Bear

by Robert Greenfield

  After doing all he could to help her remember the name, Owsley had hired a hypnotist so that Cargill might recall it while she was in a trance. As the hypnotist began leading Cargill up the stairs of Owsley’s cottage, she suddenly blurted out, “Missy Stanley,” and the missing LSD was then recovered.

  The safe-deposit box at the Manufacturers Hanover Trust contained what Owsley would later call “the most cash I ever had in my hands at one time, about $100,000.” An enormous sum at the time, which would now be worth seven times that much, all of it was in $100 bills.

  Although the charges from the Millbrook bust were eventually thrown out of court, the police never returned the safe-deposit key. Melissa Cargill had a duplicate key, but she could not risk showing up with it at the bank because no one knew if the state police had already notified officials there to immediately inform them if anyone came to open the box.

  After Owsley had explained his predicament to Richard Alpert, he set up a meeting for Owsley with Billy Hitchcock. Then twenty-two years old, Hitchcock was the independently wealthy patron who had made it possible for Leary and his followers to live rent-free at his sumptuous family estate in Millbrook. A successful stockbroker at Lehman Brothers, he was the grandson of William Larimer Mellon, the founder of Gulf Oil, and the nephew of Andrew Mellon, who had been secretary of the treasury during Prohibition.

  Hitchcock promptly inveigled a lawyer friend named Charles Rumsey to use the duplicate key to retrieve the money. In his apartment the next day, Hitchcock handed all the cash back to Owsley. He then gave it Rumsey, who deposited it all under the name “Robin Goodfellow” in the Fiduciary Trust Company in Nassau in the Bahamas.

  Despite Owsley’s recollection that the sum of money involved in this particular transaction was $100,000, Stewart Tendler and David May, the authors of The Brotherhood of Eternal Love: From Flower Power to Hippie Mafia, would later write that the actual amount was $225,000. “By the winter of 1967,” they wrote that Owsley also had more than $320,000 “salted away in safe-deposit boxes around San Francisco” as well as a bank account in London, the contents of which were never revealed. In July 1968, Hitchcock transferred whatever money still remained in the Robin Goodfellow account to the Paravacini Bank in Berne, Switzerland.

  According to Owsley, “I literally gave all that money to Billy Hitchcock to keep safe for the community which I had decided owned it although I had not exactly defined who that community was. It was a mental construct, I guess. I requested that he use it to buy gold. He didn’t and bought stocks instead. Those that went up, he took, and those that went down, he put against our hundred grand and this went on until it was all gone.

  “I thought that with so much money of his own, he would not do this. I was wrong of course. He not only did this but then also became a government snitch who disowned the hundred grand and told the IRS that it was mine. He had already paid the tax on it so they foolishly refunded the money to him and slapped a tax evasion suit on me. In the end, they got nothing as I had nothing left for them to take. And I came to the conclusion that Hitchcock was a weak, dishonorable rat bag.”

  After they had first synthesized LSD in Los Angeles in 1965, Owsley and Melissa Cargill had returned to Berkeley with eight hundred thousand doses of high-quality acid. Although Bear always insisted that he had then given half of it away, selling four hundred thousand doses on the street at an average price of $3 a dose would have earned him $1.2 million, which would today be the equivalent of more than $9 million.

  In Charles Perry’s words, “Owsley habitually played it close to the vest but he did give me the impression that he had at least one Swiss bank account when I knew him in Berkeley. I don’t know when he would have opened it, probably in 1966, but it might have been even earlier than that.” Where all the money that Owsley kept in this account might have gone, no one can say for certain.

  Despite having been busted in Millbrook, Owsley had still not been convicted of any drug-related crime and so seemed to those in the counterculture to be truly beyond the law. In a book entitled America in Legend: Folklore from the Colonial Period to the Present, Richard M. Dorson, a professor of history at Indiana University, would devote ten pages to Owsley’s mythic stature as “Mr. LSD,” “the Henry Ford of acid,” and “the LSD King.”

  “Anecdotal legends about Owsley, as he was usually called, proliferated throughout the youth drug culture,” Dorson wrote. “They celebrated him as a hip-hero manufacturer of the best LSD tablets available, invulnerable to the narcs, the patron of the rock band the Grateful Dead, and a self-made millionaire. Oral legendary traditions about him circulated among street people and college students.”

