Bear

by Robert Greenfield

  The same could not be said for the new sound equipment Owsley had purchased through which the Grateful Dead were now playing. Shortly after returning from Los Angeles, Owsley had sold his Voice of the Theatre speakers and McIntosh MC240 amp to Bill Graham for use at the Fillmore Auditorium. Being Owsley, he then bought the Dead “some bigger, even heavier gear.”

  “It never quite worked,” Jerry Garcia would later recall, “and we always had to spend five hours dragging it into a gig and five hours dragging it out afterwards and it was really bringing us down. After going through a million weird changes about it and screaming at poor Owsley and getting just crazy behind it, we finally parted ways, parted company with Owsley. He agreed to turn some of the equipment back into just regular money and bought us some regular standard single-minded equipment so we could go out and play.”

  By Labor Day 1966, Owsley was no longer working as the sound man for the Grateful Dead. “They decided they wanted to go back to standard amps, and I said, ‘Okay, I’ll buy you that and in exchange you give me all this stuff. They said, ‘Fine.’ So they picked out all the stuff they wanted and I paid the bill and took the stuff they had and gave most of it away to the Straight Theater on Haight Street. In terms of our parting ways, it was a bit of everything. It could have been my personality and the sound not being what they had anticipated, but back then I still had a lot to learn.”

  Accurately summing up what Owsley had done for the Dead during this period, Dennis McNally would later say, “He gave them a vision of quality that quite frankly influenced them for the next thirty years. And that alone gives him credibility for that scene.”

  By insisting that the band rehearse as often as possible while they had all been living together in Los Angeles as well as urging them to listen to the tapes he had made of their live performances, Owsley had helped the Dead take what they had been doing at the Acid Tests to another level. Out of his own pocket, he had furnished the band with the best equipment that money could buy and then worked tirelessly to ensure that their sound onstage would be second to none. He had also found a manager to look after their business interests, thereby freeing them to focus solely on their music. And perhaps more importantly, he had also imprinted the obsessive nature of his personality on the way in which they approached their live performances.

  While anyone else might have been devastated by the loss of the closest personal connection he had ever had with any group of individuals, Owsley took the band’s decision in stride. The good news for Owsley was that he was now free to begin making acid full-time once more.

  10

  Print the Legend

  On March 11, 1966, in Laredo, Texas, a federal judge sentenced Timothy Leary to twenty years in prison and a $20,000 fine for having unlawfully transported marijuana across the border while on his way to vacation in Mexico. The incredibly harsh verdict sparked what soon became an overwhelming flood of publicity about what had by then already become the fairly widespread use of LSD in America.

  During the next three and a half months, eighty-one articles about the drug appeared in The New York Times. Calling the phenomenon “an epidemic of acid heads,” Time magazine claimed that ten thousand students at the University of California had already taken LSD. On March 25, 1966, the cover of Life magazine featured the headline “The Exploding Threat of the Mind Drug That Got out of Control—LSD.”

  Thirteen days later, a five-year-old girl in Brooklyn was reported to be in critical condition after having swallowed a sugar cube impregnated with LSD that her eighteen-year-old uncle had purchased for $5 in Greenwich Village and then left in the refrigerator. That same day, a Harvard graduate and medical-school dropout who claimed he had been “flying on LSD for three days” was charged with stabbing his mother-in-law to death.

  With the media frenzy about LSD now in riotous bloom, the press soon got around to disclosing the role that a man whose name had previously been known only in the Bay Area had played in propagating the drug. Three days before LSD became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, the first full-length account of Owsley Stanley’s activities appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

  Beneath a banner headline on the first page of the second section that read, “‘Mr. LSD’ Makes Millions Without Breaking the Law—Young Drug Manufacturer Wins ‘Acid Head’ Set’s Applause After Following Checkered Career,” George Reasons recounted in great detail the exploits of someone who was so unwilling to let anyone take his photograph that few people outside his immediate circle even knew what he looked like. Two days later, the article was reprinted in its entirety in the San Francisco Chronicle.

