Owsley Stanley

and years later grogan wrote an autobiography that one deadhead newsletter called highly egotistical so which was he the man who gave away his own name or the man who wrote a book about it or were the stories the point all along the soup-pot is empty now scraped clean the crates are stacked and ready to go back and out on the grass the big wooden frame stands alone in the long evening light diesel first then floor polish and burnt coffee from a counter somewhere and the cold breath that comes in every time the big glass doors swing open on to the street a bus station late in the evening long wooden benches a clock with a loud second hand a woman asleep sitting up her bag held in her lap and against the far wall, a row of baggage lockers and a pile of unclaimed luggage, trunks and cases, and one small, inexpensive footlocker, waiting for somebody to come and collect it.

The man it belonged to was Augustus Owsley Stanley III.

Everyone called him Bear.

He came from a political family in Kentucky.

His grandfather had been a governor and a senator there.

You can decide.

Nobody else has managed to.

Why did the band and Bear part ways? By the time they moved into 710, he was no longer running their sound.

The tests moved around, a house in the hills near Santa Cruz, a nightclub in Palo Alto.

a recording studio once with no audience at all a big hall in san francisco then down to los angeles for a while in the late winter and out into the desert light of a strange city where nobody quite knew what they were there's a detail on the tape that nobody can quite explain or rather there's a detail about the tapes kessy wrote about talking to garcia after one of the tests and garcia telling him they had taped the whole show and could put out a record tomorrow the pranksters taped constantly the band's sound man taped too and yet of all those reels from that winter and spring very few in the band's own vault turn out to have the right date written on them mix-ups re-labellings reels in the wrong boxes the pranksters it seems didn't date theirs at all somewhere there may be hours of it with nothing on the box to say what night it was even the beginning is uncertain no one seems to know exactly when garcia and the others first connected with kisi's people there was a party at a farmhouse near santa cruz late in the autumn with a hand-lettered sign in a bookshop window asking whether you could pass the acid test and it's usually called the first one but the people who were there remember it as a party not a show garcia and a couple of the others were definitely there the biographers agree beyond that it gets vague and garcia himself said that before there were acid tests there were simply parties and the band went to one and here's the argument that has never once been settled was the soquel party the first acid test or just a party that only became the first one afterwards once the name existed and when did the band really walk through keecy's door the hall has emptied out now the projector has been switched off and its fan has slowed to nothing the coats are gone from the chair on the little stage the drum kit sits alone a cymbal still trembling very slightly no father at the dinner table No photograph of him on the mantle, no name said aloud or hardly ever, just a small apartment in Brooklyn, a mother at a sewing table, a grandmother who would wait for you out on the street because you wanted to see her through the window.

and in the back of a closet behind the coats something that doesn't belong to anybody in the house a drum pad and a pair of sticks made of snakewood dark and striped and heavy in the hand the boy in this apartment was born michael stephen hartman in flatbush much later the world would call him mickey hart he was raised by his mother leah who made gowns and kept books and by her parents the tessels his grandfather sam drove a cab his father lenny had left when he was very small and was barely spoken of but lenny hart had been somebody in his own world he was a rudimental drummer which means a military style drummer the kind who plays the old precise patterns of the marching band the rolls and flams and paradiddles and he had been a champion at the new york world's fair before the war he won the senior solo title leah was a drummer too she had taken it up the story goes partly to be near him and the two of them won a mixed doubles drumming championship at that same fair a courtship conducted in rolls and flams then the marriage came apart and the father went away and what he left behind was a practice pad and those beautiful sticks the boy found them his mother hid them he found them again she tried other closets and he went looking in those too and when he found the pad he would take it into the dark among the coats and practice there eventually when it was clear this was not going to stop his mother gave up and began teaching him herself the rudiments the same patterns she and lenny had played to each other years before from the age of about ten he wrote all he did was drum he didn't read for pleasure he didn't go out much he drummed he said that only the drum made him feel powerful and particular the way a teenager needs to feel with a drum in his hands he wrote he was the prince of noise the loudest thing in the room once a year there was a holiday his grandfather would take the family on long drives across the country in the summer and the boy would stand between the two front seats just behind the meter watching america go by yellowstone mount rushmore long straight roads in the heat when he started high school the family moved out to long island and there he found a band teacher arthur jones who took him seriously He started at the bottom.

In the marching band he wasn't even playing the giant bass drum at first, he was pulling it along on its wheels.

