Who’s the craziest person in rock and roll history?
He came from a prominent political dynasty in Kentucky; his grandfather had led the antitrust investigations against U.S. Steel, had basically written the Clayton Act, and was not the only state governor in the family tree.
At age fifteen, the young man was a voluntary psychiatric patient in Washington, D.C. He went to the University of Virginia without graduating high school, then set to work engineering supersonic missiles for Rocketdyne and for the Air Force, without finishing his degree.
After that, he supported himself as a professional ballet dancer for a while.
Then he began manufacturing LSD in the SF Bay area, where, starting in 1965, he and his assistants became the suppliers to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Three Dog Night, Jefferson Airplane, and others.
His name was Augustus Owsley Stanley III, but everybody called him “Bear.” Steely Dan wrote a song about him. They called him “Kid Charlemagne.”
Owsley was closely associated with the Dead. He designed their famous skull logo, originally for the purpose of distinctively marking their road cases, and was their chief audio engineer in the early years, a damn fine one.
But from 1970–72 he was locked up in federal prison following an earlier conviction in which his lab had been raided and more than 300,000 doses confiscated.
Back out of jail, he returned to the Grateful Dead — his station now somewhat reduced — where in 1973 he led the design of the “Wall of Sound,” the band’s live PA, the largest and most powerful such system yet devised at the time.
He sold a lot of handmade jewelry, a new interest of his, on their tours in those years. Safer than acid, I suppose.
Later Owsley moved to Australia. He lived there for nearly thirty years. He died in 2011, in a car crash near his home in northern Queensland.
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