosed to a turn,’ says Phil. Jerry,
already speechlessly spaced on gas, drinks deep.”

Bob Weir told Rolling Stone in 2011 that a year earlier, “When we played Playboy
After Dark [Hugh Hefner’s variety show, on January 19, 1969], the technicians
were drinking coffee and Bear put acid in all the coffee urns. After a while the

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Bunnies’ mascara was all running and they were starting to take off their clothes
and the technicians weren’t operating at full capacity. The Bear was after Hefner,
but he didn’t drink the coffee.”

Owsley was up to his usual tricks a few months later, when Janis Joplin joined
Pigpen and the rest of the band one last time live on stage on June 7, 1969,
when the Grateful Dead played the Fillmore West, high on acid spiked apple
juice. “I remember Janis venting her high dudgeon at Owsley backstage that
night,” said keyboardist Tom Constanten, “– her trumpet player had got dosed …
When it came time for us to play, Phil’s bass was loosely draped over his
shoulders and he was pushed onstage, muttering the while about the Fall of the
Roman Empire … I found Robert Hunter painted onto the stairs on our way out
the back door. He and Pete Grant were then decanted into their respective back
seats for the ride back home across the Golden Gate Bridge.”

Things were about to get more serious, however, as 1970 wore on. Owsley had
been fighting his 1967 Orinda bust for over two years in the courts, and his time
was running out. On January 30, 1970 Fleetwood Mac opened for the Grateful
Dead at the Warehouse in New Orleans, just before Mardi Gras. After the
concert on the second night, Saturday January 31, at 3:00am, local police–armed
with search warrants–raided the Grateful Dead’s hotel room on Bourbon Street.
They arrested 19 people–the entire band (except for Pigpen and Tom
Constanten) and their entourage for possession of drugs–including Owsley, who
was charged with “illegal possession of narcotics, dangerous non-narcotics, LSD,
and barbiturates.”

The New Orleans Times-Picayune played up the Owsley connection in its

headline the next day, “Rock Musicians, 'King of Acid,' Arrested”, and although
charges were later dismissed after generous politican donations were made, it
set in motion a chain of events that distanced Owsley from the band, and
eventually led the once mighty Acid King to jail.

But first things first–after the bust the Dead were broke, and they had to raise
enough money to get out of town and keep the show on the road. In Life on the
Road by (Stuart) Dinky Dawson, the ex-roadie and soundman wrote:

At five in the morning, my phone rang, suddenly awakening me from a deep

sleep. ‘What the bloody hell!’ I thought, turning over and grabbing the annoying
alarm. ‘They busted the Dead.’ It was Owsley. [Dawkins and Owsley arranged for
Fleetwood Mac and the Dead to play a] “’free concert at the Warehouse. As a
benefit. We can pass the hat,’ Owsley explained. It was all going to happen that
night, Sunday February 1st back at the Warehouse. The Mac’s only reservation
was the timing–with less than 12 hours to publicize the impromptu fundraiser, the
British band weren’t sure how they would pull in a crowd.

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‘It’s okay, don’t worry about that’ [Dawson quotes Owsley as saying]. ‘Don’t
underestimate the power of FM radio or the youth of America. They’ll hear about
it.’ [And they did–loyal Deadheads listened avidly to the local FM station for
news about the bust and benefit gig] “as well as Owsley’s concerns about future
busts… Owsley felt the Dead had been set up, so the DJs cautioned their listeners
that the New Orleans police would surely be out in force looking for drugs. The
response to the radio promotion was unbelievable. By 6pm, the line to get into the
Warehouse stretched around the block. Owsley had also been correct in his
assessment of a heavy police presence. Officers checked every single person
coming into the club, and I doubted that even a joint could slip past the tight
scrutiny.

Inside, we huddled with Owsley and Ram Rod, the Dead’s stage manager, to
discuss how unfortunate it was that this crowd would be unable to get high for the
gig. As usual, Owsley already had a plan. ‘Send the promoter out for two cases of
Cold Duck. That’s all the bands require for refreshment tonight.’ After the
sparkling wine arrived, we popped the corks and into each bottle Owsley inserted
a discreet but potent amount of liquid acid that he’d somehow managed to
smuggle into the club. Meanwhile, Fleetwood Mac walked onstage to a sold-out
house, and Peter announced into the microphone, ‘You all know why we’re here,
so when any of you feel like making a donation toward legal fees for our friends,
the Grateful Dead, just drop it in the buckets!’” … In return the ‘Electric Duck’
was passed out to the crowd–“sending the buzz all around the building while the
New Orleans police stood guard outside and looked for joints.

Despite reports to the contrary, Owsley was present at the Dead’s next gig after
New Orleans, at the Fox Theatre in St. Louis on Monday February 2, where he
taped the show, although with most of the band’s gear still impounded back in
New Orleans, Bob Heil’s sound system was used, kickstarting Heil Sound into
the American rock industry. Owsley was present, and using someone else’s
sound system really grated on him, as the review by Harper Barnes, from the St
Louis Post-Dispatch, noted on February 3, 1970:

“Owsley Stanley, the well-known alchemist, prowled about the stage for an hour
after the concert had been scheduled to begin, twisting knobs, cursing
microphones, and scowling at the loudspeakers. Stanley built most of the
Grateful Dead's massive array of sound equipment, but he was unhappy with the
theater's public-address system. He must have adjusted everything properly
because the sound was just fine, blasting clearly into the far reaches of the
second balcony.”

Owsley also produced the Allman Brothers band when they played at the
Fillmore East in New York City with the Grateful Dead on Feburary 11-14, 1970.
Three albums resulted from those recordings: Fillmore East, February 1970 by
the Allman Brothers, History of the Grateful Dead, Vol. 1 (Bear's Choice), which
first featured the skull and lightning bolt logo, and Dick's Picks Volume 4, a three-

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CD live concert set by the Dead. In ''Dick's Picks,'' Owsley says, ''I chose the
placement of the mikes to take advantage of the normal leakage which is present
in a sound field of the high intensity on stage with the Grateful Dead. I called this
'creative leakage.' This was accomplished entirely by trial and error, by listening
carefully night after night to the mix at the shows.”

In the liner notes to Fillmore East Owsley describes meeting the Allman Brothers
like this: "In the summer of 1969 we played at a pop festival in a park in Atlanta.
We had been hearing about a local band from Macon called the Allman Brothers
Band, and someone brought members of the band over to meet us. As I recall
they didn't play at that time [or the Dead just missed their show], so we didn't
hear their music until their first record came out that fall. So when we were
booked into the Fillmore East on a triple bill with the Allman Brothers, I was very
pleased and looked forward to the shows with anticipation, as I had heard their
record and liked the band.... There was a wonderful feeling at these concerts that
made the shows a lot of fun for us all."

The Dead had begun their first major national tour and would clock up 144 gigs in
1970, “playing more shows that year than ever before or since,” according to
Rock Scully in his biography, Living With the Dead. They had to tour because
they had been left essentially bankrupt by financial mananger Lenny Hart’s
$155,000 embezzlement, forcing them on the road through 1970 and into 1971,
turning on a whole new audience to the music that would become known as
‘Deadheads’.

The other major advantage from that time was the camaraderie, as Owsley says
on his website: “We were still pretty new at the R&R touring game and we played
in all sorts of halls. On tour, we rarely could afford separate hotel rooms for
everyone, so we shared, something which seems very odd, looking back, but I
think it was one of the nicer things limited money did, because we got to know
each other pretty well that way.”

In 2011 Mickey Hart remembered another side of getting to know Owsley to

Rolling Stone: “His powers of concentration were pretty high. One time in Atlanta
[most likely at the 1969 concert] Bear had met a girl at the show and brought her
back to the hotel. She might have been underage. Now, Bear was not the
quietest guy on earth in bed. I was walking the halls and went past his room and
it was pretty noisy in there. The elevator door opens up and here come the
police. They hear these unearthly sounds from inside the room and figure there’s
some kind of Satanic ritual going on. They pound on the door. Nothing happens.
They pound again and say, ‘We’re coming in.’ They broke the door down, but this
didn’t faze Owsley one bit. He’s banging away and making his flying-saucer
noises, and one of the cops shouts, ‘What are you doing to that girl?’ And he just
looks at him briefly and says, ‘I’m fucking her,’ and goes back to his business.
They let him finish, but needless to say they all went to jail.”

But life on the road was coming to an end for Owsley as soundman for the band.

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“They stopped me going on the road because we got busted in New Orleans,”
Owsley told David Gans. “I had already been convicted and been sentenced and
was awaiting my appeals. The Dead got busted and I was busted with them, and
that sent a bad message to the judge, and he revoked my permission to travel
[sometime after the NYC shows in February, 1970]. Matthews then became the
soundman on the road, and I only worked when they were playing in the Bay
Area, when they didn’t have to travel.”

On the personal front, Owsley’s relationship with Rhoney and on again-off again
lover Melissa Cargill (who had been dating Jack Casady from Jefferson Airplane
for a time since mid-1967, living with him–and their pet owl–in San Francisco)
culminated in both women falling pregnant only six months apart. A girl, Redbird,
was born to Cargill in June and a boy, Starfinder, to Rhoney in December. In
between the bookends of their births, Owsley would go to jail.

On June 1, 1970 the United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, dismissed all
matters under appeal by Owsley and his fellow appellants Willy Spires and Bob
Thomas, saying that “matters raised by appellants have been considered and
found to be without merit. Finding no error, the judgments are Affirmed.” The
rehearing was denied on July 13, 1970. To make matters worse, Owsley was
busted again on the night of July 15, at his home at 6024 Ascot Drive, Oakland.
The Oakland Tribune ran a story the next day that cried: “’LSD King' Nabbed
Again in Drug Raid.”
   
An Oakland judge revoked his bail on the marijuana charge, which Owsley
claims stemmed from “a landlord [who] finked on him while he was sluggishly
vacating an apartment he’d been evicted from,” according to Charles Perry.
Owsley said the “fucking judge … wanted to make sure I did time.” Like the
Establishment had with Kesey and Leary, it was the marijuana they busted him
for, alongside the LSD charges, which were still misdemeanours under the
Californian state law of 1967 when he was arrested.

Owsley was sent to a medium-security facility at the Federal Correctional

Institution, Terminal Island, at San Pedro, Los Angeles Harbor. In the Taping
Compendium interview Owsley elucidates: "They canceled my appeal bond in
July 1970 and sent me to do my time. It crippled my appeal because I could not
supervise the lawyers while I was locked up.” Owsley must have had one hell of
a send off party, though, and on the Taper’s Section of [Link], David
Lemieux notes that San Rafael “7/16/70– [known in Dead lore as ‘Bear's going-
away party’] was the last concert recorded by the Grateful Dead’s sound crew
until December, 1970 (aside from a couple of multi-track shows from October).
Bear went away for a couple of years after this show, and no one recorded the
second half of 1970."

In 2006, Owsley wrote on the online [Link] forums that:

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I was charged and convicted of a misdemeanor. However I do not consider myself

any kind of criminal. The law I was sent to prison for breaking was and still is,
'unconstitutional'. My actions, begun when what I did was perfectly legal, were
necessary to assure that I did not have to take unknown substances into my body.
I don't care whether others agree with me, but the taking of psychically active
substances into one's own body (so long as you do not thereby present a danger to
others), is a basic human right, respected over thousands of years and still in
evidence amongst tribes like the Huichols and Tarahumara of Mexico.

Outlawing one 'recreational drug', alcohol in the US, required a constitutional

amendment. The later prohibition of the present 'illegal' drugs was based on the
flawed propositions that it was first, a tax issue (the tax stamps the law required
were never printed), then it was called a 'health and safety’ issue, these were ploys
presented by former alcohol prohibition inforcement officials after they lost their
lucrative graft when Prohibition was repealed …

The definition of 'criminal' is anything that there is a law proscribing. Definition

of a 'law' is: anything that a group of men with lawmaking power say it is.
Constitutional and unconstitutional refer to the fundamental document which
grants government power and forbids some powers to it. A law in violation of this
document either in using or abusing powers is unconstitutional but will remain in
force until declared null by the Court.

The Supreme Court can decide, without appeal or recourse, whether to hear any
given case or not. If the case is a challenge to the constitutionality of a law and it
is not accepted and decided, that failure does not make that law constitutional.
Only if the Court hears the challenge and makes a decision, is it truly defined. The
Supreme Court has rejected without comment every single case ever brought to it
which questions the constitutionality of drug prohibition. There are many
unconstitutional laws in action in the U.S.. MY godfather, Stanley Reed, was an
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and I have a pretty substantial knowledge
base on the US Constitution.

In 2007 Owsley told Joel Selvin of the San Francisco Chronicle that, “I wound up
doing time for something I should have been rewarded for. What I did was a
community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons.
Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society.
Only my society and the one making the laws are different.”

It’s quite clear that taking down the drug gurus of the hippie movement was a
political agenda, because a few months before Owsley was put behind bars for
two years, Tim Leary was sentenced to a 10 year sentence that ballooned out to
20 years with previous offences, and later in 1974 he too, was transferred to
Terminal Island. Leary’s campaign for Governor of California, of course, ground
to a halt, as “the most dangerous man in America”, as Richard Nixon had called

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him, became a psychedelic political prisoner.

And prison would do what the psyops of the CIA couldn’t–and crack, or at least
dent the spirit of both Owsley and Leary. As Owsley told David Gans in 1991: “I
had been inserted into a matrix of stasis. I was inserted into something that I
went into with a great deal of fear, knowing that a misstep could kill me. I didn’t
know what I was going to deal with, I didn’t know how it worked, I didn’t know
what the rules were, I had no idea what kind of game I was going to play and it
was, like, ‘Oh, you want to learn to swim?’ and they threw you off the fantail of a
boat in the middle of the ocean. That is what it was like to me to get thrown in
jail.”

With his razor-sharp mind Owsley quickly figured out the jail game, and applied
for an assignment working in the kitchen, where with a bit of wrangling he would
at least be able to continue his meat-only diet. “THAT was a challenge, not
restaurants,” he wrote on the Active Low-Carber forum. “Jails are like the
military, the food is grease and starch based. At first I traded my veggies with
other inmates who did not want meat (Black Muslims will not eat chicken or pork)
and thus avoided carbs. I worked my way into the food service and was able to
feed my self the way I wanted to. I traded my allowed purchase of cigarettes (2
cartons/wk) for a steak a day–separate from what I gave myself from the general
food issue. I did very well indeed. Meat can be found everywhere except in a
vegetarian restaurant–avoid these.”

The real trick with jail, as with the authorities in general, was telling them what
they wanted to hear. “I had a hard time in the beginning,” Owsley told David
Gans, “because I kept telling them I didn’t do it for money, I was just doing it
because of service to the community. As long as I maintained that, my time was
hard. I got shit from everybody. As soon as I stopped saying that, they assumed I
did it for money and I acquiesced, no problem then. That was the only reason
you were allowed to be in prison, was because you did it for the money. If you did
it for any other reason, you were lying.”

The truth was Owsley was flat broke: he was still paying off lawyers and trying to
reappeal his case. While he was incarcerated the Grateful Dead threw a
fundraising gig for him at Winterland on December 23, featuring the "Acoustic
Dead" in a benefit for "the Montessori School & The Bear", the San Francisco
Chronicle reported. Although a world-class rock act themselves, the band were in
financial woes after being embezzled by their ex-manager, and posting bail for
over a dozen people for the New Orleans bust and fighting their own legal
battles. The 5,000 seat Winterland venue was “deserted” that night, with only
around 200 people turning up, when Jerry Garcia closed the gig by saying,
"thanks for helping us bail out the Bear."
 
Owsley eventually adapted to life inside, and so too, did Tim Leary, at least to
outward appearances. Assigned to San Luis Obispo, north of Santa Barbara, a
low-security prison where he worked as a gardener, Leary was busted out of jail

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in September, 1970 by the radical-left Weathermen Underground Organization,

“shimmying along a telephone cable over the prison fence” wrote biographer
John Higgs. The Weathermen promptly sent a communiqué to the FBI claiming
“Dr. Leary was being held against his will and against the will of millions of kids in
this country. He was a political prisoner, captured for the work he did in helping
all of us begin the task of creating a new culture on the barren wasteland that has
been imposed on this country by Democrats, Republicans, Capitalists and
creeps. LSD and grass, like the herbs and cactus and mushrooms of the
American indians and countless civilizations that have existed on this planet, will
help us make a future world where it will be possible to live in peace.”  

After the Brotherhood of Eternal Love fronted $25,000, the Weathermen

smuggled Leary and his wife Rosemary out of America and to Algiers, where
they were at first hosted by Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers with their
‘government in exile’. Ron Briley, of the History News Network, gave context to
the times when he said: “With a growing protest movement in the United States
and the global struggle in which anti-imperialist forces were on the march in
Vietnam, Algeria, and Angola, the Weathermen believed they were on the
winning side of history–creating new communities free from capitalist exploitation
and embracing the Che Guevara prediction that numerous Vietnam-type conflicts
would topple the American regime."

It was in this revolutionary atmosphere that Tim Leary seemed to change his
tune according to which way the wind was blowing, matching the ethos and
militant voice of the times. On Jan 7, 1971, in a telephone interview from Algeria,
Leary was quoted saying he advocated the Weathermen to “not continue just
bombing, but that they should escalate the violence by hijacking and kidnaping,”
as well. Many of his old comrades and supporters were horrified at this change in
Leary, and none moreso than Owsley himself.

In a letter obtained by Mark McCloud, proprietor of the Institute for Illegal Images,
the San Francisco ‘Blotter Art Museum’, never before published but now
reprinted in full, Owsley said:

A LETTER TO TIM LEARY

7 JAN 71

Ol’ Buddy, I’m not going to say that I am surprised at the line you have been taking,
because I’m not.
Actually you are just losing a battle that I have been watching you fight for years–and
losing all the way. The battle is the fight against age. You can’t win it, you know.

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I became aware of the battle through your own words. You described the Enemy well.
You said “Kids! Don’t let the old men tell you what to do. If your parents tell you not to
get high, and you want to get high, then do it.” And then that same evening you told your
own daughter not to get high. So–you knew the enemy, but you were losing ground to
him even as you warned the rest of us.
You also told of the missile-phalli of the aged powers/sex mad Generals–warned against
the hazards of ancient men behind the wheels of powerful machines. You decried most
valiantly the horrid practice of the senile power-clutchers of “sending the young, seed-
bearing men out to die while they sat safe to gain thereby.”
And yet today you urge the Weathermen to escalate the violence. My brother, by thine
own words art thee condemned. Will you hurtle the bombs? I think not. Of course the
success of the revolution would benefit you, so you “send forth the young etc.” to do the
dirty work. Your morality is showing. I suggest that you go off by yourself, after
abstaining from acid for two weeks, and take about 600 gamma. Take a mirror along, and
do the number about asking yourself: “Who am I”. I guess you need someone to say to
you once in a while SHUT UP/ TURN ON/ TUNE IN/ DROP OUT and I think you
should drop out of the bag you have somehow gotten into at this point.

Undoubtably the world produces and maybe even needs such things as Hell’s Angels and
Weathermen–but “that is for those who are chosen”–I don’t think you are qualified–
because you can’t advocate that shit, you have to do it, live it, and it is a youth-trip–I’m
too old, & I know for a fact that you are older than I am. Fuck, even Dylan said: ‘You
don’t need a Weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.’ By the same sense you
don’t need to tell a Weatherman which way it blows, either.

One trouble may be that you are still too fucking literate–or visually biased in the
McLuhan sense–you ought to stop writing all that bullshit & just dig the changes–rap to
people–those records are tasty.

What we are going through is a cultural change, not a political one, no matter what those
valiant, maya-blinded friends may think to call it. If we can succeed in making the
necessary cultural adjustments to the technology, the political thing is moot. Polarization
of the energy along a political axis will only bring suffering and destruction. Alchemy
shows that the truth path is that of Transmutation. The energy must be directed along a
social/cultural axis. The formation of a new cultural mode is alchemical Gold; the
formation of a new political system is alchemical Lead. Violence is lead-bullets-death.
Love is gold-true value-life. Only by the constant effort of all of us will we succeed in
directing the energy in the right direction.

You know that I am a true revolutionary, and have given myself to the cause of the
elevation of human consciousness and the new cultural mode. And yet I am an American,
an Earthman and a lover. Listen to the music. I too have been, and still am, in prison. And
yet I cannot see myself as a criminal. I think the real criminals are those such as Regan
and Nixon–who use power to enforce a social ‘norm’ or attitude.

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I come from a long line of legal and public service tradition. I grew up around
government. I have the strangest feeling that the U.S. Constitution is a ‘magical’
document, & that there is tremendous alchemical significance in America.

I think that the present dross of oppressive ‘laws of prohibition’ are in violation of the
true Constitution–and the only right thing is to get rid of them–the Laws, not the system.
Without the supression of cultural transition the system will change too, as well as the
economic structure. The key seems to lie in the basic premise inherent in the Declaration
of Independence and the Constitution– that is, the ‘Right of Personal Domain’–the right
of adults to do whatever they will, providing that all parties consent. That is, a crime must
be bound not only by intent but also by consent (the only example of this now is rape).

Tyranny is the term given by people to a government which is acting in a socially

repressive fashion–and is not dependent upon any political idealogy–any government
which makes crimes by the act of passing a law, where the crime is simply a form of
cultural behavior is a tyranny. The development of the conception of government and the
social use of power throughout history shows the steady limitation of ‘kingly’ power in
the dictation of social function and cultural manifestation.

Once practically everything a person did was subject to Machiavellian limitations and
description. Not only were you burned at the stake for your beliefs, but you couldn’t say
much about just about anything–or assemble for any reason. You could be displaced from
ownership, or taxed at any whim of the leader. As men became more aware, the things
which were formally expected of government became unbearable, and concessions
(revolution) were demanded. Sometimes the concessions were granted and the
government form remained, sometimes the concessions were resisted and the government
was overthrown. Usually the later course led to great chaos and trouble–the granting of
the demands of the people as in the first case in every case led to a radical alteration in
form–but with less suffering by the people.

The revolution of 1776 in America was a war of Independence, not an overthrow of the
government. America was just severing an umbilicus–not transplanting a heart! And the
Constitution is a really remarkable work, really something special in history. Compare
the English system with the French to get a good modern view of ‘concessionary’
revolution versus overthrow.
We must have relief, of that I am determined–“Don’t tread on me.”–“Give me Liberty or
give me Death”–So I feel, but there is in these yet the affirmative that if you don’t tread,
the snakes will not bite, that if the Liberty is forthcoming the dealing of death is withheld.
I am a patriot to the true spirit of man. I will to be free, yet I seek not to destroy
needlessly. Hell, I just want to be able to get high & make love & good music & get
together. I think the thing we need to do is get the governing powers everywhere to yield
on the question of consent and crime. To eliminate the dope laws, the gambling laws, the
prostitution and porn laws. If this is done, I am sure the rest will follow.
If you still aren’t convinced, I can be more explicit. I have given a lot of thought to this,
and you know how thorough I am about what I do. So why don’t you spend some time on

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convincing people of the need to legalize the use of psi-substances–there are millions in
the world who use them in religion. The legal status would quickly eliminate the black
market (God damn the pusherman) and its horrors &death (God rest Janis & Jimi; Neal
Cassidy (sic) & Terry & millions like them).

Also, how can a government hope to continue which makes a large part of the youth
‘criminals’ for what they KNOW is no crime. They just consider the government who
labels them to be the criminals–and that is not politics–just horse sense! What irony–the
gov’t overthrown for non-political reasons (an ‘anarchist’ is someone, who although he
has no plan for a new system, has had it with the present one, & considers no gov’t at all
better than continuing). Well, look at the apartheid way the kids look at voting and all
that–they reject the system that makes them outlaws.
If you can give us one strong base–one country with the guts to stand up and say: In this
country there is true freedom–and will permit the use of the psychedelics and a world
headquarters–a real haven/heaven, where we can produce our own sacraments without
fear–build plants, grow plants–build music studios–get stoned and fight for the rights of
all human beings to have access to these things.

Remember–the Grand Canyon was made without explosives–so too, we can have our
way, all we have to do is be happy & turn on–the work of change is as inevitable as the
river– a turned on world cannot play the games that now are threatening the very
existence of life itself on the planet (What if they gave a war and nobody came?).
Tim, I want to let you in on something that was revealed to me. This planet is Paradise.
The most beautiful of all the rocks in the cosmos. A work of art. And we are the most
priviliged of beings to be incarnate here. The goal of life is happiness–not easy, but that
which is easy is not part of the value/concept of the cosmic game–the analogy of the path
which climbs.

SHIT! WHY AM I HAVING TO TELL YOU THIS? GODDAMNIT CAN’T

ANYBODY DO ANYTHING RIGHT? ANY IDIOT CAN BLOW THINGS UP–
DOESN’T PROVE SHIT. I DON’T WANT A WRECKED WORLD. RUBBLE IS
NOTHING BUT HIGH RENT LITTER/ POLLUTION. Grrrr.
I think the high vegetable content of prison food is making me uptight & mean. Haven’t
had a decent piece of meat in months.

At least give the gov’t an alternative–like how come the Weatherfreaks don’t say ‘repeal
the prohibition or blooey’–making it understood that the prohibition is the
dope/gambling/prostitution type laws. Oppose the cultural oppression. I really doubt that
dynamite makes right. But I don’t think the nerds in the gov’t know what we want. Or
rather, they think we want what they would want–BUT WE ARE NOT THEM (Are you
them? Do you want wars and political power?).

No one should hold a public office past the age of 40 (the judge who sent me to prison is
past 80). Fuck–from 18 to 40 is plenty long enough for power handling. Who would want
to die with all that distortion of power-karma on his soul?

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My ‘revolutionary reading’ list:

Human Zoo, Naked Ape – Desmond Morris
African Genesis, Social Contract – R. Ardvery
Peter Principle – L.J. Peter

Parkinson’s Laws (various), C.W. Parkinson

Fat of the Land – Vilhalamon Steffansson
Structural Anthropology – Claude Levi-Strauss

Evolution and Human Behaviour – Alex Alland Jr.

Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media– Marshall McLuhan
The Teachings of Don Juan – C. Castaneda

(The Teachings are a remarkable example of cultural confrontation between visual-

literate and oral-tacticle. Read the last 5 in sequence & you may find that you missed the
real point of the Teachings before. I got a real heavy flash from it, even Castaneda never
figured it out. We will have to put our heads together some time about it.)
Now I got to ask something of you. PLEASE consider this communication as personal
and confidential. Digest, absorb (curse if you will) and then BURN IT.I mean it for you
alone. I don’t want to see it turning up somewhere. I don’t need or want any publicity or
any ego-power shit. I can only do my part if I can stay as invisible as possible (by now
you must have had some thoughts about the problems of high visibility).
I am designing a new musical instrument which will blow your mind–music can do that,
you know.