  Long before the Internet had been invented, the stories that people shared about Owsley were rarely true but always fantastic. Owsley, it was said, had an electric glow about him but never spoke. He had been seen in Golden Gate Park one day giving away thousands of caps of acid. When the cops came to bust him, all the acid was already gone because Owsley had taken the last ten caps himself when he saw them coming. For him, that was just a normal trip.

  Believing that every word they were saying was true, people who had never met Owsley said the reason that he had never been busted was because he was actually a narc who was setting up other people. Someone who had lived with Owsley claimed he had shot strychnine with him. Owsley also put the substance into his acid to make it more intense. Before starting to make acid, Owsley had been a doctor. He was also said to be the son of a wealthy family, a Swede who was now living in exile, and a kid who had just turned twenty.

  One Saturday afternoon, Owsley had flown on a helicopter to Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, where he had distributed acid to his disciples like Jesus. In what must still rank as the greatest story of them all, Owsley was said to have gone to visit a group of Berkeley Free Speech activists who had been thrown in jail. Wearing a purple velvet suit and carrying a Bible, he solemnly began reading passages from it only to reveal that the Bible had been dipped in acid so those in jail could “groove” on the pages. Each activist then tore out a page from a favorite section of the Bible and sucked on it until they were all tripping madly behind bars.

  In Dorson’s words, “Owsley represents the magician-trickster who can always escape the narcs and whose mind-expanding pills give manna to their takers.” On every level, Owsley himself fully understood the process in which he was now involved. “All myths and legends perform sociological functions. They allow people to focus on certain attributes, even if the attributes have nothing to do with the person. Some of that has attached itself to me and some of things are sort of sketchily based on what I actually did.

  “I’ve been made into the hero. The Robin Hood. The John Wesley Harding. The figure who saves the culture but is always just outside the reach of the dark principle. The trickster who changes shape and form. Loki. Hermes. But that was never my plan. Why did Perry Lederman tell people my name? Why did my name attach itself to LSD like glue? I have no idea.”

  Never one to hide his light under a bushel, Owsley now became even more full of himself than he had been before, if that was possible. John Perry Barlow, who had met Bob Weir while they were both students at the Fountain Valley School in Colorado, first encountered Owsley in June 1967 in the apartment up the street from the Grateful Dead house at 710 Ashbury where Phil Lesh “lived with this incredibly beautiful girl named Florence Nathan, who was always wandering around naked. I was up there one day when this feverish little man came in wearing a blazer with brass buttons on it, and I said, ‘That looks like it needs a coat of arms. A family crest, or some damn thing.’”

  Picking right up on the suggestion, Owsley told Barlow that he had been “‘thinking exactly the same thing at this very moment! And here’s what I was thinking. I was thinking about a big O made out of flame wrapping itself through the indole ring.’” That Barlow even knew that Owsley was referring to the six-membered benzene ring fused to a five-membered ring containing nitrogen found in psilo
cybin, serotonin, and LSD speaks volumes about them both at the time. “Owsley said, ‘What would you think of that?’ And I said, ‘That sounds pretty good. Is one of your initials O?’ He said, ‘I’m Owsley.’ And I said, ‘Well, so far that doesn’t mean a great deal to me but it looks like it’s about to.’”

  Then still pretty much an outsider from the East Coast who had only just arrived in San Francisco, Barlow soon realized that “various people had gotten out on the edge of the framework to the point where if they had gone any further out, they would have been institutionalized.” Barlow quickly realized that Owsley’s “trip with everybody was adversarial. I was not a rival, but he saw me as a good sparring partner. I don’t know if he would have said I was as smart as him, but he might have said I came closer than most.

  “For Owsley, there was always a right way and a wrong way. And he was pro-choice. He was magnanimous about it. If you wanted to be an idiot, that was your right. And he was not surprised that you would choose to be an idiot. Because if you did it any way but his, that was pretty much what you were.”