  Without ever having spoken to his subject, Reasons, an investigative reporter who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, began his article by describing how Owsley had sped up to a bank at Sunset Boulevard and Stanley Avenue in Los Angeles on a red motorcycle. Wearing a black leather jacket, jeans, boots, and a white crash helmet, he walked up to the teller’s counter and began pulling $1, $5, and $10 bills from his shirt pockets, boots, and crash helmet.

  After he had built a “heaping pile of currency” on the counter, Owsley asked the teller to change it all for him into $100 bills. He then walked out of the bank with $25,000 in cash only to come “running back in a panic” after having realized that “he had also pocketed a wad of the bank’s money.” By the time Owsley returned, bank officials were already calling the police to report the incident.

  Unwittingly doing his part to add to Owsley’s growing status as a legendary underground figure, Reasons wrote that “even Owsley’s close friends and associates do not know his complete name, or his origins. He also has carefully guarded his identity from the world at large.” Based on extensive research that included interviews with one of Owsley’s ex-wives as well as his father, Reasons accurately portrayed Owsley’s life as well as his various brushes with the law before he ever began making LSD.

  “What kind of man is he?” Reasons wrote. “By reputation, he is a drifter, a dapper ladies’ man, and a professional student.” Noting that Owsley himself had recently “dropped from sight,” Reasons ended the article by quoting an unnamed police officer who said he doubted that Owsley was still making acid because “with all that money, why should he take the chance?”

  In the photograph that accompanied the article, Owsley could be seen in profile in what looked very much like a mug shot or a black-and-white picture that had been culled from a high school yearbook. Wearing a high-collared shirt and a sweater, he is clean shaven and sharp featured. Even with his hair spewing up from his head in a very James Dean 1950s do, Owsley looks preppy and most closely resembles a young Tom Waits. In every way, he seems like an eager go-getter who is destined for success.

  After the San Francisco Chronicle ran the article under a headline reading, “Home Made Drugs—Strange Story of Bay Area’s LSD Millionaire,” the Grateful Dead were so amused that they came up with the song “Alice D. Millionaire,” which they sometimes performed live but which did not appear on any of their albums until many years later. In Bob Weir’s words, “I vaguely recall the Chronicle headline about ‘LSD Millionaire Arrested,’ and that is where the song came from. But it had nothing to do with Owsley. We were just throwing lines at the canvas, and the title of the song was a pun that came from the headline, with Pigpen singing lead.”

  Although this was the first time Owsley would find himself celebrated in song, it would not be the last. Ten years later, Steely Dan would record “Kid Charlemagne,” a song loosely based on Owsley’s exploits that includes a reference to his time in Los Angeles with the Dead. Owsley is also mentioned by name in “Who Needs the Peace Corps?” by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention as well as in “Mexico” by the Jefferson Airplane.

  Still living in Berkeley, Owsley had now also rented a house in Point Richmond, an industrial neighborhood in Contra Costa County at the eastern end of the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge. Working alongside Tim Scully and Melissa Cargill in a basement laboratory the
re, he had manufactured what may have been more than three hundred thousand tabs of powerful acid, each of which contained 270 micrograms of LSD.

  On January 14, 1967, more than twenty thousand people showed up in Golden Gate Park for what was billed as a “Pow Wow—a Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In.” The event featured an all-star lineup of counterculture luminaries that included Timothy Leary in his first appearance on the West Coast, his former Harvard colleague Richard Alpert, the poet Lenore Kandel, Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Suzuki Roshi of the San Francisco Zen Center.

  Although the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service also performed that day, most of those who attended what came to be known as the Human Be-In were there primarily to hang out with one another while tripping on a brand-new batch of acid that Owsley had named while driving into San Francisco to attend the event. “We were on our way back into town from where we had been putting up the acid, and I saw this poster for the ‘Pow Wow.’ It had an eagle with lightning bolts in its claws and I said, ‘We gotta call this stuff White Lightning.’”

