B (3:14)

That was the grateful dead on June 28, 1969 in Santa Rosa, California, covering Porter Wagoner's old slue foot and answering the musical question, does a bear drop in the woods? The bear in question is also the person responsible for that recording and many more by the Grateful Dead and others. He was born Augustus Owsley Stanley III in 1935, though he hated the Augustus and had it legally changed later on. Owsley Stanley, also known as the Bear or just Bear, made mini tapes and there's some excellent tracks to leave behind. But Bear left behind more than tracks. He left trails. In addition to being the Grateful Dead's first in house audio engineer and a pioneer who helped transform live concert sound, Owsley was also the most legendary underground LSD chemist in history. A story inseparable from the history of the Dead and for that matter, perhaps the entirety of western culture over the past half century. That's a lot for some little cuddly bears, but as you may have noticed, there sure are a lot of them. The bears that you know first appeared in July 1973 on the Grateful Dead live album, the History of The Grateful Dead, Volume 1, Bear's Choice. It was a tribute to Ron Pigpen McKernan who passed away earlier that spring. It was also the first release of music from what Owsley called his sonic journals, verite documents of his work as a sound engineer. It was artist Bob Thomas who put the little bears in a circle around the back cover. If you asked Bear himself, he'd explain that the bears on Bears Choice weren't dancing at all, they were marching. But he'd probably explain a lot of other things too. Here's his son. Starfinder Stanley Barrett had firm views on.

C (5:02)

Pretty much everything and anything you could come up with. He was never lacking in opinions and he was really a Renaissance man in every sense of the word. He had many, many different interests and many talents and you know, he never did anything halfway. So if he was going to put time into things, he was going to do it to the best of his ability. When he moved down to Australia, he built his own compound and put up the solar panels and put in the septic system and wired the electricity. After he passed, when his widow Sheila went to try to get some help with the electric system, the electrical guy came in and said, holy cow, I'm not sure I can work on this. Because he had combined 12 volt DC, American 110, Australian 220 and there's solar and wind. And he created his own system. But I'm sure it all worked flawlessly while it did. It did. But it was pretty challenging to reverse engineer and figure out how to maintain.

B (6:10)

We'll work our way back to the dancing bears, but first let's talk about bear dancing. Here's Roney Stanley, partner to owsley in the 60s and 70s.

D (6:20)

I love to dance with Bear. That was one thing that brought us together, that we totally loved to dance. And we danced at every show. And he would go wild dancing. And Bear, he started out with ballet and he used to say to the quippies and they made fun of him that ballet is the best exercise. He would tell them that and they're like, Big Steve, you know what? But Big Steve wasn't a dancer. I've never seen Big Steve dance. But Bear, he was light on his feet and he could dance. He was great. Dancing was a huge part of the acid test. And we'd have these strobe lights and the lights that make everything look a certain weird color. And we would come back from making LSD and we'd go to Family Dog or Avalon and we'd be dancing and we'd go into the lights and our hands, which had residue from working with cats, like going wild, it was crazy.

B (7:29)

Owsley Stanley began to manufacture LSD in 1965. He wasn't the first to do so outside a proper lab, but he was the first to do it well, very well and at volume. He tried some amateur acid at first and wasn't impressed, but. But when he tried 250 micrograms of the real stuff, possibly from Sandoz, possibly from a Czechoslovakian lab, he wanted to try more, which is where the story really starts. Here's Starfinder.

C (7:57)

When he made acid, he was an underground chemist, but it was legal. You were gonna get in a lot of trouble if you got caught with pot. But acid was actually not criminalized at the time that he was making it. It was just hard to get. He didn't want to take adulterated or low quality acid. So when he couldn't get a good source, he decided he would have to make it himself.

B (8:20)

With his partner, a chemistry major at UC Berkeley, Owsley got up to speed quickly.