Be cool
Have love
Drop out

– Owsley

While Leary would continue living the life of a psychedleic political revolutionary
on the run, Owsley buckled down to prison life, making the best of it. After
appealing the “bogus charge in Oakland” and having his sentence reduced,

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Owsley kept his profile so low that he was transferred in late 1971 to the Lompoc
Federal Penitentiary near Santa Barbara. “Lompoc isn’t so bad, as prisons go.
It’s a white-collar jail; some of the Watergate conspirators served time there. It
reminded me of my high school campus, except that you couldn’t go home after
sixth period,” wrote Charles Perry in a 1972 Rolling Stone feature.

Owsley started out waxing the dining room floor but soon graduated to the
maintenance shop, where he first discovered he had a knack for hand-crafted art.
“I discovered I could make things with my hands,” Owsley told David Gans in
1991. “[Lompoc is] where I discovered that I was an artist, and I would not have
otherwise. I got into the maintenance shop there because there was no
advantage to being in food service because they cooked everything inside the
walled prison, Lompoc main prison, and brought it out on trucks, and so I wound
up taking care of the floor. I was responsible for the appearance of the dining
room.” He tackled his reponsibility with his customary excellence, drawing upon
his time in the Navy to produce a “super wax surface that required minimum
maintenance,” but when threatened by another inmate over the role he
transferred to the maintenance shop where Bob Thomas was also working.

It was a blessing in disguise, because in the maintenance shop Owsley found “all
the raw materials you’d want and all of the tools you needed to work it with …
and all of that time on your hands. And all of that smoke that was being
smuggled in, all those ideas that it would make you do,” he told David Gans. He
began carving in wood and stone, making art with his hands, and it was a
revelation for him. “I’ve always had an interest in art,” he told Bruce Eisner. “For
some reason, until 1971, I had no idea that I could do good art. I always knew I
wanted to make things. I knew that the work that I did with music was art, and I
knew that it had something to do with sculpture, because it was a three-
dimensional sculpturing of sound in space. It all made sense to me, all the pieces
made sense. I’ve always been an artist, but I wasn’t always aware that I was
one.”

In his second talk at the EGA conference on November 8, 2009, Owsley told the
crowd that:

I just happen to have a talent that I can pick up anything and make something out of
it . I don’t know how I do it. I never had any training. I pick up a lump of coal, or a
piece of wood, or a piece of plastic or clay and I can make whatever I think of. I
just–it’s scary to tell you the truth. I have no idea why I can do that. I didn’t
discover it till I was 35 and I thought waitaminute, c’mon. That little horned face–
where did that come from? I had no idea.

It’s a certain kind of talent. I think certain musicans have that–you’re playing this
incredible stuff and it’s like it’s not you… It’s coming from somewhere and you are
a facilitator a transport, a channel… And channels, sometimes they do it,

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sometimes they don’t. I’ll tell you one funny thing–I can go for years without
making a piece and the next piece I make, no practice, nothing, is better than the
last one. I have no idea why, I’ve never had any skill before and I didn’t have to
train for it.

Riding, talking, art–I have no idea what happens. It’s something that’s kind of scary
but it’s a gift, I accept that. I don’t brag about it. I think most people have
something they can do, they just have to discover it. But they’ll never know about it
unless something happens and they have to do it. You try something and open a
door and start to paint, start to carve… You shoud do it because you never know
where it will fucking lead…

“The first time I visited Owsley [in Lompoc], I had to wait almost to the end of the
visitors’ hour,” Charles Perry wrote in 1972 in Rolling Stone. “The guards weren’t
surprised; they were accustomed to inmate Stanley’s peculiarities. Finally he
arrived, out of breath, with a belt buckle he’d started making for me when my
name was announced over the loudspeakers. It was quite striking: a lion’s head
… boldly composed of drops of molten brass … [Owsley] was turning out jewelry
and small sculptures that combine a sort of blunt occult humor with minimalist
refinements of technique …

“Owsley not only had a jewelry lab in prison but all sorts of hi-fi and electronic
equipment as well. The prison authorities were too damnably narrow-minded to
provide such things, so he had been obliged to have them all smuggled in–out on
the visitors’ lawn for the smaller things and under a pew in the chapel for big stuff
like tape decks. The joke around Lompoc was that when Owsley was released,
he’d have to leave in a Bekins van.”
When Owsley finally was released in August,1972 he was a different man. In
conversation in 2009 he told me that: “It's a shock … after you've spent two years
surviving in a jail and knowing nothing about the culture you've been thrown into–
except it's very dangerous–and when you come out into the street and you're
released from a very controlled environment … It takes a minimum of two years
[to readjust]; if you do four years you never adjust. No one who ever did four
years of jail ever reintegrates fully back into society. They become a hermit, or
they go back to jail.”

Wearing a buccaneer's earring he made in Lompoc, Owsley went back to the

only family he had ever known–the Dead, but as Dennis McNally said: "It was a
different world. Bear wanted to be the sound man, and he was not the sound
man, and he just never got it, because he had a single vision. That was his
strength and his flaw. And the band had a bunch of macho cowboys as a crew
who were snorting blow and drinking a whole lot of beer, and Bear was offended
by their language and by their beer."

It wasn’t just the band and crew, though, it was the whole damn scene–including

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the crowd and the vibe–that was different to what Owsley remembered. His first
offical show taping the Dead again was 8/21/72, and as he told David Gans:
“When I came back out of jail it had changed to the extent that somebody stole
my tapes out of the booth, ’72, at one show. Somebody stole my oscilloscope out
of the booth at another show.”

“When I came back the roadies and the guys who were supposed to be replacing
me temporarily refused to move over. And they did everything they could to fit
me,” Owsley told me in 2009. Where once Owsley took responsibility for the
stage monitors, the recording and the house mixing, now three technicians,
including Bob Matthews, guarded their territory fiercely, and let him know it.
Things were genuinely rough in the outer fringes of the Dead entourage, and,
one must remember, Owsley was also super-sensitive after coming out of prison,
where he had smoked enough dope to keep him nicely sedated inside, but that
combination just made him more vulnerable in the outside world.

“I was still smoking a lot of pot, so I was being everybody’s fool,” Owsley told
David Gans. He felt he was under psychic attack and was not really welcomed
back into the fold, no matter what people were saying to his face. “You go and
get locked up for two years, see where your head is at,” Owsley said in
Conversations With The Dead. “I come out of that, bang, right into this high-
speed scene, which was not what I expected, and which nobody would admit to
me. I had to figure it out. Why is this different? Why are these guys not being nice
to each other? Why is there this heavy jockeying going on, all of this stuff.”

It all came to a head when Owsley got into an argument with a roadie and was
thrown across the room. He told David Gans that: "I had to recruit some of the
kids from this college that we were playing [a] gig to carry the stuff back. Two of
them took half our PA and split. At the next show, there's no PA. I said, 'I sent it
to the truck.' [A crew member] picked me up and threw me into a water cooler."
Owsley asked the Dead to clarify his position with the crew by giving him the
power to hire and fire. They declined, and Owsley was at a loss, without a
foundation or purpose in the band.

Ever the pragmatist, he went back to what he knew–which was sound itself–and
applied himself to improving the sound quality of the Dead’s live shows, which
was of prime importance with their increased focus on touring at the large
stadiums and arenas they now filled. And, they told him, they wanted to go
bigger, be bigger. So Owsley started experimenting. His aim, as always, was to
deliver crystal-clear audio in those large venues that would be as intimate and
authentic as what the band would hear themselves. As he said on his website,
[Link]:

My desire [was] to return all the power and control to the musicians, by putting
the speakers behind them. Everything that went to the audience they (the band)

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were fully aware of because they were imbedded in that sound-field. We did the
best we could with the tools we had. The tools were inadequate, of course, and
there weren't any sound systems made for music reinforcement at concert levels.
Ours was the first attempt to provide something of good quality. But we didn't
understand–I didn't understand– that you couldn't separate your speakers by the
width of the stage and have it work right. I didn't figure that out until later. As I
began to discover it, I evolved things like the Wall of Sound, where everything
had a single source. There were no distributed sources. There were single rows of
speakers for instruments; there was a single cluster for the vocals; and a single
cluster for the piano. Everything had a point source, or a line source. And it was
totally coherent. You could go back hundreds of feet and it was clean and
coherent--it didn't sound like a giant transistor radio.

The Wall of Sound system really had its origin in the 3D sound Owsley saw
coming out of the speakers back at the Watts Acid Test rehearsal. “I went around
and inspected it very carefully, and I spent a lot of time absorbing what it was
doing and realizing how different it was from what I thought sound did,” he wrote
on his website. “And that became the foundation for all the sound work that I've
done. The fact that I was able to convert aural information into a three-
dimensional image–it was all coming from my ears, of course, but transforming it
into a visual form.”

For Owsley, The Wall of Sound was to be the crowning achievement that united
his intuitions in alchemy with sound production. As he says on [Link]: “For
years we discussed the concept (that Phil and I had come to), about the
microcosm and the macrocosm. The microcosm being the world on stage, and
the macrocosm being the world for the audience, and how to approximate the
two so they became one. That was always my goal. The best soundman is
perfectly transparent. As far as I'm concerned, the soundman should be as
superfluous as tits on a boar hog. All he should do is make sure things run and
don't break down; plug the wires in and unplug them. All the control of what's
going to the audience should be fully in the hands of the performing artists
themselves. That's the only way you'll ever get close to true art.”

Owsley instinctively knew the Wall of Sound would work, and he “pushed for it
even though it looked like it was going to be an incredible amount of work,” he
told David Gans. It was a group project that involved input over the years from
many pioneers, including Dan Healy, Mark Raizene, Ron Wickersham, Rick
Turner and John Curl. The system utilized 604 speakers and an array of tweeters
and crossvers in a stack 40 feet high. It “combined a half-dozen independent
PAs arranged behind the band to act as a combined house and monitor system,”
wrote ProSound Network. “A total of 11 channels fed the system: vocals, guitar,
lead guitar, piano, three drum channels, and four bass channels—one for each
string, which were separated by a quadraphonic encoder. [It] was powered by 92
amplifiers for a total of 26,400 watts” RMS of audio power. All-in-all it weighed

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75-tons and needed four semi-trucks to transport it, and 21 people to load it, and
at the time was the biggest touring sound system in the world.

It was also, Owsley conceded to Gans, “a logistical nightmare. There were a lot
of problems.” On February 9, 1973 the system was trialed at Stanford
University's Roscoe Maples Pavilion. Every tweeter blew out as the band played
the first song, and it was all downhill from there. It took another full year of
tweaking for the Wall of Sound to hit the road with the Dead in 1974, and on
March 23 of that year it had its official debut at the Cow Palace in San Francisco.

Throughout 1973, however, Owsley industriously applied himself to being useful

to the band, and he made a number of other contributions to the Grateful Dead
that are often overlooked by the history books. Another ‘mini-Woodstock’ was
held with The Summer Jam at Watkins Glen, New York on July 28, which at the
time received the Guinness Book of World Records entry for the ‘largest
audience [600,000] at a pop festival’. Owsley was on the soundboard for the
Grateful Dead, and undoubtedly kept his hand in his other line of inquiry,
lubricating the band and friends amongst all those amassed minds into a meta-
Gestalt circuit. As he told me in 2009 at the EGA conference Down Under:

“You can hook up a whole sea of people, like at Woodstock, or Watkins Glen, or
at the Acid Tests, where you become one mind. You feel like a patchwork quilt
that can feel the sensations of all the people around you; you can see things,
hear things, feel things that they're thinking.” Even though the free-festival hippie
vibe had been punctured by Altamont, the Gestalt mind rock’n’roll template would
continue to pollinate through the 1970’s and beyond, as the wave that had
broken in the Haight Ashbury rippled out into the larger world.

Not only was Watkin’s another peak acid-drenched affair, the Dead played what
many consider the cream of their musical oeuvre that day. As [Link]
wrote, it was:

The most prolonged musical satori experience in all of Dead tape history. The
band drops into the zone from the first notes, and remains there for a solid 21
minutes, all while allowing the music to change direction and color many times
over. The jam demands repeated listening, as the opening spacey noodling only
reveals its intricate connection to the rest of the jam after you hear where it leads,
how it returns, and where it leads again … And the jaw-dropping, spine tingling,
continually expanding inspired flashes of musical oneness that go on and on and
on, serve to fuse your heart to this music completely. The entire jam exhibits how
this band could become five fingers on one hand … this musical journey goes
beyond. It transcends. The big jam appears and burns away all fabric of reality,
revealing the hidden truth of Grateful Dead music.

In July, Owsley’s recording of the History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 1: Bear's

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Choice was released as a tribute to one of the band’s founders, Ron ‘Pigpen’
McKernan, who died of liver cancer during the production. The front cover was
the first public usage of the lightning bolt in the skull logo Owsley designed with
Bob Thomas, and the reverse cover also saw the first use of the ‘dancing bears’
that would also enter Deadhead legend and lexicon. “The bears on the album
cover are not really ‘dancing’,” Owsley says on his website. “I don't know why
people think they are, their positions are quite obviously those of a high-stepping
march. You can also see what some people think are ‘bibs’, are actually a
stylization of the chest fur of the bear.”

A few months later on Oct 1 and 8, 1973, Owsley and fellow recordist Victoria
Babcock captured pristine performances of the spin-off band Old and in the Way,
with Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Peter Rowan, John Kahn and Vassar
Clements in their bluegrass peak. “With the formation of the group, Old and in the
Way, I had a wonderful opportunity to try the various ideas I had about the
production of a realistic stereo sound from multiple microphones,” Owsley wrote
again on his website.

“Binaural recordings are traditionally done with a simple stereo pair,” he

continued. “I experimented with the placement of the mics, and to a certain
extent with kinds of mics. I was limited in the choices available and I vastly
preferred omnidirectional types. Incidentally, none of the microphones that were
used in the recording were also fed to the PA. The mics were clipped onto the PA
stands. I was able to capture a stereo ‘space’, which while different from the
actual on stage sound, gives the listener the impression of being in amongst the
performers, and isn't dependent on the listener being in any particular position
with regards to the placement of the speakers. Something like a hologram, is the
way I like to think of it. In contrast with my sonic journal tapes, this was a purpose
recording not related to the PA mix at all.” The album Old And In The Way was
released in 1975 and a second album That High Lonesome Sound, also came
out decades later in 1996, based on the same recordings.

The Wall of Sound, meanwhile, was dragged around on tour throughout 1974,
where the simple logistics and escalating costs of maintaining and transporting it
proved wholly untenable. Road manager Steve Parrish wrote on his website,
Thoughts on the Dead: “The problem was not really with the Sound so much as it
was with the Wall. It was also an intractable problem, due to the fact that the very
definition of ‘wall’ is something you cannot move easily, if at all. Hadrian’s Wall?
Great Wall of China? All still there, mostly because a bunch of longhairs and
bikers didn’t drag them around the midwest for months at a time. It took 12 hours
to set the Wall up … If something takes you twelve hours to build, it should be
permanent. These facts, though, pale in comparison to the fact that they chose to
do this during a gas crisis. You cannot haul 75 tons of anything around during a
gas crisis and expect to turn a profit.”

“There was a lot of coke and a lot of beer and a lot of booze and a lot of

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roughness and there were too many people working,” Owsley told David Gans.
“There was too much weird shit going on and there were too many power
struggles at the top–management against management against the record
company … The brotherhood was gone.”

With all the growing egos and the rising cost of fuel and personnel, the inclusive,
hippie laissez-fair ethos that the Dead ran on was headed towards a wall of its
own. The Wall of Sound cost an estimated $350,000 and around $100,000 to set
up and take down each gig–which meant it was never going to be sustainable.
As Dennis McNally says, "It was brilliant and it worked. But they had to double
the size of the crew and, in the process, the crew took over the band."

After touring over 70 gigs with the largest sound system in the world, there was
nowhere else to go with it. The band–unable to fire anybody, decided to take a
hiatus from touring, and disassembled the Wall of Sound in October, 1974, when
the band ‘retired’. “People tire and you can only do one thing for so long. The
band is tired of touring for ten years and needs to take a year and go fishing,”
Robert Hunter wrote in the Dead Heads Newsletter at the time.

Richard Pechner, an ex-roadie and photographer for the Dead in the early 70s,
told website AudioJunkies what happened to the Wall after it was retired. “I think
the Wall had a great afterlife. The Grateful Dead have always recycled what they
could and spread the rest around.” A driver from the Wall was auctioned on eBay
in 2007, and as Pechner says, “I am sure other components are still providing
quality sound for other musicians and home hi-fis.”

The Wall of Sound was a group effort, but it also had Owsley’s vibe all over it.
The project had his flair for relentless perfection behind it, as well as his singular
reputation. In some ways it was his last hurrah with the band, simply because he
was left with nowhere else to go with his [Link] boom had well and truly bust,
and Owsley was also facing other problems back on the legal front.
As Charles Perry wrote in Rolling Stone, “He couldn’t afford his old flamboyance
after the LSD factory bust; the money wasn’t coming in any longer. In 1974 he
told a federal judge he had lost most of his savings in bad investments, to say
nothing of legal fees, gifts and toys and a solid diet of flank steak.” Owsley was
“fined $5,000 for wilfully failing to file income tax returns of $239,011 income in
1967-69,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Owsley pleaded no contest to the two-count indictment which was accepted by

the judge, despite the U.S. attorney’s office contending he actually owed $142-
176,000 in back taxes. As Charles Perry wrote: “Of course, there was no
question of returning to his old business, not the way he has been watched since
1966. His once-consuming interest in drugs had dwindled anyway, gone along
with motorcycles and beekeeping into the conflagration of burned bridges he
leaves behind him.”

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And as the backlash from the Wall of Sound hit home, Owsley was feeling he
had been burned by the whole experience. “I did two years, almost three,” he told
me in 2009, “and in that time these guys managed to fuck me up and I didn't see
it. I could've dealt with it if I had of known. And at the end the [band] sort of just
squeezed me out, and then I had to go do something else. I wasn't hanging
around because I couldn't; I had no money and I had to earn a living.”

The acid had gone and the sound had gone, and what remained? “I got involved
in some agriculture experiments,” he told David Gans. “I didn’t have the leisure or
the money or ability to hang around … I didn’t have it. The ‘millions’ that I made
were vaporware. Didn’t exist.”
“And then the next thing you know the Dead were touring again with Dan Healy
[in 1976],” he told me in 2009, with a tinge of regret. “And I thought that was
strange, but he knew how to talk people up, he was very friendly and a nice guy
to hang out with. He was tone deaf and had no sense of balance and couldn't tell
when something was right and he wouldn't leave anything alone. When I was
with the band I used 12 microphones; he used 41 or 42. It was a cacophony of
blur and I couldn't stand to be in the audience as [the sound] would change from
minute to minute. They had to eventually get a separate soundman on stage
whereas with me I did everything for them.”
Even as the band took a hiatus, though, United Artists were holding them to a
contractual obligation for a live double album recorded at Winterland in late 1974,
during the Dead’s at the time ‘farewell run’. But the tapes had sound problems on
every level, as Owsley explained on his website: “This is one that I would just as
soon forget. The master tapes were a disaster of epic proportions, requiring a
complete over dubbing of all the vocals and many of the instrumental tracks. I
had absolutely nothing to do with the recording of the master tapes, and was
called in to try to ‘fix’ it. Phil Lesh and I were given only 18 days to rebuild this
‘titanic’. Fact is, of course, no-one could make a silk purse out of this pig's ear.”
Released in June, 1976, the final album, Steal Your Face, was universally hailed
as the worst Grateful Dead production to date.

It would have been competing on the Billboard charts with Steely Dan’s album
The Royal Scam, which in May, 1976, released the hit single ‘Kid Charlemagne’.
It “was very loosely inspired by a character named Owsley,” said Walter Becker
to the BBC in 2000. “His name was actually Augustus Stanley Owsley (sic). He
was a well-known psychedelic chef of the day. Later a sound man for the
Grateful Dead.” As the lyrics say:

On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene

But yours was kitchen clean
Everyone stopped to stare at your Technicolor motor home
Every A-frame had your number on the wall

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None of that noterierty, howver, paid Owsley’s bills. He kept working, but after
the Dead returned to touring in 1976 he never again worked as their soundman,
although he kept close ties with them and friendships with members like Phil
Lesh, who he toured with in 1978 for a few shows as Phil’s roadie. Owsley lived
simply in Marin County and supported himself selling his jewelry backstage and
in the arena carparks at Grateful Dead shows, growing dope and doing the odd
sound gig for other bands, like Jefferson Starship.

In 1977 Owsley was on the road again as soundman for the Beach Boys.
Blogger Campbell Hair toured with Owsley as part of the road personnel and
says that, “I never knew how Bear got the gig but the same time he appeared
was the time that Brian Wilson first came out of his room and started appearing
in the public. I always assumed that had it had something to do with Brian. I know
Carl was alive but I'm not sure about Dennis Wilson. And I know for a fact that
Mike Love was pretty freaked out by the presence of Bear. It was a pretty
dysfunctional organization with a lot of infighting at the time but they put on a
incredible show. Road buddies forever.”
On January 21, 1977, the day after Jimmy Carter's inaugaration in nearby
Washington D.C., Campbell Hair noted that, “We were playing the Capital Center
… and we had a day off. Bear's family lived close by and he invited me to go to
dinner at his family's house … I remember feeling how bizarre is this taking a 60s
icon to visit his straight family for the first time in a while. All went well and we
had a very pleasant dinner together and we sat around most of the night talking
to one another.”

It must have been a lot different to the last time Owsley talked to his family, which
according to Los Angeles Times was back in the height of his acid days in 1966.
Owsley’s father, Augustus Owsley Stanley II, who died in 1979, said at the time:
“He was only four miles away but we spoke on the phone. He got mad at me,
tried to tell me booze is worse [than drugs]. I told him to wash his hands and
come back and talk to me about it … We haven’t had a pleasant relationship.
We’re not in accord with what he’s doing. His life is divorced from ours. He’s had
two wives and a child by each and lives with another woman. When he came
here with that floozy I wouldn’t let him in.”

Throughout 1978 Owsley’s tendrils were still having an presence in the sound
recording industry. John Meyer, with whom he’d worked with for the Grateful
Dead doing sound research, formed Meyer Sound Laboratories, which
streamlined sound quality for touring bands. On his website, Owsley notes that “I
managed to interest [Meyer] in the rock music field while I was monitor mixer for
the Jefferson Starship in 1978, diverting his interest from the movie industry. I
don't think that the movie industry would have ever supported him, although he
was a hard sell on the rock and roll!”

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1978 was also to prove a crucial nexus for both Owsley and the Grateful Dead.
There had always been something strange, alchemical, magical–even karmic
about their whole relationship right from the start. What uncanny hand of fate led
Jerry Garcia to that Funk and Wagnalls page, when he first spied the phrase the
‘Grateful Dead’? What synchronicity that Owsley, so drawn to ancient alchemical
beliefs and practices, would end up their wizard, in more ways than one? In
some indigenous cultures shamans are said to sing the world into being with
sound. While the Grateful Dead were indeed sonic shamans to a generation, it
was Owsley who captured and remastered the sound of their magic for the
generations yet to come, adding his own magic to the mix.

If Owsley was the Merlin of the whole alchemical Camelot of the 60s
counterculture, how deep must the wound have been then, when the Grateful
Dead announced in 1978 they were going to play the concert of a lifetime in the
heart of alchemical magic: Egypt–and he wasn’t invited?
“Bassist Phil Lesh was instrumental in arranging the concert,” wrote David Dodd
and Diana Spaulding in The Grateful Dead Reader. “Describing the planning
[Lesh] said ‘it sort of became my project because I was one of the first people in
the band who was on the trip of playing at places of power. You know, power
that's been preserved from The ancient world. The pyramids are like the obvious
number one choice because no matter what anyone thinks they might be, there
is definitely some kind of mojo about the pyramids.’”

Lesh was, of course, very close to Owsley, who toured with him through 1978 as
his roadie, so one wonders where Lesh got his sudden enthusiasm for power
spots and Egyptian magical thought. Alan Trist claims the band’s trip to Avebury
and Stonehenge on the European tour in 1972 instilled in them that “profund
energies might be tapped, and their music enhanced, at ancient sites around the
world.” Phil Lesh says in his autobiography, Searching for the Sound, that the
inspiration came from a vacation the Dead’s then manager, Richard Loren and
his wife took to Luxor. But surely Owsley had at least partially sewn the seeds in
the band in long years of friendship, as Lesh, especially, readily absorbed
Owsley’s alchemical ideas and archetypal awareness.

Bill Graham proved unable to commit to the project when Lesh first pitched it at
him in 1976, so Alan Trist, who would later become the director of the Dead's
music publisher company, Ice Nine, helped connect Joseph J. Malone, a
professor at the American University of Beirut and an expert on the Middle East,
who auspiced the project with the Egyptian government. No other band had ever
staged a concert at the pyramids before, and the bureacratic hurdles were
enormous. Months of diplomatic negotiations with the Egyptian Ministry of
Culture culminated in an agreement that the band would pay all its own expenses
AND donate ALL of the ticket sales to numerous Egyptian charities, including the
Wafa'a wal Amal (Faith and Hope) Society–and the Department of Antiquities.

“The Grateful Dead are cultural ambassadors, bringing the music of the young

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people of America in friendship to a troubled region. Cultural exchange is a

contribution to understanding and a way to peace between nations,” declared
Joseph Malone in his speech to the ‘Men in Grey’ at the U.S. State Department,
where the final hurdle after being invited by Egypt was getting ‘high level–heavy
sanction’ by the powers that be to travel to the Middle East at a tense time.
Malone and his MID (Men in Dark Suits) team succeeded:

ATTENTION GREATFUL DEAD.

EX PYRAMID CARAVANSARI
MISSION REPORT
21 MARCH 1978
CAIRO

TWO COUNT THEM TWO OPEN AIR CONCERTS AT THE GREAT PYRAMID
SPHINX THEATRE IN LOWER EGYPT CONFIRMED REPEAT CONFIRMED FOR
SEPTEMBER 14 AND 15. STEERING COMMITTEE LANDING SFO THURSDAY
WITH SIGNED REPEAT SIGNED AGREEMENT.
YES YES.

SUN RULES IN UPPER EGYPT WHERE IS ALCHEMY AND INVITATION TO

PLAY IN THE GREAT COURT OF LUXOR’S TEMPLE OF AMUN. LETS CLOSE
THE CIRCUIT. INSHALLA. HOPE ALL IS WELL.
MIDS.