  Barlow, who over the course of his remarkably Zelig-like life would become close friends with such disparate cultural figures as Timothy Leary and John F. Kennedy Jr., also understood Owsley’s desire to remain as anonymous as possible despite his growing notoriety. “You become as you are beheld. And Owsley was smart enough to know that. Not being photographed was his dodge, which was very thoughtful. He was not so easily beheld. And so there was no caricature for him to live up to. There certainly was one of Jerry Garcia. You become a cartoon of yourself.”

  And while pride may go before the fall, in truth Owsley was just being who he had always been. Once the Summer of Love in San Francisco became the subject of mass-media attention throughout the nation, it was only a matter of time until he got seriously busted for the first time for making acid.

  11

  Monterey Pop, and Beyond

  In many ways, the Summer of Love actually began at the Monterey Pop Festival on June 16–18, 1967. With thirty thousand people jamming the Monterey Fairgrounds each day, the legendary performances put on by Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix immediately catapulted them to a level of stardom they had never before known. Because many of those in attendance as well as the performers were stoned on a brand-new batch of Owsley’s acid known as Monterey Purple, much the same could also be said for him. To begin synthesizing the LSD, he had flown to Denver with Melissa Cargill and Rhoney Gissen.

  In Denver, Owsley, Cargill, and Gissen were met at the airport by Tim Scully. Their first stop was a dry-ice plant. Picking up several fifty-pound blocks of dry ice, which Owsley called “drice,” they drove to a two-story suburban house where Scully had already set up a laboratory equipped with three custom-made seventy-two-liter condensing flasks and vacuum pumps.

  Ravi Shankar, Owsley, and tabla player Ali Akbar Khan backstage at the Monterey Pop Festival, June 16, 1967. (© Jim Marshall Photography LLC)

  As Albert Hofmann had done many years before him, Owsley was now using flash evaporation to rid his product of impurities. Because LSD was sensitive to ultraviolet light, he replaced all the bulbs in the laboratory with bug lights. Wearing wire-rimmed glasses, masks, paper smocks, and rubber gloves, Owsley, Cargill, Gissen, and Tim Scully did all their work in a soft yellow glow to the music of Buffalo Springfield and Blue Cheer, the hard-rocking San Francisco psychedelic blues power trio who had named themselves after the brand of acid that Owsley had tabbed up before leaving Los Angeles with the Grateful Dead.

  After having begun the synthesis, Melissa Cargill flew back to the Bay Area to spend time with Jack Casady, the Jefferson Airplane bass player with whom she was then also having a relationship. Leaving Gissen and Scully behind to continue the work, Owsley went to Los Angeles, where he promised his friend Cass Elliot of the Mamas and Papas that he would provide more than enough acid for the upcoming festival in Monterey. A week later, he returned to Denver, where Gissen and Tim Scully had been “working around the clock” to make as much LSD as they could.

  On June 16, 1967, Owsley and Rhoney Gissen flew from Denver to Monterey. Wearing a leather vest and a bear-claw necklace, Owsley was carrying with him one hundred thousand tabs of LSD that had been dyed purple. Half the size of an aspirin, each tab contained 270 micrograms of acid. He also had his Murine bottle filled with LSD, a bottle of dark green hashish oil, and an ounce of powerful Cannabis sativa.

  Because of the heavy cloud cover in Monterey, the flight was diverted to San Jose. After having boarded a bus heading south, Owsley dosed himself with a drop of liquid acid from his Murine bottle. His first move upon arriving backstage at the festival was to offer a dose to Ravi Shankar, only to have the famed Indian sitar player promptly turn away from him and stalk out of the room.

  Nor was this the first time that Owsley had been rebuffed by a world-famous musician whom he was trying to turn on to LSD. Once after having returned to Berkeley from a visit to New York City, Owsley proudly told Charles Perry that he had finally managed to meet “Bobby Dylan.” Perry then heard the complete story from someone else who had been there. Owsley had allegedly walked up to Dylan and introduced himself by saying, “Hi, Bob. I’m Owsley. Want some acid?” Dylan’s immediate response was “Who is this freak? Get him out of here!”