C (8:25)

He went to the library, spent a few weeks learning the synthesis and sorting out what kind of equipment he would need and, you know, all the different steps along the way and getting the equipment. He set up a company to order the chemical precursors. He had a very exacting approach to everything he did. So, you know, and the thing about making assays hard to make a little bit. So when he made it, he ended up with a lot of it. Relatively speaking. It's dosed in micrograms, so a little goes a long way. And so, you know, he spread it around and he didn't really have a profit motive. He was trying to help his friends get turned on. And the money that came back from it he thought was part of the scene. And so he put that back into the scene. That's how the patronage of the Grateful Dead and, you know, helping house and feed and buy equipment and get things rolling when the money was there, that's what he did with it.

B (9:24)

Owsley would later estimate that he gave away about half the LSD he manufactured. In addition to the mind manifesting powers of Owsley's lsd, he also became a patron to underground culture. In the 1960s, Owsley was fascinated by many topics. Alchemy, Indian classical music and Russian ballet, to name a few. But few would obsess him more than his favorite band. He first encountered the Grateful Dead at the Muir Beach Acid test in late 1965, only a few weeks after the band had changed their name from the Warlocks to the Grateful Dead. They'd already found LSD through a variety of other means. But meeting Owsley Stanley properly at the Fomor Acid test in early 1966 would change the course of both Owsley and the Dead's lives.

C (10:09)

When he saw him play, he just was really captivated by the music. He recognized that there was something about this man that was different and special. He went and introduced himself after the show and said, hey, I really like your music and I'd love to get involved, help you guys out. Is there anything that you guys need? And they said, well, we don't have a manager. You want to be our manager? And he said, no way. That is not my thing. I said, well, we don't have a sound man. Can you do sound? And he said, well, I'm into sound.

B (10:44)

That's a bit of an understatement. Here's Roni Stanley.

D (10:48)

A lot of the money that was made from LSD was spent on buying music and equipment. Bear and I used to spend a lot of time going to hi Fi stores and checking out sound systems. This is our big thing. We'd go and we'd listen to speakers and amplifiers and we'd have them put together different sets. And we'd listen and we'd decide which we liked. As far as his home stereo. At the time I was with him, we lived in this Fox Brothers house in Berkeley that is sort of like a little hobbit house, but it's all out of wood and it had very high ceilings and beams and little nooks and stained glass windows. So it was a great sound studio. And we just listened a lot to different kinds of music. He was very into all sorts of music. It was weird because he wasn't intellectual in the sense that Phil Lesh was intellectual, but he liked that Schopenhauer and that weird kind of music that Phil liked as well. And that bonded them, that love of sort of New Age music. Not as much rock and roll. And Jerry Garcia loved this as well. And I even knew about it before I met any of them. It was the Bulgarian Women's Choir, and it's all voices and no instruments. And Bear loved that, and Jerry loved that. And we played that. And the other one we played, which I recently got back into, was Eric Sati. Very sort of gentle piano music. Baer also had a theory about vinyl. He thought that the English pressings were far superior to the ones in the United States. And he'd play them for you. He'd show you, like he'd take a Beatles pressing that was from the United States and one that was from England, and he'd show you the difference, and you could hear it. And it had something to do with the way the grooves were marked on the vinyl. But he definitely believed that there was a difference in the vinyl between English pressing and US pressings.

B (13:15)

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise to confirm that Owsley was a serious music head, but he was a music head who had come to change music back to Starfinder.