It was going to be an enormously expensive concert, but the band felt sure a live
album recorded at the pyramids would return the investment. Unbeknownest to
them, Egypt was at this time being wooed by American diplomats to reach a
peace accord with Israel (with the Camp David Peace Talks climaxing as the
band toured), and perhaps in light of the cultural interconnections going on
behind the scenes, the Dead got the green light, and the adventure opened up…
 
It quickly became a mythic event that gathered a psychic momentum of its own,
an inevitability: The Dead at the pyramids of Giza. Or as Brian Ferdman wrote on
[Link]: “The Dead were playing on a makeshift stage at the base of the
Great Pyramid … in front of a 50-story structure that is one of the Seven
Wonders of the Ancient World.” Everybody wanted in on it. All up, 174 crew,
friends, and extended family made the journey, all the usual suspects and a
whole lot more, including Ken Kesey, Chuck Kesey, Mike Hagen, George
Walker, and Paul Krassner of the Realist, Bill Graham, Owsley–and a slew of
American and European Deadheads.
 
“Impromptu expeditions went to pyramid and temple sites south of Gizah; to Nile
side restaurants in Cairo; camel rides, horseback riding, climbing the Great

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Pyramid, exploring its inner dimensions (where Kesey famously played ‘Home on
the Range’ on a mouth organ); visits to the local market at Mena Village. All this
went on for days as the technical setup at the Sphinx Theatre slowly came
together,” wrote Alan Trist in the liner notes to future CD release, Rocking the
Cradle, released thirty years later.
 
The whole Grateful Dead family was magnetized to the mythic resonance of the
pyramids, the audacity and sublime perfection of the idea itself–if not the
eventual execution. Jerry Garcia, perhaps aware of the rise of the punk music
popularity at the time, told The Observer newspaper in the U.K. that “the Dead
are trying to uphold a different kind of idealism. It ain't the Sixties sort, more a
delicate state of anarchy in the USA, and anarchy in Egypt. Coming here is a
dream we've had for a long time–and the Pranksters are here, too, which is
great. This might be the ultimate Acid Test.”

And so it could have been. The Observer wrote later that “Kesey has brought
along a stash of Stanley 'Bear' Owsley's liquid LSD, which he administers with a
dropper to the eyeball 'for immediate effect... a rare special occasions batch.
Only person who is missing is Neal Cassady–but he's here in spirit, and he's
going nuts.'”

“You’re going to the highest temple of alchemy on this planet,” Owsley told the
Dead when he heard about their plans. “You’re going to the ancient place, the
place that all of the writings are about, the place that all the books speak about,
the magic place.” Still, Owsley was stung by the fact that the band didn’t need
him for their proposed tour of Europe, nor with Bob Matthews, Dan Healey, John
Cutler and the rest did they really need him in Egypt. He hadn’t gigged with them
for almost four years, and when offered he refused their token ticket and was
given a free tour ticket by someone outside the band. It was a matter of pride. He
arrived there over a week before the band, and started his usual meticulous
course of inquiry into the nature of things. As he told David Gans:

I started very carefully with the third pyramid and worked every day a little
closer. And the longer I was there, the higher I was. I couldn’t smoke pot,
couldn’t smoke hash, after the third day I couldn’t even drink wine. It would
make me weird, and I got higher and higher off of the place … I’d been there
almost a week before I actually got into the Great Pyramid … I just knew it was
the magic place. I wanted to sense what it was. So I steeped myself in it.

I … discovered all kinds of interesting things about the way sounds propagated
inside the passageways and how they coupled. The King’s Chamber was terrible,
it was an acoustic nightmare. It was all the wrong dimensions and all the modes
were all out of sync, they were not harmonically related in any way at all. But a
sound that was created in there would couple into the passages and then the
passages would couple into the other chambers with their own resonances … it

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was like an instrument… a gigantic organ … on a cosmic scale. It had certain

frequencies that were almost imperceivable to the ear, but you could feel them.
And … I was testing all of this, because I knew the band was coming.

As Owsley related to Gans, though, the band arrived in a bad state, after six
weeks in the studio recording Shakedown Street, all with “a head full of coke–or
an attitude full of coke, if not physically … they [were] trying to deal with this thing
[the pyramids] with arrogance and determination and will instead of trying to find
out what it is!” In truth, the Dead had had enough of Owsley wanting to do things
his way, and like all families over the years, there was fighting and egos involved,
and long standing grudges at play. There was no way days before the concerts
began they were going to let Owsley wire up the Great Pyramid because of his
crazy theories–and indeed, Dan Healy already had his sights set on using the
King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid as an echo chamber. The show would go
on–their way.

“The mass of the Great Pyramid warped local dimensions,” Alan Trist said in the
Rocking the Cradle liner notes. “The vast, ancient structures with which the
music of the Grateful Dead attempted to come into phase and alignment hosted
us in silent grandeur. We tried to draw them into the music by using the King's
Chamber deep inside the Great Pyramid as an echo chamber. Dan Healy set up
a radio link from a PA tower to the corner of the Great Pyramid, and from there
John Cutler had run a 2,000-foot length of wire up through the Ascending
Passage and the Grand Gallery to a speaker in the King's Chamber. A
microphone picked up the sound and sent the feedback to the radio relay and
thence to Healy's mixing console.” They should have talked to Owsley about that
setup, because it proved unworkable in the end, and the acoustic magics of the
Great Pyramid confounded expectation.

The Dead played their first concert the night of September 14, 1978 to a crowd of
around 1,000 Deadheads that fit in the sand-riddled Gizah Sound & Light Theater  
(Sphinx Theatre)  seating directly in front of the Sphinx–and a growing number of
bemused desert bedouins and their goats. It was a “huge, scattered caravan of
crazies that descended on Cairo from the U.S. and Europe, drawn to the desert
by some irresistible force,” wrote the review on [Link] for Rocking the Cradle.

The Who had lent their PA and sound recording equipment to the band and it
was brought in from England on semi-trailer trucks that got bogged down in all
the desert sand. Eventually the tried and trustworthy camel method extricated the
gear so the show could go on. Still, this was it, what could perhaps mythically be
described as the apex of the Grateful Dead’s career. And of course the higher
the expectations of the Dead–as with pivotal shows like Monterey and
Woodstock–the more they would feel those psychic vibes and blow the whole
gig.

There were huge issues to confront setting up in 110-degree heat, and the power

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available on-site at Giza was so maxed out that a leviathan generator was
brought in to power the band’s cutting edge sound and recording equipment. But
the sound quality was abysmal, Billy Kreutzmann played with a broken wrist, and
the days of super potent hash, stress and heat took their toll. “It was so bad I left
at the break,” Owsley told David Gans. “I couldn’t stand it. I went back to the
hotel, I said, ‘this is so pathetic, I can’t stand to be a part of it.’ And the next day
came and it was a whole lot more together and it was doing a little bit better. I
stayed for the whole show, but it still wasn’t even up to working level.”

The last night of the tour was, incredibly, synchronistically, a lunar eclipse (the
band had no idea this was due to occur when they first locked in the tour dates,
and quickly extended for a third night), a mystical nexus that could not be denied.
So Owsley dropped some acid–200 mcgs. So too did “nearly everyone in the
Dead’s extended family,” wrote Blair Jackson.

“I was feeling pretty good, feeling pretty weird, I’m down on stage,” Owsley told
Gans years later. “Here comes Healey. ‘Oh, Bear, gee, I’m really glad to see you.
Hey could you go up to the pyramid and help [John] Cutler? He’s having a little
trouble in the King’s Chamber.’ I said, ‘Gee, I’d love to help you, but you know I
just dropped about two hundred mikes of acid and I don’t think I want to go
anywhere right now.’ He looked at me and my eyes were all like this and he said,
‘Oh, OK. [Laughter]”

As Alan Trist wrote in the liner notes to Rock the Cradle: “Ultimately we failed to
make the connections work, and the Great Pyramid remained a silent witness.
Some said that a genie had bamboozled us; others that the wiring was cheap
and flawed.” What no one wants to admit is they didn’t ask Owsley in advance,
giving him enough time to wire up the pyramid his way. Without that co-operation
and brotherhood at play, the Dead lost the ability to recognize the cascading
chambers that connected the King’s Chamber with the other pyramids for what
they really were, and to fully grok how to use that to amplify their sound. As
Owsley told David Gans: “It wasn’t like a thing with echo chambers in it, it was
like an instrument.” Just waiting to be played.

With an understandable trace of bitterness–and the old dominant ego–Owsley

told David Gans in 1991 that, “If they had done it the way I thought they should
do it, it would’ve been dynamite and everything would’ve worked. Because
everybody would’ve been there two weeks ahead … they could have listened,
they could have looked, and they could have played, they would have had plenty
of time, they could try something, if it didn’t work they could try something else,
and the whole thing would’ve been totally different because the Egyptians gave
them carte blanche, they could have done anything they wanted. For just a few
Egyptian pounds, they’d open all doors and we could go anywhere we wanted.
No problem.”

The third night had its moments, but they were all stolen by the eclipse and
alchemy of the heavens. “What could be better? What could be more amazing?

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A total eclipse, a full moon, the Great Pyramid; everything perfect and we went
and played shitty,” Jerry Garcia said in Garcia: An American Life. “The value of
the moment,” wrote Phil Lesh in Searching for the Sound, “didn’t seem to depend
on how well or badly we played according to our own lights; rather, it was more
important somehow that we just be there and participate in the ageless ritual of
the eclipse.” Which is lucky, because it was almost unanimous that the shows at
the Great Pyramid bombed.
 
The band lost an estimated half a million dollars on the adventure, but Lesh
claims that it all had a magickal significance. “Our performance in front of the
Sphinx during a total lunar eclipse was the first, and totally spontaneous, raising
of the Djed, the spine of Osiris, as the axes of the galaxy and of Earth’s sky were
turning into alignment. Our performance lit a fuse, and myth descended into
reality. Let our chant fill the void, that others may know: In the land of the night,
the Ship of the Sun is driven across the sky by the Grateful Dead.”

And Owsley came out of the whole endeavour with something else: art. “He
came up with the design for the [now famous belt] buckle while in Egypt with the
Dead in 1978,” wrote ‘Unterfunken’, a Dead blogger on Dark Star Palace. “One
will notice that there is a sun disc and two serpents above the Steal Your Face
on the buckle. These images come directly from the Egyptian Book of the Dead
(and related hieroglyphs) that represent the sun god ‘Ra’ and the union of upper
and lower Egypt (via the 2 snakes).”
 
The Dead had played, and the Sun had risen. The alchemical ritual was
complete.

As a new decade dawned, Owsley found himself facing the challenges of the
times. He was in his late thirties, and the days of both the ‘Acid King’ and
soundman for the Dead–his two main drivers for over a decade, had long since
passed. That great psychedelic wave had continued to ripple out into the world,
and now there were only swirls and eddies to be seen in its wake.
Owsley had left the San Francisco scene and moved to a “rustic home up the
coast,” wrote Charles Perry in Rolling Stone:

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He was living a very private life, but apart from no longer being a drug
manufacturer, he was living as he always has. Surrounded by audio equipment,
oriental rugs, occult books, African masks and welding tools, he continued to
puzzle out the mysteries of the universe. He’d pace around the living room,
drawing unexpected parallels: A biochemistry text illustrates the same
philosophical principle made in his latest sculpture, which in turn bears out his
theory on the historical ramifications of the development of ultra hi-fi.

Strangely, he wouldn’t talk much about the old days or what it all meant, [He’s
never been much of a reminiscer; he’s always engrossed in current projects.
Sometimes he’d speak of what he’d done as a chemist as a humble attempt to
‘raise the level of bossness,’ but he’d quickly lose interest in the subject.

Imagine that at one stage of your life you had viscerally felt what you perceived
was a larger, loving intelligence at work in the affairs of humankind. That this
force was and is at play shaping the outward events in the world towards a
perfect outcome, and that for a brief and shining moment you had the joy and the
burden of playing a key role in that force’s nurturing of the planetary activation.
And then that moment was over, although the process you helped birth
continued.

In later years, out of the quixotic zeitgeist of the 60s ground zero culture, Owsley
would often play down his role as an alchemist, one who transforms the base
materials into the gold of the soul. But he did, he was that archetype, and
although the planetary intelligence no longer needed him to repeat the same role,
he still had an intimate connection with it, an inner resonance with higher
consciousness shaped by his acid years.

In January, 1982 Owsley was back in San Francisco, temporarily sharing a

house with Paul Kanter from Jefferson Starship and his partner at the time,
Cynthia Bowman. “I had an infant [Alex] that I was breast-feeding," Bowman told
the Clevland Examiner. "My mother was visiting from Cleveland to help out at the
same time. Owsley suggested that he, or any man, could breast-feed a baby. He
told my mother that he would be happy to demonstrate. She grabbed Alex and
RAN to another wing of the house, mumbling that he was 'out of his mind.' Little
did she know!"

Around March 21st, on the Spring Equinox, Owsley and some friends consumed
a ritual high dose of LSD to attune to the planetary energies and grok the vibe.
For up to three weeks after, Owsley was to have a recurring, lucid dream–some
would say a transmission–that would shape the remainder of his life. As he told
John Swan when he visited Kesey’s Pleasant Hill, Oregon farm in late June,
1990 (a ten part video of which is on YouTube), it was “one of the most intense
trips I've ever had.” It was all about the planet and it’s cycles, and it directly
involved what would later be called ‘global warming’ and its part in forming ice

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ages.

Owsley describes his ice age theory and the principles he discovered behind it on
his website and in fragmented talks and chats that all helped fuel the public
image of him in his later years as a slightly whacked out acid crank–or genius, or
both. Taken out of context or without full appreciation for the true facts, Owsley’s
ideas would come to rest in what the political correct would term ‘climate denial’.
They are, however, nothing of the sort: in fact, they aim to understand and
contextualize what is going on in our larger planetary and galactic cycles. The
transcript that follows is thus the most thorough delineation of Owsley’s ice age
theory in his own words. It fits with his earlier ideas about psychedelics as
planetary activators and thus builds upon his consciousness raising endeavors to
see that flowering in light of the larger cycles of nature.

And as he told the crowd at EGA in late 2009, Owsley felt it was more than a
dream–it was a message, and one that he was in the service of delivering. “I’ll tell
you a story… I tell everybody–I’m obliged to. The message came to me–I didn’t
ask for it. For three weeks it came to me and it drove me nuts. Drove me nuts. I
thought, holy shit this is an amazing thing.”

This is Owsley’s last great contribution to those who have the ears to hear, and
the eyes to see: a map and at times a compass for the days ahead. For as
Owsley says: “The idea is to try be more prepared each year, more prepared.”
How this message resonates, and what you do with it, just like the acid, is up to
you.

BEAR'S PROPHECY

KESEY FARM
23 June 1990
JOHN SWAN, interviewer

KESEY: Tell us the story of the ice age, Owsley...

OWSLEY: Well, we're living in the midst of a cycle, it's got a real long period to it, like
thousands of human lifetimes, 115,000 a cycle. So the only traces we have of this are in
our myths. Every group of man on the planet has deluge myths ...

We've been on this planet for millions of years, which means every one of us has
ancestors that have survived this particular phenomenon. Every one of us, so that all of

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the stories that are handed down from generation to generation concern the different
things that people have experienced. And until the invention of writing it was perfect,
because people memorized. They memorized and memorized it perfectly.

In my case it was kind of interesting because I just had a dream. And the dream reocurred
over and over again for maybe three or four weeks, I dunno exactly when it stopped–I
didn't realize it had stopped for a while … But I never had any repeating dreams that I
can think of. I mean, when you're a kid you sort of have categorical type of nightmares
that are sort of similar and have the same motif, but they're different.

But this was the exact same thing, like watching TV or something, getting a 60-second
spot or commercial. It was like watching the planet from outer space. I was on a satellite
watching the planet. And the northern part of the planet was all wrapped up in cloud. And
I knew that the rains were moving really fast at sea level, although you could hardly see it
moving. I just knew that. And I knew that near the north pole there was a place that was
both hot and cold. I knew that was the center of it.

And at the same time I knew that it had something to do with the deluge, and that it was
involved with the ice age. That was all. I knew that, without experiencing any voices
telling me or anything else. It was just sorta like you look at an apple and you know it's a
red, ripe apple–you just know that when you look at it, as if you had seen it before, but I
had never seen it before but I knew those things about it.

I didn't think too much about it the first time I had the dream, it was after, y'know, taking
a little equinox acid trip with some friends, nothing unusual, maybe 300 mcgs, it felt
good. It didn't get weird, nothing got weird, we hung out and raved about different things.
The sky started getting heavy and I thought, maybe the ice age is coming, I'd read some
stuff in papers and …

[Now an ice age] … has happened eighteen times or so–it's hard to tell because each
succeeding glacation wipes out traces of the one before. The only thing that they've got a
lot of data on was the last one. The glaciers reached their peak about 18,000 years ago,
more or less, and after that they rapidly melted away. We've experienced about 11,000
years of relatively warm, constant weather like we're having now … In recent history for
the last 10,000 years, man has lived on a planet that has a temperate climate. The only ice
is at the poles; in the winter it snows and in the summer it melts away. But for most of the
last 115,000 years the northern part of the planet has experienced these huge glaciers that
are up to 4,000 meters thick and weigh millions of tons.

[Now] the glaciers are melting off, the seas are melting, the planet is becoming… well
actually, it's not really becoming warmer, that's the thing. All these people talk about
Greenhouse Effect, and yet they're finding that the planet hasn't altered hardly at all.
[Note: this conversation was in June, 1990 and the exponetial effect of global warming,
climate change and the body of scientific evidence around it has both increased–and
been politicized–in the two decades since Owsley made these statements.]

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It isn't that the planet's getting warmer–it's just that something is about to happen. We’re
close, we're very close. In fact, we're in the process, we're already deep within the process
of this thing happening.

… What I dreamed about was this image that I saw. In addition to that I started having
dreams with this other stuff, like about ancient Egypt, all kinds of things. And after the
second of third recurrence of the dream I thought this is really unusual, what does this
mean? [So] I started trying to figure it out. And I figured that if the dream is about
something that is real, than it has to occur in the ordinary world, it can't be part of the
dreamworld, it has to be the real world. In the real world there's certain laws, like you
drop something, it falls. If you put water on a fire it boils at the same temperature every
day. There's rules which we call rules of nature or rules of physics which are just the
rules by which everything fits together. So I figured nothing on this world can work that
violates any those laws, so if there is something like this I'm watching then there must be
a real physical principle involved. Perhaps one that hasn't been discovered.

[Previous cultures may have known this]. The Hopi are people that live closest to …
what's called the ‘Meeting of the Ways’. People migrated back into this hemisphere when
the glaciers started to melt off about 11,000 years ago. Right at the end of the last glacial
period people migrated across the Darien Straight and when they got to the middle of
North America they split off; some of them went to the east, some of them went to the
west, some of them went on down to the fartherest tip of Patagonia. And the Hopi lived at
the crossroads. And a lot of their myths and things talk about this, a lot of their stories
and whatnot are all about this migration. So in that way they're integrated with this ice
age cycle...

[Anyway] I just really plugged into something that I think was happening in 1982. And
so I got all this stuff ... It stopped when that Mexican volcano went off [El Chichon in the
Chiapas, April, 1982] … I think the Mexican volcano altered the time cycle on this thing.
That perhaps it was going to happen that year but the volcano throwing all that sulphuric
acid in the stratosphere slowed it all down. So it didn't happen that year.

It's sort like you can get a fire, you can start a fire with kindling and paper and all this
stuff, and get the match on it and in almost no time at all you've got a huge
conflagaration. But if about half way up you throw a bucket of water on it, it might
smoulder for days before it finally catches. It would build its intensity much more
gradually. I think that that might be what happened. That's why the dreams stopped.
They've not recurred.

[Now as for the science, it starts like this:] Physics is how a cyclonic storm works …
Tornadoes are small, a small, intensity storm. Thunderstorms have these kind of
structures inside of them anyway, they're full of these little cyclones. A hurricane is a
larger one, it can be several hundred miles in diameter; it occurs in the tropics where
there's a lot of heat in the water.

And the storm that I dreamnt about is half the planet big. It's huge. And the core of it, the

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central part, is in the Arctic circle near Greenland. And it occurs up there because of heat
in the water that's flowing into the Arctic Ocean during the early part of winter. The
Arctic Ocean has been exposed to sun 24 hours a day during summer and it heats up, the
ice moves back and the ocean water warms up, and as it warms up it expands and moves
out to the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. It turns out that these inlets are very shallow, they'e
not very big, so there's an appreciable and measurable current that flows outwards. In
winter time when the pole turns away from the sun, the same exposed water now radiates
heat away and it starts to contract, it cools. And when it does it draws water in from the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Which because the inlets are shallow, is the warmest water
from the top of the ocean.

And inside the inlet called Baffin Bay is an area where the ocean currents force this warm
water to agitate enough so it doesn't freeze. There's an unfrozen area which is very warm.
The air might be 40 or 50 below zero but this water can only be at the freezing point of
water, it can't be any colder than that, so it's a ‘hotspot’. It generates heat just like the
tropical ocean does and it supports a cyclone on top of it. And this cyclone is dependent
upon not just the heat from the water below, but also whatever heat it can get from the air
it's processing … As the cycle that we're in progresses the high glaciers in the mountains
are melting off and this is raising the sea level. As the sea level rises more and more
water can fit through these shallow passages, so the amount of heat that is available for
these cyclones has been increasing. This has been going on for 10,000 years. We've
gotten to a point about maybe thirty years ago that the amount of heat available causes
the cyclones intensity to increase to a point where a process is started…

In the process [of figuring all this out] I started to go to the library and read all types of
stuff. I even called a scientist who had given a lecture before Congress about carbon
dioxide and the Greenhouse Effect, all of that, ice ages and all that sort of thing. He said
well, he didn't write the paper it was a guy in Berkeley that was an ice age climatologist
named George Kukla. He was a professor at Columbia University and he said you should
talk to him, so I did. I called him and he said well, as it happens I'm on my way to
California and a weather meeting at La Jolla. Why don't you call me down there. He was
real tired and fell asleep on the phone–and I though, Jesus, did my story put him to sleep
or what? So I thought I'd better go down there.

So I went down there and it was this closed meeting and they said you can't attend. It
didn't look like they were taking passes so on the last day I slipped in the back, sat down
and it was this guy from Canada giving a lecture. And he was talking about how all of a
sudden the atmospheric waves were not declining in intensity but they were actually
increasing in intensity and it was causing a shift in the pressure patterns. And he thought
that was a reason why the weather all of a sudden in '82 got weird.

… It was a heavy El Nino year… It was a very intense El Nino year. El Nino turns out to
be a byproduct of this process. But anyway I'm sitting in the back looking at this guy and
he's up the front and has a big diagram on a board, highs and lows and so forth. And he's
talking about stuff I didn't know shit about, I didn't know… I never studied meteorology,
I had no idea what he was talking about. But it sorta made some kind of sense.

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And he was saying well, in this place where there's a ridge there's normally a low. And I
looked, and there was a high and there was a low, and the low was right on Barring
Straight. There was another low over near Greenland. They're somehow connected, the
waves from one of those things… Where the low is I figured out was a cyclone. This is
maybe a week into this dream and I was starting to understand some of the physics at this
point.

It sounded like there's an amplification taking place. And the amplification seems to be
taking place right where this low is. So maybe the low is like an amplifier. And by that
time I'd read a bunch of stuff on meteorology and whatnot and I discovered that the lows
were the active ones. Low pressure centers are the heat engines where the actual energy
was being developed. They were the motors. The highs were passive, that’s just heavy
cold air coming back down to sea level. So here we were with a low underneath this wave
and it seemed to be amplified, the wave was amplified. So I thought, maybe the low,
since it's an engine is adding energy to that wave. And then I thought, gee, that sounds a
little bit like electronics, where you have a amplifier or a transistor vacuum tube that's
actually amplifying the signal, where a small change causes a large change in the output.

And then I thought, that's funny. It reminded me about something I'd read about as a kid
in a Scientific American … that I thought was maybe Maxwell's Demon [An imaginary
creature proposed by mathematician James Clerk Maxwell to contradict the Second Law
of Thermodynamics]. You built a little vortex thing like taking a tube of steel stock and
drilling a hole through it and drilling a hole in from an angle so it intersected with the
edge of that hole. And then on one side you put a pipe that was big and on the other side
you put a pipe that was small. When you put compressed air into it, the air had to spin
around in a circle. And you put a valve at the big end where the big tube came out. The
other end was small. If you adjusted the valve you could get super cold air coming out of
one end and super hot air coming out of the other. The room temperature air would go
like, minus 60 or 70 and plus 140 [degrees F]. Unbelievable temperature differences.

I somehow connected that in my head and thought that had something to do with it, that's
really important. … It's not an undiscovered law but it's an undiscovered application. The
law that's involved is the law of centrifigal force. Say you take a string three of four feet
long. Put a rock on it, weighs a pound. You spin it round your head going about maybe
10 rpm or something. You put a scale on it look at it and it says two pounds of stress,
right. And so now you increase the speed to 20 rpm and you look at that thing and all of a
sudden instead of two pounds of stress it's four pounds. So you spin it a little faster.
Every time you double the speed it goes up as a square. That's in order to keep it going in
the same orbit. But if you lengthen the string you can keep the same force on it.

Turns out it's a square law. It’s the thing which makes transitors amplify. The input
current change causes a square change in the output current that amplifies…

If you take air and spin the air around you're dealing with something that's not uniform.
The air's composed of molecules and each molecule is moving at it's own speed. So some

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are going real fast and some are going real slow. They go in all directions of course, but
when you have wind moving in one direction, and most of them are going in that
direction, the net result is they're going in that direction. And some of them are going
faster than the others, so you start to make the air go round in a circle, and it acts like a
cream separator. The faster ones go to the outside and the slow ones drift inward. But the
slow ones are the cold ones, the faster ones are the hot ones.

In this case, in the atmosphere with a tornado or something, the air goes up. So it goes
away from the operation of the thing. In the Hilstube some of the air goes out one end,
that's the hotter part, and some of it has to be siphoned off from the very middle, that's the
cold part, you get the cold part out. Now the thing of it is that this is a statistical thing. So
it has a bell shaped curve, it goes up and it goes down. There's a certain number of hot
ones, there's a certain number of cold ones, but the majority of them are the average
temperature. They're all moving at sort of an average speed. And so you're making that
division … As you adjust the valve over here you have some super cold air and warmer
air, but not super hot. If you move the thing up to the middle, they're about the same. If
you move it the other way you get more hot and less cold. So you're limited in the heating
and cooling effect. They use these things like little point refrigerators but they're not very
efficient because there's only so much cold air.

But when you apply this same principal to a circuation like a tornado, or a hurricane or
some other circulating storm, lots of air and lots of flow, and it always occurs in warm,
moist air anyway… Moisture's taken out of the air, the heat comes up, the sucker
separates heat and makes a flywheel effect by storing that heat. That's why the tornado
has a sudden wall inside, where the pressure suddenly drops; hurricanes have the same
sort of thing with a wall effect, like the inside edge of this mass…

What happens is, you’ got a flywheel and all the heat gets caught. It's going too fast so it
can't go in, and yet it's forced to stay in by the air that's flowing in towards it. So it
represents a lot of stored energy. It's like the flywheel on a motor on a car. The flywheel
keeps the motor going, it stores energy, and in a cyclonic storm all that air that's the
hottest part gets trapped in there like a flywheel, it keeps it turning so the faster it goes
the more efficient it is. And because of the stored energy the thing exists like an entity.
It's an engine, it's now got a working part. It's all composed of the working fluid so it's a
machine that has no moving parts, it's a working fluid. But it actually represents a real
physical thing.