  Unlike Ravi Shankar, many of the other performers at the festival were more than eager to sample Owsley’s brand-new batch of LSD. As Pete Townshend of the Who would later say, “Now, at Monterey, Owsley was introducing like Version 7 of his own acid, which up to that point had really only been available in Europe in its clinical variety from Sandoz Laboratories … so you knew exactly what you were getting when you took some of it. With Owsley, you had no clue at all. I took some of his at Monterey and I never touched a drug again for eighteen years. It was extraordinarily powerful.

  “The thing about Owsley was that when he gave you something, he would take it too. Just to show you. He was like the man who used to eat the king’s food. ‘Hmm, so you’ve had some of that? I’ll have some, too!’ And then he’d go over to somebody else and say, ‘Have some acid.’ He must have had the most extraordinary liver.”

  The acid that Owsley was handing out to all who wanted it, as well as some who had no idea what they were ingesting, also caused D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary film about the festival to look the way it does. On Saturday night, Chip Monck, who was in charge of lighting at the festival, suddenly realized how tired he was and took what he believed to be a purple heart, the street name for Dexamyl, a widely used form of amphetamine combined with a barbiturate.

  “But it wasn’t,” Monck would later say. “It was Owsley Purple. It was the first time I had taken acid and after it hit, I looked at Laura Nyro and she was going ‘Black … out.’ I was just staring at her thinking it was wonderful. Instead of blacking out the stage. That’s why anywhere after Booker T. and the M.G.’s, the Pennebaker film is completely red. I just said, ‘Go to frame six, guys—wow, this is fucking groovy.’ Pennebaker was not pleased.… We went to frame six, we took off our headsets, and we sat there, just sort of gazing at it.”

  Having already experienced the wonders of LSD in England, John Lennon had become fixated on how he could continue to obtain enough high-quality acid to fuel his creative endeavors. Since money was not an issue for him, Lennon decided to lay in a lifetime supply by going directly to Owsley. The problem was how to get the stuff back into England. Although the film rights to Monterey Pop had already been sold, Lennon sent a cameraman there to shoot the festival for what was ostensibly his own private use. The cameraman’s real job was to smuggle the acid back through English customs.

  Owsley confirmed his role in this arrangement by saying, “I sent a photographer who had accompanied Brian Jones to Monterey Pop back home with a telephoto lens packed full of Monterey Purple tabs. Jones agreed to share the stash with the Beatles just as they had shared the bottle of White Lightning that Mama Cass had carried over there a f
ew months earlier.”

  After Owsley’s shipment had arrived safely in England, the Beatles spent the next three weeks tripping. The continuing aftereffects of whatever visions they may have derived from Owsley’s batch of Monterey Purple can clearly be seen in Magical Mystery Tour, the Merry Pranksters–inspired, homemade road-trip movie that the Beatles filmed in September 1967.

  Even for Owsley, it did not seem that things could possibly get any higher or wilder. Having been blinded by the insight that the Grateful Dead could someday become even bigger than the Beatles, he was now personally responsible for getting the most popular band in rock history higher than they had ever before been. Being Owsley, he was not yet done turning on rock stars.

  Six days after Monterey Pop, Owsley showed up backstage with Rhoney Gissen at Jimi Hendrix’s debut performance at Fillmore West in San Francisco. Although Hendrix was surrounded by a circle of friends and family members, Owsley boldly stepped forward and told Hendrix that he wanted to record him while high on acid and playing on his own. Owsley then sealed the deal with Hendrix by lighting up a pipe filled with DMT smeared on mint leaves that they both smoked together.

  After the show was over, Owsley and Gissen drove to the Masonic Temple, a large auditorium on California Street in the Nob Hill section of the city. Carrying his tape recorder and a Fender amp, Owsley followed Hendrix into a dark room with heavy draperies and a fireplace. After lighting a fire, Owsley set up his recording equipment and gave Hendrix a dose of liquid LSD from the Murine bottle. Seated on a chair with his guitar, Hendrix then began to play.

  After he was done, Owsley held up the cassette he had just recorded in triumph as Gissen drew the drapes to admit blinding sunlight into the room. Asking if he could see the tape, Hendrix took it from Owsley’s hand and threw it into the fire. Smiling broadly, he then grabbed his guitar and walked out the door. Frantically, Owsley did all he could to retrieve the cassette from the fire, only to realize that the tape had already been destroyed.