C (13:24)

The modern sound system I don't think would exist as it does if not for air. When he started, as you were saying, it was the Beatles in Shea Stadium, sort of tinny echoey, you know, low resolution. And for an audio file, that was that Athema. He did not want to listen to that. And he knew it could be better. Just like with the acid, he wanted good acid. He couldn't find it. The only one thing to do. Gotta make it yourself. He had worked as a radio tech at radio stations and had aspirations at one time of being a dj. So he said, yeah, I'll take a stab at that. You know, the early system that he set up for the Dead was like, literally his hi fi stereo from home. He had big voice theater speakers that he set up on stage. And I don't think they got too far down the road before they got blown up. When he first set up the sound system, he set it up like he set up a stereo system in his living room. You know, this. One stack stage right, one stack stage left. And when you're sitting right in the middle where the soundboard is, it sounds great. But Bear spent a lot of time running around at the shows. He didn't sit at the soundboard and pat himself on the back. He moved around in the audience. And he noticed pretty early on that when he got away from that sweet spot didn't sound so good. And so he spent a lot of time trying to figure out the way that that worked and how to make it sound good everywhere. Bear's approach was to try to set things up, to create a situation where the band could create its music. He thought it was inappropriate for a sound man to make judgments and say, oh, this needs to go up, this needs to go down. He thought that was, you know, the band knew what they wanted to give to the audience. And soundman wasn't supposed to be an arbiter of what the audience got. So his objective was to try to let the band know what they were giving the audience. I mean, that was why he started recording, trying to capture exactly that audience experience. When he first started doing it, he was making the band after the show, like that night, listen to the tapes and say, this is what they got? Is this what you're trying to give them? The thing that evolved into the wall of sound was putting that system behind the band so that they got everything that the audience got on the way to the audience, you know, really enabled them to control exactly what they were giving the audience. It purifies the vision. The alembic is that crucible that the alchemist transmutates base metal into gold. So the whole concept of an alembic is to distill out that most pure expression. And I think that's what they were aiming for. You know, it took a long way, a long time to get where they were going. And I think they were never satisfied. I don't know if Bear was ever satisfied with anything. I mean, it was always funny trying to chase after him. He'd go on and on about this amazing piece of technology that you got. That's just the kind. The stuff, the one you want, you gotta get this one. This is the best one. A couple months later, I'd be like, oh, I got that thing you were talking about. He's like that, oh, that's crap. You want this one? It's like, what? Wait a minute. He had very little sentimentality about equipment. It was a tool that did its job hopefully well. But he was always looking to improve it, to change it, to supplant it. He wasn't satisfied with something because there was always room for improvement. He didn't sit and rest on where things were. He was constantly onto the next, newest, better iteration.

A (17:11)

Relentless pursuit of perfection.

B (17:14)

That relentless pursuit of perfection led to the formation in 1969 of Alembic, the Grateful Dead's audio offshoot. Bayer was the driving force behind the company's formation, which would split into several different startups. One of the original players in Alembic was engineer and producer Bob Matthews, who you can hear more from in our series about the 50th anniversary of Workingman's Dead. Named for the alchemical vessel of transformation, Alembic encompassed more than just the dead. The engineers that Baer helped recruit would come to be pioneers in live sound reproduction and instrument building, absolute cornerstones of their respective industries.

C (17:54)

One of Bayer's talents was finding people who had the skill sets and the minds to tackle these tasks and pulling them together and then creating an idea and finding people to help actualize that. That gestalt, that synergistic combination of talents, the whole being greater than the sum of the. Of hearts, was definitely at work with Bear's alchemical mix of misfits and mad scientists. You know, he found some staggeringly talented people that dragged them into the fray.

B (18:26)

Behr was a Renaissance man, figuratively, but also somewhat literally a regular at the early Renaissance Fairs, another outgrowth of the 60s counterculture. Here's Roni Stanley.

