Lest anyone think that all this could be just another acid-drenched fantasy that never happened, consider that before Jimi Hendrix began his guitar solo on a cover version of the Beatles’ “Day Tripper” that was recorded on December 15, 1967, at the BBC-1 studios in London, he can clearly be heard calling out, “Oh, Owsley, can you hear me now?” But by then, Owsley’s everyday life had already become far stranger than fiction.
Owsley getting busted in Orinda, California, on December 21, 1967. (Corbis Images)
12
Getting Busted
Although LSD had now been illegal in California for nine months, it did nothing to stem the invasion of a hundred thousand would-be hippies from all over the United States to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the summer of 1967. What had until then been a vibrant and collegial scene soon became a public spectacle of such proportions that a Gray Line bus began regularly driving through the neighborhood so tourists could gaze in wonder at all the long-haired, stoned-out kids who were crowding the streets.
None of what was then happening in the Haight surprised Jerry Garcia in the least. “It was inevitable. I mean, the media portrait of the innocent hippie flower children was a joke. It wasn’t that innocent.… Stuff like cops and politicians and the rest of the world, all those people just kept right on grinding in the same old groove. So it was not as though any of this was surprising. It wasn’t surprising to get busted. It was surprising if you didn’t get busted.”
As always, the Grateful Dead were among the first to feel the heat. On October 2, 1967, eleven people who lived in the Dead house at 710 Ashbury were arrested for possession of marijuana by eight narcotics agents accompanied by a dozen reporters and several television crews. Among those taken into custody in the raid, which became front-page news in the San Francisco Chronicle, were lead vocalist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and Bob Weir, band managers Rock Scully and Danny Rifkin, and Owsley’s close friend Bob Matthews. Most of those who were arrested eventually pleaded guilty to lesser charges and paid small fines.
Nonetheless, a message written in capital letters had now been sent. Even in San Francisco, a city where every form of personal eccentricity had not just always been accepted but also actively encouraged ever since the Gold Rush, state and federal authorities were no longer willing to ignore the free-form carnival of drug use that was going on in the Haight.
Two days after the Grateful Dead bust, the Psychedelic Shop closed its doors. On October 6, 1967, the Diggers, who were now known as the Free City Collective, put on an elaborate “Death of Hippie” ceremony. In the weeks that followed, thirty-two truants were arrested in a police sweep on Haight Street. What had begun as an authentic social experiment had, in Charles Perry’s words, “collapsed into a monstrous stew of methedrine, heroin, and strong arm crime.”
Throughout the Summer of Love, five different street chemists had busily been synthesizing their own versions of LSD, thereby making the Haight, in the words of author Nicholas von Hoffman, “the acid center of the world, the place where it was first mass-marketed and where it is cheapest and most plentiful.” During the period between May 1, 1966, and April 30, 1967, the federal Bureau of Drug Abuse Control had already seized about 1.6 million doses of acid.
Fully aware that he was now a high-priority target on the bureau’s most wanted list, Owsley continued doing all he could to avoid getting busted. By refusing to ever front his product to others, he was able to keep from having to do business with them again until they had exhausted their current supply. He also insisted on working with only one principal distributor at a time in every market, who would then resell the LSD to dealers on the street. As soon as any of his distributors began to feel that they were under suspicion, Owsley would immediately start working with someone else.
“The change of guard for sales was always a decision based on that person’s perception of their situation, not mine. It was always by mutual assessment and agreement. None of us wanted the trouble that we all knew was going to come down the line eventually.”
Owsley also devised a practical but ingenious method of safeguarding his product without having to put it into a safe-deposit box. “My regular stash was in a small, inexpensive footlocker, which made a circle between Oakland, San Jose, and San Francisco on the Greyhound bus. I could leave it in the bus station for up to thirty days so I would go to wherever it was, take out whatever I needed, and then send it to myself in the next city. It was always in a safe place and nobody had a clue because I learned early on that if you had a stash, you had to be the only person who knew about it.”
Although “the money flow was very embarrassing,” Owsley did not “feel it was for me because what I was doing was in my mind a service to the community,” and so he “did not buy expensive things, dressed in a normal manner, and drove a second-hand car. In fact, I lived in modest rentals and generally was not much of a consumer.”
While it might have seemed this way to him, Owsley had always loved to take his friends out to dinner at restaurants such as Original Joe’s in San Francisco, where he would pay for everything they had ordered with $20 and $100 bills from his boots. Despite his penchant for dressing in a manner that Charles Perry described as what “border policemen would later call ‘the dealer look,’” Owsley’s theory was that “cops don’t register outrageousness, only the attempt to be inconspicuous, so if you don’t give paranoia an inch, you’ll never get busted.”
While he was still living in his cottage on Berkeley Way, Owsley had already made so much money from selling LSD that after he had woken up each afternoon and taken an hour-long shower, what Charles Perry called “a regular retinue of petitioners would present themselves like serfs pleading for boons from the king. I can still see Owsley listening warily but regally to their requests, enthroned in the nude on a huge fur-covered chair, drying his hair with the royal hair dryer.”