A rock band in a college town theater had stopped in the middle of a song to make room for a classical percussion ensemble.

Years later, people would look back on it as the very first glimmer of the drum segment.

as for the house in the hills the school soon outgrew it and the lease passed to the band's sound man owsley stanley and his partner roney and it became a household full of the dead's crew and friends in return for the house the story goes roney arranged for those drumming students to appear at a grateful dead concert which may be how that berkeley night came about even the school's beginnings are a little tangled one careful local historian credits ala raka with founding it another writer is just as sure the founder was ali akbar khan whose name it bears and places its first home in berkeley rather than in oakland And where did Hart first sit down with Ala Raka? One biography sends him to a suburb on Long Island to meet the master on a trip back east.

The band's own newsletter says simply that they met in the band's early years and that Mickey gave himself over to Indian rhythm at their very first meeting.

Those problems had started in 1966, when he was introduced to LSD by Linda Keith.

While hanging out in Keith's New York City apartment, Hendrix was given LSD by Linda and an unnamed friend, who I very strongly suspect is Owsley Stanley.

And if you wanna know more about that, go and read my breakdowns into him.

They're...

Uh, but, uh, neither here nor there, the experience that Hendrix had that night in 1966 changed him, and not in a good way.

Hendrix regularly started dropping acid, and on top of that, he became a regular user of marijuana, hash, cocaine, and amphetamines, going especially hard on a combination of all these drugs when he was touring.

It's the same story we've talked about in previous episodes and the deep dives that I've done on Patreon about Owsley Stanley, and The Beatles, and all the shit that the CIA was pulling.

A talented musician is given heaps of insanely strong, probably CIA-grade LSD, becomes a strung-out junkie who completely destroys themselves.

And so I was taking probably about 300 micrograms in a session at that point because I had a bit of a high tolerance and I could still fully function.

So I took three drops from this vial, not realizing that this ink-colored LSD was taken from the drawer of the Grateful Dead uh, tie dye person who got it from Owsley.

Uh, and each drop was 500 micrograms.

So

That was a winter run, a year and a half before this closing night.

The Dead headlined, with love and the almonds opening and the almonds were still unknown enough not to headline owsley stanley running the dead sound noticed with some surprise that the other band like his carried two drum kits on the wednesday late show the stage filled up Dwayne and Greg Allman came out, and Barry Oakley and Butch Trucks, so did Arthur Lee from Love, and so did Peter Green, Danny Kirwan and Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac, who happened to be in town with a free night.

They played together for about an hour.

Two nights later, a late show began after one in the morning and finished, by one account near daybreak.

... thinks it was, but...

Owsley was a big part of it.

Uh, he was, he was the big acid chemist, you know, um, who was, uh, stationed up in San Francisco, who was supplying just, just unbelievable amounts of, [laughs] putting just u- unfathomable amounts of LSD on the streets, and oftentimes for free.

You know, he's the guy that anytime there was a big festival going on, whether it was, uh, Altamont or Monterey or the HumanBeIn or, you know, a- any big music festival or big hippie gathering, he, you know, he pretty reliably showed up to distribute free acid.

So-

[laughs]

... you know, I mean, the question could, uh, could be raised, was, was he really the benevolent, you know, Johnny Appleseed, you know, running around the country giving everybody free acid just 'cause he was a g- a good guy, or, or, or was he, you know, was this all a part of a planned, you know, operation to, you know, affect whatever changes it was they wanted to make in the youth culture? So, you know, there's, there's a lot of open questions there, you know, and, and I, I think there's, in, in a lot of these cases there is, there is room for, you know, reasonable people to disagree over the effectiveness of, you know, whe- whether these things had effect or not.

I tend to think that they, that they largely did succeed in their goals, but, uh, you know, other people disagree.

One of them, a little surprisingly, is Wild Horses, the Rolling Stones tune played on banjo and mandolin and fiddle.

The man in that credit was the one everybody called Bear.

He had been away for about two years in federal prison, and he came home to find the Dead's touring operation on solid ground and their sound system grown enormous.

So in the autumn of that year, he turned his attention to something much smaller, a little club, five musicians and no electricity to speak of, beyond what his own machines needed.

The band was Old and in the Way.

Jerry Garcia on banjo, David Grisman on mandolin, Peter Rowan on guitar, Vassar Clements on fiddle, and John Khan on the acoustic bass.

They played a run at The Boarding House in early October, and Bear taped more than one of those nights.

What he did for the bluegrass band was his own idea, and he was proud of it.