D (18:38)

The Renaissance Fair was at first in a what was called the Bayberry Forest. It was incredible because the scent of bayberries was so luscious. The Bayberry Forest was right near China Camp. I don't know if you know that area. It's where Hunter lived. He lived with MG Mound Girl and Jerry in Larkspur. And then he moved to China Camp. It was a beautiful area. It's been developed, but at that point it would not develop. And the Bayberry Forest was there. With the Renaissance Fair, Bear was so into that. It's sort of like reenactment. But Bear got so into it that he, when he was in New York or we went to New York one time to bring a lot of LSD to New York. The band was there. This was early on. We went to the fabric section of New York and the bead section. With unlimited budget, we bought fabrics and beads. And Bear was like, no plastic way before anyone, he would refuse to let anybody wear anything synthetic. He said that plastic drains you of your energy and carried negative ions and that if you wore plastic, you would have no energy. So we couldn't wear any plastic. And then he wouldn't allow us to string on nylon because somebody one time came up to him and pulled at his beads to strangle him because he made lsd. And a lot of people hated him as well as loved him. And he said if he had been wearing a nylon, he could have choked. So he could only string beads on silk thread. So we bought this fabric in New York, and Bear got us sewing machines and we sewed our own gowns. They were gorgeous. They were beautiful. And because the fabrics, if you start out with good raw materials, you're going to create a good product if you give it your devotion. And Bear had an outfit, and Melissa and I had outfits, and we all went to the Renaissance Faire, and we stayed there.

B (21:09)

Even at the Ren Faire, Behr kept his eye open for talent.

D (21:13)

I'm very friendly with this woman, Lily, who's on Facebook, and she's a jewelry designer. Lily Hart, her name is. And she told me a story that she was selling her jewelry at the Renaissance Fair. And Bear came over to her and said, you jewelry is beautiful, but you're selling it too cheap. Raise your prices. You will get it, and you will get what you deserve for your artistry. And she did. And she's still making jewelry. She's my age, you know, and she's still successful. She sells on Etsy. She won an award for the most sale. And she says to her, it was Bear who's taught her how to be an entrepreneur and how to actually make her creativity into a business. And she's always been grateful to him for that.

B (22:05)

An important part of Bear's Renaissance Faire crew was Bob Thomas.

D (22:09)

He was sort of a Renaissance man. He was accomplished at everything. He was a fabulous painter. We slept over, we had encampments. And Bob Thomas was very pivotal at this. He would set it up so we, when we arrived, we'd have everything ready. There were Bob Thomas, Will Spires, and Dawn. A guy named Don were the Golden Toad, and they performed. Bob was very talented musically. He played the bagpipes like Robert Hunter. He was Scottish, and he also could play anything. He lived behind us in Berkeley, we had this house. I said, the Fox brothers built it. It was on Valley street, and behind it, the main house was a little cottage, and he lived in that cottage, and he had a workshop there where he'd do his art. And he also could make instruments.

B (23:07)

Like Roney, Bob was part of Owsley's laboratory operations, but his interests and talents were vast. His acoustic world fusion band, the Golden Toad, who sometimes shared bills with the Dead, have been called the Grateful Dead of the Renaissance Fair culture, a touring collective that traveled the circuit for years. If that sounds at all fascinating to you, I recommend Rachel Lee Rubin's book, well met, about the history of the Renaissance Fair in the counterculture. But Bob Thomas might be known best to Grateful Dead fans and the world at large for being the artist behind two of the Grateful Dead's most identifiable symbols, the skull and lightning bolt logo, known as the steal your face and those high stepping bears. In both cases, it was Owsley that made it happen.

C (23:53)