During the spring of 1967, Owsley moved to what became known as the Troll House at 2321 Valley Street in Berkeley. Designed by the Fox brothers, the brick cottage was set back from the street with a cobblestone walkway leading to the front door. Among the cottage’s features were a steep, gabled roof, oddly shaped stained-glass windows, a cylindrical chimney, and stucco nooks.
Owsley soon filled the house with what Charles Perry described as “Persian rugs, hi-fi equipment, Indian fabrics, Tibetan wall hangings, pillows, hash pipes, musical instruments made by his personal guitar maker and all sorts of electronic toys like strobe lights.” The Troll House soon became “a regular stopover for the psychedelic elite, from Richard Alpert … to out-of-town rock musicians.”
Adding to the mise-en-scène was the gift that Terry the Tramp brought his old friend one day—a live burrowing owl that Owsley promptly named Screech after what Melissa Cargill had said when she first saw the bird. The owl, which had to be fed a live mouse each week, constantly escaped from its cage and could often be found perched on one of the wooden beams beneath the high ceiling of the living room.
Owsley might well have gone on living in this manner if he had not decided to rent “an ordinary house in a normal neighborhood” at 69 La Espiral Street in Orinda, a suburban town east of Berkeley in Contra Costa County, so he could tab up a new batch of acid that Tim Scully had synthesized in Denver.
“All that was there was a set of screens, lactose, a set of soft lab molds, and unfortunately some crystal acid. We had not yet brought in the press and were just beginning to make the granulation for tabbing. While doing this, we made some soft-molded tabs called ‘tablet titrate.’ Not a good idea as some of these tabs were smuggled out by one of my friends who sold them to a narc, resulting in the bust.”
On December 21, 1967, six agents under the direction of the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control used a sledgehammer to break down the front door of the house on La Espiral Street. They then arrested Owsley, Melissa Cargill, Rhoney Gissen, Bob Thomas, Robert W. Massey, and Owsley’s old friend Will Spires on charges of conspiracy to illega
lly manufacture controlled drugs. After he had sold $3,400 worth of LSD to an undercover agent two days earlier, Spires had unwittingly led the authorities to the house.
Based on the 67.5 grams of LSD that were seized in the house, enough for about seven hundred thousand doses, one agent mistakenly underestimated the street value of the haul at anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million. In fact, it would have been worth about three times that much. Another agent said that Owsley’s arrest would probably cause “panic in the streets” because “to a lot of hippies, their idol has fallen.”
As Owsley sat handcuffed on the couch after having been given his Miranda warning, he said, “How did you find my place? Even though you have a search warrant, I consider you an uninvited guest in my house.” He also told the agents that his LSD formula adhered to federal Food and Drug Administration standards and that he only “made the purest acid for my family and friends.”
When agents began seizing the STP that Scully had also made in Denver, Owsley informed them that the substance was still legal and asked them to take only the contraband with them. As one of the arresting agents noted, Owsley was “actually a psychedelic missionary” who “gives the impression that he feels the average person can never actually know himself without turning on with LSD.” A day later, all those who had been arrested were freed on $5,000 bail each. In time, the charges against both Melissa Cargill and Rhoney Gissen were dropped.
Not surprisingly, the story of the arrest of the “King of Acid” was picked up by newspapers throughout America. By far the single most astonishing aspect of the coverage was the photograph of Owsley that appeared above a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle reading, “LSD ‘Tycoon’ Held After Orinda Raid.”
Just fourteen months after that photograph of him looking young and innocent with short hair had appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Owsley stands with his hands cuffed behind his back in a doorway. With his hair no longer than it was before, he sports the kind of drooping, thick black mustache that was just then coming into vogue.
Although the mustache does make him look somewhat like an outlaw from the Old West, he seems far more like a serious young professor who has only just learned that his research grant has been taken away by those who will never understand the importance of his work. The brief caption beneath the photo accurately sums up his current situation: “Augustus Owsley Stanley Under Arrest—A folk hero of the ‘underground.’”
Owsley, now more usually referred to as Bear, in hat and shades with Jerry Garcia at the San Diego International Airport in September 1968. (Photo © Rosie McGee)
13
Two Festivals
In return for 10 percent of what soon proved to be nonexistent profits, Ron Rakow persuaded the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service to perform for free at shows that he began putting on at the Carousel Ballroom at 1805 Geary Boulevard in San Francisco.
The scene at the Carousel Ballroom, an ill-fated attempt to provide an alternative venue to Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium as well as the Avalon Ballroom run by Chet Helms on Sutter Street, was so wild and loose that it soon became what Dennis McNally would call “a clubhouse for the city’s freak community.”
No longer able to synthesize LSD to earn a living because he was now under federal indictment, Owsley and his friend Bob Matthews both began working as sound men at the Carousel Ballroom in February 1968. “I worked for Rakow, but he didn’t know what he was doing. We ran three or four nights a week and had a jam on Tuesday nights with a lot of action, but Bill Graham would tell people that if they played for us, they couldn’t play for him, and then he would offer them more money because he wanted the hall himself. Rakow was charging people too little to get in and not paying attention in his typical way, and so it had no possibility of surviving for very long.”