It's got a lot of hot air stuck like a spinning donut, it's keeping the thing going. But it
exists on the surface of the planet, which is curved. So that means that at any given place
one part of it is furtherest from the axis of the earth than another, so it doesn't move
steadily–as it moves closer to the axis it has to speed up with relationship to the direction
the earth is turning because the other end slows down. Generally there's a name for that:
it's called Coriolis Force. In an actual tornado or something, what it does is, it causes it to
wobble. So when it's wobbling it's generating sound, it's generating pressure waves which
are sound. So people talk about tornados and they say it was really noisy, it sounded like
a rushing train, y'know, lots of vibration.

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I believe that this soundwave that propagates out from a tornado is part of the thing which
compresses the air going into it, makes it work, like a jet engine has a compressor stage.
This energy is actually forcing the water out of the air and making it work, giving it heat,
giving it speed. It goes into the thing and it traps it.

The faster it goes, the more efficient it is at trapping the heat. And this energy is actually
forcing the water out of the air and making it work, giving it heat, giving it speed.
Tornados are limited because they're small, they’re real small in diameter, so they can
only process so much air. Also, the tornado is a complicated structure. The down draft is
usually down the middle of the tornado, wrapped around it like a rope, like sections of a
rope … spiralling around. The funnel that you see is way outside of this, that's the point
where the water droplets, the smallest possible water droplets that are too heavy to go any
further, they have too much mass because mass is part of that equation. So you don't
really see the active part that's inside a tornado, you can't really look at it from a distance,
you just see where the water vapor is. But inside of there is this really intense, relatively
small cyclonic storm.

So it's limited in that no matter how fast it goes it's got it's own down draft feeding cold
air into it and it can only reach out so far for heat and moisture to get it. And the faster it
moves forward the longer it will last. Usually it lasts anywhere from a couple of minutes
to a few hours. But if it's traveling with a cold front, a storm front, and that thing is really
moving, like 50 or 60 miles an hour, it can often cover a thousand miles.

[Now back to the dream…] This has started and we're now pretty deep into it. In 1982 the
cyclone in Baffin Bay became strong enough to actually upset the other two cyclones in
the northern polar region and increase their intensity. It's sort of like three fountains going
up in the atmosphere, each one of them is pushing air upwards, making waves. And as
the waves go outwards they have to pass over the others so all of them are affected,
they're all affected by each other.

Up to a certain point, because the law of centrifugal force is a square law, if you increase
the speed you increase the force by the square of the speed. You increase the separation
of heat by the square of the speed. So a little stretch that makes the cyclone smaller
causes it to spin a little faster. And it spins a little faster and it gets to draw more heat and
so it grabs some heat. And then when the following wave passes over and wants to slow
it down it won't slow down because it's got more energy in it. It resembles a kid's top
with the plunger on the top; you push down and she speeds up, you pull up and nothing
happens. So each time you push down you pump a little more speed in.

They reached this point in '82. At that point cyclones in the Arctic started putting out just
enough energy so that each of them was increased a little in intensity and gave a little
kick to the wave, increasing the wave in intensity, like the kid on the swing that starts to
swing his feet right with it… Just a little more energy, a little more energy, a little more
energy. This has now been going on for eight years [1990].

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The energies are going to higher frequencies, which means the wavelengths are getting
shorter. So when you look at a weather map, instead of seeing a few large highs and large
lows, you see lots of clusters, clusters of highs and clusters of lows, which indicates that
the energy is at a higher harmonic. As you shorten the wavelength by one octave at the
same amplitude you go up 60dcb of energy. So as energy is added to the atmosphere,
because it's only so thick, you can't make the waves any bigger than a certain size, you
get shorter waves. And as the wavelength shortens all the ocean currents have changed,
because wind drives the ocean currents. This is where El Nino comes from, and this is
also what's pushing the heat from the tropics towards the poles, which is warming the
oceans and driving CO2 up, pushing up the CO2 balance in the atmosphere.

It's causing all this strange rainfall where you don't expect it, drought where you don't
expect it, changing all the pressures on the earth because water's very heavy, so you
change stresses on the crust and you get earthquakes, you get volcanos. Because of the
nature of the smaller and more intense circulations you get more hurricanes, you get more
tornados, you get more thunderstorms. And each year this goes on the amplification goes
up, too, so it amplifies more each year. So each year the rate of change is increasing.

And the critical moment happens in December… because of the orbit of the earth, which
is an ellipse, the sun is near one end of it, so every year you have one day where the earth
and sun are closest together, its called the perihelion. Now it's the first day or two of
January. Every year about the 21st of December on our calendar the North Pole is pointed
directly away from the sun, the winter solstice. At that point you have the maximum
amount of cold in the Arctic, or if it lags about the first of January. At that point you have
perihelion, which means you have the maximum amount of heat coming from the sun,
because we're the closest. So you have the maximum amount of heat and the maximum
amount of cold at the same time. This is the trigger for the ice age storm.

That's the greatest slope, the greatest heat, the greatest cold and the greatest intensity, it's
like rolling a snowball down a hill; the steeper the hill the more effective the thing will
work.

So every 23,450 years the perihelion and winter solstice come together. When this occurs
you have a condition that can allow one of these storms to happen. Before that happens
the energy level in the atmosphere builds. When that energy level gets to a certain
point… eventually one of these storms reaches a point where it's producing more power
than the physical drag of the air, the friction drag against the surface of the atmosphere,
requires. So it's not limited any longer and it starts to pull air so powerfully that it reaches
as far around the planet as it can, halfway around. And it makes that half of the planet it's
body, that's it’s storm, right, air rushes in at sea level, it goes through this thing that
extracts the heat, the air comes out the top and goes back down till it gets half way
around. That was the storm, that was what I saw, that was what that image represented …

Here’s how it works: The atmospheric circulation is increased in intensity. Every year
around the 15th or 16th of December the waves in the atmosphere suddenly increase
dramatically. Every year–this goes back to the 40s when they started making these

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measurements, accurate measurements. At that time when enough energy exists and the
speed of these cyclones is strong enough, this one in Baffin Bay literally just goes off the
edge. It just goes until it goes as fast as it can. And it's a heat separator. So it traps the
heat, which it tries to radiate away. And because it's during the Arctic night it radiates
away into a constant dark background, which can absorb a lot of heat. The background of
outer space is only about the liquifying point of helium, it's really cold.

So it's actually removing so much heat from the air that it starts to liquefy some of it. And
it's this liquid air coming out of the top and falling to the ground which actually causes
the glaciers to form. The Russians back around the turn of the century [1900] dug up a
bunch of mammoths in Siberia. These mammoths had been frozen so quickly that none of
their intestinal contents had fermented. They still found the things that they swallowed
intact in their stomach. No composting. [It happened] so quickly that none of the bacteria
in their gut had a chance to ferment. You know when you see a dead animal on the road
it's blown up like a balloon. Things ferment. An elephant sized animal, a mammoth sized
animal, you can literally put it in a deep freeze and it would swell up. It's generating heat.
The bacteria generates heat, you know how hot a compost heap gets, you dig into it it's
smoking, right? So the inside of an elephant which eats grass would be composting when
the elephant died. It would be generating heat which would flow outwards to its skin
faster than you could take it away from the skin. Because the elephant is large and it has a
lot of interior. So what they were saying was at the time they dug it up no one knew any
method that you could freeze an animal that quickly.

It wasn't until we started liquifying air that they discovered that a mist of liquid air would
do it, like the foggers they use on airplanes that are on fire. The tiny droplets can make it
though the heat and actually hit the metal and cool it. … The same thing happens with
air. Liquid air, little droplets of it, a mist, could actually freeze the animal. But no other
method would freeze the animal. And these animals exist so it proves that liquid air came
to the ground at some time. And that was the thing that led me to understand that. I knew
that the mammoths had been frozen. So I thought… this storm liquifies air. Of course.

And if it liquifies air and that comes to the ground, it's going to cool the ground so much
it's going to cause a lot of ice making, like a block of dry ice makes all kind of snow
around it, right, as it tries to warm up. So you've got this thing making liquid air.
Something else: even if the temperature of this hot ring of trapped heated air, even if that
was 100,000 degrees it couldn't radiate heat in six weeks… which seems to be the length
of this storm, it couldn't radiate that much heat away that 100,000 years of glaciers were
needed to replace it. So I had a problem: how did the heat leave?

Well, when I'm having this dream I'm reading everything I can get, so I start reading all
kinds of deluge myths, stories that people have about deluges, because obviously this
storm is a huge rainstorm; all that cold dry air going south and all that wet warm air, a
huge wave pouring rain out of the skies till all the surface looks like it's covered by water.
It's a deluge, like the story of Noah and the Bible. So I started reading all the deluge
myths, and some tropical people have a deluge myth that says 'lightning strikes the moon'
during the deluge. So I thought, yeah, why not, thunderstorms generate electricity don't

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they …

This thing is like a giant thunderstorm, because positively charged ions in the air are
lighter than negatively charged ions, because the negative ones have gained an electron
they're more massive. This thing sorts ions like it sorts heat. The lightest ones, which are
positive, tend to go to the middle. So a thunderstorm generates lightning because it's
pumping positive electricity to the top of the cloud. And the bottom becomes negative.
And then you get the lightning strike. The lightning is equalizing the charges. This thing
is a huge storm and is doing the same thing. All this intense friction, 10,000 mile an hour
winds, generates a huge amount of charge and it pumps mostly the positive stuff to the
top, so the northern pole area of the planet is covered by a huge cloud of positively
charged air ions.

The sun throws out what's called the solar wind, which is ions, mostly positive ions, and
they're moving at great velocities … The channel that lightning goes down is … about the
same density of plasma, which is conducting the lightning. So it's highly conductive.
What happens is the earth’s magnetic field focuses this solar wind and makes it even
more concentrated. It drifts outward away from the sun in what's called a ‘magnetic tail’.
The moon goes around the earth and every month it passes through that magnetic tail
when it goes full, full moon. The moon has to go full at least once, maybe twice in a six-
week period. When it does it passes the magnetic tail, this huge cloud of positively
charged air ions, it goes down this channel of solar wind until it impacts the surface of the
moon and melts areas. We call them the Maria. The dark areas on the moon. They'e
melted by this thing. Every 100,000 years. The moon gets a changed face every 100,000
years.

I figured that out, I went to trace it. I said okay, if that's true and all that air is going down
to the moon, then the next thing that would happen would be that it would be attracted
back to the earth, because lightning goes down and up, down and up, etc., ten thousand
times, it's a radio frequency oscillation. That means that if the energy goes to the moon
then it has to come back. That's physical stuff, so when it blasts into the moon it must've
blasted a lot of rocks up into the air, into the space around the moon. And when it came
back it must have drawn some of those [rocks] with it.

And they've discovered what they call tektites, which is a kind of meteorite. Tektite has
the same structure as moon rock. They're identical. And it's a big mystery, why are they
the same, okay? I kept looking and found where tektites are found, and they're found in
little compact areas they call 'strewn fields'. And so I looked at all the ages of all the
tektites, all the strewn fields of tektites, and then I looked how old they were, and then I
looked at continental drift and calculated where they were when they went back in the
atmosphere–and they were all at the equator. That's where the storm turns, downwards.
That would be the negatively charged area.

So when the stream heads back it can't go back where it came from as that's positive,
because of the storm. It goes for the negative, right, because it's positively charged air
ions. So it carries all this shit with it and when it comes into the atmosphere they melt,

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and when they pick them up they know the last time they melted, that's the age of the
[strewn] field, the tektites composition is the same as moon rocks–it's the same stuff. It
coroborates the story.

So then, I called the guy who measured all the magnetic remnants on the moon rocks,
he's at Penn State University, his name is Frank Daschille. And I described this idea, and
I asked him if the magnetic remnants that he found in the moon rocks could be accounted
for with this phenomenon, and he said yes. He said that the amount of energy involved
would have been about 10 to the 30 ergs. This is a huge amount of energy. It's like the
rotational momentum of the earth itself. And something like that could represent 100,000
years of glacial building. So all the heat that melts the moon has to be heat that's come
from the earth, because the equations always balance. What you take from one place you
put them in another place, the equation always balances, that's one of the laws of nature,
one of the rules. So that's where the heat goes. And we get glaciers from it.

And people survive, but they only survive in certain places… And one of those places is
Australia. Another one's Indonesia. Another one is equatorial Africa. Well, a lot of those
places are not a place where white English-speaking guys are likely to be comfortable in
times of intense stress. But Australia… now you see why I go to Australia … So see, it's
a pretty intense trip, it's a pretty intense trip.

The ice builds up because it takes so long to replace that heat that the ice continues to
build for 100,000 years, so every 23,400 when the perihelion-winter solstice thing
happens, during four of those there's ice all over that area, so there's no water up there so
it can't happen. It's like a gun you can pull the trigger all you want but if you don't cock it,
it doesn't do any good. So eventually all that heat gets replaced and the ice melts off, it
takes maybe three, four thousand years to melt off–which has happened 11,000 years ago.

18,000 years ago the glaciers were maximum, 11,000 years ago it was all gone after
7,000 years of glacial melt back it was all gone. For 10-11,000 years we've had this kind
of climate. Now we're at the end. Now the storm event occurs, the result of which the
climate changes, and we go into glacial building. The glaciers build, the water table
drops, and the trigger, even though it comes around, doesn't do anything. Then it all melts
off, conditions like today occur again, and then the next time the perihelion and winter
solstice come together–bang! It happens. You get a tremendous destructive storm, the
deluge, and new glaciers. This cycle's gone on 18 times…

[This is going to happen] … Sometime within the next few years. I cannot tell you.
There is no way of knowing until Christmas… The point is, is that it's like a railroad
track that is long unused. If you pitch your tent on a railway track, when a train comes
through you're finished. But if you're over there–you watch the train go by. Everything
doesn't go, people are still here, our ancestors were here.

[I live in Australia] up a mountain. You can stay on a tourist visa six months out of the
year… and you only need to be there at the critical time in December… It's warm there,
it's a beautiful place, it's a lot of fun. It's just a lucky place. They call it the "Lucky

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Country". It's the right place, but it's not the only place. People survive on Java, they
survive on Bali, they survive on New Guinea, they survive on southern parts of
Indonesia… Several million people will probably survive this event. But lots of them
won't.

… It's not real till it happens. When this storm happens it's very real for about 95-98% of
humanity. They're going to flatten out, whether they believe it or not, it's going to happen.
That's the thing. Just like you and I, you know. We were born and one day we're going to
die. Believe it or not, one day we will die. It's part of the trip. It's punched into the ticket.
And that happens. This particular phenomenon that I figured out is going to happen, I
think it is. I don't see anything that turns me away from it. All the changes I see fit right
into the predictions.

… The dream didn't tell me when… I figured out what time of year it has to happen–I
have no idea which year. Each year I expect it could be that year–until it happens, I don't
know. But I think we’re going to get very, very, very, very weird weather as we work up
to it. As we get closer it's going to get very weird. But how weird is very weird? Right?
… The idea is to try be more prepared each year, more prepared.

When all of this comes the people that are left over are going to sit down and say hey:
what type of government are we going to have? What kind of rules are we going to live
by? So if people are thinking about it, we'll try not to make the mistakes we made before.
It's an opportunity if it occurs. I could be wrong and it's just some crazy dream. It's put
me on some hell of trip, I tell ya … It might not happen, it might just be some trip that
I'm on, but I'll tell ya. It's one of the most intense trips I've ever had. It's lasted real well
for eight years [1990].

Sixteen years later Owsley wove in the connection between his ice age theory
and his carnivorous diet, when he wrote on the Active Low-Carber forums:

The reason there are 6 billion people on the planet is entirely DUE to the eating of
the food of our natural prey, which allowed us to move DOWN the food-pyramid
and spread out and grow to become a major planetary burden with our
dangerously high population level. IF we truly only ate what the prey we are
trying to replace ate, we would not be a huge burden on the ecosystem, but NO,
we STILL mostly eat a LOT of meat and since we are no longer population-
restricted by food availability, we are now raping the system bigtime. The only
way 'back' to a sustainable pure carnivory would require a massive depopulation-
all the way down to about 50-100 million, which is highly unlikely on a voluntary
basis (!). Although if my theorem about a very imminent ice-age initiating storm
is true, and not just some weird repeating dream that has held my attention for 24
years now [2006], and led to my having seen most of my predictions of 1982
coming good, the Earth's own natural processes may do the job of reduction for
us.

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Owsley kep tabs with his ice age theory over the years, absorbing new
information as it came to light and testing it against his hypothesis. In 1998 when
he was interviewed by Bruce Eisner for the Psychedelic Island Views magazine
he gave more context to the growing global warming movement of the late 1990s
and the vested interests that he believed supported it:
 
 
Mostly what people know or think about ‘global warming’ stuff, and the other
questions that I address, comes from the media, the public media. Most of them
are reporting on scientific work that's been done, but they often only report on one
side of it. There's a lot of discussion going on in the scientific literature about
each of the various points that I address, unlike the seeming united front the
media present. For instance, there are several ways in which researchers can
measure the temperature of the planet. One of the ways is by taking all of the
reports from weather station readings, which are mostly in the populated areas of
the Northern Hemisphere, and averaging them.

Another way is to use the global satellite information, which accurately records
the temperature of the entire Earth’s surface from outer space. The coverage is
quite extensive, and the data goes back to 1979. The problem is that careful
calculation of the corrected satellite data from complete coverage of the planet
indicates that the planet has one of the most remarkably well-buffered and
stabilized thermal systems known. In fact, they have detected a drop of 0.05
degree Celsius per decade in that period. The planet is extremely stable. But the
weather station data indicates that in most places where people live, it is getting
warmer a few tenths of a degree.

So you have two different databases that you can access, you've got world
temperature average, based on the weather staion averages, and you've got the
global mean temperature from the satellite data. The global mean temp is
indicating a cooling. The global mean is the only one which can indicate whether
the planet is actually undergoing global warming or not. But ‘world temperature
average’ gives another indication entirely. So you have a problem, and significant
number of scientists are standing up and saying look, we can't find the evidence of
this warming you guys are jumping up and down, screaming and yelling about.

The global warming people are telling you there's a problem. This problem
consists of two things: One thing is the carbon dioxide level. They absolutely
insist that the ‘problem’ is caused by our pumping up all the oil, which is trapped
carbon, out of the ground and burning it. This is probably the best thing that man's
ever done, I sometimes think we might have been evolved by the oldest and
largest organism on the planet, the blue-green algae of the oceans, to do this,
because it's carbon that's been lost to the life system on this planet. The algae, or
plankton, in the ocean fall to the bottom, die and are buried, and all the oil from
their little diatom bodies eventually migrates into oil deposits.

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It's carbon that's lost, there's very little carbon left on the surface of this planet,
there's only 300 parts per million in the bloody atmosphere, it's microscopic.
Actually, 99.99% of all the free carbon dioxide on this planet is to be found in one
place: The ocean, it's dissolved in the ocean. Carbon dioxide, of all materials, has
one of the steepest solubility curves known, which means that cold water
dissolves a lot of gas. Warm water doesn't hold much at all. The slope is very
steep. Everyone knows the difference between opening a warm Coca-Cola, and a
cold one. You immediately experience this dramatic solubility slope.

A storm cloud forms and rain starts to fall. Rain is very, very cold, close to
freezing point when it starts to come down. It's a very excellent scrubber.
Scrubbers designed very much like rainfall are used to scrub chemicals out of
gases in industry. So virtually all of the carbon dioxide in the air under the
raincloud is dissolved in this freshly formed, pristine, and very cold water, and
carried down to the surface of the planet. Much of it falls into the ocean, which is
already saturated. It must be, because it is in contact with the atmosphere, and
there's an equilibrium between the ocean and the atmosphere, a certain percentage
is in the atmosphere and it is in balance with the rest dissolved in the ocean at the
given temperature. Well, if the rain has more than that amount, some of it will
evaporate back into the air. If it's got less, of course it all will remain dissolved.
But it always has more, because it is cold and has dissolved some of the
atmosphere’s carbon dioxide, and most likely has more carbon dioxide in it than
the equilibrium amount with the warmer ocean.

The actual carbon dioxide found in the atmosphere is therefore determined by the
temperature of the sea. The majority of the data that people use when quoting
increasing carbon dioxide levels is produced by a single measuring point,
especially built for this purpose, on the top of Mona Kea, on the Island of Hawaii.
The measurements taken at this place show a gradual rise in carbon dioxide levels
from about 200 some odd parts/million when they first started making the
measurements, up to 300 or so now. This means a very microscopic amount has
only become slightly less microscopic. However, it is still a 50% increase in the
measured carbon dioxide.

A close examination of these carbon dioxide level graphs reveals a very

interesting thing. They're not simply a straight, rising line. This line is very
irregular, it goes up and down, it is cyclic. This variation is in step with the
seasons. During the summer, the carbon dioxide content goes up, during the
winter it goes down. You would naturally think, winter... summer... it must have
something to do with temperature. Well, you'd be truly surprised at the ways in
which people have tried to explain this variation, ‘It goes up and down due to
plant growth, etc.’ This is pretty odd, since the summer is when there is greater
growth, and if plants were the answer, the CO2 would go down, not up.

The Hilo Observatory, part of NOAA, located at the very foot of Mona Kea, takes

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regular sea surface temperatures, and publish them. Lo and behold, these charts
have the same types of irregularities as the carbon dioxide chart, and if you look
more closely at them, you will find that also the sea surface temperatures in the
vicinity of Hilo have been slowly increasing. If you go a step further and take
identical graphs of the carbon dioxide levels and the sea surface temperatures
drawn to the same scale, and superimpose them, they correspond exactly. Sea
surface temperature rises, carbon dioxide rises. Sea surface temperature drops,
carbon dioxide drops. The sea surface temperature has slowly been increasing
over time by an amount equal to the amount of increase in carbon dioxide. The
mystery is solved. The temperature of the sea surface is what is controlling carbon
dioxide, not how much carbon you're burning or anything else. So man's carbon
emissions are unimportant. Or to place them in the true context of the paramount
importance of CO2 as a food for plants, our actions to produce more CO2 are so
well buffered as to only be of benefit to life on the planet.

Bruce: So that's an ecological red herring then?

Owsley: You've got to say, well gee whiz, who benefits from this? There's only
one major industry that will benefit from this: The nuclear power industry.
Because one of the major uses of fossil fuels is to generate electricity, and there's
only a few ways of generating electricity where you don't burn fossil fuels. You're
limited to how many rivers you want to stuff up. Solar is completely controlled by
the petroleum industry, so the cost of solar has not changed much in the last 15
years. Lastly you've got wind. Effective wind generation requires a good location
with high wind levels, and the investment is pretty high, and they only work a
certain percentage of the time anyway. The only other source of generation of
electricity is nuclear energy.

Bruce: So it's the nuclear industry that's trying to push it.

Owsley: That would be my conclusion, by eliminating all other possible groups

who could possibly benefit from this. You have to follow the money. Everything
seems to boil down to who is getting a benefit, who is gaining a financial
advantage, and only the most naïve people think that money's not involved in all
of this. Money is involved in all things.

Bruce: And the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer.

Owsley: Exactly but then, that is also planned. We’ve gotten into a runaway
condition with this. It's a way of continuing the elitist structure.
 
 
By 2009, Bear was still delivering the message of his transmission, this time
Down Under, at the EGA conference in November. “[So] I tried to put myself in a
good place for the storm … When this happens six billion people will be reduced
to a few million. You don’t have a chance down here by the way [Melbourne]. It’ll

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freeze up solid, y’know, the bottom part of Australia will be glacial terrain. When
this happens and it starts to snow–well just imagine a foot or two feet of snow for
every single day for six weeks. What are you going to do? You can’t travel–
you’re stuck. What happens when the sea level rises 500 feet? There’ll be be no
coastal cities left. None. Every city in Australia just about, except Canberra and
Alice Springs are on the coast. You can’t build on the coast–you have to be in the
mountains. You can’t be south of Rockhampton, you’ve got to be up north, the
more up north the better, it stays warmer. I got as far as I could go north and still
have a mountain. That’s inland from Cairns.
“I got the idea when I lived in Berkeley, but no one believed me then anyway. I’ve
been telling the story for 28 years … but they’ll see. They expect life to go on. I
can’t share [this] because people don’t want to believe me. You’re lucky people;
you’re in one of the few places in the world that has safe places. You get inland,
you get high enough, you go far enough north and stay away from low lying
areas or areas that are so far south … I worry about people down here but no
one listens to me …
“When things start to get really bad we’re going to know. I think the weather will
get weird. First all the arctic ice will melt off. All of it. That black water up there,
when that starts to melt you’re sure of the end. And then the weather becomes
so disruptive that in the northern hemisphere there’ll probably be no power lines,
no water reticulation, no roads, no one will be flying and this could go on for eight
or nine months.
“This world is interconnected and we’ll know that something’s going on up north.
And when that happens you’ll have to figure out where to go. Australia’s good.”
Whether you believe it or not, Owsley’s ice age theory is potent food for thought.
From a psychedelic perspective the interesting thing isn’t even the theory itself, but
the mode of transmission. Now Owsley wasn’t the only ‘acid prophet’ to be
connected to larger intelliences and try to relay some of that message out into the
world. Leary, Kesey, Huxley–to some degree many of the intelligentsia
experienced otherworldly connection, or a deepening of this world’s knowing. It’s
almost cliched to portray ‘acidheads’ espousing cosmic mumbo jumbo and trying
to codense their expanded awareness of the natural systems around them down
into monkey words. But consider that Owsley wasn’t any mere acidhead–he was
an alchemist–he made the acid, he had an ongoing deep, spiritual, alchemical
relationship with the material on a physical and an astral level.

The other pertinent character in the story of LSD that was also an alchemist was
the High Father, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who ‘discovered’ the substance
in 1943. As we have discussed earlier, Hofmann had his own mystical leanings, a
strange presentiment, as he called it. “Eureka” comes The ancient Greek,
meaning “"I have found (it)" and is attributed to the ancient Greek scholar
Archimedes, who is said to have proclaimed “Eureka!” when he stepped into a
bath and noticed that the water level rose according to the volume of water
displaced. By accurately measuring volume the density and thus purity of objects

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could be ascertained, like the gold crown of a local king that was suspected of
being diluted with silver.