One of the things about the scene early on was that all of the bands would go to these music festivals and everybody had the same black road cases for their equipment, and they'd spray stencil, their band name, on the side of the gear so that they could identify whose case it was. And then they'd all get stacked up in the corner on the stage and, you know, trying to identify which of these cases was yours, you know, they'd be blocking the names, and you couldn't see. Could only see part of the stencil and see two letters, and it's like, which band is that? So he thought, well, if we had a logo that we could stencil on the side of the equipment, then you wouldn't have to be able to read the name. You could just see, like, any little piece of it. You'd know, okay, that's our stuff, you know. He had this image that popped into his head as he was driving in a winter storm in California and saw this circle split by a lightning bolt. He thought that would make a cool logo. So he was talking with a friend who had done some stencil work, and he said, oh, I know how to make a stencil. That'll be easy to apply that. And he cut out a circle with a jagged edge, and you could spray that and flip it over and spray the other side, and you'd have the circle with the lightning bolt in the middle. They used that. He refined it. You know, 13 was a powerful number, the number of letters in Owsley, Stanley, man, that was Always a number that resonated with Behr. So he made it into a 13 point lightning bolt. And then he thought, well, it'd be cool if we could take the words Grateful Dead, you know, with the psychedelic writing that was really popular for the posters and the artwork of the time. He said, if we could take the letters, the Grateful Dead put that underneath the lightning bolt so it looks like a skull. And Bear was an artist, but he was a sculptor. He wasn't much into line drawing, but one of his best friends, who often was a roommate, Bob Thomas, was an amazing painter and line artist. So he went to Bob and said, hey, here's this idea. You think you can get the lettering to work out? So Bob fiddled around with it, came back the next day and he said, well, wasn't able to get the letters to work, but what do you think of this? And he handed Bear the skull and lightning bolt, commonly called steal your face these days. And Bear said, yeah, yeah, that'll do.

B (26:20)

Around 1970 or 71, probably around the time Bear went to prison for two years, the skull and lightning bolt was born. Soon after that, it started to appear on the dead's gear. In 1971, Phil Lesh sported perhaps the first skull and lightning bolt t shirt. In 1972, when the band went to Europe, Pigpen flew a flag with the logo on the front of his Hammond. Here's Hawk, an old friend of both Bear and Starfinder, and archivist for the Owsley Stanley Foundation.

E (26:50)

Another detail about the birth of the original steal your faces. For a time it circulated without the skull. And then when the studio faces with the skull face was added, Bear, I believe he went to a place in LA that manufactured stickers for NASCAR racers or real high end adhesives that would withstand crash up derbies and all kinds of weather events and created basically the most durable first run of stickers that any rock band had ever seen.

A (27:21)

Again, going for the best.

E (27:23)

Yeah, going for the best. It's going to go on our equipment. It better be able to withstand a hurricane.

C (27:28)

Yeah, I still have several of them. They're in great shape. The guitar that he gave me when I was seven years old, I still have it and I still have the original case. And the original case has one of those stickers on it.

B (27:44)

Which brings us back to those darling little dancing bears. Here's Starfinder.

C (27:49)

You know, everybody calls them dancing bears. Bear would correct you and tell you that they're not actually dancing, they're marching. But you know, that was, that was Bob Thomas. Again, Bob was an amazing artist and did several album covers and did the album cover for the History of The Grateful Dead, Volume 1, Bear's Choice. Those were some early sonic journals that got put out as Bear's memorial for Pigpen, who was one of his very best friends after Pig passed away. Bob did the front and back, which is just amazing artwork. He also did the Live Dead artwork, which is one of my. Also one of my favorite album covers of all time. But History of the Grateful Dead, Bear's Choice had the skull and lightning bolt on one side and a three eyed bear on the flip side with the dancing bears marching around the outside circle. And Bob had seen. Found that image as a type print die. It was actually a fairly old one. And I think if you look on Bear's website, the Bear. Org, he had written a number of essays that we, we maintain his website the way he had left it. So it's. It's getting pretty archaic as far as HTML goes these days. But I keep that up there so that people can encounter it. And he talks about these images and their origins so you can get his own words by looking there. Bear in his youth had studied ballet. And so one of his quirks, when he was feeling the music and in the flow of the electric experience, he would start doing ballet to the band's musical explorations. And so I suspect that he was called the Dancing Bear more than once. It's an appropriate image. So it was a little bit of an inside joke, I think, with Bob, that he covered the album with the Dancing Bear.

B (29:48)

Owsley's legacy is enormous, stretching way beyond the music the Grateful Dead made and beyond music altogether into other fields of art and technology and virtually wherever underground LSD bonded with creative minds. But the legacy that he left behind also involved tapes. Lots and lots of tapes. Starfinder and Hawke have taken on the mighty task of preserving them.