On July 23, 1968, Owsley recorded Big Brother and the Holding Company as they performed at the Carousel Ballroom, which had by then been purchased by Bill Graham, who promptly renamed it Fillmore West. Having only just completed Cheap Thrills, an album that would become number one on the Billboard charts, Janis Joplin and the band were in top form. Finally released in 2012, Live at the Carousel Ballroom 1968 is now recognized as what Owsley called “the definitive Big Brother live album.”
A month later, Dan Healy, who had been mixing the Grateful Dead’s live performances, left his job to work with Quicksilver Messenger Service. The Dead, who were then in the studio recording Aoxomoxoa, asked Owsley to return to the fold as their sound man. Despite all the travails that they had been through, Owsley was still part of the Dead family. With no other prospects available to him, he quickly accepted the offer.
When the band performed at Fillmore West for three nights beginning on August 20, 1968, Owsley played his part in helping the Dead finally achieve a goal that they had been pursuing with great intensity for more than a year. Convinced that Bill Graham needed to take LSD so he would truly understand what their music was all about, the band had done everything in their power to dose him, but to no avail.
Well aware of what the Dead were trying to do to him, Graham had by then already become so paranoid that he “would never touch anything they gave me. I’d never hug them. Their ladies used to want to kiss me because they had first put a blotter of acid in their mouths. I used to say, ‘Kiss the back of my hair if you want.’ It became a big running thing.” To prevent the Dead from dosing anything that he ate at their shows, Graham also began bringing food from home wrapped in wax paper that he kept in a bag sealed with tape.
Knowing that Graham liked to drink from the cans of soda that he kept in garbage cans filled with ice backstage at Fillmore West, the Dead, in Graham’s words, “decided to go for it. What they did, unbeknownst to me, was warn all their people, ‘Don’t touch any of the soda in our dressing room.’ Then they took hypodermic needles and shot acid through the top of every soda can.”
Many years later, Owsley explained the Dead’s fairly ingenious plan to get Graham high by saying, “Nobody injected anything. We had been trying to hit him for years and we knew he wouldn’t touch anything that was opened or in a cup. He had to open his own. We saw what kind of soda he liked and made sure that every can he was likely to find was already fixed.
“When you picked up a soft drink out of a cooler, it was always covered with beads of condensation. So a drop or two was put on the lid of every can in the room. They were all still sealed. The drop was in the little ridge around the outside. Take a sip and the drop went in with the first sip. But it wasn’t me who did it. It was our road manager at the time. He was very clever at that.”
Totally stoned on acid for the first time in his life, Graham was then asked by Mickey Hart if he wanted to walk out onstage and play with the Dead. Clutching a drumstick in his hand, Graham began wildly beating on a gong before switching over to a cowbell. He then spent four hours onstage. In Mickey Hart’s words, “He was in the band. He really was. He was right there. He became one with the universe. And we couldn’t stop him. He was possessed. He kept hitting that cowbell like it was the last thing in his life.
“He really lost himself and I think that was when he started to see what it was all about. Once he got high, he saw that we were not just a bunch of hippies getting high and going, ‘Yahoo! Look at the colors!’ We were serious musicians exploring a new zone. That was something that made an impression on him and he also saw that the Grateful Dead was basically good.”
Whenever the Dead were having problems onstage during this period, one of them would inevitably shout out Owsley’s name. To remain as anonymous as possible while he was out on bail, Owsley insisted that everyone now begin calling him Bear, which is how he will be referred to from this point on. Now that he was once again mixing their live sound, Bear recorded all the Dead’s performances just as he had in the past.
“I always plugged a tape deck into the PA feed to keep a diary of my work, and only for that reason. It seemed to me that since I had a
lready done all the work to produce a mix for the house, why not grab it on tape? The Dead sometimes asked to listen to the show afterwards when we were all still pretty high but I never forced any of them to do this. Left to my own devices, I only ever listened if I’d had problems during the show which was the major practical reason I kept a journal of each show and sound check.
“The comments from the boys were very helpful in my learning how to mix and when they heard the way they actually sounded to the audience, they were stimulated to change things. It was a contributing reason to why they learned how to use dynamics, which are a rarity among loud rock bands, who seem to prefer keeping everything turned up to ten.”
Confirming this, Bob Weir told David Browne, the author of So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead, “We used to sit and listen to everything we did and kick it around.… That came from his tapes.… He instilled in us quality consciousness. If you’re going to do something, you have to … set your internal compass toward excellence and go for that, because nothing else matters.”
By this point in the Grateful Dead’s career, the relationship between the band and their audience had already undergone a seismic shift. In Bear’s words, “As soon as it starting costing as much as a movie to see a show, the whole thing changed. Instead of people just having a good time and dancing, they stood around mesmerized, staring at the stage as if they missed a stroke of the guitarist’s pick, they would really miss seeing something. It became like they were watching a movie, and eventually they even started sitting down and staring at the musicians. Before, it had just been this incredible crazy, wonderful experience, and it was the money that buggered it all up.”
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