The Eureka effect is that ‘aha!’ moment when the conscious mind breaks through
the mental box of previous thought forms, often solving intractable problems and
having access to a whole new way of seeing. Like a ‘bolt from the blue’,
information previously unaccessible seems to be transmitted and integrated in a
flash, whether from the unconscious mind or from outside the individual is still
unknown. In Christian theology this was called the ‘epiphany’–sudden inspiration
from the divine, from outside of oneself.

Einstein had his breakthrough on the theory of relativity whilst talking to his friend
Michele Besso; Francis Crick had a similar breakthrough whilst working out the
DNA code, with the difference there being his documented attribution to LSD as
a creativity drug; Kary Mullis, the 1993 Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry told
Albert Hofmann himself that “LSD had helped him develop the polymerase chain
reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences." LSD did, in fact, help
engender insights in Mullis, and many other scientists and intellectuals work
through the 1950s and early 1960s. So Owsley is by far from alone in the history
books in receiving a sudden knowledge download from larger forces. Indeed, the
morphenogenetic theory proposed by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake suggests that ‘fields’
of information may be omnipresent in nature. Some higher intelligence–whether it
be from within or without its all the same really–is said to transmit across the
frequencies and into the minds of its creatures, or so the theory goes.

Owsley could have been another prophet, like Terence McKenna. But where
McKenna was New Testament, Bear was the Abrahamic patriarch who went up
the mountain and heard the burning bush to bring back the living language of
God. Like all prophets, he was simply the messenger. In his own words, he was
simply deconstructing and implementing knowledge from the patterns coming
through. For when the acid removed the filters it allowed a brilliant mind to see
even more clearly through the doors of perception. And the planet spok
And what he saw was the planet.
Alive and communicating with us, its creation.

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The ice age was coming and there were plans to be made, and time was of the
essence. Before Armageddon arrived, however, Owsley still had to pay the bills,
and despite popular mythology he was anything but rich in the decades after his
supposed ‘LSD millions’. As he said in 2007, “You need to realize I have very
little in the way of savings, a pathetic $500/mo in US SS, and never had a
retirement plan. My art and the odd music royalty from my earlier sound work are
my sole sources of income.”

By 1983 Owsley was a familiar sight backstage at Greatful Dead concerts and in
hotel lobbies and the arena carparks with the roaming legions of Deadheads in
their psychic-group-mind-moshpits, selling his metal belt buckles and enamel
jewelry and paraphenalia. Owsley’s wares once again became the coin of the
realm, with gold and silver ‘Stealies’ belt buckles fetching quite a few thousand
dollars apiece.

The term ‘Deadhead’ had been floating around the band’s fans since the early
days, and was officially inagurated in 1971 on the back cover of the LP Grateful
Dead/Skull and Roses, which said: “Dead Freaks Unite! Who are you? Where
are you? How are you? Send us your name and address and we’ll keep you
informed.” This hippie-brotherhood inspired marketing outreach nurtured the
band’s relationship with their fans over the decades, forming a loyal bond
unprecedented in rock history. The band’s mailing list grew from only 350 names
in 1971 to a staggering 500,000 by 1995. And thousands of those fans, including
younger generations, were drawn to the sense of innate psychedelic community
the Dead concerts represented, following the band from concert to concert and
congregating in van villages in the arena carparks, what Owsley affectionately
dubbed, ‘the zoo’.

“When I’m walking in the crowd, when I’m out in the zoo–which is what I call the
tribal thing out in [the parking lot]–I feel the sixties, I feel the way it all was,”
Owsley told David Gans. “In the old days, there was no separation. The Grateful
Dead, the Deadheads, the crew, the band, everybody, was the same, it was all
the same. That’s what we were, it was like a family.” Anthropologist Joseph
Campbell once proclaimed Deadheads as "the world's newest tribe."

British anthropologist Victor Turner called it ‘communitas’–and it “is a useful way

to understand aspects of the 1960s psychedelic counterculture,” wrote Zevic
Mishor in his essay, ‘Acid and Anti-Structure: Turner’s ‘Communitas’ and
Society’s Backlash Against the 1960s Counterculture, in the EntheoGenesis
Australis 2011 Journal. “Communitas refers to a state of primordial union
amongst a group of human beings, a state that transcends the standard societal
divisions of rank and responsibility.”

The tribe that sprang up around the Dead was a socio-cultural mutation back to
cooperative models of organization that the hippies had first tried to anchor in the
60s. And yet, as Mishor continued, “the 1960s backlash can be explained in

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terms of the societal super-organism, threatened by a shifting of the balance

towards such communitas, ‘using’ human actors and social institutions, whether
with their conscious awareness or not, to achieve self-preservation and
continuity.” As Owsley trailed through the carparks and concert venues of the
early 1980s Dead shows, there was an often-noted feeling that the tribal family
they had become was keeping alive the essence of the 1960s psychedelic
dream.

“Today [by the late 1990s] the followers of the Grateful Dead have been preyed
upon by law enforcement at many of the venues the Dead visited,” Owsley wrote
on his website. “They could not peacefully practice what is to them a true
religious practice without persecution. I guess it'd be the modern version of
feeding Christians to the lions practiced by the government of Rome a couple of
thousand years ago. So much for the rhetoric of ‘freedom of religion’, so oft
repeated nowadays. So what if the psychedelic of choice is LSD rather than
peyote? Is it OK to eat peyote if you are a native American indigenee but not if
you are a white or black or other native of America? Since when is there any
difference? Why should there be some sort of barrier to joining any religious
group? There is only one answer: you are not allowed to be different, to think
original thoughts, to act as if you were really free. You are not supposed to
experience the world in any way differently to the way those in power wish you
to.”

The hippie dream was a threat to the system, and it also didn’t pay the rent. And
so Owsley grew weed, and he told Robert Greenfield it was “the most dangerous,
underpaid job I ever had in my life. I was never a real grower. I did it because I
was into breeding, and I had some strains that were absolutely unbelievable. All
in all, I was making about a dollar fifty an hour." Add in some gang warfare and
the cost just wasn’t worth it all. One night his burgeoning urban crop was stolen
by desperate junkies who held guns at his head and chest, but Owsley, never
one to let anything get the better of him, had his revenge. He hired some armed
muscle from his old connections and when the thieves returned two nights later a
gun battle ensued. But he still didn’t get his crop back, and “a year after that, I
moved to Australia," he told Greenfield.
 
David Gans met Owsley backstage in 1982 at the Greek Theatre, and again in
1983 at Phil Lesh’s house, when he arrived armed with maps and proceeded to
download the ice age theory he had received in the recurring dream. “He showed
us a climate map showing mean temperatures at the peak of the last Ice Age,
and pointed to a spot in Australia where there was both habitable climate and
land underfoot – and where he already owned property,” Gans says in
‘Remembering Owsley "Bear" Stanley’ on [Link]. “He had a sheaf of visa
applications to distribute to his audience so we could begin the emigration
process immediately. Lesh demurred, stating that if this climate-change
catastrophe were to take place, he'd climb up onto the ridge behind his then-

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home and watch it go down. ‘When your number's oop, it's oop,’ said someone
else, quoting George Harrison.”

Undeterred, Owsley would press ahead with his plan for surviving the ice age,
eventually taking his extended tribal family–including both ex-wives and his two
youngest kids, Redbird, Starfinder–who were very close, and had grown up
together as brother and sister, with him. In 2011 Wavy Gravy told the San
Francisco Bay Guardian online that, “At first he wanted to go to this crater in
Hawaii, and then it changed to Australia.” In 2009 at the EGA conference,
Owsley told the crowd that “I searched and found a place in North Queensland in
the mountains that I think is safe. It may or may not be–I don’t know.”

The psychedelic wave had hit Australia in the late 1960s, and curiously enough,
one of the main enclaves of hippe lifestyle was in the tropics north of Cairns, in
the rustic Cedar Bay community. There, refugees from the Summer of Love had
settled in amongst the sugarcane farmers and were quietly living the dream.
There was also the Kuranda commune–the precursor to Cedar Bay, with a
private community called Rosebud, which was run by Californian hippies through
the 70s. In 1976 the deeply conservative Joh Bjelke Petersen government
ordered a raid by Queensland police that violently destroyed the Cedar Bay
commune, and the hippies moved inland up to the Tablelands, out into the wild
Wash River and back to the earth. They settled on miner's leases extending 90
years or more, as individuals and groups, essentially squatting the land.

And by 1984 Owsley, who was looking for a safe and habitable part of the white,
Western world to move to–to escape the worst of the coming ice age–joined
them. Owsley must have presented well enough as a law-abiding citizen to win
entry to Australia when he emigrated in 1984. He told them everything about his
past, and is rumoured to have sterling references, one of them from Keith
Richards of the Rolling Stones (one would think that may have gone against him,
being Keith).

Owsley entered on a tourist visa and had to leave Australia every six months to
fulfil his visa requirements. He would return to California and hang out at the
Dead shows, timing it of course so that he was back before the possible
superstorm tipping point in late December. This juggling act finally ended when
he eventually become a naturalized Australian citizen in 1996, but when he first
arrived in Australia in 1984, Owsley was a survivor. The course of events were
not just leading him away from the cities, they were taking him back to the earth
to put into practice what he believed, to live an honorable, if marginal life.

“I live out in the country,” Owsley told Bruce Eisner. “I’m basically a country boy; I
don’t like cities much. I like nature. I don’t like to rely upon the civil
infrastructures; we generate our own electricity and so forth. It keeps me busy
trying to maintain things, but I don’t have to worry about the power surges that
blow out your TV and your computer and telephones. And believe me, it happens

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a lot.”

Owsley buit his squat out on the Walsh, starting off small and gradually building it
up over many years to the castle and refuge it would finally become. When Wavy
Gravy visited years later he described “roaring streams and boulders and every
now and then there would be a flattened beer can pounded into a tree, and that
would be an indication you were headed the right way... Finally you break into a
clearing and there’s this amazing space…” Robert Greenfield wrote it was, “a
complex of sheds, caravans, large canvas tents, modified shipping containers
and corrugated-iron structures designed and built by Owsley.” When John Perry
Barlow visited he described the place as "something out of Lord Jim, but the
main living area is rather Victorian, handsomely carpeted, lots of books around,
nice furniture and no walls."

Owsley was building his kingdom, one step at a time. “We settled on raw forest
land 24 years ago,” he wrote online in 2006, “and built from scratch as the money
came along. Still building. It is in the tropics–our tent (Moss Op-200) makes a fine
bedroom. We are on our third (and hopefully, last) … I sleep in [the] tent, but we
have water, a kitchen with woodstove, gas cooker, electric fan oven, fridges,
flush toilet/septic system, a classy tent with a nice queensized bed, and a world-
class solar/wind/diesel electrical system. I've lived this way for 24 years.”

Eventually he would have a recording studio, a gym where he worked out

regularly–taking up weights at 55 and never looking back–a hot tub, three
kitchens, a library, septic tanks and solar power of his own devising. “Our
electricity is generated here from solar and wind, with a diesel back-up. We use
12v DC–a legacy of the early days, some lights and the fridges, 24 vDC for the
inverter, 120v and 240v/60 Hz AC for everything else. Anything which is made to
run on 50 Hz does better on 60. Not the other way around, however. My shop
and studio–with kilns and welders, etc., need the 9kw Onan genset running. I
have four fridges on the property. One is just for meat (and cream).”

He built a pond where he raised fish and playtpuses, even oversaw a small
coffee plantation. “I have ten coffee bushes (they are actually scraggly, multiple-
stemmed shrubs, not trees),” he wrote online in Active Low-Carber forum: “one
12 years old the rest 7, which produce a small harvest of very nicely flavoured
coffee. Each and every coffee growing location around the world has a distinctive
coffee. In Oz, most of the coffee is grown at too low an elevation for good body–
arabica needs at least 750 m to develop proper acidity and body–we are at 900m
and have a northfacing slope, ideal as there is no frost in winter here.”

Here was a man with gold records to his credit, living an austere lifestyle in the
Australian bush–and loving it. Owsley wasn't poor, but he wasn't living it up large
either. He lived according to the particular aesthetic and lifestyle choices that he
made–and helped create–back in the 1960s. He had integrity, and a good heart,
in a gruff and misathropic kind of way. And some people couldn’t take that and

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others loved him for it.

With his base sorted, Owsley made regular sojurns back to the States, remaining
a frequent face backstage at Grateful Dead concerts, like the one he met his
future wife, Sheilah Manning at in 1985. Sheilah was working in the ticket booth
at the Greek Theatre in Oakland and Owsley was hustling his belt buckles and
hand-crafted artistry. It was a match made in heaven. “She was a practicing
vegetarian when we met, “ he told Robert Greenfield, “but that did not last past
our first dinner date. She asked for a bite of my steak, actually.”

Sheilah joined Owsley and settled down to life in the tropical Aussie bush. And
twenty years after the first acid wave Owsley had helped birth in the San
Francisco psychedelic scene, he was about to discover the next wave in his own
backyard. As he told Bruce Eisner in 1998:

Some of the strangest parties I've been to here, and we're talking 13 years ago, I went
to a party that people who had come from Goa were running, and it was full of the
strangest, heaviest, most psychedelic music. I was stoned myself, so I tried to find out
later what records they used. They showed me this box full of records. I said what did
you play, he said man I don't know, and whatever I thought was good at the time!
There was a lot of African stuff, techno stuff, an amazing mix, and all of it was good.
I didn't connect the thing at all in those days. Until I saw the show [on TV] the other
night, I wasn't really that aware of the depth of the scene. It looked like early Grateful
Dead, looked like the Acid Test. Images of parties and people dancing, and freaking
to music. It's the same kind of stuff. It's Acid Test stuff. So if somebody tells me:
‘You were doing this then, but they're not doing that now’, I'd just tell them, you
might not be in contact with the scene, but that scene is very much alive.

The Acid Tests vibe was indeed alive and well, and not just Down Under.
Emanating from Goa, hippies and DJs had held the flame of the psychedelic
group mind and their large scale acid-fueled trance parties, and were birthing a
cultural renaissance. From Goa it would spread to Europe and the U.K.,
Australia, Israel and beyond, as the next wave peaked. And as trance branched
into house, techno, and a myriad of other sonic frequencies, Rave culture
embraced MDMA–‘Ecstasy’ as its sacrament. It was a neuro-branding shift that
made it especially palatable for the mainstream, as that generation trance-
danced its way into a critical mass in the millions of switched on, hedonistic
clubbers across the world.

“I'm not out on the street anymore,” Owsley told Bruce Eisner in 1998:

But [there is an] acid scene, the modern scene: the music, acid, ecstasy, etc. … Some
techno is very good, some of it's uninteresting to me, but some of it is so good, it's
amazing. It's modern, complex, electronic music, and musicians usually do it in real

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time. So it's sort of like performances that resemble in some ways John Cage, Berlioz
and Sobotnik. Real cutting edge, heavy duty. I've been thinking of trying to contact
Phil Lesh about this, I was really impressed. It started in Goa.

Bruce: With Goa Gil.

Owsley: Yeah, it started in Goa, this whole thing.

Bruce: That's what Goa Gil claims.

Owsley: … The scene which runs on acid, I have no problems with that. I do have
problems with the ecstasy scene, I have serious problems with that. I just don't think
it's good stuff. I don't think any of the synthetics based on those multi-ring exotic oils
are good. I think they're very bad and I think that you're creating a substance that the
body has no way of dealing with because they don't occur in nature.

Despite Owsley’s disavowal of it, ecstasy was as potent a transformer of youth

culture when it first hit in the 1980s as LSD was to the 60s–but the main break of
the wave was in Britain, where ecstasy culture and acid house music saw a
euphoric explosion of the rave scene. The ‘Second Summer of Love’ was so big,
in fact, that it stretched across two summers from 1988-89, and saw the Thatcher
government mercilessly beat into submission the hundreds of thousands of
travelers, gypsies and ravers that fueled the free party movement across the
land.

The 60s wave peaked again in the 80s, and as radical anthropologist to the new
trance music culture of the 21st century, Graham St. John, explains in Global
Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance, it has, since then, continued to
grow and permeate through the Western world:

Bohemia is a party with multiple rooms, tents, sound areas and a fabulous
lightshow. Larger clubs and festivals are capable of accommodating multiple
zones, musics and aesthetics, including stages for celebrity icons powered by
electricity and renegade sound system collectives operating off re-usable energy
sources. It is a rather consensual view among psytrance participants, however,
that only select events, or enclaves within them, provide the appropriate platform
for the visionary experience. Not unlike bohemianism, cosmic clubbing can be
traced to cosmopolitan clubs and expatriate enclaves—districts, venues and clubs
that became the birthing canals of psychedelia. While Goa was integral, it was
itself fed by aesthetics that had fermented in the various scenes and centres of
Disctopia. Since the discothèques operating in occupied Paris during WWII,
dance clubs have courted, sometimes rather stridently, an ‘underground’ aesthetic,
subversions later oiled by LSD and the psychedelia percolating within late 1960s
discultures…

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Within the Goatrance festival tradition, networks of artists including the

participants themselves have intentionally generated ritualized contexts,
appropriating from traditional and popular cultures, and adapting technics to
purposive agendas. Psychedelic art has been adapted to the alteration of self
within the context of social dance since the 1960s, and by the 1990s psychedelic
liminalisation had been fully augmented by computers, and analog and digital
media. Over this thirty-year period, from the Acid Tests to Goatrance, alterant-
assisted initiatory praxis in the context of psychedelic dance music events has
evolved. The early psychedelic ‘rituals’ were characterised by a chaotic, open-
ended, multi-mediated experimentalism—to which countless samples from film
and other dialogue deployed in music productions pay homage. Infused with
psychedelic Orientalism and the shamanic practice of native peoples from the
Americas and elsewhere, Goatrance harboured a concerted effort to effect self-
transformation. We have seen conscious ritualization orchestrated using the
techno-chemical assemblage imported to and nurtured in Goa and then exported
worldwide as a ‘global trance ritual’ (Larkin 2003), care of Goa Gil, Ray Castle
and others, and from the late 1990s, in the wake of McKenna’s influence, ‘spirit
molecule’ assisted ‘entheogenesis’ would become inscribed in the music, and in
the culture, of psytrance.

Owsley, mostly oblivious to all of this, would mellow out in the succeeding years, and
in the next decade or so live the dream, focusing his energies inwards. “I began
[weight] lifting on my birthday at age 55 [in 1990]. I ride my mountain bike on a
very hilly dirt track for about 30-45 minutes before each workout,” he said on the
Active Low-Carber forum in 2007. “The aerobics session immediately prior to
lifting gets everything warmed up and functioning, and brings the liver online with
the enzymes needed by the muscles, for optimal activity-muscle cells do not
make them, and do not store them in the quantity needed by strenuous exercise.

“I lift heavy. I am not very large but I'm as strong as many of the big boys I see in
the gym. I basically follow Mike Mentzer's 'heavy duty': brief, infrequent sessions
with only few exercises to failure, I do 3 sets of one exercise per body part and
divide into a legs/bi's/tri's day and an upper body day (no bi or tri specifics). I lift
two days a week only–rest days need to be at least two between workouts. I do
crunches and hypers each work out. I gained over 30 pounds of solid muscle in
less than three years when I began–probably my genetic limit, as although the
shapes of my muscles changed a bit over time, I did not continue to gain mass.

“I lift at a normal rate. But only do three sets of one exercise per body part. Time
spent lifting should only be about 45-60 min … I was even told that it was
impossible to gain muscle mass after age 40–by an MD, no less. He did not
recognise me a few years later, and was blown away by my new mass. The
awful thing was, after spending a considerable amount of time first-off telling me
my diet was (nuts) and I was wasting time at my age lifting, he had grown obese.
Funny how the truth will out.”

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Not only was Owsley in great shape for his age–his all-meat diet seemed to have
other benefits, as well. “I noticed many years ago that I did not seem to be aging
much, and that my body, as I got older began to look a lot different from
everyone else my age that I met, no matter whether they were into fitness or just
had a good body size and shape naturally. In all cases I began to pull away, and
it slowly dawned on me that virtually all the 'standard changes of age' I had
accepted as a natural and normal product of simply getting older were not
showing up,” he wrote on the Active Low-Carber forum in 2006.

Health problems, however, started to crop up around the turn of the millennium,
and they were, ironically, due to the muscle mass Owsley had put on
bodybuilding, and the extra stress that put on his heart. His son Starfinder, wrote
in the comments section of the San Francisco Chronicle feature back in 2007,
that: “He has never had a heart attack, although he did have bypass surgery a
few years ago [in 2000]–to correct blockages which he blames on the high carb
diet he ate from childhood until his early 20s. Broccoli, being low in carbs, would
not be a factor (not that he has ever considered it edible), though he does joke
about mothers trying to ‘poison’ their heroically resistant children with such
veggies.

“Unfortunately,” Starfinder continued, “the broccoli crack makes his espousal of a

low-carbohydrate diet seem pretty crackpot, when (speaking more as someone
with 2 Ivy degrees in biology and veterinary medicine than as a loyal son) there is
plenty of hard science to substantiate the critical role of high carb consumption in
the etiology of aetheroscierosis. And anyone who thinks he cooks his food to any
significant degree has obviously never been served steak by him–cooking, he will
gladly tell you, is the process of getting the meat back up to body temperature,
and nothing more. Raw but warm.”

Owsley himself reinterated that:

The blockage was present from my teens, and caused classic angina when I began
ballet training in my early 20's. I thought it was just my intercostal muscles hurting,
due to the sudden experience of very heavy breathing. It passed, and did not return
until much later after a period of low activity, followed by renewed strenuous
exercise–it passed then too. The heart's coronaries lose the ability to form new
arterial pathways (anastomosis) by the mid 20's.... in some people, earlier than that.
My cardiologist remarked on the extent of my 'natural bypass' which he said
confirmed that the blockage was very old indeed.

The blockage, over 90% was in the (left) descending artery, the single, critical
feeder for the ventricles, the most important muscle group in the heart. I had
another, minor narrowing of 60% in the right circumflex, not considered operable
alone, but they still fixed it while attending to the other. The damage was there, as it

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is in everyone (shown by autopsies on kids–as young as 13) by the end of my teen

years, and only became a real problem after I had put on about 35 pounds of muscle
in a few years starting in '90. The added mass required more oxygen than my
compromised heart could provide, even though it had grown 5% larger than
average. I have had a slightly grey complexion all my adult life. It was gone forever
when I came out of surgery. I healed up so fast I was able to do incline dumbbell
presses three weeks post-op. The new arterial connections add extra blood supply to
my heart, and the result is more endurance and strength than ever before in my
entire life.

Owsley would relish that extra energy as he continued to pursue his interests with
vigor, conducting the sporadic interviews that pepper the internet, selling his jewelry
at Grateful Dead concerts throughout the 90s and the 00s, releasing the odd sound
archive when the lawyers for the big record companies would eventually iron out all
the copyrights and legal issues, and building his home and developing the land.
“Those who kept the faith [of the 1960s] now gather in the sort of communities
that Stanley helped create, and many who were drawn to the Bear are no longer
unwashed beatniks but prosperous pillars of a community no longer viewing
them as marginal … with their wind- and solar-powered homes and organic
vegetable gardens,” wrote the Winnipeg Free Press in 2011.

Owsley was who he was, and his ‘relentless enthusiasms’ as Charles Perry
called them, still rubbed many up the wrong way in his later years. “You had to
take him with a grain of salt,” said one of the Walsh River crew I interviewed. “He
was cranky at times, but it was only because he was so passionate and
unswerving about his beliefs. Some people literally couldn’t stand him–they
would tolerate him, but they couldn’t stand him. They just found him too intense.
He wasn’t into small talk and that’s what others liked about him–he would cut
through the bullshit and go deep, straight away. Towards the end of a night it
would be the same deep stuff he would talk about over and over, but it was
different levels of the same stuff and the old story, filling in the gaps depending
on what you asked.”

To others, especially some of the younger generation at the Walsh, he was “like
an elder. You could rely on the fact that he was providing true knowlede, that he
wouldn’t lie to you, that he was solid,” said my source. Owsley was an elder, but
not a guru, although some of the teenagers growing up in their community looked
up to him as an uncle–and a liberal one at that. "He described acid to me when I
was 15 as like a religion, which of course got me super excited about trying it,”
said one young community member, now in his mid-twenties.

Owsley was still very much into technology, and in his later years he also put
others onto using Apple computers, whom he had a long relationship with.
Legend has it that Owsley was the one who switched on Steve Wozniak of Apple,
alongside Steve Jobs. Woz wanted to put on music festivals in the early 1970s
and all the money they made from their first Apple computer sales went to paying

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for these festivals, that were in part inspired by the Acid Tests of the 60s and the
free festival vibe that flowed from them. Owsley was given brand new G3 and G4
laptops before they were commercially released. They were way outside his
budget and they would be sent to him from Apple in the States. You could find
him any day of the week puttering away in the backend of the computers,
working to modify each machine to be the optimal tool for his consciousness.

During the day Owsley would tend to–and sample his sativa cannabis plants. He
had different strains that he would smoke in the morning, at midday and in the
afternoon, each with different qualities that would relax the body or stimulate the
mind. “He was a connoisseur and he wouldn’t cross blends,” one of his young
friends told me in 2011. In the evenings he had some ‘down-tempo’ sativa indica
that he would smoke in small tokes from a chillum, chatting away and going
about his business, “whether you were listening or not. He would wander around
the house and out into the library and you could still hear his voice meandering
about, continuing the conversation.”

“Night after night during the summer months,” wrote Robert Greenfield in Rolling
Stone, “Owsley can be found stalking Bufo marinus, the species of poisonous
toads ([up to two pounds large] whose venom, Owsley insists, won't get you
high).” Cane toads were an embarassing cultural faux pas, first introduced into
Australia in 1935 from Hawaii, in the hope that they would curtail the cane beetle.
But things got out of hand when the toads began breeding so fast in the new
habitat that they themselves became an ecological problem, swarming across
the continent and invading native habitats. “I know a lot of people who have
extracted samples of their venom, and found that it's inactive,” Owsley told Bruce
Eisner. “It doesn't do anything. Eating it'll make you sicker than a dog, but smoking it
does nothing. But the story persists. There is an American native toad, bufo alvarius,
called the Colorado River Toad, which indeed has a strong DMT-like venom, which
can be smoked.”

The cane toads were a notorious pest throughout Queensland, and were
“poisoning the baby fish in the acre-and-a-half lake Owsley created on his
property,” Greenfield wrote. “Shining an LED light on them, he sprays each one
with Detsol, a liquid disinfectant much like Lysol that is highly toxic to them,
throws each one into a bucket, and then dumps their corpses into the woods the
next day. On a good night, Owsley will catch as many as 225 toads. During the
past month, he has dispensed with 1,400 of them.”

