There are many people who might lay claim to being pivotal figures of the 1960s but Augustus Owsley Stanley III is right up there.

Who, you ask? And it's a good question because Owsley, as he was known, didn't talk a lot.

"I don't want my life exposed publicly," he told Rolling Stone magazine when they tracked him down in Queensland shortly before his death. "I'm interested in the work I've done and the things I've discovered … I'm not into being a celebrity, because I think celebrityhood has no value to anyone, least of all the celebrity."

Owsley Stanley and his daughter, Redbird

Take note and weep as we find ourselves in a world full of wannabe celebrities. This was a guy who spoke little in public but did a lot to change the way we viewed the world: firstly through his sound engineering skills and later through his expertise as a chemist.

As his daughter Redbird Ferguson told me:

"He was highly intellectual, voraciously smart and focused tightly on what he was interested in. He believed that you needed to understand how everything fits together."

That desire to understand everything led him to work as a highly creative sound engineer with the Grateful Dead and found one of the world's greatest musical archives. It also led him to perfect the process of making the purest form of LSD outside the famed Sandoz labs in Switzerland. More than that, he saw to it that some of those tabs would be ingested by artists on the frontlines of the '60s' revolution.

Press photo of The Beatles during their Magical Mystery Tour. ( Wikipedia Commons: Parlophone Music Sweden )

If you've watched the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour you should know the "Fabs" were flying high on Owsley acid. He turned Jimi Hendrix on, along with many, many people at the Monterey Pop Festival.

In fact it's almost impossible to imagine the so called "Summer of Love" — focused on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury District — without his pharmaceutical assistance.

In all, it's estimated he manufactured around five million LSD trips in his life time.

Owsley Stanley was born to a rich Kentucky family in 1935. Known as "Bear" because of his hairy chest, he also had a remarkable mind.

In his words: "I had a scary memory".

That meant that when he enrolled briefly at university "Bear" would buy his textbooks, read them, and then return them for a refund because he could remember what he'd read. When it came time to synthesise acid he simply read the chemistry books before he set to work perfecting the process of LSD purification.

A legal high

When he first made LSD in 1965 it was not illegal. In fact it had been tested in psychiatric hospitals as a possible way of dealing with mental illness. Bear, like many others, saw it as a path to enlightenment and he set about making it in large quantities.

First to sample his acid were the music fans who flocked to the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests in San Francisco.

As the Grateful Dead played, the audience drank Kool-Aid laced with LSD, and presto!

Electric Kool-aid acid test original flyer ( Wikimedia Commons: Merry Pranksters et al (1965) )

At the peak of his output, and with LSD declared illegal, he avoided arrest by packing his stash in a trunk and keeping it moving backward and forward between cities in the cargo hold of a Greyhound bus.

But Owsley didn't just make acid that turned on a generation, he was also a gifted and innovative sound engineer.

Using the profits from his acid sales he bank-rolled the Grateful Dead. Working with the band, he created a sound system of remarkable quality.

Having revolutionised live music sound he did something else that changed rock music.

He found a way to record in stereo a band playing live, by plugging his tape recorder into the sound desk.

Having done this he then set about making an archive of the Grateful Dead and many other artists.

As a result Owsley gathered 1300 reel-to-reel tapes documenting Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna, Doc and Merle Watson as well as the Allman Brothers Band; all at the peak of their powers.

The tapes are now the property of the Owsley Stanley Foundation. The recordings have proved useful for the Dead in its archive release program.

However, there is a problem looming.

The recordings are held on reel-to-reel oxide coated tapes and the tapes are now 50 years old.

Publicity photo of Jefferson Airplane with singer Grace Slick, centre. ( Wikipedia Commons: RCA Records/Photographer Herb Greene )

A race to protect history

As Redbird, who is the foundation's chief financial officer, puts it: "we are up against the ticking clock".

Not all the tapes are in great condition and there's an added complication, she says: "Each time a tape is opened and placed on a machine the oxide can disintegrate. To stop this, the tape must be baked and the sound digitised as it goes through a special player.

"Whenever we open the tape box and put it on the machine you have to capture it from start to finish. We are working with the very best to do that."

Working with the best is expensive. In all the cost of restoring the archive could be close to $500,000. Undaunted she is determined to protect her father's legacy and her reasons are very simple.

A musical time capsule

"I think the archive is a time capsule ... if you come to it consciously it offers insight into society at the time and the way it was changing ... not just rock and roll but the counter-culture."

A crowd funding campaign aims to raise money to "digitise, preserve and release Bear's Sonic Journals" which feature the mustic of Grateful Dead, here in 1970. ( Wikimedia Commons )

To try to preserve this archive the Owsley Stanley Foundation launched a campaign of crowd funding to raise money to start the process of preserving, digitising and releasing Bear's Sonic Journals.

To assist the process the Foundation is selecting certain concerts for release and feeding money back into the preservation program. So far 450 tapes have been digitised and some released for sale according to Redbird.

"We are not aiming to become a record company and we want to share the income with the artist and the profit is all used in the mission to preserve the music," she said.

The Aussie link

If all this sounds remote to Australian music fans, think again.

Owsley is, in spirit at least, one of us.

A climate change refugee before anyone else had even used the term, Australia became "Bear's" home for much of the last two decades of his life.

Owsley decided the northern hemisphere would be destroyed by climate change as a result of uncontrollable storms creating a new ice-age.

His solution was to move to Australia.

North Queensland to be precise, where he lived for many years.

During his time here he was struck down by throat cancer but survived, eating a diet he ingested with the help of a blender.

Superstar bands of the 1960s were flying high on Owsley's acid. ( Creative Commons )

The ultimate bad trip

In the end he died not from cancer, or a bad trip (not an LSD inspired one anyway), but a car accident.

Owsley Stanley was a mysterious character to many for much of his life.

In death, his fame is growing.

Now baby boomer music fans are being called on the use some of their superannuation to help preserve a unique part of the culture they helped create.

Putting it another way, "turn on, tune in and cough up!".

Mark Bannerman is a freelance journalist.