C (30:10)

Before he died, he had told me that he expected if he didn't get that done before he passed, which he thought he would because he thought he was gonna live forever, but if he didn't get it done that he expected that I would make sure that it proceeded according to his standards, which was a pretty high bar.

E (30:31)

There's magic in those tapes and there's mayhem in the archive. And I mean that in the best way. They are not organized chronologically or by artists. Often the boxes are unlabeled. Often what appears on the box doesn't appear on the reel. And we don't know these things until we preserve them. And our operating Policy is that we don't recreationally listen to the reels, so they have to be targeted for preservation. The way we target them for preservation is either an historically significant performance, an unusual set of artist combinations, you know, trying to look at sort of spheres of influence and cross pollination of art forms that, you know, in this sort of very fertile period in American musical history in the Bay area in the 60s. And then we also target tapes that we believe will be distressed based on the vintage of the tape. When we talk about the wealth of recordings of other artists along with the Grateful Dead, we're really talking about just about every idiom of music. Baer loved all music. He loved all music played well. He could be quite critical when he felt the band could do better or a musician could do better. But our archive, our Bears archive. Bears tapes have, you know, rock, blues, jazz, country, bluegrass, folk, reggae, Motown, even several classical artists, international music. Part of what we're hoping to do with the archive is to tell a narrative of the different musical forms and different musical voices that Bear recorded. And it's all part of this rich mix.

B (32:02)

It's a truly breathtaking archive of music with an equally breathtaking amount of stories to go along with it. And we'll be going deep into it during future bear drops. The sonic journals released by the Owsley Stanley foundation over the past several years have been an utter joy, including albums of the Primal, Allman Brothers, Jorma, Kaukonen and Jack Cassidy before they Were Hot Tuna, a massive box set documenting the early years of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, an intimate set of Doc and Merle Watson, and most recently an early performance by Commander Codeine as Lost Planet Airmen. They're all worth checking out. Head over to owsleystanleyfoundation.org for more information. Let's listen to a little bit of Jorma and Jack with Joey Covington on drums from the amazing Owsley Stanley foundation release titled Before We Were Them. Incidentally, recorded on the same night in Santa Rosa as the Dead clip we heard before. This track is called Turnaround. There's lots of Bear to come. So until then, one more story from Starfinder about another one of Bear's obsessions, coffee.

C (33:39)

I remember as a kid when he was living in Fairfax, being set out on the back porch with the hand cranked coffee roaster, learning how to roast the coffee for what seemed like hours, but only takes about 15 minutes to roast a batch of coffee. But he was a tea drinker. At first, it's funny. But then he encountered Alfred Peet in Berkeley. The founder of Peet's Coffee became friends and Pete taught him how to roast. Of course, never one to do things by halves, he was very dedicated to finding the best beans and which his favorite variety was Papua New Guinea Sigri Plantation. I have to say I agree with him on that one. That's my favorite bean as well. Bear always espoused a lighter roast, freshly roasted, freshly ground, freshly made. He traveled with a portable roaster and a portable espresso machine. He had built his own little road case to protect the equipment so that it would be unscathed in touring.

B (34:44)

And most likely that road case was adorned with a steal your face sticker, as is this podcast we'll leave you with a bear solo recorded February 8, 1970 at the Fillmore west in San Francisco.

C (34:57)

We're waiting for the bear to turn on his love light. He just did.

A (35:08)

There are so many sides to bear, it's impossible to cover everything about him in one episode and give him the detail he deserves. So keep your eyes peeled for other bear drops down the trail. Make sure to Visit us@dead.net deadcast where you can not only find past episodes, but check out this cool feature. You can record your story about your favorite Dead show. Crazy things that happened in the lot Getting miracled. We want to hear from you, so head to dead.netdeadcast and record your story with. We might just use it in an upcoming episode. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast Mark Pincus and Dorin Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.