The acid he created was so powerful, clean, and pure that he became the supplier to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. It's a very, very difficult chemical process, and Owsley was so obsessive that the glassware he used when he made the acid was designed especially for him. VICE chatted with Greenfield by phone to find out why Bear was one of the most important forces within the counterculture community, why his incarceration "ended" the 60s for a lot of people, and if LSD actually paved the way for the internet.Īlbert Hoffmann, who first synthesized LSD in 1938 and took the first intentional acid trip in history, supposedly once said Owsley "was the only one who ever got the crystallization process right." It is incredibly difficult to make LSD. Greenfield had previously written about Bear in Rolling Stone for the magazine's issue celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, and he had so much unused interview material from his subject, as well as from key figures like Jerry Garcia, that he decided to expand his profile into a definitive biography of the man. "Without his LSD, I don't think those times would have been as crazy as they were," explains the author. In the new book Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, out November 15, noted rock historian Robert Greenfield explores the life of the Grateful Dead insider who "helped to create the 60s" that lives on in our collective conscious. (LSD was made illegal by late 1966) Once he was released from prison, Bear never made LSD again, though he continued to be involved with the Grateful Dead and the counterculture scene until his death in 2011. His influence was omnipresent, even if below-the-radar of the pop culture canon, and would have continued to affect and inspire lead figures of the era if he wasn't arrested by federal agents in late 1967. He also worked as the Dead's sound engineer, even creating their "Wall of Sound" and the notorious "Steal Your Face" logo, inspiring the dancing bear icons, and recording some of the band's best recordings, live and in the studio. The chemist even used the money he generated selling LSD to help fund the early days of the Grateful Dead when they resided in Haight-Ashbury. He's directly credited with expanding the minds of many of the most influential figures of the 60s, including John Lennon, who once tried to obtain a lifetime supply of Bear's potent product. Put it this way: If Bear wasn't on the scene, there would literally be no acid in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.īear manufactured millions of hits of "White Lightning," the cleanest LSD this side of Albert Hofmann, at a time when the drug was still legal. Bear, was an underground hippie legend who some say is largely responsible for the zeitgeist of the 1960s counterculture movement, thanks to the ultra-pure LSD he manufactured. Though not a household name, Augustus Owsley Stanley III, a.k.a.
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