  As people milled about the park communing blissfully with one another, a masked man whom many mistakenly believed to be Owsley himself floated to the ground clutching a paisley parachute and then began distributing LSD to the crowd. On every level, the foundation had now been firmly laid for Owsley’s transmutation into a mythic figure in the counterculture.

  Based on the strength and purity of the product he continued to provide to all who wanted it, Owsley was now, in Rock Scully’s words, “revered because he was a bit of a guru and an alchemist. He was our good wizard, an extreme Robin Hood–like outlaw wizard. He wouldn’t let anybody see his picture so no one knew what he looked like, but he also had a big head. He had no fear of telling girls right off the bat, ‘Hi, I’m Owsley. Oh, you’ve never heard of me? How interesting.’”

  Six days after the Human Be-In, Owsley accompanied the Grateful Dead to a show at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium that featured Timothy Leary as the opening act. Leary would later describe his appearance there as “the high point of the road trip. Hall jammed. Grateful Dead jammed. The LSD alchemist Owsley was everywhere dispensing his White Lightning pills.” Owsley himself was less than impressed with Leary’s performance that night. “Somebody played a sitar and Tim did a rave and then the band played. He was being Guru Tim.”

  Tailoring his message to the LA crowd, Leary urged all those in attendance to “flick on the inner switch to full power” to avoid spending “the rest of your life as a badly paid extra in someone else’s low-budget black-and-white documentary/training film.” As Leary went on and on, Owsley kept pacing restlessly backstage while checking the monitors. Finally, he turned to Tim’s companion Rosemary Woodruff and asked, “Are you sure you guys take acid?”

  “Everything Tim said that night was very provocative. ‘Fuck authorities. To hell with your parents. Turn on, tune in, drop out. Take acid, don’t care what anyone will say, do what you please.’ He scared a lot of people because they thought he was too weird. And he was. He just kind of went around the bend. Everyone was saying, ‘Look, Tim, you’re out of control here. You’ve got to cool it. You’re bringing too much heat on everything. We don’t want a lot of attention.’ But he wouldn’t listen.”

  Owsley had first tried to contact Leary in 1965, only to find himself talking to Richard Alpert over the phone. Owsley then met Alpert while he was lecturing in California, and they soon became friends. In search of the highest possible high one day in Owsley’s cottage in Berkeley, Owsley intravenously injected himself, Alpert, Melissa Cargill, and others with pure crystalline LSD. Stoned out of his head, a biker friend from San Jose freaked out and threatened to murder Owsley. Already on the spiritual path that would lead him to becoming Ram Dass, Alpert somehow managed to cool the biker out.

  Although Owsley continued to maintain a close relationship with Alpert, he was never able to do the same with Leary. “Unless you were actually kissing Tim’s feet, he didn’t pay much attention to you. I just tried to be pals with the guy.” That Leary had already made himself the public face of LSD use in America was but one of the many factors that kept them apart. Memorably during this period, Owsley told Charles Perry, “Leary may be the king in this chess game but what nobody realizes is that I’m the rogue queen.”

  Despite his many reservations about the way in which Timothy Leary continued to deliver his relentless sales pitch for LSD, Owsley went to visit him in April 1967. Having already been booted out of Mexico and then the island of Anguilla in fairly rapid succession, Leary and his acolytes were then residing in a four-story, sixty-four-room mansion in Millbrook, New York.

  Eighteen months earlier, after having driven across America in their madly painted bus, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters had made the same pilgrimage. What was wildly anticipated by all those on the bus as a summit meeting between the two men who were then the titans of LSD in America turned out to be somewhat of a disaster.

  Not at all pleased that Leary was in the midst of a three-day acid trip and so could not be bothered to welcome his visitors personally, the Pranksters began goofing on everything they saw. Ken Babbs, Kesey’s right-hand man, went so far as to perform a parody version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was considered a sacred text by all those who lived there. As Tom Wolfe would later write, “The clear message was Fuck you, Millbrook, for your freaking frostiness.”

