Owsley Stanley (born Augustus Owsley Stanley III, January 19, 1935 – March 12, 2011) also known as Bear, was a figure of the San Francisco Bay counter-culture. His early activities spanned the Beat-era years of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters scenes, but he played a role during the explosion of 1960's Psychedelia culture. As a crafts-person, he became best known simply as 'Owsley' – the LSD "cook" (underground chemist). Under the professional name of "Bear", he worked with the rock band the Grateful Dead.

Bear was as an early soundman for The Grateful Dead, a band he met when Kesey invited them to an Owsley Acid test party. As their sound engineer, Bear frequently recorded live tapes behind his mixing board and helped "The Dead" become the first performers since Les Paul to custom-develop high-fidelity audio components and sound systems.

Stanley was the first private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD. Between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced more than 1.25 million doses of LSD. He was the scion of a political family from Kentucky. His father was a government attorney. His grandfather, A. Owsley Stanley, a member of the United States Senate after serving as Governor of Kentucky and in the U.S. House of Representatives, campaigned against alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s.

In his youth, Stanley was expelled from the Charlotte Hall Military Academy for bringing alcoholic beverages onto campus, then self-committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. He studied engineering at the University of Virginia before dropping out; in 1956, when Stanley was twenty-one, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and served for eighteen months before being discharged in 1958. Later, inspired by a 1958 performance of the Bolshoi Ballet, he began studying ballet in Los Angeles, supporting himself for a time as a professional dancer. In 1963, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley where he became involved in the psychoactive drug scene. He dropped out after a semester, took a technical job at KGO-TV, and began producing LSD in a small lab located in the bathroom of a house near campus. His makeshift laboratory was raided by police on February 21, 1965. He beat the charges and successfully sued for the return of his equipment. The police were looking for methamphetamine but found only LSD, which was not illegal at the time.

Stanley moved to Los Angeles to pursue the production of LSD. He used his Berkeley lab proceeds to buy 500 grams of lysergic acid monohydrate, the basis for LSD. His first shipment arrived on March 30, 1965. He produced 300,000 capsules (270 micrograms each) of LSD by May 1965 and then returned to the Bay Area.

In September 1965, Stanley became the primary LSD supplier to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. By this time, Sandoz LSD was hard to come by, and "Owsley Acid" had become the new standard. He was featured (most prominently his freak-out at the Muir Beach Acid Test in November 1965) in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a book detailing the history of Kesey and the Merry Pranksters by Tom Wolfe. Stanley attended the Watts Acid Test on February 12, 1966 with his new apprentice Tim Scully, and provided the LSD.

Stanley met the members of the Grateful Dead during the acid tests in 1966, began working with them as their first soundman, and helped finance them. Along with his close friend Bob Thomas, he designed the Lightning Bolt Skull Logo, often referred to by fans as "Steal Your Face", "Stealie" or SYF (after the name of the 1976 Grateful Dead album featuring only the lightning bolt skull on the cover, although the symbol predates the namesake album by eight years). The 13-point lightning bolt was derived from a stencil Stanley created to spray-paint on the Grateful Dead's equipment boxes (he wanted an easily identifiable mark to help the crew find the Dead's equipment in the jumble of multiple bands' identical black equipment boxes at festivals). The lightning bolt design came to him after seeing a similar design on a roadside advertisement: "One day in the rain, I looked out the side and saw a sign along the freeway which was a circle with a white bar across it. The top of the circle was orange, and the bottom blue. I couldn't read the name of the firm, and so was just looking at the shape. A thought occurred to me: if the orange were red and the bar across were a lightning bolt cutting across at an angle, then we would have a very nice, unique and highly identifiable mark to put on the equipment." Stanley suggested to Thomas that the words "Grateful Dead" might be drawn beneath the red, white and blue circled bolt in such a way that it looked like a skull. Thomas returned with the now familiar Grateful Dead icon, having discarded the hidden-word concept. The lightning-adorned skull logo made its first appearance on the 1973 release, History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 1: Bear's Choice, an album put together by Stanley as his tribute to his dear friend, the recently deceased Grateful Dead co-founder Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, from recordings Stanley had made in 1970. The iconic "Dancing Bears" also first appeared on the reverse cover of this album, created by Thomas.

During his time as the sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, Stanley started what became the long-term practice of recording the Dead while they rehearsed and performed. His initial motivation for creating what he dubs his "sonic journal" was to improve his ability to mix the sound, but the fortuitous result was an extensive trove of recordings from the heyday of the San Francisco concert/dance scene in the mid-sixties. Focusing on quality and clarity of sound, he favored simplicity in his miking, and his tapes are widely touted as unrivaled live recordings. In addition to his large archive of Dead performances, Stanley made numerous live recordings of other leading artists appearing in San Francisco, including Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix. While many Stanley recordings have been released, many more remain unissued.

Stanley and Scully built electronic equipment for the Grateful Dead until late spring 1966. At this point, Stanley rented a house in Point Richmond, California. He, Scully, and Melissa Cargill (Stanley's girlfriend, and a skilled chemist, introduced to Stanley by Susan Cowper, a former girlfriend) set up a lab in the basement. The Point Richmond lab turned out more than 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) of LSD dubbed "White Lightning". LSD became illegal in California on October 6, 1966. Scully therefore decided to set up a new lab in Denver, Colorado. The new lab was set up in the basement of a house across the street from the Denver zoo in early 1967. Scully made the LSD in the Denver lab while Stanley tableted the product in Orinda, California.

In late 1967, Stanley's Orinda lab was raided by police; he was found in possession of 350,000 doses of LSD and 1,500 doses of STP. His defense was that the illegal substances were for personal use, but he was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison. The same year, Stanley officially shortened his name to "Owsley Stanley".

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