Moving to Far North Queensland had been a strategic move, but despite the
plague of canetoads there were other pressing ecological issues. Living in the
tropics meant getting used to tropical storms–even as far inland as Owsley was.
As he wrote in 2006 on the Active Low-Carber forums:

“We just had a powerful category 5 tropical cyclone (hurricane/typhoon) come

ashore directly west of our place, and it was still cat 3 as it passed us by. Nearly

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10" of rain so far and we had very strong wind. We have serious problems with
downed trees, and some storm-induced problems with our electrical supply and
other bits and pieces of work we must do to get it all back up and running. Cat 5
is as strong as they come. We live in a sheltered mountain valley … our road in
and out is blocked with trees, and our phones are dead … Another intense
cyclone is passing just north of us, LOTS of rain...”

Owsley had twenty years to get used to the storms, but with the increase in
‘global warming’ and warmer sea levels, the storms were getting more frequent
and more intense. “We have had two cyclones pass us this month,” he continued
writing online in 2006. “Larry, category 5, landed east of us and the eye passed
within 5 miles (south) of our place. Monica, category 5, passed just north of us
and is presently just passing by Darwin–in the Northern Territory north west of
Qld. We got lots of wind both times, more with Larry, and massive rainfall over
very short periods both times. Such storms, while they can sometimes be
destructive to trees and property, are important to us here and provide important
summer/fall rainfall during our 'wet' (season). If we fail to get at least one cyclone
in a year, we have a 'mini-drought'. So, since cyclones are actually a necessity
and are a fact of life here, most of us are well prepared to deal with the situation.”

More health problems had errupted in 2004, when Bear was diagnosed with
throat cancer. In his second public talk at the EGA 2009 conference, Bear would
frankly confide that: “I got [the] throat cancer from a virus … HTV-16, which is the
same virus … that causes cervical cancer. They discovered that purely by
chance … This thing is sexually transmitted, it makes warts. But the warts are a
small thing and you don’t notice them maybe until its too late. But anyway,
they’re very common, and oral sex is very common–I don’t think theres a porno
that doesn’t have it in it…

“This is dangerous stuff y’now… I mean this cancer grows really quickly and it
can kill you, but the virus is easy to get rid of. They hit me with the heaviest thing
you can hit. I got the sledgehammer technique … The guy who zapped me said
boy, you’ve taken the most radiation I’ve ever seen, and I said yeah, that’s what I
thought they were doing at the time [and] it scared the shit outta me. I didn’t like
the chemo thing–they said oh, you’ve only got a 40% chance without it and
you’ve got an 80% chance with it… Oh my God… Your own body tells you when
to stop.
“My old body said, well, hey, let me tell you something. Every fucking day is
precious and don’t you forget it. Every day in the now, in the present to its fullest,
try to do what you can do, you’ve got to work and do things, try to master what
youre doing. If you’ve got to wash the dishes, wash the dishes. Don’t think about
what you’d rather be doing. Make that dishwashing the best dishwashing you’ve
ever seen. It doesn’t matter what it is, anything you do, do well, or don’t do it.
What else can I say?”

In comments on the Active Low-Carber forum he frequented online in 2006, Bear

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reinterated that: “My cancer was present for 3 or 4 years, growing very slowly
and did not metastase out of the side of my neck–most likely due to my diet's
extremely low glucose turnover–most SCC of the tonsil is very aggressive and
can progress to the stage it can kill in less than one year.”

Owsley was battered by the chemotherapy, but also determined not to let it hold
him back. On his 70th birthday in 2005 he “went around and made sure
everybody was on the wavelength, literally dosing everybody up with a drop of
liquid acid on their tongue or hand–he hated paper [blotter] acid and since he
didn’t do inferior supply, it was most likely his own personal stash,” said one of
the Walsh River crew. Quite possibly he had a stash of crystal left over from his
heyday–if he had arranged John Lennon with a “lifetime supply”, he would surely
do the same for himself. But these were his golden years–it was different times;
he didnt need to make acid any longer because there wasn’t the same supply
and demand going on in his peer culture at that time. But he still liked taking it.

The aggressive chemotherapy had destroyed the soft palate of Owsley’s mouth
and left him thirty pounds lighter. “Bear was feeding himself via a tube, and he
wasn't hiding the fact,” Neil Pike remembers. “In fact, he seemed to be almost
enjoying the discomfort it was putting other people through. There he was,
standing in front of a room full of people, laying down one of his usual raves on
this that or the other–this guy was recovering from having cancer and there he
was buck naked, fixing a light in preparation for his party. He comes down the
ladder, gets this industrial horse syringe filled with pureed meat and bangs it
through a tube into his guts, whilst laying a pretty impressive rave all the time…
He certainly wasn't going to let that stop him do what he wanted to do.”

Owsley kept a positive spin on his personal adversity, but he was deeply affected
by the changes the chemotherapy caused. “The radiation [made] it impossible to
swallow anything, even water, so they wanted me to get a tube put through my
abdomen into my stomach, a 'PEG’ tube,” he explained online. “I resisted and
lost weight like crazy–I simply could not swallow enough of anything, even
protein drinks with heavy cream, and had the tube put in. Then of course they
wanted me to use a prepared liquid meal called Sustegen–carb based of course,
which I refused. I managed to get a nice food processor and made my regular
meat and fat meals, turned them into a liquid, and squirted them in with a 60 ml
syringe. Takes forever to get enough to eat that way, I can tell you.

“In the end, I still [make] soup-like meals because a nerve was crushed by the
tumour and half my throat does not contract to force solids into my esophagus.
Nothing tastes the same either (garlic helps), but that is not as bad as not being
able to simply chew up and swallow pieces of lovely rare steak. Not to complain,
I like being alive and I don't have any kind of fixation on how I eat my food.
Oysters are a love from my youth, and I can still chew them up and wash them
down ok, So all is not lost.”

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In some ways Owsley was a broken man who simply refused to admit that he
was broken. With his indomitable will he carried on doing things his way, as
always. He was running on pure willpower and, God love him, still ranting on
about his crazy trips, right to the end. According to friends he was still taking acid
on a semi-regular basis and functioning fine: “You could catch him on any
weekday tripping balls and pulling off conversation and going about his thing on
the property.” By 2009, with the economy melting down and the War on Drugs as
bad as ever, Owsley’s feverent hope was that somehow, against the odds, he
could dose strategic politicans with acid, which would then prove a game-
changer. “I’ve got to dose Obama, that’s got to happen,” he confided to a friend.

When he visited America again in 2007 to take care of business and catch up
with friends and family, his visit coincided with the 40th anniversary of the
Summer of Love, and the media, seeing an angle, started taking notice. Both the
San Francisco Chronicle and Rolling Stone wrote evocative catch up pieces on
him, Robert Greenfield noting that:

To see Owsley in action now is to understand that forty years after the Summer of
Love, the man has not really changed very much at all. Wherever he goes, he
carries an astonishing aluminum briefcase bedecked with wrinkled rock & roll
stickers and ancient Grateful Dead backstage passes stuffed to the brim with
precious scraps of platinum and gold from which he has fashioned his jewelry, a
jeweler's loup so his pieces can be viewed at close range on black felt jeweler's
boards, a small metric scale, a portable memory drive, numerous rolls of tape and
a plethora of tiny plastic film containers. In every way, the briefcase reflects his
mind.

As he cooks up the protein-rich soupy mixture that sustains him (composed, in

part, of a thick gelatinous paste he makes by boiling down countless chicken
legs), Owsley scrolls through digital photographs of his work on his laptop, burns
a CD of his live mix of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and fills a tiny
baggie with the Australian peppercorns he considers the finest in the world …
Believing ‘there is no past and no future’ because ‘everything exists only in
present time,’ it never occurs to him to drive five minutes out of his way to the
Monterey Fairgrounds where, forty years ago, his high-powered rocket fuel
helped launch the Summer of Love. For him, this is just another day on the road.

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ENTHEOGENESIS AUSTRALIS (EGA)

BUSH CONFERENCE,
OUTSIDE SWANPOOL, VICTORIA,
SUNDAY NOV 8TH, 2009

As Bear’s second talk wound down on the Sunday night the crowd of young
hipsters dispersed into the night and became electric. A bloom of trippers to the
right were taking photos over by a clump of giant paper mache magic
mushrooms, the red and white Amanita Muscaria trip, the whole Alice in
Wonderland thing, with colored lights spotlighting them. To the left, huge pillars of
fire whooshed into the night from the industrial Frankensteinery of the Mutoid
Waste Company’s fire organ, conducted by the Panish trickster Robin Mutoid at
the helm.

The vibes were liquid Californian, stronger and cleaner than most of the usual
blotter going around. It seemed like there was some sort of, not unconscious
homage to Bear, but… entrainment, maybe. It was like we were all in this giant
Acid Test ourselves, twenty four years later at the tail end of his-story, the
grandchildren of the hippies, living at that moment where the psychedelic wave of
the 1960s finally rose again. Rave culture, global trance culture, modern entheo
culture. The same memes were coming to fruition halfway round the world and
peaking in the species once more.

It didn't seem a coincidence that here was this man, the alchemist that lit the
powder fuse to the acid revolution, walking amongst us again at this time. Things
have a way of coming full circle, and having the original ‘Acid King’ back on the
ground triggered an unconscious tribal collusion to tune back into the group
mind. Gestalt mind. Presque Vu. The proof in the magic pudding. Everyone was
loaded.

I was phasing in and out of the swirling crowd, watching them wrapped in neo-tek
tribal wear and masquerade avatars for the ‘psycorroboree’ harmonic frequency
experiment. The word ‘coorroboree’ was coined by English settlers after the
Aboriginal word caribberie, meaning a ‘ceremonial meeting’ where people
interract with the Dreamtime through song and dance. DJ Krusty, a wiry,
dreadlocked elder of the local trance scene, had set up six points of surround
sound around the perimeter of a circular oval at the opposite end of the path from
the conference stage. A 12-foot geodesic dome sat at the center and in a
clearing to one side was a huge bonfire roaring out into the night.

Under the dome was a massive Ishtar Function 1 sound system, infamous on the

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Australian renegade party-protest circuit, sandwiched in the middle of two smaller

rigs either side. “Four 18 woofers produced output in a sub-frequency range,”
Boffin, one of the soundmen told me, “with a big speaker bin outputting the bass
frequencies, a couple of Res 2 low-to-high range only speakers, and two full-
range JDL speakers stuck in there to make up the six points.” It was a cobbled
together thing that was difficult to patch, and when you get that many sources of
sound the technicians had to be real careful not to get cancellation or clashes.

DJ Krusty’s idea was that underneath the music would be broadcast tonal notes
at the same vibrational resonances as various crystals. The crystals themselves
were hanging in front of each speaker box so the sound waves would pass
through them, with a seventh crystal in the middle to ground it, so they matched
the chakra levels as well. Each crystal was a different chakra color and each tone
was matched to a chakra so that the wave was a harmonic frequency that would
match the harmonic frequency of the crystal itself, and then ripple out into the
space and fill it with that energy. “In the overlap of the six sources of sound there
was meant to be a sweet spot, and it was highly technical to get it to do all that,”
Boffin recalls. And with Bear out there listening, they had better get it right.

Bear was wandering into the market, mingling with the hippies, going to different
stalls, looking at things and talking to the few people who weren’t in shock or awe
after his chastising of the audience during his last talk. I was melting through the
crowd of masked bohemians and roving performers like infamous chaos
magician Orryelle Defenestrate Bascule, who was jumping around and doing
weird magickal theatre; everywhere I looked there were freaks and ferals all
doing their own thing. Gareth with the velvet cape and velvet pants, missing a
few teeth, gorgeous in his psyber-pixieness… players everywhere.... It was less a
focused dancefloor than a space where trippers were just free to freak against
the night and the bush with some low background music to draw you in, lulling
the mind along with it.

Starfinder was grazing lightly on the nights festivities, keeping one eye on what
Bear was up to whilst letting him have full rein, and Sheilah was wandering
around doing her own thing, too. Bear was enjoying hanging out with the tribe
and entertaining the different supplicants that mustered the courage to come up
and duel with him. He never suffered fools, and didn't chat long, but you could
see that he was digging it. If he didn’t he woudn’t have been there, he would
have gone back to the bed and breakfast he was staying at off the property. No,
tonight he was in his element.

I wasn’t really able to speak but my gaze followed Bear further up the path to the
giant bonfire in the middle of a cleared circular space with a line around it, like a
magic circle. A group of young bucks seemed to be one-upping each other by
chucking logs on the fire, stoking it higher and higher till the flames licked the
night and sparks dazzled everywhere. Bear eased in up to the fire, and the
higher the flames went, the more Bear held his ground, right there on the edge of

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the inferno. This was his psychic territory and he wasn't scared a bit, no siree.
And those bucks kept throwing huge logs on and the flames kept blazing up and
out, tickling the steadfast figure of Owsley ‘Bear’ Stanley, holding the space
before them.

Those bucks had no chance.

Owsley was checking it all out: his brow narrowed, owl's eyes and diamond will
consciousness filtering the sea of energy and information around him, the
swirling tide of trippers and trance. It was just like old times.

Was he electric himself, that night, at 74? Who can say? But one thing was
certain–he was well aware of the group mind, nonetheless. “Once you've been in
the group mind it's familiar territory,” Neil Pike told me. “And surely that is the
whole art of tripping, to get to know those brain chemicals within yourself, and to
get those juices flowing in a manageable way all the time. That was Kesey’s Next
Step. To anchor the places that acid took you to. The trick was to learn, as the
Pranksters tried, to function on this stuff. Or to be somewhat sensitive to that
zone, and to be able to slide into a manageable version of that zone, without
taking the drugs. Particularily if you’re surrounded by people that have taken a
dose.”

So perhaps Bear didn't need acid to get into the acid headspace. He knew the
culture because he was one of the prime instigators of it.

"For me, personally, I deliberately took acid that night because of Bear, because
he was the special guest and all the rest of it," one of the patrons, Myz Guidance
said. "So I was quite pleased to find that the trip I had was quite fabulous. It was
really good acid. And when I saw Bear at the fire, the acid was so strong that
people in front of me were morphing into different things. And Bear definitely
morphed into a little monkey man. There was no conversation to be had; we
were IT.

“Bear was sitting at the edge of the fire–and to me it looked like he was holding a
box of some kind he was tinkering with, like he was holding a screwdriver and
doing something to it. In my vision the box was black and sparkly, half a shoebox
in size, and who knew what the hell it could be, with his penchant for weird
recording gear and the like…

“At that time my friends Margaret and Shane were standing next to me, high on
acid as well. We were drooling at each other and I think we had a hug, and we
continued watching Bear. And as he stood there, the flames licking his hunched
and wiry frame, Margaret said:

“’It's Hanuman’.

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“And she was right. The avatar of the trickster-monkey god had descended and
taken human form in Bear, fiddling with his god-box. And we started laughing and
laughing as Hanuman stood there before us, playing with his magical box. I
mean, we knew, we weren't so tripped out that we couldn't say to each other oh,
that's just his hearing aid. But as we stood around and watched him play with his
hearing gear, we saw the godform take hold, or be revealed within him; it was
very magical under the circumstances. The Alchemist amongst the faerie
children. It was great."

Like everything Bear approached in life he was totally focused on what he was
doing in the present moment, consumed in the now with a singular will. And
when his hearing aid kicked back onto the frequency, Bear was drawn to the
sound of the unspoken thing...

“And so of course around midnight as we're getting it all together Bear wanders
down and sees what we’re doing at the psycoroborree dome,” Boffin remembers.
“And he looks around at it all and he just starts losing it:

“‘You can't have surround sound … This is crap, this isn't how you run a sound
system! You need the stack all in one spot, you need to … If I were you…’” He
was like an old curmudgeon standing there in the middle of the whole crew,
telling them that they'd done absolutely everything wrong. "He was sort of like
Yoda, ribbing us in a zen-like way,” Boffin continued, “the elder monk whacking
the young monks on the back of the head to bring them into line.”

Bear hated multiple points of sound, and he was losing it and loving it at the
same time. There he was, the soundman for the Grateful Dead, creator of the
Wall of Sound, the most complicated sound rig of the 1970s and beyond, that set
in motion modern rock stadium sound delivery, at a backwoods psychedelic
gathering and smack-dab in the middle of an audacious experiment not just in
sound design, but of harmonic vibration and sonic alchemy. It was enough to
make his bionic hearing aid cream itself. These hippie kids were pissing in his
territory, and boy, was he gonna have fun setting them right.

"This is garbage why would you rig up a system this way? Why go to all this
trouble, it doesn't sound good…" he berated them. Technically, Boffin admitted,
maybe they were getting some sound cancelation in some spots. But you have to
remember that Bear heard sound differently, he had the ability to hear four-
dimensional sound, to feel it. So by all extensions of logic, it must have annoyed
the fuck out of him to hear this flat, six-sourced sound messing with the spatial-
integrity of the space. And, shades of Muir Beach, you really don’t want to flip out
Owsley with the sound gear, not after the last time that happened so
spectacularly...

“So then we tried to steer him away from the system as he continued to berate
us," Boffin confided. “‘What is this, what are you guys doing here…? You're like a

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bunch of high school kids who don't even know how to hold a dance…!’ Of
course he found it interesting, but he had to bag it out at the same time. It was
great, we were in hysterics. He reamed us hard and told us everything we were
trying to do was shit, but in the paternal way he delivered those criticisms you
couldn’t help but go along with it–and love it.

“We were trying to explain to him about the frequencies of the crystals and it
seemed to me that he wasn’t really into the whole hippie/ new age side of things,
so I didnt think he was into crystals,” Boffin concluded. Which is actually untrue,
as Bear fully appreciated the practical qualities of crystals, as he told David Gans
in 1991: “People are attracted to crystals [because] a crystalline substance has a
highly ordered electronic behaviour. And the behaviour of thought and mentation
has a highly electronic nature to it, it’s a flow of electrons.”

So it should have been right up Bear’s alley. There in the dome, Krusty and
Boffin were running sine waves in similar patterns to the frequency pattern of
each crystal. “You can go octaves and octaves and octaves up the scale from
which the crystal sits,” Krusty explained, “because the crystal is such a low sine
wave it’s not even moving into vibration and you can't hear it… you can't hear
matter. And then we were playing a similar frequency up the octave at a range
that was within hearing. For instance, an earthquake is a vibration that you can
feel because it’s much faster than matter, which is stable. Earthquakes usually
come in around 7hrz and times it by 2, times it by 2, times it by 2 and go up the
octave scale to within human hearing, you find that its actually the note ‘A’. So
you can technically say that an earthquake resonates in ‘A’.”

Curmudgeonly old Bear would have none of it, but underneath one sensed a
begrudging respect for what was going on, or at least that some of the ideas and
principles that he was into and had pioneered were still being explored, even if by
incomptetents and dilettantes. Not that he would never be able to say that. “It
wasn't necessarily an ego trip,” Boffin said, “but he liked to let you know that he
was the ‘Obi-Wan’ of the room." Inscrutable and ornery old Jedi masters never
do say it outright, you see, its all about the unspoken thing.

“And so, even though we explained about the crystal frequencies underneath the
music, all he could hear was DJ Krusty's trance being played really loud,” Boffin
explained. “The other stuff was there but it was just a physicality coming out into
the space along with the music. So there was Bear in the middle of all this being
a curmudgeon and we were at the zen master's feet trying to explain ourselves
as the energy got all scattered and hectic at that point. He had walked into the
middle of this medatitive thing we had tried to create and was ranting about it.

“And in the midst of all this chaos this typical farmer woman storms in from
nowhere and says that she's the neighbor and she starts telling us we were
making way too much noise and that we had to shut the whole thing off–now.”
She was going to send her husband down with an axe if the sound wasn't

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stopped, and you don’t want to mess with an axe weilding farmer in the middle of
the night in the Aussie bush whilst on acid, no siree.

Krusty was trying to talk her down and he managed to get her to have a smile on
her face, but the chaos was peaking. Finally they agreed to turn off the main
music till after dawn, and so just like that the music went out. But the crystal
frequencies went on. “We played the frequencies amplified at mid-volume and let
the chakra tones ripple out into the night,” Krusty remembers. Bear was still not
impressed. And neither was the audience in general, as the more ambient
sounds frittered the focus of the crowd away. The collective consciousness was
let loose into the night.

And what, can we only wonder, would the prime creator have thought about the
scene he had not so inadvertedly helped create? It could have been very nice
doof music, electronic trance, but he still wouldn’t dig it. Many a doofer had tried
to turn him onto Sphongle back in the day, but when Neil Pike played him their
CD, Owsley had replied, "It’s not doing anything for me. I haven't heard anything
yet that I like… Not a round wave amongst it.” And he was right. As Pike says,
“it’s all samples, all square waves. There's a difference between analogue and
digital sound that most audio technicians who have worked with both will tell you.
Analogue’s warmer, and kids these days don’t know anything about it,
particularlily the iPod generation. Put an MP3 through a PA system and it’s bad
sound.”

After the neighbors complained about the amplified noise all the things you need
in a shamanic dance ritual–starting at sunset, dancing through the night to
amplified music and greeting the dawn, having gone on a transmorgification of
the soul, none of those things could happen at EGA that year, in that space.
“However there was still this “good thing that happened that came out of that,
this… Acid Test of sorts,” Pike remembers. “The culture was still going, there
were people exploring these realms, trying to figure them out and do something
in that space. It was creative, and artistic, and high, and friendly–all of which
were factors he valued in the Dead culture and that he helped create, now here
Down Under.”

It was definitely high, I can vouch for that. As I started coming up on a huge wave
of my own, I climbed a small hill in the dark and looked down on the conference.
It looked like a faerie village at night, awash with colored lights on tipis, domes,
and installation art, the whoosh of the fire organ billowing out occasional jets of
fire that blazed through the air. There was also a gentle ambient soundtrack
rippling out from the dome, pierced by the glossalalia croon of witches carried on
the wind. I couldn’t hear the crystals, but it felt as if every cell of my being could
feel them, still vibrating, pulsing their chakra activation energies into the group
circuit. I tilted my head and fell into the sounds of the night, the vibe of the tribe,
the electric Atlantean hum that seemed to radiate from us all as we pulsed to the
sound and the glow and the moment here and now and way back when and all

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times as one, in the ever-present NOW––

As I looked up at the clouds a quirk of the wind, or physics, or both, warped the
cloudbank directly above the party into an archetypal saucer shape. And as the
crowd pulsed to and fro below, eddying and swirling in a tribal flow, I could feel
their energy, and that of all those who had come before, all of us awakened on a
cellular level by these planetary exo-pheremones. I felt like Bear at Muir Beach,
logged into a patchwork gestalt consciousness, hearing the tribe in my head,
feeling them dance upon the earth…

A species pattern recognition washed over me then as a great pressure built in

my head and in the clouds above me. And I was certain there was this…thing…
up there, pushing down, but not from above the cloudbank, from a higher
dimensional space entirely. A cosmic mothership like the tip of a watermelon
pushed down, drawn by the vibrational siren-call of the gestalt mind we had
become, and I was so so so so close–but to getting it–or losing it?

I looked down at our gestalt tribe, the children of the children of the hippies, of
the far-reaching waves of change that acid unleashed on the planet all those
years ago. Oh, how could these bright young ‘ultras’ sitting here in the Australian
bush in 2009 have any idea that the Central Intelligence Agency–the CIA–was
directly responsible for their whole hippie lineage? Here now, 40 years after
Woodstock, were the children of the children of the MK-ULTRA, the third
generation whose DNA–the scaremongering of the press said in the 60s–has
been altered by LSD.

Well what if it had? Not chromosome damage as they tried to slander it, but
awakening? What if they were different, all of us that have been touched by LSD,
different now? Or as French philosopher Henri Bergson had so wildly speculated,
perhaps the universe was a “machine for the production of gods,” after all. Like
the center of a cyclone, or some species-molecular-chain diagram, the crowd
down below was amassed in such a way, organically and invisibly, to create a
circuit. A human crop circle, ground zero entheogenesis.

…And then it hit me… like lightning, white lightning, out of the blue. Like Kesey
on the beach down in Mexico…

And I went outside and there was an electrical storm, and there was lightning
everywhere and I pointed to the sky and lightning flashed and all of a sudden I
had a second skin, of lightning, electricity, like a suit of electricity, and I knew it
was in us to be superheroes and that we could become superheroes or nothing.

And I realized we were an ultraculture, not a counterculture, all of us seeds

ignited by Bear's lightning, like Zeus with his thunderbolts shooting down from
Heaven. We weren’t counter to the mainstream culture, that was a mistake to

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believe we were in opposition. The ultraculture was the latest evolutionary wave
holding the vibration that had been peaking throughout history–the pattern-signal
recognition of the planetary mind–anchoring it in our cells, our dreams and our
deeds, tuning us in to the greater reality.

What did Bear think then, of this generation, and the psychedelics that had been
tuning in the species for three successive generations now? As he wrote on his
website, [Link]: “...Psychedelics are a gift of nature that brings tribalism to
people; they bring an understanding of the ecology of the planet and the
interaction of all living things, because that's one of the first things you become
aware of when you take psychedelics–how everything is alive and how
everything depends on everything else. You go take a look at every indigenous
culture that has a respect for its environment–unlike the hierarchical approach of
the feudalistic structures that the world is now run by–and you will find that these
people use psychedelics of some sort, usually in a regular, ritualized manner.”

If, as Bear's theory suggests, that nature herself is in a reciprocal relationship

chemically messaging us humans, then her message was loud and clear: go
green. Go back to the garden, with all its fruits of consciousness and abundance.
get back in synch with Mother Earth and our rightful place in the web of life. And
as the Acid Tests fueled the Goa Scene, which gave birth to the global trance
movement, a more commercial, commodified but still tribal altered state of mind
is now experienced by millions of youth that is an antidote to the hierarchical
control systems imposed on us by elites who think they run the show.

“The music of the Grateful Dead is an important assistant to the revival of

tribality,” Bear said on his website. “Because it has to do with the way things are.
It's not somebody's idea about the way things might be, or the way things could
be or should be. It's what it is. It's real music about real things. The whole thing is
about a social movement. It's tribalism. Which is the only social structure that is
truly human. The structure of the world today runs on feudalism–governments,
companies; all those structures are feudalistic, arranged in a hierarchy which at
the root of it follows Parkinson's law. That is, once you create a hierarchy or
bureaucracy, it has only one purpose, and that is: To Continue. There's nothing
else. But that has nothing to do with the tribal entity. The tribal entity exists so as
to abide in harmony with its environment. It's something that benefits everyone,
not just this one structure.”

An eternity passed before I walked back down to the gathering below, drawn like
a moth to the flame of the bonfire, radiating white light from the centre of the
nuculeus. Stray ‘ultraculturals’ were clumped round about five metres out from
the white hot center of the flames, circled in a ring. Clusters of paper mache
amanita muscaria mushrooms were dotted around, and it hit me then that like the
mushroom, these people, too, were spores–all of us, spores. Green laser light-
flower of life symbols were projected on the treescapes behind them, the night
awash with projections and light.