  After Owsley had driven up from New York City in a rented car with Melissa Cargill, Rhoney Gissen, with whom he had been carrying on an intensely sexual affair for the past two years, and a male friend from California, they all received a similarly lukewarm reception. According to Gissen, Leary seemed far more interested in sipping from a martini than taking any of the LSD that Owsley repeatedly offered him.

  Then twenty-six years old, Rhona Helen Gissen had been raised in a well-to-do family in New York’s Westchester County. Her father, an observant Jew who attended synagogue each week and laid tefillin every day, was an orthodontist who practiced in the Bronx. Her mother was the president of the local chapter of Hadassah in Mount Vernon.

  After having been placed on disciplinary probation during her freshman year at Mount Holyoke College, an exclusive all-girls school in South Hadley, Massachusetts, Rhoney Gissen had transferred to the University of California in Berkeley, where she took LSD for the first time with Perry Lederman.

  In what was then his standard approach to any woman to whom he was attracted, Owsley began coming on to Gissen as soon as they met in Lederman’s apartment. After Owsley had squeezed a dose of liquid acid onto her tongue from a Murine bottle, they returned to her place, where “they made love till the sun came up.” Although Owsley was still involved with Melissa Cargill, he then introduced the two women to one another and they soon became good friends as well as his coworkers. When Owsley called Gissen in New York City to tell her that he and Melissa were coming East to visit Timothy Leary in Millbrook, Gissen happily accompanied them on the journey.

  Despite having failed yet again to make any kind of connection with Leary, Owsley’s recollection of the visit was relatively benign. “We spent a few days at Millbrook, and I didn’t think the people there were a hundred percent genuine. A lot of them were boffing other people all over the place, but they all seemed to have their own agendas. There was a lot of talk and pretension going on, and the only one who seemed to get past that in any sense was Richard Alpert.”

  High on acid, Owsley and his traveling companions decided to return to New York City on April 4, 1967, to watch the Jefferson Airplane perform at the Cafe au Go Go in Greenwich Village. Having arrived at Millbrook in the dark, Owsley promptly got lost when leaving. Pointing to a New York State trooper named James Dudley, who was sitting in his patrol car on Mill Street, Melissa Cargill told Owsley to ask him for directions to the Taconic Parkway.

  After do
ing so as politely as he could, Owsley drove off, only to realize that the trooper was now following him. Leary’s residence in Millbrook had already been busted in a raid led by Dutchess County assistant district attorney G. Gordon Liddy, so virtually everyone seen leaving the estate was automatically under suspicion.

  When Owsley failed to signal while changing lanes, the trooper pulled the car over. After Owsley had stepped outside to present his registration, the trooper saw a foil-wrapped packet fall to the ground. Opening it, he identified the substance within as hashish. The trooper then ordered Owsley to open the trunk.

  The trunk was packed to the brim with bags and boxes and bottles, most of which contained a wide variety of exotic scents and different kinds of lanolin that Owsley had just purchased in the Kiehl’s store on Third Avenue in Manhattan for use in formulating what he called his Barely Burn Bear suntanning lotion. Although no illegal substances were in the trunk, the trooper arrested everyone in the car and took them to jail, where they remained until Owsley got a high-priced attorney in New York to post bail so they could all return to Manhattan.

  “I stopped to ask a cop for directions, and he took one look at our hair and, half a mile down the road, he pulled us over and tore the car apart and found what he found. We had to go to court and the judge said, ‘You mean, these people stopped to ask you for directions and you tore their car apart?’ And he threw it out. It cost me about twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars and I never got any of the money back.”

  The most serious consequence of the bust for Owsley was that the trooper found the key to a safe-deposit box filled with cash at a Manufacturers Hanover Trust bank in Manhattan. Owsley had already been through another safe-deposit-box nightmare in Berkeley when Melissa Cargill had forgotten the name she had used to rent the box in which five hundred grams of LSD were stashed.