Owsley Flashes Back To The U.S.

During a recent visit from his quiet lifestyle in the Australian outback, the patriarch of LSD sat down for the rarest of interviews.

The Bear – aka Augustus Owsley Stanley III – was coaxed by a friend to spend some time with San Francisco Chronicle pop music critic Joel Selvin. The man known as Owsley was the premier cooker of LSD, making him one of the most influential characters of Sixties subculture.

"Owsley" was street slang for good LSD. The Grateful Dead wrote the song "Alice D. Millionaire" based on Owsley Stanley’s arrest at his secret lab in 1965 and the subsequent Chronicle headline, "LSD Millionaire." Steely Dan has also immortalized him in song. He supplied Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters with their doses, his "Owsley Purple" fueled Jimi Hendrix at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival and he was briefly one of the Dead’s managers.

During his visit to the Bay Area, Owsley Stanley – barefoot and wearing blue jeans – visited a Starbucks in San Rafael without anyone batting an eye, the Chronicle said. The ’60s icon is photographed about as rarely as he consents to interviews.

"I never set out to change the world," Owsley Stanley whispered (he lost a vocal cord due to throat cancer). "I only set out 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."

But for all of the tuning in and dropping out that Owsley Stanley supplied, it was his lesser-known contribution to the ’60s that has had a lasting impact on the concert business.

"We never thought about high-quality PAs," the Dead’s Bob Weir told the Chronicle. "There was no such thing until Bear started making one."

Owsley Stanley, a perfectionist, was known to send his eggs back at restaurants three times until they were cooked right. He told the Chronicle of the human ear’s sophisticated sound processing

Bear built the first public address system dedicated to music in 1966, the paper said, using the Dead as guinea pigs. Before Bear, there were no monitors. He also began the tradition of recording the Dead live, and some of his recordings became albums.

Bear left the U.S. in the ‘’80s because he believed global warming would cause a six-week cyclone across the Northern Hemisphere, the paper said. He is now living off the grid in the Queensland outback, selling small gold and enamel scultptures on the Internet. He said he enjoys Wolfmother and The Arctic Monkeys and "anytime the music on the radio starts to sound like rubbish, it’s time to take some LSD."

Bear sells his sculptures and posts diatribes and essays on his Web site, Thebear.org.