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The 1960s was the first modern generation to fully re-discover the shamanic
modality, and the group mind and vibration that underscored it. And while at
times even Bear and the Grateful Dead themselves may have shied away from it,
if you could lock in that vibration and start to drive the group mind… Well, who
knows where that might have gone? Or where it’s still headed? Evolution can
sometimes seem slow and then surge ahead in an instant. It can’t be stopped–
perhaps the only true mistake is thinking that the group mind can forced into
being.

When acid saturated the culture of the 1960s "we discovered a new way to think,
and it has to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind,” Ken Kesey told
the BBC in 1987. “Why is it that people think it's so evil? What is it about it that
scares people so deeply, even the guy that invented it, what is it? Because
they're afraid that there's more to reality than they have confronted. That there
are doors that they're afraid to go in, and they don't want us to go in there either,
because if we go in we might learn something that they don't know. And that
makes us a little out of their control."

Gestalt consciousness, like acid itself, is all about loss of the individual ego, as it
opens up to something larger than itself. Society is the largest group mind we
have, and with that example we can see there's always a push-pull relationship
with change, with progress and repression, freedom and control. You need both
to work, like an accelerator needs brakes, they're both an extension of one
another. That's how the rough beast slouching towards Jerusalem to be born
always travels. In waves.

It’s the whole Kesey trip on the beach in Mexico, high on acid: it’s all waves, all
vibration, and sometimes the wave becomes a tsunami. It's been waiting, as
Kesey would say, the unspoken thing, just waiting for the right set and setting,
the critical mass to bring it back to the fore–building, just like Bear’s
superstorm…

And the time is near…

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ENTHEOGENESIS AUSTRALIS (EGA)

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY FOYER,
OUTSIDE THE MAIN LECTURE HALL,
SATURDAY 11/14/2009

One week later, on Saturday, Novermber 14, Bear was at it again for a command
performance at the off-Melbourne University lecture hall for the day-long EGA
conference in the city.

I lounged around with Bear, Sheilah, Starfinder and the EGA crew in the foyer of the
auditorium, and finally nailed that most elusive of interviews from the master as he
waited to deliver his last talk. Bear had warmed up to me by now, and I’d even
agreed to take some cactus back home for him and arrange to get it to him up in Far
North Queensland. He was still an ornery, cantenkerous, commanding figure, and I
still annoyed the hell out of him, but we had come to some type of unspoken truce, a
begrudging respect.

I understood, now: He was Owsley, the onetime ‘Acid King’, and he was a significant
historical person. It remains to be seen in the big picture where the ripples he
started will go. By their very nature ripples dissipate, but at the least, you can
view the last forty years or so of cultural change as being directly affected by
Bear. And so I wanted one last take for the historical record, one last interview
with him, to get his message across.

The Unbearable Truth

by Rak Razam

[Owsley Stanley interview 11/14/09]

Rak: How did you find the weekend and the four days in the bush?

Bear: I liked it, I had a good time... It was cold, there were too many flies, there was no
food and no cream...

Kath Williamson: And you loved every minute of it!

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Bear: No. But I had a good time talking. Once I got the sound guy to listen to me and we
got the PA set up... He should have left it [the way I told him] the day before when I set
it up... I told him how to reset the board and everything... He had a board with seven
independent outputs and he was using two of them and taking the pre-fade list which is
what you use to monitor the things and putting them into one BUS and feeding that into
his recorder... I said you gotta be nuts! Of course that blows all the channels down and
causes distortion, and you have no way of finding a fault if there is one... He could have
easily set it to any of the auxilaries for a nice stereo feed instead of mono.

Rak: How did you find the people [at EGA] that you were talking to? Did you think they
received your ideas well?

Bear: I have no idea–I hope so.

Rak: I heard a lot of good feedback, I think people were impressed by your ability as an
elder to come out and share your wisdom with the modern generation.

Bear: I don't give speeches. I'd like to know what people would like to hear here.

Rak: I think people are interested in your legacy. I mean, I think of you as the 'shaman
of the Haight Ashbury'...

Bear: I never had anything to do with that... I never lived in the Haight Ashbury, I never
lived in San Francisco, I just hung out there. I was never a hippie. I saw the hippies as a
real danger to our community and sure enough they destroyed the whole scene very
quickly.

Rak: Well who was the 'community' if it wasn't the hippies?

Bear: A bunch of us taking acid and having a good time very carefully, and below the
radar.

Rak: But then when you started sharing the acid you made with people like the
Warlocks, who went on to become the Grateful Dead–now that was a very psychedelic
community.

Bear: That's right, but that wasn't on the street, waving and shouting it about. It wasn't
like Tim Leary saying: "Fuck your parents! Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out!" I said to him,
Tim, you can't do that! ... That brought psychedelics into prohibition. And prohibition is
the problem.
The most important thing I have to say to anyone, anywhere, is that they have to legalize
drugs, and I mean not decriminalize, not harm reduce, legalize. Make them available on
an open market and you can control them, you can limit them, do anything you want
according to your plan–and I have a plan! I'm not just saying you've got to figure one out,

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I have a plan that can be followed or modified, but it has to be done because we will not
recover from the [current] economic collapse until the drugs are taken out of the mix.
The worse it gets the more money goes to the black market. So as the economy
deteriorates more and more people will try to sell drugs and more people will use their
stimulus packages to buy drugs, etc. Jobs are not being created they're fading away.
Australia can do its dance with China for a long time, but the US will go down, Europe
will go down, the Taliban will get more powerful, and Al Queda will start spreading out...
We'll have problems down here and China will have problems...

Rak: If the government legalized drugs tomorrow what do you think the social
repercussions would be from people having elevated consciousness?

Bear: I don't think they would have elevated consciousness, number one. Most of the
common drugs of recreation do not elevate consciousness. And what they'll do is, people
will use less of them. There won't be anyone out there flogging it because you can't sell a
pound of marijuana at $2500 when you can grow it by throwing a seed in a compost
heap.

See, if you grow for your own use, and even if you extract hash from it, or grow poppies
for your own use, that is, extract opium from it, and even if you don't sell it to anybody,
that's your business. As soon as you either concentrate that to THC or morphine, or
heroin, or as soon as you try to sell that, you have to have a license and a register and all
that.

In order to buy a drug you have to have passed a course–and you'd get a license like a
driver's license, and like how they are endorsed for cars ... you have to be endorsed for
the drug you want. Then if you want a powder drug you go to a doctor and you get a
script. If you want cannabis you just go to a place where someone is selling, where they
have a license and you can buy it. You do not pay a tax on that. You do pay a fee. In
Australia the constitution says all taxes go to general revenue, and that includes road
taxes, which is why our roads are deteriorating. Any type of health tax goes to general
revenue.

So [drugs] can't be taxed, they have to be [licensed] under a fee, and specifically a fee to
provide for the education of the users, a card and health care if the users screw
themselves up on stupid shit. A course of education would help people detox and get out
of [their addiction], all of that. It would regulate and license the people who are doing it,
all of that can be covered by a fee–and not a big fee.
If you raise taxes then the government is in the business of promoting [the thing taxed]. If
you put a fee on it that's too high or a tax, then it's the same as prohibition. People say,
oh, I'm not going to pay thirty-five or forty dollars for an ounce of tobacco when I can get
it for a dollar and a half from a farmer who makes about thirty-five cents from that and is
glad to give it out for that because the government's giving them less.

Rak: But say they do that and the government was to legalize drugs–and the government

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must be the worst ones to try and instruct us on the spiritual use of drugs –

Bear: There is no spiritual use–that's a figment of your imagination.

Rak: But many people have spiritual responses to certain drugs–

Bear: There's no such thing as an entheogen [Latin for 'evoking the divine within'] .
Drugs do not create gods–

Rak: But they can reveal god within.

Bear: They don't reveal anything, I'm sorry.

Rak: But have you had spiritual/illuminating moments on acid, for instance?

Bear: I don't think you'd call them spiritual, but yeah I've seen a whole bunch of shit, you
wouldn't believe what I've done.
Rak: Bear, you've also promoted the theory of planetary exo-pheremones, that the planet
itself secretes these substances [plant entheogens] to interact and shape us...

Bear: Yes, but that doesn't mean it's doing so to create a god within... [The planet] is
creating [these things] because it's like an amplifier. I can't hear without my hearing aid,
but with it now I can hear you. The acid does the same thing. It turns your knobs up. It
makes whoever you are a little bit louder. It brings things into you and raises them up and
gives you more fine detail like a high-quality tv.

Rak: It's a tool to use.

Bear: it is a tool for anyone. Like when you get your male hormones and hair sprouts and
your balls grow, you're suddenly interested in girls and all that; that's part of your
development. I think you get to a certain point and to go further you need these
consciousness altering substances. You can't say whether they're spiritual or they create
gods, because the only god there is–is not a god. God is the universe we live in and he is
the ALL. There is nothing outside of it. There's no time outside of it so it had no
beginning and it can't have an end–there's no such thing as the Big Bang.
Rak: There was an idea promulgated by people like Aldous Huxley that the elites or the
government, etc., should take acid to open them up the full gamut of human experience,
in the hope that it would make them better leaders and they would make wiser decisions
for the planet. Do you agree with that?

Bear: About what?

Rak: You’ve said previously that acid brings out and amplifies what people have within
them, so for instance on acid the Hell’s Angels become better fighters, and hippies better
hippies, etc…

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Bear: Here’s what I found out, okay. You take a bunch of soldiers and without doing
anything, you put them into battle. Some of them don’t fire their guns, some do fire their
guns, and some do become killers. You take the same soldiers and you dose them all with
acid and have a battle, and at the end there’ll be the same number that didn’t fire their
guns, the same number that did fire their guns and the same number that became killers–
except that they’re more confused, make more mistakes and lose more equipment. And
shoot more of their own companions. It’s absolutely worthless.

What [acid] does is very personal. It doesn’t improve; it doesn’t make you religious; it
isn’t spiritual; it doesn’t improve society. It may not improve your functionality within
society, but it will enable you to explore certain growth factors. You may go there or you
may not. If you go to college and spend twenty years studying art, you may never
produce a work of great value. Someone else who has never been in a studio may pick up
a paintbrush and do a painting that will blow your mind. You either have a talent or you
don’t. And you can’t amplify a talent you don’t have.

And so a talentless person taking acid won’t become better at anything. Over the years
I’ve watched acid given to family and friends and if they’re unbalanced it will definitely
unplug them and set them adrift. Some people should never take anything–some people
shouldn’t even smoke pot, or drink alcohol–it just sets them adrift. That’s just the way it
is–there’s a spectrum of [reactions] because people come in all different shapes and sizes
with all different abilities and capabilities to deal with things like that.

We just want to put a label on something and I’m saying that the acid and psychedelics
and things like that are extremely difficult to label. I still think, though, that ‘psychedelic’
is a good name because it means ‘mind manifesting’, it doesn’t really mean much of
anything, we’re just changing our mind, mind altering.
It’s like saying the water’s hot–well how hot? Compared to what? The room temperature
of water is hot compared to dry ice. In fact I’ve used the room temperature of ice as a
heat source to distill some of the things that we use in acid because it was cool enough
not to destroy the substance … So it’s relative, it’s all relative.
It’s people that want to put labels on stuff. They want to put limits and names to it to give
it some type of pigeon hole. And some things don’t pigeon hole.
Rak: What about things like DMT, [or DET] what are your thoughts on that? I find it
such a powerful experience…
Bear: What can I say? You’ve already taken it so you know. There’s nothing I can tell
you. You can’t share experiences of that kind. Someone asked me, what’s acid like? Well
take it, open your mouth. Find out. It’s not otherwise possible to find out, its not that kind
of thing.
It’s like saying to someone who’s colorblind that they can find out what color’s like…
You can’t tell somebody who can’t think in color what color is about. You can’t tell
people who are deaf what music is like.

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Rak: So what was the point of the Acid Tests of the 60s, with Kesey and the Grateful
Dead and people like you who realized the point was to evolve beyond acid... to go
beyond the doorway acid revealed...?

Bear: No it wasn't. There was no point to the Acid Tests...

Rak: Well that's what the literature says, like Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test...

Bear: I don't care what the literature says, no sir...

Rak: Well what was the Acid Tests all about?

Bear: Having a great time getting stoned out of your mind and seeing what you could
make happen. It had nothing to do with any of that other shit. You can't go back and
analyze all that and write a book about it, its nonsense. Ask Kesey, if you wanted to know
how to get that Gestalt [mind] going, he'd say oh, you don't even talk about that.
Sometimes it happened, sometimes it didn't. There were very specific things you did to
make it come together but you didn't talk about it.

Rak: It was play...

B: Yeah... Now Humphrey Osmond was a psychiatrist and he used acid a lot in his
treatment. And he said that acid alters or changes the mind, and makes manifest, so he
coined the term 'psychedelic'. There were other terms like psycho-mimetic, but acid
doesn't really mimic psychosis. They said hallucinogen, but those are not hallucinations,
you see. And now they say entheogen, and I think that is so far from reality that it leads
you down some weird path... spirituality... oh my God, you know... Spirit is in the forest
and you'd better eat your vegetables, despite the fact that your body's not prepared to eat
vegetables at all... Oh, you can't kill animals– what, you think plants aren't conscious?
There's no living thing on this planet, including bacteria, that's not conscious.

The most conscious thing on this planet, and you may not believe this, is an algae that
grows in the sea. It’s the diotomes and plankton that create the oxygen and air around us.
It's three billion years old, almost as old as the planet and it started out 80% oxygen and
14% nitrogen, methane and everything else in the atmosphere and it took all the CO2 and
used it to create all this organic material, and it was the oil that floated it. But a diotome
is made of silicon and it’s like a little petri dish that you add oil to and it circulates. And
if it gets too deep and gets too cold, water contracts and down it goes. So liquid
petroleum that you pump up out of the ground is up to a billion years old.

And what's left when you take the oil out? The oil cavity. Coal, brown coal, peat– that's
from the land, the land has to form that, that's why it’s a rock hard thing. The oil is only
found where it used to be sea bottoms which are now continents. You go out into the
oceans you have now and all that granite [comes from] the moon. So you can't find any
oil out there, you can only find it on the continental shelves around the continents and in
the continents themselves. But literally, I would say within five hundred metres of any

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spot on this planet, there's oil. They know how to find it and mine it–there's more oil than
you could possibly use, no matter how you try. And every bit of that oil that you burn
returns the most basic nutrient for life on this planet back to the atmosphere–and that's
carbon dioxide.

Plants actually have two foods, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Phosphorous, pot ash, all the
rest of those things are like vitamins, they're mineral supplements.

Rak: So you think global warming is a naturally occurring event?

Bear: There's no such thing. It doesn't happen it hasn't happened it can't happen. It cannot
happen. Our planet is governed by water vapor. Have you ever heard of anybody running
a steam engine on carbon dioxide? Or methane? You can't do it. When you take water as
ice and melt it it takes 750 calories per gram to melt it. When you take water and turn it
into steam its takes 1050 calories per gram to turn it into steam. That's a huge amount of
energy that's transported back and forth as water changes state. When water condenses in
the air it forms an opaque cloud that's a great reflector of heat and everything else. Yet
too much moisture, or too much evaporation from too much heat and bang–you get a
cloud that reflects extra heat away. It traps the heat in and traps the heat out. It evaporates
water and moves the heat somewhere else, as with rain. You take the heat from here and
put it there.

So presently we have an atmospheric turmoil that's a build up to an ice age storm which
is the next wave.

Rak: So it's a natural cycle.

Bear: It'll happen within a few years but it's a long cycle. The last storm like this was
140,000 years ago. We've had 11,000 years–which is normally 10,000, and we're right at
the end of the period, we've had an extra 1,000 years of fun and we're about to have a
very destructive storm in the northern hemisphere–that's why I'm in Australia. In order
for that storm to happen the first thing that has to occur is water levels have to rise a
certain amount, and the ice from the Arctic Ocean must melt away. That then creates a
tremendous flow of heat in and out of the Arctic and in the meantime the atmosphere
becomes more and more turbulent with more heavy storms and floods and things like
that. And all that heat moves from the tropics to the poles to melt the ice.

And in order for the heat to get from here to there it has to pass you. And when it does
you experience warming. Now 95% of all the weather stations on the planet are in the
temperate zones on land, so they all say it's getting warmer. But if you take a pan-global
satellite analysis, which does exist, by the way, it says the planet is cooling. You can't
melt ice without taking heat out of the system and you can't get heat in faster to replace it.

Rak: is it true you studied ballet?

Bear: Of course.

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Rak: And why did you choose ballet?

Bear: It's beautiful. I like it. I saw a guy dancing [ballet] and I liked it, and went down
and signed up for a class–I was 23. I went backstage to talk to the dancer and I couldn't
talk to him because he spoke Russian, so I signed up for a Russian class as well. So I
learned to speak Russian and I learned to dance. And I wound up dancing a few parts in
local neighborhood dance companies, but then I found out I'd have to join a union, and
the highest pay I could expect, unless I was a soloist, was about a hundred dollars a
week. And it cost fifty to buy my classes. And if you take ten classes a week you don't
have any energy to do anything and all your money's going for rent and food–so I didn't
see a future in it. I'd already proven I could do it.

Rak: Bear, I look at you as a bit of a Renaissance Man, in that you have the skills and
ability to put whatever you put your mind to. And so when the acid opportunity came
along–

Bear: Well that was obvious. I wanted to take the acid and I couldn't find anything good,
and I tried four or five different ways...

Rak: Your girlfriend Melissa, was she making acid at the time?

Bear: I was making acid. She helped me. It takes a lot of time to do that. I didn't know
any chemistry at the time–I'd played around with rocket fuels and I'd taken a basic course
in inorganic chemistry, but I hadn't done the lab work and so I failed the course. So I
learned what I needed to know to cook acid in less than three weeks in the library. I
found out very quickly that the apparatus wasn't quite right and some of the information
was missing. So I designed some apparatus and I worked around and found out what was
missing and I had glassware built for that. And so within a year I was successful in
crystalizing acid.

Rak: And so it wasn't just a commercial endeavor for you to make money...

Bear: Never. Are you kidding? I would make a certain batch and we'd have to sell some
of it because it was expensive [to produce]...

Rak: And you gave a lot of it away...

Bear: About half of it.

Rak: Which was millions of doses?

Bear: No, wrong. I made less than... I made about 420 grams of which the government
confiscated a hundred [grams], so it was somewhere about half a pound... so 250... and
we used to dose it out to about 3600 doses to a gram, which was a little over 300
micrograms per hit. I must have made somewhere between 850-900,000 doses of acid.

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And only about 200 or 300,00 were done properly, some of it had to go...

Rak: But strategically you were in the right place at the right time to be the person who
made the acid and disseminate it...

Bear: I don't know anything about that... I wanted to take it, my friends wanted to take it,
and if you wanted to make it one batch, starting with 15 grams of lysergic acid
monohydrate, well the way I did it you ended up with 15 grams of lysergic acid
diethylamide.. and 15 times 3600 is a lot of doses of acid! And that's just one tiny batch!
So I'd make about 45 or 30 grams...

Rak: And your acid was the most famous of the period... names for your acid like 'White
Lightning' still resonate today...

Bear: Well I didn't do anything about that; it was a mistake that my name was attached to
it. I gave the first batch to a musician friend of mine and he told everyone who made it. I
asked Perry [Letterman] why the fuck he did that... It wasn't illegal at the time but I still
didn't want my name attached to it because I knew that this stuff was so powerful, so
strange and so weird that it wouldn't stay legal for long. But you could keep it legal by
being quiet about it, but oh no, that got destroyed big time.

Rak: Well, when your lab was raided the first time [in 1965] your lab was still legal, and
you went as far as suing the government to get your lab equipment back.

Bear: They didn't raid me for acid. They raided me because some moronic kid was
staying in my apartment and he sold some speed out the front door to an agent. So they
came back looking for me and they found a little laboratory. I was in the process of
figuring out the acid process so there was no speed there. So they took all my stuff
anyway and then arrogantly said fuck you. And I said no, you can't do that.
They told me to get a court order and so in less than a week I was back with a court order
that named that officer and named the state. I told them they had to give back everything:
all the glassware and all the chemicals. The court said to me that these [chemicals] were
poisons and I said to them so what? Lots of things are poision. Draino's poison. And I
picked up my stuff and walked out.
And that guy and that crew, the state narcs, never fucked with me again. They weren't
involved in my federal bust or anything. I said fuck with me baby and I will bite your
fucking noo-noo's off! And I did. And then he fucked with this lawyer I know and they
canned him, quicktime. He was a big guy, top of the department and everything, but he
fucked with the wrong people and he got the shaft right up his butt.

Rak: You were probably one of the most famous alchemists of the 60s but there were
others, like Tim Scully, Nick Sand, etc...

Bear: I should've stuck with Nick, he seemed to be dedicated but he didn't look like he
would do the quality...

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Rak: Was he your apprentice?

Bear: Tim [Scully was]. I said Tim, I can't figure out why you would want to do this. I
couldn't figure out his motivations and I don't think he knew either. He was so wrong that
the first time I introduced him to one of my suppliers they turned him in. Every time he
turned around he did something to get into trouble. I dealt with everybody–I could call
and order...crazy stuff... I could get large quantities of chemicals and things in the mail
because I knew what to say and how to say it.. No one ever turned me in for anything.

The cops would watch my house for three or four months continuously and they saw me
come and go only once. And yet I would come and go every day. So I don't know...

Rak: William Burroughs practised that same thing–going under the radar and not being
seen... el hombre invisible...

Bear: I've gone through security checks where I had to open up film cannisters full of
weed and as they were doing so I would be thinking... there's absolutely nothing you're
interested in here whatsoever... and it works... they must look at it but not see it... And the
other thing is that I was trained as an actor. I was trained in the Michael Chekhovian
method acting school. Which is different from Stanislavski, where you create the
character in the script. In Chekhov you discover the character and then impersonate it. I
knew how to direct anyone, anywhere by just talking to them.

Rak: Getting back to making acid, there is this theory that the alchemist imprints a bit of
themselves on their creation.

Bear: Alchemists believed the universe was conscious. They weren't imprinting
anything; they weren't doing anything except trying to pretend to make gold out of lead
so that the church wouldn't burn them at the stake.

Rak: I mean the modern chemists nowdays and in the 60s which are sometimes called
alchemists. One of the theories in psychedelia is that the quality of acid [or other
chemicals] is affected by the consciousness of the maker.

Bear: Well I thought so, but I do a lot of things strangely. I thought that. You're taking
something absolutely inert and turning it into something so powerful–a microgram will
do it–that you can warp the universe. It was so powerful that I always moved it around–I
wouldn't make it in one place for more than two or three weeks because I felt the place
would get all twisted.

Rak: Do you have any regrets about how the 60s turned out? About how the psychedelic
movement collapsed?

Bear: Well what can you say? Let me tell you something. If you have regrets and you
look back and worry, think you're born too late or something, then you're missing your

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life. Stay in present time and don't worry about such things. If you open your mind and
look around there's all kind of opportunities. But you'll miss it all if you do that. Worry
about the past? Forget it. I don't worry about the past and I don't remember most of it.
Someone said to me once that I should write a book and I said–about what?

Rak: Do you think the psychedelic culture of the 60s was detourned?

Bear: It [was] distorted by illegality. It [was] full of covert behavior. It [was] full of
people that [were] full of being frightened. Freaking out on acid? You don't freak out on
acid. They're freaking out because suddenly they realize they're doing something very
illegal and if they get caught they might be put in jail for a long time.

Rak: Do you think the [War on Drugs is] religious persecution?

Bear: No, I think it's stupid, that's all. It's the result of putting laws on something which
is a natural human right. And yet no one has the bravery to go to the Human Rights Court
and say that the worldwide prohibition on drugs is an absolute violation of the basic right
of all humans–and animals–to alter their consciousness.

Rak: That message is absolutely correct but do you think governments would listen to
anyone saying it? Would they let that message be heard?

Bear: Well that's the point of me talking [at conferences like Entheogenesis Australis]. If
you listen to what I say, which obviously you haven’t–I’m doing this with the hope that
there’s an ear somewhere that will understand exactly what I say; will see it opened up
and will know who to talk to and how to tell them. Who to talk to–we know basically
that; how to tell them and when to tell them and where to tell them–all of those things are
critical. [For change to happen] it requires someone who has that ability, has the contacts,
and is intelligent enough to actually drop this weird screen that makes people think that
prohibition is stopping or reducing drugs, when in fact it's spreading and increasing it.

We have to do this. We have people killing themselves by the hundreds in Mexico going
across the border with drugs. 95% of the world's heroin production is growing in poppy
fields in Pakistan and Afghanistan under the Taliban. The Taliban have a cash flow that's
over the roof and Al Qaeda are the same way. All all of this endangers the whole world
… Their idea is to produce a Taliban-style Shaira government worldwide. Every singe
person on the planet would be subjected to the same [paradigm] the poor Afghanis were
subjected to before the U.S. went in there. But the U.S. went in there [reprimanding]
'naughty-naughty' like–they should have gone in there and blown their heads off. You
will not defeat the Taliban until you kill every last one of them. You cannot convert them.
You cannot change them.

Rak: But isn't that similar to the American ideology? The American zealotism and the
Neo-Con agenda was very much that they could save the world–their way?

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Bear: It's stupid. Americans are mostly Christian fundamentalists. If you start out
believing in nonsense, the world becomes nonsense. If you sit down and pray for an hour
five times a day then you're brainwashed. Who or what are you praying to–some
imaginary thing? It's like some yoga practises–you chant until you become so stoned that
you have an acid-like experience. You're living in an imaginary world that is not coherent
with the secular world around you.
And if someone tells you the best thing for you to do is to strap these explosives on and
go down to the marketplace they do it! They're promised this, that and the other–but what
the fuck does a ghost want with [heavenly] virgins? They say there's 72 virgins in heaven
but where's heaven? Do you know anybody that's been there? What does heaven need
with virgins?
Rak: What I'm interested in though, is if they did legalize all drugs, absorbed the black
market economy money back into the regular economy and propped it up, what then
would the affect be on global culture? What would it do to our consciousness to have
access to drugs without legal limitation?

Bear: I don't know. Drugs have been with us since pre-historic times. If you go back half
a million or a million years or whatever, however far back you want to go to consider
humans separate from animals–but even animals like to get high. I've watched animals
get high, even wild animals. Coffee growers in Ethiopia have trouble with wild goats
eating their coffee. In the past I've had dogs get into my plants and get so stoned they
can't walk–and any chance they get they're right back at it again.
That's part of the living process of the animals to want to alter their restricted
consciousness which you have to have in animals to make decisions. Plants don't have
egos, they're in communion with the manifest all the time. They're the most holy things
on the planet. And yet people say they won't eat animals, yet they'll eat the most
conscious things on the planet and kill them without regard for them, destroy and cook
them!

Rak: Aren't plants at the top of the Gaian food chain, because they drink in the light?
And the animals eat the plants, etc...

Bear: Not so. Bullshit. They're at the bottom of the food chain. They create the compost
that everybody's made out of. Light's not life. Life comes from DNA/RNA and proteins.

