Owlsley Stanley RIP

[Ahkenaten]

Owlsley Stanley, friend of the Grateful Dead, Ken Kesey, Jimi Hendrix, Bill Graham and others, dies in car crash in Queensland, Australia. Most noted for manufacturing and distributing LSD in the sixties before it was declared illegal in the US, in tribute to which Jimi Hendrix composed his famous song "Purple Haze," Owlsley was said to have been 76 years old. Owlsley Stanley, RIP

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/14/MND41IAC74.DTL&tsp=1

[Ahkenaten]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hSW67ySCio
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnFSaqFzSO8

[Intraphase]

Owsley aka Kid Charlemagne


http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x68od0_steely-dan-kid-charlemagne_music

KID CHARLEMAGNE

While the music played you worked by candlelight
Those San Francisco nights
You were the best in town
Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl
You turned it on the world
That's when you turned the world around
Did you feel like Jesus
Did you realize
That you were a champion in their eyes

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
You must have had it all
You'd go to L.A. on a dare
And you'd go it alone
Could you live forever
Could you see the day
Could you feel your whole world fall apart and fade away

CHORUS:
Get along, get along Kid Charlemagne
Get along Kid Charlemagne

Now your patrons have all left you in the red
Your low rent friends are dead
This life can be very strange
All those dayglow freaks who used to paint the face
They've joined the human race
Some things will never change
Son you were mistaken
You are obsolete
Look at all the white men on the street

CHORUS

Clean this mess up else we'll all end up in jail
Those test tubes and the scale
Just get them all out of here
Is there gas in the car
Yes, there's gas in the car
I think the people down the hall
Know who you are

Careful what you carry
'Cause the man is wise
You are still an outlaw in their eyes

CHORUS

----------------------------

Obituary

By STEPHEN MILLER

Owsley Stanley, the grandson of Kentucky's governor, supplied the cheap LSD that fueled acid rock and California's hallucinogenic culture in the 1960s.

Mr. Stanley died Sunday at age 76 after an automobile accident in Queensland, Australia, where he had emigrated in the 1980s.

An early patron of the Grateful Dead and their sound engineer, Mr. Stanley was memorialized in the band's "Alice D. Millionaire," named after a newspaper headline about his arrest for dealing LSD.

Mr. Stanley was credited with distributing thousands—some say millions— of doses of high-purity LSD, often for free at concerts and "acid tests" run by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Notoriously press-shy, Mr. Stanley thought he was helping introduce a new form of consciousness. Renegade Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary agreed, calling him "God's Secret Agent A.O.S. 3" (Augustus Owsley Stanley III was his given name).

But authorities demurred, repeatedly busting him and finally convicting him for drug possession in 1969.

"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for," Mr. Stanley told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007. "What I did was a community service."

Mr. Stanley was the rebellious scion of an eminent Kentucky family whose grandfather, A.O.S. 1, was a U.S. senator after serving as governor. Mr. Stanley was described by a former schoolmaster "almost like a brain child," but was kicked out of the Charlotte Hall Military Academy in 9th grade for "getting the whole campus intoxicated" on smuggled booze, he told a biographer of Jerry Garcia, the late guitarist for the Grateful Dead.

After that, he bounced between schools and enrolled briefly at the University of Virginia's School of Engineering. He enlisted in the Air Force, which sent him to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. There, he acquired expertise in electronics, and later worked at radio and television stations.

By the mid-1960s, Mr. Stanley had been married and divorced twice with two kids, and was living with a Berkeley chemistry student who helped him synthesize LSD in makeshift laboratories.

He had also become an audio expert, helping to create the Grateful Dead's wall-of-sound speaker setups featured in the band's shows, as well as initiating the live recordings that would become a hallmark of the band.

His patronage helped pay for the band's living expenses in the early years, and he also came up with the Dead's trademark skull and lightning-bolt logo—originally used to mark music equipment on tours. When the band released its 1973 "History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 1," it was subtitled: "Bear's Choice"—Bear being his nickname.

Mr. Stanley recorded many other artists, including Janis Joplin and the Allman Brothers.

But it was for LSD that he was best-known, and Owsley became the byword for the most potent and plentiful acid available. Tom Wolfe wrote that he provided the drugs used at "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" in Watts in 1966. It became a popular legend that Jimi Hendrix's breakout hit "Purple Haze" was named after an Owsley concoction, though Mr. Hendrix denied it.

After being released from prison in the early 1970s, Mr. Stanley assumed a lower profile. He became convinced that a new ice age was upon the world, and decided to move to Australia, where he thought the effects would be least severe.

There, Mr. Stanley became a jewelry sculptor and sold his ceramic and metal creations online in recent years at a website packed with essays denying global warming and espousing his metaphysical and dietary theories.

Mr. Stanley wrote in a recent essay on his website that psychedelics could "renew our connection with the planet we live on and its life forms."

His relationship to Earth's life forms included following a purely carnivorous diet. Carbohydrates and vegetables were killers, he said. He blamed a recent heart attack on poisonous broccoli his mother had fed him as a child.

[Ahkenaten]

And for those interested, details on the Wall of Sound system Stanley designed for the Dead that was the first line array, non-distorting sound system also functioning as a monitor for the band, here:

http://news.yahoo.com/video/world-15749633/24516480#video=24525926

http://media.junkies.com/pechner/grateful-dead-wall-of-sound-1.jpg