fri 29/03/2024

R I P The Acid King | reviews, news & interviews

R.I.P. The Acid King

R.I.P. The Acid King

One of the great adventures of the 20th century is the story of LSD. A warped, unlikely slice of history not taught in schools, it has flavoured many aspects of life to this day. The countercultural explosion of the Sixties influenced the broader Western world - art, music, politics, religion, social issues and much more - and at its vanguard were key figures who believed that enlightenment might be found through the use of psychedelic drugs. These utopian mavericks were from all sorts of different backgrounds and they wanted nothing less than to turn society completely on its head, to change its value system.

Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Aldous Huxley, Richard Alpert, Alfred Hubbard and so on: when I was a suburban teenager in the relentlessly material Eighties, with Thatcher's autocratic shadow darkening all, these names conjured excitement, conjured a different set of values, as wild as they were bizarrely visionary. I voraciously read Jay Stevens's fabulous Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream and occasionally wished I'd been an undergraduate at Harvard in 1960 when it all kicked off. Since those days I've been saddened to mark the passing of those who remained of these zealous adventurers (apart from Richard Alpert, that is, who changed his name to Baba Ram Dass in 1967 and still lives in Hawaii sharing his spiritual thoughts via his website). I observed as, excepting the joyous aftershock of Nineties rave culture, their ideas were steadily and forcefully sidelined.

On 13 March another one passed. Augustus Owsley Stanley III, or Owsley Stanley as he preferred, died when he lost control of his car in Mareeba, Queensland, Australia, in a storm. It was primarily Owsley's acid that tipped the US into the socio-cultural-musical explosion that was the Sixties. It's hard to comprehend now, but he and collectives such as The Brotherhood of Eternal Love were initially not drug dealers in the traditional sense. They were on an almost evangelical mission to turn on the world in the certain knowledge that everyone would be the better for it. Not for nothing were the authorities paranoid about hippies putting acid in the water supplies. Elements of the psychedelic underground considered it. "Better living through chemistry" was the phrase Leary purloined and paraphrased from an old DuPont commercial. It became a doctrine.

kenkeseyOwsley was born into Southern gentry - his grandfather was a Kentucky senator - but he dropped out after school and bummed about throughout the late Fifties and early Sixties. An eccentric and a technical whizz-kid, he returned to academia in 1963, attending Berkeley, California. Here he had revelatory experiences on LSD and, as Stevens puts it in Storming Heaven, "returned with a mission: he was going to save the world by making the purest and cheapest and most abundant LSD possible". His first lab was busted by the police in 1965 but since no illegal chemicals were found he got off scott free and successfully sued for the return of his equipment. Using Los Angeles as a base, he then synthesised vast quantities of top-quality LSD. He hooked up with Ken Kesey (pictured above, with psychedelic bus) who was, at that time, attempting to put on his psychedelic happenings, the Acid Tests. Kesey supplied the concept, Owsley the acid - lots of it, clean and pure.

Known as Bear, he became an essential part of the entourage of Acid Test in-house band, the Grateful Dead, even funding them for a while with his profits. During this era, the rock world was tuning in to psychedelia and everyone from The Beatles to The Byrds to Jimi Hendrix was on Owsley acid. LSD made by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland became harder and harder to obtain as prohibition approached, thus Owsley's acid, of comparable quality, became the mainstay. It had a profound influence on the musical direction of hundreds of bands, all attempting, with various degress of success, to use rock music to reflect their expanded consciousness. It's fair to say that Owsley fuelled the Summer of Love. He was arrested in 1967 but it took a few years for the courts to eventually gain a conviction and Owsley went to prison for three years. When he reappeared in 1972 he turned his technical brilliance to the Grateful Dead's sound system, introducing monitors and other innovations that later became industry standard. He moved to Australia over 30 years ago where he remained until his death, declining most media interest in his dramatic past.

The psychedelic freaks didn't change the world. They tweaked it a little

Beneath his online obituary in the LA Times one Michael G has commented, "Again and again, you do the majority of your readership a huge disservice by wasting the ink on wacked-out druggies and reprobates." Owsley would likely have expected such blinkered dull predictability. He and all the psychedelic freaks didn't change the world. They tweaked it a little. However, it is still the case that, as Ken Kesey said - meant as metaphor rather than direct reference to his own lysergic road trip - "You're either on the bus or off the bus." Owsley was not only on the bus but, for a little while, he actually dictated the route.

Share this article

Add comment

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters