Augustus Owsley Stanley III: The sound engineer who kickstarted the counterculture movement – Far Out Magazine

Kings and Queens have always been shapers of society; King Tut shaped the Egyptian tourist industry, King Henry VIII worked wonders for the turtleneck trade, and The Acid King, Augustus Owsley Stanley III, defined the counterculture movement. Anyone from a long line of Augustus-es is bound to have some bearing on society, but in the tumbling dominos of culture, the third fellow in this long line of Kentuckian politicos presented a pivotal moment of diegesis that set pop culture on a different trip. This is the weird story of the wests wayward rock n Walter White.

The long and the short of it is that Augustus Owsley Stanley III brewed LSD so pure that Owsley is actually listed in the dictionary alongside the definition: An extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD. Tom Wolfe, the novelist who once wrote: The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. Thats not true with non-fiction, coined this phrase. You could argue that Wolfe was the proto-voice of a generation and that he, along withKen Kesey, Jack Kerouacand other notable contributors, helped to give rise to pop culture. But every engine of influence needs fuel, and that was where Stanley III stepped in.

Before he became the chef behind a thousand epiphanies and crafted the sound of the Grateful Dead, he went against his family history of entering government and became a professional college drop-out. His window wouldnt arrive until 1963 when he was 28 years old. But before then, he was an Air Force pilot, a ham-radio operator, a broadcast engineer, a father and a twice divorcee. He was also a sporter of a Fu Manchu moustache that welcomed so many ladies he may as well have called it his Foof Manchu Muff Duster, a multiple petty-crime felon, and a student of Russian, French and ballet.

With a CV like that, do you think he was able to support himself as a professional dancer for long? Nada, his niche was yet to be foraged, but importantly, a point which has sadly almost become a footnote in his wildly unravelling life, he was also a geniusand that can help even the most vagrant of vagabonds.

In 1963, that vivacious intelligence led him to become a student at Berkley, and that was a critical year in our cultural history. You see, it seems very un-1960s-like to mention admin, but in 1963, the patent for LSD expired, and a lot of the culture thereafter spun out from that tie-dye three years where mind-bending was basically legalised. It wasnt just the hippies at it either. The CIA, an organisation that has seemingly welcomed more well-manicured arseholes than every one of Hugh Hefners pool parties combined, were dabbling in its kaleidoscopic properties to such an extent that they gave 297mg of it to an elephant called Tusko. Tusko died.

Stanley IIIs time had come. He took acid in 64 for the first time and heard The Beatles the following week. Stanley IIIs future seemed to be standing in his spinning vision, jangling the lab keys. He learned everything he needed to know about the synthesis of this potent danger in three weeks and was not the type to sit around wondering what best to do with that knowledge. If he were alive today, however, it would be here that he interjected and said that his aim in the lab was not to brew substances that got you high but to obey the transfiguring principles of alchemya notion that only someone who was high could understand.

Thus, it is clear from this imagined interjection that a collision of contributing factors occurred during this period: acid, music, and the bullshit to go along with it. Stanley III was a ready-made scion of the counterculture. However, a fourth tributary would join this trifectahis roommate and girlfriend at the time was Melissa Cargill, a skilled chemist and heir of the uber-wealthy Cargill-Macmillan family. How such a thing could happen is a mystery of fate. The result was that they had the know-how, funds, connections, and get-out-jail cards to make a real go at blowing the minds of a generation.

In fact, when they were selling cheap methedrine to raise funds to enter the acid trade, their bathtub lab was busted, but Stanley III was able to hire the vice-mayor of Berkley, and charges were dropped. There are many questions about the lax drug enforcement during this time and why it took three years for legislation to be passed making the substance that Charles Manson and many others who stepped one toke over the line dabbled in to a debauched degree illegal. However, well get onto those clandestine CIA mysteries later.

Off the back of this legal windfall, Stanley III, who was nicknamed Bear as a teen because of his premature production of short and curlies, set up the Bear Research Group. As such, he could attain acid-making technology under the guise of science. Thereafter, asSteely Dan would one day sing, On the hill, the stuff was laced with kerosene, but yours was kitchen clean. This ballet dancing drop-out was now making the most pristine acid in the west (and the world, for that matter).

Thanks to Ken Kesey, a generation of creatives had been swayed toward the technicolour ways of acid. Many of these were all on the same bus: a multicoloured wanderer called Furthur. This near-mythical vehicle travelled through the unfurling expanse of America and its consciousness. It contained Kesey, Wolfe, and Neil Cassidy (the actual driver in KerouacsOn The Road), and these guys were after the best acid around. It was only a matter of time before the Merry Pranksters (as they were known) careened into a big mad Bear and crowned him The Acid King.

These tripping folks would pull up at various spots around the country and have picnics. Therein, Kool-Aid containing acid was served up, and the spun-out folks in attendance would take in a band bashing out rock n roll. Their journey was a vehicle for the counterculture, and one of the bands absorbed in the gatherings was none other than the Grateful Dead. Stanley III met the Dead at one of these picnics and told them he knew just as much about sound engineering as he did about acidthen he was in the band.

Shortly after, the music world would all be tripping out on Owsleys Acid. He even supplied The Beatles during theMagical Mystery Tour. Thus, there are no surprises about the origin of I Am the Walrus. Bands were tumbling down the rabbit hole of his renegade possibilities, but his drive to pursue the power of alchemy sustained and spread into his sound work. As the Owsley Foundation States: Owsley essentially recorded every artist that ever played through a sound system that he built.

Thus, his sonic journals helped to develop the general sound of an entire generation of musicians. With the likes of Miles Davis, Johnny Cash, Jefferson Airplane, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Flying Burrito Brothers and 80 other massive artists in his roster, it isnt far-fetched to say that it was Stanley III who defined the sound and minds of a generation. He was the puppet master making the marionette of counterculture move in weird ways.

And through it all, he still had to keep brewing. During his time on the acid run, Stanley III is believed to have produced at least five million doses of some of the finest wall-shifting tabs to grace the market. Moreover, he didnt just enjoy the dealers boon of administrative oversight. Once criminality was imposed in 1966, Stanley and Cargill simply shifted production to a lab in Denver, Colorado, and began brightening the daydreams of counterculture kids once more.

Their new headquarters were stationed across the street from Denver Zoo, and tales are bountiful in the regions subterranean realms of old acidheads staring agog at a gibbon or some other higher simian and having evolutionary epiphanies whizz into their addled minds. All the while, funky gibbons looked on, wondering why a hippy with swirling eyes was delivering a brown spine extension to their flared pantaloons and watching them peel a banana with their feet. It was as if the Maharishi himself had ceased being a fraud and manufactured a miracle before their googly eyes.

A short trip away from this head-spinning simian hotspot, youd find Hunter S. Thompson playing golf also while on Owsley Acid. But Thompson would also provide a cautionary talehis golf swing was reportedly explosive if not smooth, and his third drive was solid and long. Still, if he missed a putt, he would fling his club into the nearest body of water and proceed to blast the ball home with the 12-gauge shotgun he carried in his golf bag. He would later turn that shotgun on himself.

And that is a critical denouement that defies all the fun. You watched that high of the hippie thing descend into drug depression, Joni Mitchell once said. Right after Woodstock, then we went through a decade of basic apathy where my generation sucked its thumb and then just decided to be greedy and pornographic. In short, a generation of peace and love had stepped one toke over the line, and the fate of their revolution was dower after that.

Stanley III was finally arrested for his dealings in 1970. He remained in prison for two years. Therein, he learnt another trade. This time it was metalwork and jewellery-making. It seemed like the music scene had sobered up when he was released. As he stated: I found on my release from jail that the [Grateful Dead] crew, most of whom had been hired in my absence, did not want anything changed. No improvements for the sound, no new gear, nothing different on stage. They wanted to maintain the same old same old which under their limited abilities, they had memorised to the point where they could sleepwalk through shows.

The world was harsher now. He ventured on tour and found cities falling into some comic book dystopia. The prelapsarian dream of the sixties lay in ruin, like a long-forgotten civilisation that the History Channel will say was built by aliens and abandoned centuries from now, failing to mention his forsaken bathtub where it was all born. The zeitgeist, now, was one of gritty tumult and grimy turmoil. A barren field of dirt had supplanted flower power. Opiates had replaced opulent excesses, and the only ubiquitous munificent bounty that money couldnt buy was poverty. Sometimes you eat the Bear, and sometimes the Bear eats you.

In 1982, Stanley III believed a thermal cataclysm would render the Northern Hemisphere climatologically uninhabitable. As ever, he was always just trying to look a little too far ahead. Nevertheless, he moved to Australia and found himself a suitable realm. It was in the bush, where the only highways were imaginary. Here, he made his jewellery and would frequently fly back to the states, where he sold pieces of wearable art to Keith Richards and the likes at backstage bashes.

All the while, he continued to advocate an all-meat diet claiming that humans are born carnivores. And he lived happily with his wife, Sheilah. He met her when she was a clerk at the Grateful Deads ticket office. He lived a happy life out there until he died in a head-on collision in 2011. The bulk of his legacy, however, had died four decades earlier. Hunter S. Thompson was right when he lamented that his incarceration marked the death of the 1960s; it happened in 1970.

Theories are rampant about why his drug dealing was allowed to go on for so longwere the CIA aware that such exposure to LSD would curtail the movement? Theres no concrete evidence for any of these claims, so I wont go on. Theres nothing concrete about anything in his Rorschach blot of an existence. Thus, the mystery goes on, just like his indelible impact on culture and sound. That much is concrete, and theOwsley Stanley Foundationhas the tapes to prove it.

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Augustus Owsley Stanley III: The sound engineer who kickstarted the counterculture movement - Far Out Magazine