Rak: But it's fed by the light.

Bear: But plants are actually fed by carbon dioxide. Are you fed by the fire that cooks
your food? The light operates the chlorophyll that creates the organic molecules from
which life is formed. The carbon dioxide, chlorophyll, and nitrogen which creates
everything including the proteins, you have all those things which people think are
fertilizers, which in fact allow the plant to build the structures to do what they do. But
plants are at the bottom of the food chain and everything above them are a higher order of
consciousness. And at the topmost level are the carnivores. So ideally there should be a

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few of them and lots at the bottom–it's a pyramid.

Those animals at the top are not supposed to go down to eat the food from below. It's bad
for their health and it's bad for the planet because there gets to be too many of them. Why
are there six bloody billion people on this planet? About 100 million is about all we really
need. I'd rather see cows grazing and trees growing, lots of fish in the ocean and nobody
crowded or fighting over territory. If we were all carnivores still that's how it could be,
and no one with bad teeth, heart disease or obesity, etc. That's how we were, before.

Slavery is what made us vegetable eaters and once that started about 10,000 years ago,
our bodies fell apart and our culture took a bad turn, and cruelty and slavery crept into it.
And all the bad stuff has to do with eating vegetables! Some people say how do you
know that a meat diet is good? And I say well, I’ve been eating it for 51 years, if there
was something wrong with it surely I’d know in 51 years. If something disagrees with
you, you get the shits or you barf. If it doesn’t disagree with you and you like the taste of
it, well you can eat it till the end.
For a lot of people when they hear about my meat diet the reaction is well, that’s not what
mom taught them. If they were happy [trying] that, do it. If not, don’t do it. You don’t
live very long so you shoud enjoy it. It’s very difficult to change your diet. It’s like
changing your country, or your style, or your language. You record that stuff at an
instinctive level.

Rak: How did you first choose to eat a meat only diet?

Bear: I had a lot of trouble keeping my weight down and I wanted to be a ballet dancer,
and then I read a book about the eskimos and I thought shit, that's right, I knew that when
I was a kid, meat was what I wanted to eat. My mother didn't force me to eat veggies and
I lived on huge hamburgers and I had very little weight to hang onto. But as soon as I
started eating vegetables I started putting on the weight and I got to the point where I
couldn't get enough energy from my mixed diet and keep my weight down. As soon as I
stopped eating vegetables and carbs I suddenly had a tremendous amount of energy.
We're carnivores but people don't want to admit it.

Some hippies believed there was karma attached to eating meat but that's all bullshit.
Meat is food. Is there karma to not eat and die? Do you think a vegetable is not a being?
I'll tell you something–a carrot has more consciousness than you, because you have an
ego and it doesn't. You can kill a carrot without even giving it hope or telling it thanks.

You have to eat something that's alive. You have a choice: animals with limited
consciousness that are easily taken care of, or vegetables that are conscious until the
moment you boil them to death and are more conscious than you, and are in complete
union with the entity that created them.

It's the animals job to convert vegetables into something you can eat. If you weren't a
meat eater you'd have a brain the size of a pea and you'd be running around on the ground
on all fours munching on grass. But you're a carnivore with a carnivore's teeth and

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insights, and your body is damaged severly by insulin which your body has to deal with
from carbs, but it can't.
Vegetables create obesity, heart disease, bad teeth, and diabetes–which is not a disease
but your own immune system trying to protect you. You get cataracts, bad skin, bad
joints–all from insulin. If you don't eat some meat you're in serious trouble. Vegans?
They're wrecks. I'm 75. I haven’t eaten a vegetable or a carb since 1958, not one. 80% of
my calories comes from fat, 20% from protein. Its 99% meat with some chicken and
eggs… I have all my teeth. I have skin like a baby and I’m out in the sun all day.
Rak: From my understanding of the Grateful Dead culture, the Deadheads were very
much a tribal culture within the capitalist society, what's your take on them?

Bear: It's hard to say... the Deadheads were a group of people that used to follow the
Dead around and they formed their own community of people that traded and had
business between themselves, but they were not very musical. They didn't listen to
anything except the Grateful Dead, so they had absolutely no musical knowledge or taste
or anything else; they would just take acid at the shows and have an experience that was
all beautiful and strange, but that's all they wanted to hear.

Rak: You say on your website that the Grateful Dead created music that had so many
layers in it that you could only really 'get' if you were on psychedelics.

Bear: Well a lot of bands did that.

Rak: Nowdays, maybe, but back then the Dead were the leaders...

Bear: Oh no, before them, even. Look at Jazz artists, Miles Davis did that, Talking
Heads did that. There's a lot of [psychedelic layering] in the Rolling Stones and the
Beatles. In the old days people took mescaline and mushrooms and stuff like that and
some people were naturally high–look at inventors like Nikolai Tesla, the father of AC
electricity. He was on the same level as you are when you're on acid and he could create
things in his mind and see them running, hear a clock ticking a 100 metres away; all of
those things that you can do on acid. And as a result he was a real stoned spacer... But
that was natural, it was in his body. Schizophrenic people are naturally that way, too.
That's why they thought psychedelics were at first 'psychomimetic', that they copy
psychosis. It doesn't, there's a confusion of effects.

I've done all those little corners, been down all those little dead end streets and all that.
I've been there and done that. You can get anything from acid–a John Lennon or the
Grateful Dead, or a Charles Manson, or something even more awful. Some of the Hell's
Angels told me–and to me, the last thing you'd want to do is hit someone else while high–
but Angels told me that they just love to get into a fight whilst on acid, because the other
guy is just moving in slow motion. The first blow counts for ten.

Rak: Now you were the soundman for the Rolling Stones at their infamous concert at
Altamont in '69... How was it?

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Bear: It was terrible.

Rak: What happened, the group mind shifted...?

Bear: No, there was no group mind.

Rak: Just a mob mentality?

Bear: No there wasn't even a mob. It was a bad site. We didn't have proper staging. It
was forced on us at the last minute because the Rolling Stones wouldn't fulfill a contract
with the mob that controlled Sear's Point, where we were supposed to have it. And all
those guys wanted was one concert in LA to make up for one they had canceled but they
refused to do it. And so they rented a generator without anyone making sure it was okay,
and it had bad fuel.

So we had no power or bad power; we had a stage that was knee-high off the ground and
it should have been twelve feet up, and it would have been at Sear's Point. I had five or
six disparate sound systems which I wove together, and we had a bunch of very, very
psychedelic Hell's Angels guarding the place. And we had one black lunatic who wanted
to shoot Mick Jagger.

He had the gun out and the gun discharged; one of the Angels saw him and jumped on
him but this guy overpowered him. He was bringing the gun around on the Angel and the
Angel stabbed him, and unfortunately he stabbed him fatally. It wasn't his intention to kill
him. So now it's the Grateful Dead's fault for foolishly hiring the Hell's Angels who
actually killed somebody, an innocent person at the concert? Nonsense! The Angels
saved Mick's life and maybe other people's lives, too, because those guys when they start
shooting at one, may shoot as many people as they can.

Rak: The mythology of the 60s says that Altamont was sort of the moment when the
hippie peace-love myth was shattered, all that flower-power idealism...

Bear: That's bullshit, because that was [just] the scene, flower-power idealism... just look
at me, I was just getting high!

Rak: But what about things like the Summer of Love, the Human Be-Ins, a whole
generation amassing in beauty and love?

Bear: The Summer of Love was the summer of 'look at me' I'm stoned and this is acid
and you should all take it–in front of the cameras.

Rak: And did that become a threat to the government?

Bear: A threat to the government? It was a threat to the culture, to everybody... It was
crazy stuff! And they were all dirty, barefoot and sleeping on the streets, which you can
do [in San Francisco] in the summer time. The hippies and Tim Leary destroyed what

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could have been a really beautiful scene. It might have developed into something that
would have been acceptable. We'll never know.
And the point is all of that is conjecture, which I don't like. We didn't do that, so therefore
it vanished. What did happen wasn't fun. It wasn't good, that's all I can say. It was stupid
and I stayed away from it as much as I could. I never lived in San Francisco, I rarely went
to the Haight, and when I did it was usually because [the Grateful Dead] had a house
there that I'd go to sometimes.

Rak: But you remained with the Grateful Dead for many years, and even after you went
to jail in 1970 you still toured with the Dead as a soundman. Was it like a family for you,
being with the Dead?

Bear: I worked for them until I went to jail, and when I came back the roadies and the
guys who were supposed to be replacing me temporarily refused to move over. And they
did everything they could to fit me. And after you've spent two years surviving in a jail
and knowing nothing about the culture you've been thrown into–except it's very
dangerous–and when you come out into the street and you're released from a very
controlled environment, it's a shock. It takes a minimum of two years [to readjust]; if you
do four years you never adjust. No one who ever did four years of jail ever reintegrates
fully back into society. They become a hermit, or they go back to jail.

I did two years, almost three, and in that time these guys managed to fuck me up and I
didn't see it. I could've dealt with it if I had of known. And at the end the [band] sort of
just squeezed me out, and then I had to go do something else.
I wasn't hanging around because I couldn't; I had no money and I had to earn a living.
And then the next thing you know the Dead were touring again with Dan Healy and I
thought that was strange but he knew how to talk people up, he was very friendly and a
nice guy to hang out with. He was tone deaf and had no sense of balance and couldn't tell
when something was right and he wouldn't leave anything alone. When I was with the
band I used 12 microphones; he used 41 or 42. It was a cacophony of blur and I couldn't
stand to be in the audience as [the sound] would change from minute to minute. They had
to eventually get a separate soundman on stage whereas with me I did everything for
them.

Rak: You worked with a lot of other bands after the Dead: the Rolling Stones, which
we've mentioned, but also Jefferson Starship, [Link]...

Bear: Yeah, and I also worked at Elmo's club outside San Francisco for almost two
years, and that was when I figured out the perfect [sound] system...

Rak: You describe seeing sound on acid once, and how you saw a circuit of energy was
created and how that influenced your approach to sound engineering. It was a very
different approach to other engineers at the time.

Bear: Well, I once saw sound coming out of speakers–on acid–but I've never seen it

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since, or heard of anybody else seeing it.

Rak: Did that vision give you the knowledge of how to approach building sound systems
in a more organic way?

Bear: … I could actually see the sound, and I could see that it wasn't doing what I
thought it would do. I tried to pay attention to what it was doing and how different it was
from what I thought it did. I sort of embedded that in my conceptual sphere. And this was
at the very beginning, at least within a few months of joining up with the Dead. I think it
was April 1966 and I joined the Dead in Feb 1966. So that helped a little bit, but I had a
long road to go to actually learn something useful.

So what I did is, I worked on how it sounded. If it didn't sound right I moved it around.
We couldn't afford twelve inputs or the like on a board and the way I did it sounded
better. My idea was to create a sound space on stage that would sound like it would if the
band was rehearsing in the back room. They could hear everything, hear themselves and
their instruments...

Rak: You pioneered a lot of approaches like the modern rock stadium 'Wall of Sound'
approach...

Bear: I created a sonic space on stage that they could relate to, like standing around in a
back room and in which they could hear everything plainly. If it got loud they could hear
it, if if got quiet they could hear it, they could move up on a mic, if it shifted a little they
could hear that and do what they wanted. And then I sampled them, and moved the mics
around in the space until in my headphones it sounded like it did without them on stage.

And once I got that I went out and set the PA to sound the same way. And then I never
touched anything. If someone came on to do a guest set they'd move the mic and I'd
change the mic accordingly, but I never changed the layout in the slightest. The space, the
fallback, everything stayed the same.

And once the band felt that and learned that, they started playing with the dynamics and
were able to hear themselves properly. Most soundmen walk away from the stage and
shove a mic in, then adjust accordingly.

Rak: What do you think of the music that the 60s created, and the energy behind it?

Bear: It was just what people were doing in those days.

Rak: And it's a very different sound to nowadays.

Bear: Well, there were different instruments and different ideas, and much younger
people involved... Everyone was exuberant and it was a lot to do with the currency of the
times. But everything is in time. The music today is great as well but you have to go look
for it. If you're living in the past looking at bands like the Rolling Stones and the Grateful
Dead, and all that, then you're missing everything. There's some incredible bands right

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now.

Rak: Who are some of your favorite modern bands?

Bear: Wolfmother's one of them, although I heard they broke up. Arctic Monkeys, is
another, White Stripes. I look around, I listen to a lot of them, I read the reviews in
Rolling Stone and things like that, then go out and buy a CD to see if I like it. I still like
people that do the old stuff, too, like Emmy Lou Harris, etc.

Rak: Well speaking of music, you have an extensive sound archive of many Grateful
Dead concerts, some of which have been released as bootlegs...

Bear: Well I don't release them. I was creating a sonic field that the band was playing in.
I sampled that sonic field and now I've got a signal and two wires. I put that signal out to
the audience and it matched. So I plugged a recorder in to sample that and I got what the
audience got. I called that a sonic journal, it's a diary.
The band and the record company and others have learned that I was there at the golden
age of the Grateful Dead and that I was the only one whose recordings really sounded
good. And so slowly and surely they're putting more and more [of these recordings] out. I
have no control over them, except that they can't alter them in any way.
Rak: Bear, you'll be 75 in January. Do you still enjoy an altered headspace at your age?

Bear: Are you kidding? Is the Pope Catholic? Are you asking me do I get high? I take
[acid] a couple of times a year… Do I eat? Am I a meat eater? Do I like sex? Am I an
artist? You can ask any of those things–I don't know why you would.
Rak: What's the biggest mark you've left on the world?

Bear: I don't know; I hope to do something significant soon. I've just had a lot of fun–I
don't think I've done much of anything but have a good time. I got caught out a few times
and I got punished inappropriately. They sent me to prison for making acid, which is a
community service, I thought. But I did it anyway because that was part of what I took on
when I started making it. I thought, well, shit can happen. Maybe I just had the wrong
lawyer and I could have escaped that, too–that happens. Lawyers and doctors, you've got
to be careful.

The [psychedelic community] has idolized things like acid and making it, and all that. I'm
just an artist and that was just a tool, like a paintbrush, so I don't think too much of it. I
did it, but that wasn't what I wanted to do, and it took a lot of time and it cost me two
years in jail, which wasn't fun. And that cost me my relationship with the Grateful Dead
and that wasn't fun. And in the end when I came out I had learned that I could make art
with my hands. And that probably paid for the whole trip.

So I would say that discovering that I have a natural talent to produce art out of nothing
with my hands, without any training, is probably the best thing that has happened to me.

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But whether that's an accomplishment, or whether other people would say its good art or
whatever, I don't know.
With music I discovered the way the human ear processes sound and mastered the PA
systems into that. Nobody else seems to be interested in that and I can't train anybody in
that, so when I'm gone, it’s gone.

I can only tell you that at the end when you look back at your life... Well, what I wanted
to do was to make a positive contribution to human society, to do something that would
make life better, or easier. That might be improving government or taxation, reducing
crime and violence by eliminating inappropriate laws and shape human behavior in a way
that would be a worthy thing to do. But what I've done, to date, I do not believe is worthy
of anything like that.
I don't care what people think about me when I die, if I'm a good man with honor or not.
All I care about is honor. If what you do is honorable then that's all you really have.
People lie and cheat and don't honor their word and things like that, but if you're not
honorable you've given away everything of value.

You're born into this world with nothing and you leave with nothing. And you have to–
that's part of the game. Don't leave anything behind or die thinking you haven't finished
something. As long as you're not bound by a desire then you'll go where you're supposed
to go. As long as you've left something behind you have to go and finish it.
That's what the [Tibetans] say–I don't say that. All I know is they're the only people in the
world that can be found again after they reincarnate–the Lamas.

 
 

Caveat lector:
Bear probably wouldn’t have liked this book. He probably would have taken
issues with just about everything in here, though I assure you, dear reader, that it
happened just like this. Bear conversed with me at length at the EGA 2009
conferences, both in the bush and in the city, and a small article on him and the
conference was published in the Byron Bay Echo newspaper in late Dec, 2009.
But by and large the bulk of the final interview and the transcripts of his talks
have stayed with me, like a legacy. It isn’t that I thought our interview wasn’t
good–it was classic ‘Bear’ baiting and I fell for it hook, line and sinker, with some

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pointed but resonant talks that exploded with ideas and the potential of the scene
back then and what it all meant to us now. It was just that Bear sat on the
interview audio files and transcriptions that I gave him for so long that I thought
he’d added them to his infamous sonic journal.

Fourteen months or so went by after EGA 2009, and Bear was still sitting on the
audio and the transcripts, and I was still extending him that courtesy. Until one
Monday morning in March, 2011, when I came back into cell phone reception
after lecturing on my own psychedelic theories at Maitreya electronic music
festival in the Victorian bush, and there was a flurry of SMS text messages that
all said the same, incongrous, impossible thing:
Owsley ‘Bear’ Stanley was dead.
As obituaries in every major broadsheet across the world, including this one from
the New York Times, reported:

Owsley Stanley, Artisan of Acid, Is Dead at 76

By MARGALIT FOX

Owsley Stanley, the prodigiously gifted applied chemist to the stars, who made
LSD in quantity for the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and
other avatars of the psychedelic ’60s, died on Saturday in a car accident in
Australia. He was 76 and lived in the bush near Cairns, in the Australian state of
Queensland …

Bear died in a car accident on a long patch of the Kennedy Highway between
Davies Creek and Koah, two tiny blips on a map of the Atherton Tablelands in
Far North Queensland, Australia. He was headed back from Cairns airport on
Saturday 03/12/11 in his truck with his beloved wife Sheilah, after one of his
semi-regular sojurns to Sydney and the charms of the big city.

There was a storm, but that wasn’t unsual for the tropical wet of FNQ. Nor were
the large puddles of water that gathered on the long, flat roads, invisible until a
car passed over them, and then in a flash of the mindseye—his truck fully
overturned and slid down an embankment, hitting trees. “Members of the public
provided first aid to the man and woman entrapped in the vehicle until
emergency services arrived, however the man died at the scene,” wrote the
Queensland Police Service. His wife, Sheilah, suffered a broken collarbone and
was pulled from the wreckage otherwise unscathed.

I’ve traveled that stretch myself, a long, lone highway with dense trees, Aussie
scrub and paddocks either side, heading towards Atherton. Riding the storm, as
often as not. It’s ironic, in a way, as the storm was the reason Bear was living in

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the bush, as far off the grid he could get and still be near the resources of
civilization, in one of the highest arable lands from the coast, as close to the
equator as possible. The storm. The storms were especially potent in early 2011,
and Pi Ra, one of his young friends from the Walsh, remembers having his last
conversation with Bear about three hours before cyclone Yasi was due to hit
Queensland in February:

Yasi was “a category five plus and it was headed right towatds FNQ,” Ra told me.
“Every map was showing it headed dead centre for Cairns. And so Bear calls me
up just before it’s due to hit, and he says: ‘Didnt I tell you? It’s the beginning of
the conditions that form the superstorm. The only thing that hasn’t happened that
I predicted is the flipping of the poles. Yet.’ He was still insistent that his vision
and prophesy were correct, that the breakdown of culture, the wild weather, the
earthquakes, the melting of the poles, all of it were symptoms of the superstorm
that would usher in the ice age.”

Bear believed the storm was coming, you see, and so in the end, it got him.

It seemed impossible, incorrect; despite his physical fraility, that indomitable will
to live wouldn’t–couldn’t die, not unless he chose it, at his timing, not in some
freak accident. But as Bear might say, with his deep understanding of the
magical-hologrammatic nature of reality, everything’s scripted. We all choose our
exits consciously or not, according to the principles in The Kybalion, the
alchemical book that informed his life. Everything attracts that which it seeks.
And the way to true change, Owsley said, is through transmutation.

As his friend John Perry Barlow, ex-lyricist for the Grateful Dead said: “He died
with his boots on.” What remains to be seen then, is his legacy, touched on by
the obituaries and memorials, hinted at, but so hard to explain without the full
understanding of who Owsley was, what he did, and what he left behind. As
fellow Dead member Bob Weir told David Gans: “He got plenty done this time
around.”
Sixteen months earlier, on the second night of talks at EGA, Bear had said: “The
thing about it is, I never tied myself down with debts and stuff. So whenever a
strange corner or door popped up, a strange pathway, turn left here and you’ll
find something… I thought, oh… okay. I wasn’t tied down and most people are.
As soon as they go to the first of those doorways–there’s no way they can open
them.
“Well if I’m going to do anything, I’m going to do it as absolutely as best as it can
be done. And if I don’t have the skill or the talent for that, then I don’t do it. It’s not
a complicated thing, it doesn’t, I think, make you a celebrity. You’re following the
air, life’s patterns, and it’s like the wind. If you’re a sailor, in a way you kind of
follow the wind. If you’re a balloonist you’ve gotta follow the wind. We’re more
like balloonists really. It’s a dangerous journey through life. There’s not just one
world–there’s millions of them floating around and crashing into each other.”

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Bear was cremated in a simple funeral in Atherton, with a small number of people
physically present. There was also a huge gathering in the States that parallelled
the physical funeral, and interracting with it via Skype. Mickey Hart, Phil Lesh and
Bob Weir spoke, and Bear’s friend of many decades, Sam Cutler, facilitated the
session. It was pretty cutting edge, and may have been one of the first Skyped
funerals of its type across the world. In typical Bear fashion, he was right at the
forefront of technolgy once again, even at the end. And Robert Hunter provided
these immortal words:
 
An Anthem for The Bear

Augustus Owsley Stanley the Third

being less a name than a designation,
the bearer of the appellation became,

of his own inspiration, The Bear.

Thus he became and thus remained

and every old timer worth salt has
a tale or two to tell regarding same:

of the time The Bear did this or that

incredibly singular, utterly apposite

action without apology or shame

to his own particular undying fame.

Unreachable, unteachable, aflame

in the light of his own magnificence

reflected in deeds dwarfing the achievements

of the run-of-the-mill creative sort
by a factor of ten or more,

King of Many Things was he

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of mortal physiology,
the soul’s chemistry,

geography, geology,
not to mention the

applied physics of sound,

regarding which, deaf in one ear,
he pronounced stereo to be

a distraction affording only

one perfect seat in the house
upon which to work its elusive illusion
seting himself to design the world’s
most powerful hi-fi system to prove it!

One suspects that, had he but one leg

he’d have seen the advantage in that

and invented accordingly, ingeniously
and, it goes without saying, successfully.

Lovable and loving in the abstract

effusiveness was not his hold card;

his judgments swift, certain and irrevocable

the last word was his personal property.

For the few times he was wrong
there is no accounting.

Was there ever a man who changed so many

while, himself, changing so little?

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A Cardinal Sign, were there ever one,

fixed like a bright white star in dark-blue heaven.

Save sentimental eulogies for lesser men

and leave it that he was King of Many Things,

of perfected personal taste and detailed opinion,
first and last a scientist and propounder

of a brand new species of reason.

No bucolic Heaven for such as Bear,

rather a Rock of Ages from where
an eagle in full flight might dare

a sudden detour into endless dawn.

Sail on, dear brother Bear, sail on

Robert Hunter
March 20, 2011

The unspoken thing chose its avatars well, it seems, working through agents like
Bear. And as the collective consciousness first breached in the Acid Tests and
group mind tribality of the Grateful Dead peaks again now in the global
ultraculture, the next big wave may soon be following Bear’s example, whether
they’re aware of it or not.

As social critic Theodore Roszak, who wrote the influential book The Making of a
Counter Culture said, “[If the ideals of the Sixties had prevailed], it would be a
world, where people lived gently on the planet without the sense that they have
to exploit nature or make war upon nature in order to find basic security. It would
be a simpler way of life, less urban, less consumption-oriented, and much more
concerned about spiritual values, about companionship, friendship, community.
Community was one of the great words of this period, getting together with other
people, solving problems, enjoying one another's company, sharing ideas,

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values, insights. And if that's not what life is all about, if that's not what the wealth
is for, then we are definitely on the wrong path.”

So in the second decade of the 21st century, as economic collapse and societal
transformation threatens to errupt yet again, the time may have arrived to get
back to the land for a generation of switched-on youth. The times they are a
changin’–again, and they promise to be tough. Gather your familiies and tribes,
create gardens to sustain, survive and continue the miracle of living. And
remember–it’s not just going back to the land… it’s back to the garden, to the
great green web of nature, to our place in the unfolding. Or as Joni Mitchell wrote
in her song, ‘Woodstock’, and Bear liked to quote:

"We are stardust, we are golden

we are billion-year-old carbon, and we've
got to get ourselves back to the garden…"

 
Now, to be fair, I have to let you know that the last word has to go to Bear, that’s
the deal, yeah. As Robert Hunter said in his poetic eulogy: "The last word was his
personal property.''
Bear had the last word on everything: he knew it, his family knew it, his friends
knew it, his critics knew it, the hippies knew it and the cops knew it, and when it
came to the crunch and he finally met his Maker, I’m pretty damn sure that God
knew it, too. So here it is, straight from his lips at the EGA conference in 2009,
words of wisdom for all of us ready to hear his message:

Oh, I’m a firm believer in reincarnation. I know I didn’t just come into existence 75
years ago. When I was about five years old I knew that. I didn’t know what that
meant–I still don’t–but you don’t have much of a choice, y’know. It’s like they got
a ticket and it’s a round trip. You’re born. You die. Psychedelics are good because
they make you die, and you say, ‘well, that wasn’t so bad, so scary’. It’s okay, kids.
You gotta accept it–you can’t fear death. You can’t love it, you can’t fear it. When
your friends are gone, you grieve for them. But you’ve gotta let it go. They had to
go– that’s part of the deal. There’s no way in without a way out. I’m having a good
time, I’m not ready to go anywhere. I’m glad that they killed the cancer even while
they fucked up my life for it. But every day, every day, every fucking day is
precious. I’m glad I’m alive and I hope I can keep doing things … and sharing what
I do know with people that care about it… And I hope you do…
… I can’t tell you when [the superstorm will be]. Could be now, could be 2012,
could be 2050, I don’t know. I can’t worry about that, you can’t worry about that.
It’s like thinking about, ‘when am I going to die?’ Live day by day and stay in

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present time, do the things that are right. Stay happy, try to do everything that you
do well, look at what you’re doing, think about what you’re doing. I don’t have a
lot of advice and most of it’s the stuff you’ve heard before. But what else is there?
The world is the world and that hasn’t changed.

Life’s not easy, it’s not meant to be easy–if it was you might as well turn your face
to the wall and fall asleep. It’s supposed to be struggling. It’s dynamic. Think about
every other animal on this planet–they spend all their waking hours looking for
something to eat or something to screw. We’re kind of unique. And we should
enjoy it. So don’t abuse it.
Take care of this planet–it’s wonderful.
I think this is the most special place in the entire manifesting universe. A special
planet amongst all planets. And those of us who are turning on should be absolutely
joyful that we’re here.

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