Viewers under 30 might be forgiven for missing the historical implications of these shows. But they can read up with a parade of self-serving, dawn-of-drug-culture autobiographies, which recently includes a first-person account of Owsley and Me. Its subject, Augustus Owsley Stanley III, remains a central character in the rock mythos: the chemistry whiz who cooked the best dope (Breaking Bad fans, there's your entrée) and engineered the best concert sound. Born in Kentucky in 1935, killed in a car accident at age 76 in 2011, his myth survives through his "steal your face" Grateful Dead skull logo and his fictional alter ego in Steely Dan's "Kid Charlemagne." According to widely held legend, Owsley singlehandedly produced more than 1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, becoming a major supplier for the Dead themselves. Few boomer luminaries deserve a serious biography more.

He certainly deserves better than longtime girlfriend Rhoney Gissen Stanley's rickety, meandering account, co-written with Senator Al Franken's former SNL partner Tom Davis. She speaks as a wild-eyed, free-love acid enthusiast who still believes in unquestioned positive vibes as a counterbalance to the evils of the military-industrial complex and capitalism. Reading her no-apologies saga reminds you how much the era's idealism subsisted on naivety.

It's the kind of book where you're supposed to be charmed by how Owsley keeps pronouncing "You need to take more LSD!" even as he two-times on Gissen with a steadier girlfriend and roams concert crowds dosing eager listeners with pure liquid LSD extract. Here's how Gissen regales about her early trips: "The sun set over the Pacific Ocean, and it was like seeing colors for the first time. I witnessed the merging of water and sky, the infinity of the universe, the changing of perspective. We made love under the stars. I swayed with the to and fro of the ocean waves as the sun rose behind us, and I could feel the roundness of the Earth."

Typical we-are-all-one-let's-zonk-out-at-the-beach stuff. Until Owsley gets thrown in jail for dealing in 1968, she persuades herself that acid's redemptive qualities far outweigh any harm. Even the manufacture of LSD became ritualized. "Yes," Alpert tells her, "the entire process of making LSD is a sacred trip." Drugs' social benefits, of course, are taken for granted. "LSD is just a tool for transformation," Owsley pronounced. "We need more people on the bandwagon. Critical mass. That is my vision. The Grateful Dead are part of the equation--the audience, you too."

Gissen goes on to study dentistry and bear Owsley a son, Starfinder, but says little about the movement's punctured altruism. One of many unintentionally comic scenes comes when Owsley and his tribe sojourn to upstate New York to meet with Timothy Leary and Alpert, on a grandiose quest for Great Minds to trip together. It winds up with an ambivalent Leary snarfing down martinis and Owsley spending the night in the clink for failing to use his car signal properly; the yokel cops can't even fathom the ingeniously hidden stash in his trunk.

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Breaking Bad and Nurse Jackie make characters like Owsley, Gissen, the Dead, and that band's audience seem all the more distant. A historical understanding of the 1960s acid myth, in turn, lends these shows alternating currents of absurdity and tragedy.