If the psychedelic explosion that came to define the America in the 1960s has an MVP, it’s Augustus Owsley “Bear” Stanley III. Best known as the self-taught chemist that cooked millions of doses of acid for Haight-Ashbury hippies, Stanley possesses the most impressive resume known to the counter-culture

Other than making legendary LSD, he managed the Grateful Dead during their early years, and engineered the band’s famous Wall of Sound public address system. He pioneered recording live concerts in stereo which led to the intense documentarian nature of the jam band scene.

He designed the Dead’s most famous logo—the Steal Your Face skull—and lightning bolt seal. Without his artistic and technological innovations—not to mention the money he made selling acid—the Grateful Dead likely would have never got out of the Bay Area.

“We were definitely not making ends meet, we were living solely off of Owsley’s good graces at that time,” frontman Jerry Garcia told Rolling Stone publisher Jan Wenner in a 1972 interview.

Acid Tests and the Berkeley Street Scene

Stanley met the Grateful Dead during the Acid Tests of 1965 and 1966, a series of parties thrown by author Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters that are regarded as the impetus of the nascent hippie movement.

The Dead was the de facto house band for the events, at which everyone drank from vats of LSD-laced Kool-Aid and more or less howled at the moon. Stanley attended his first Acid Test at Muir Beach in December 1965, and the Dead’s set shot him to the moon. He had found his tribe.

By then, Stanley had already established himself as a psychedelic drug maker in Berkeley, Calif. where he lived, though early on, he was somewhat of an outsider with Kesey’s crew who partied in La Honda and Palo Alto.

Drugs had become a sneaky fashion around the area when Stanley enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley two years earlier. He dropped out after a semester, but he still hung around the campus—the library in particular—where he holed up reading organic chemistry texts and studying street drugs.

He taught himself to cook methedrine, a type of injectable speed, from which he used the proceeds to buy the lysergic acid for his first batch of LSD. A sample was passed to Kesey and Stanley’s acid, simply dubbed “Owsley” became the go-to fuel for the Acid Tests.

Soon he became a household name for psychedelic explorers coast to coast and overseas.

Hi, I’m Owsley. Want some acid?

Stanley was notorious for trying to turn musicians on to acid. He would often hang out backstage at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco trying to coax touring artists onto an acid trip.

“Hi, I’m Owsley. Want some acid?” he once greeted Bob Dylan, who responded by asking for his removal from the venue. He did this to unsuspecting straight-laced artists like bluegrass banjoist Earl Scruggs.

Perhaps the most famous unsuspected Owsley dosing came when the Grateful Dead performed at Playboy After Dark in 1967. Stanley dosed the coffee pot shared by the television crew, who let loose with the production, letting cameras go out of focus and forgetting to turn on microphones.

Later than evening, Hugh Hefner was spotted by drummer Bill Kreutzmann standing frozen against the wall, gooned-out tripping on acid.

The Unwritten Code of Acid Dealing

Stanley never set out to be an acid maker. His original intent was art—ballet, in fact. He had, for a time, supported himself in Los Angeles as a professional dancer before falling into the freak scene in Berkeley. He was also proficient in sculpting, making wearable art items that sold for thousands of dollars—Jackson Browne even bought one of his belt buckles for $20,000.

Stanley called the drug-making a tool that enabled him to do art wildly and freely. This refers to the jolt acid provides the creative mind just as much as the financial boon selling acid provided.

While Stanley was able to live comfortably and support the Grateful Dead with his LSD profits, he took measures to restrain the street price of the drug. Such was the attitude of the psychedelic black market of the time—those involved in production and distribution were true proponents of the spiritual qualities of acid.

As Reddit user dubbedbass points out:

“It was about 10 years ago and I came across a report about the psyche of different drug dealers. Basically to summarize the obvious: “The following drugs all had huge profit margins and were sold by people looking to make lots of money: cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, high end pot. “The following drugs all set out to make a little bit of money but we’re most likely people selling to friends: low end pot, Xanax, Percocet, other prescription narcotics. “The last group were people who basically sold drugs, essentially almost at cost, almost only to friends, and who basically thought the drugs were mind-expanding and should be taken by everyone. This grouping consisted of like essentially ALL the psychedelic drugs. Anything with a tryptamine radical, including LSD, LSA, DMT, Psilocybin mushrooms, Ayahuasca, and a few other non-tryptamine radical drugs like peyote, salvia, and Ketamine.”

Stanley sold in bulk to dealers on the condition that they kept prices below $2 per dose. Another factor that kept prices low was that people were encouraged to give away LSD for free. Old hippies will recall paying for half the doses they dropped, with the other half gifted to them. It was the thing to do in communal times—and it holds up today among many still making and selling the drug.

As a Sonic Pioneer

Much like how he taught himself organic chemistry to manufacture LSD, Stanley learned sound engineering as he went. His foray into sonic spheres started simply because he became enamored with the Grateful Dead after hearing an Acid Test performance. He walked up to bassist Phil Lesh and demanded to be involved with the band in some form. The Dead needed a manager and a soundman, so Stanley got both jobs.

Stanley and the Dead pieced together the amps and speakers for the famed Wall of Sound over the course of several years. At its apex in 1974, the immense speaker stacks reached over three stories high, and required two 40-foot trailers to transport.

It took roadies five hours to set up and take down, and could be finicky as all get-out. Stanley was known to sweet-talk to the amplifiers during phases of troubleshooting. What made it unique (besides the sheer size) is that it acted as its own monitor—all the sound came from behind the band, who heard the music exactly as the audience did—a setup that was completely different from anything before.

It offered the band a loud but clean output, and allowed for really trippy mixes, with bass notes bouncing out of different speaker cabinets in the rig.

Most importantly, he had the presence of mind to plug in a stereo recorder into the mixing boards for high-quality live recording. Fans circulated concert tapes which spread the band’s reputation as a top live act, essentially building a following one listener at a time.

After 1974, the Wall of Sound became too much for the band and crew to lug around the country, and they traded it in for a more logistically reasonable setup when they resumed touring in 1976. For all intents and purposes, that concluded Stanley’s working relationship with the Grateful Dead.

He retired to Australia in 1996 and lived in the remote bush area of Queensland with his wife. Stanley died in a car accident in 2011. He was 76.