Owsley "The Bear" Stanley - January 19, 1935 - March 13, 2011

"The name Owsley became a noun that appears in the Oxford dictionary as English street slang for good acid. It is the most famous brand name in LSD history. Probably the first private individual to manufacture the psychedelic, "Owsley" is a folk hero of the counterculture, celebrated in songs by the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan.

Bear studied ballet, acting and Russian, worked in jet propulsion labs as well as radio and television, and then entered UC Berkeley in 1963, but lasted less than a year. He found the recipe for making LSD in the Journal of Organic Chemistry at the UC Berkeley library. Soon after, Bear began to cook acid. By conservative estimates, Bear Research Group made more than 1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, essentially seeding the entire modern psychedelic movement.

Less well known are Bear’s contributions to rock concert sound. As the original sound mixer for the Grateful Dead, he was responsible for fundamental advances in audio technology, things as basic now as monitor speakers that allow vocalists to hear
themselves onstage.

"We'd never thought about high-quality PAs," says the Dead's Weir. "There was no such thing until Bear started making one."

Bear made the first public address system specifically dedicated to music in 1966. If he was the first concert sound engineer in rock music to take his job seriously, his habit of making tape recordings of the shows he mixed also gave the Dead an unprecedented archive of live recordings dating back to the band's first days. Many of Bear's tapes have been turned into albums.

As a sound mixer, Bear holds equally strict viewpoints, insisting that the most effective rock concert systems should have only a single source of sound, his argument quickly veering into the realm of psycho-acoustics.

"The PA can only be in one spot," he says. "All the sounds have to come from a single place because the human brain is carrying around the most sophisticated sound processing of any computer or living creature. It equals the bats that fly by echo. It equals the dolphins. It equals the owls that hunt at night without any daylight at all. It is a superb system for locating and separating one sound from everything else."

He keeps up with the music scene -- he singles out Wolfmother and the Arctic Monkeys as new bands he likes. "Any time the music on the radio starts to sound like rubbish, it's time to take some LSD," he says." (SF Gate 2007)

Brotherhood of Eternal Love bust 1973

the shake and bake method

"You've got Coleman fuel, you've got ammodium nitrate, you've got lithium strips, so virtually what you have is a bomb."

drugs on film / film on drugs

GASPAR NOÉ: In Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, the priest or the shaman is giving a magic drink to all of the people around him, and I was surprised to read in some books about you, that he's giving them yage. I've done yage many times in the jungle in Peru, and it's a drink that is full of DMT. Have you ever done yourself chemical DMT? Or have you drunk ayahuasca?

KENNETH ANGER: No, neither one. I've read about them, but I've never tried them. I don't go out of my way to seek that sort of thing. But yage is from South America, isn't it? I tried peyote, which makes me kind of ill before it clears up. But that takes all night.

NOÉ: Have you tried it many times?

ANGER: A few times. I haven't taken any drugs, of any kind, in years. It was an experimental period in an earlier part of my life.

NOÉ: They open your mind, if you don't lose your mind.

ANGER: Well, one thing you cannot do—once, I tried to film when I was on LSD. And I had very good LSD in the early days, because I was a friend in San Francisco of Owsley Stanley, the famous chemist. And in the early days, it was just a drop of it on a sugar cube. So I had very good LSD, but the problem was—I tried making a film, or doing some filming, when I was on LSD, and it's impossible. I couldn't focus. I tried focusing, but when I looked through the lens, I'd see all different layers of focus, and I couldn't find which was the real one behind the camera. And I just thought, this does not work, and I never tried that again.

NOÉ: I have a heavy question... What is the essence of cinema for you? Is it reproducing the language of dreams, or creating a shamanistic trance?

ANGER: I think it's basically quite different from dreams. If only cinema was that easy. Because dreams, all you have to do is fall asleep, and you can have fantastic vision. I know Baudelaire and people like that enhance their dreams with opium or something. But films are very constructed—they're like architecture. They're pieced together, glued together. To me, it's a craft. It's like making a tapestry. And I prefer to think of it—you know, um, the sweat is supposed to be invisible. But a lot of sweat can go into making a film. But of course, if you enjoy doing it, you enjoy doing it. I will go on cutting for three days without sleeping. You can have everything from a realistic story with recognizable people, or...

I actually love the Italian neo-realist films, and in some ways they seem very dreamlike. You know, the early Rossellini and so forth... But you can have a very expensive dream, which is quite beautifully done, which is like Cameron's Avatar, which you probably saw. Did you see it?

NOÉ: Yes.

ANGER: Well, that can be considered like a dream, a very expensive dream. I prefer simpler things.

(Interview Magazine)

turning on

MCLUHAN: The upsurge in drug taking is intimately related to the impact of the electric media. Look at the metaphor for getting high: turning on. One turns on his consciousness through drugs just as he opens up all his senses to a total depth involvement by turning on the TV dial. Drug taking is stimulated by today's pervasive environment of instant information, with its feedback mechanism of the inner trip. The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it's the universal experience of TV watchers. LSD is a way of miming the invisible electronic world; it releases a person from acquired verbal and visual habits and reactions, and gives the potential of instant and total involvement, both all-at-onceness and all-at-oneness, which are the basic needs of people translated by electric extensions of their central nervous systems out of the old rational, sequential value system. The attraction to hallucinogenic drugs is a means of achieving empathy with our penetrating electric environment, an environment that in itself is a drugless inner trip.

Drug taking is also a means of expressing rejection of the obsolescent mechanical world and values. And drugs often stimulate a fresh interest in artistic expression, which is primarily of the audile-tactile world. The hallucinogenic drugs, as chemical simulations of our electric environment, thus revive senses long atrophied by the overwhelmingly visual orientation of the mechanical culture. LSD and related hallucinogenic drugs, furthermore, breed a highly tribal and communally oriented subculture, so it's understandable why the retribalized young take to drugs like a duck to water.

PLAYBOY: A Columbia coed was recently quoted in Newsweek as equating you and LSD. "LSD doesn't mean anything until you consume it," she said. "Likewise McLuhan." Do you see any similarities?

MCLUHAN: I'm flattered to hear my work described as hallucinogenic, but I suspect that some of my academic critics find me a bad trip.

PLAYBOY: Have you ever taken LSD yourself?

MCLUHAN: No, I never have. I'm an observer in these matters, not a participant. I had an operation last year to remove a tumor that was expanding my brain in a less pleasant manner, and during my prolonged convalescence I'm not allowed any stimulant stronger than coffee. Alas! A few months ago, however, I was almost "busted" on a drug charge. On a plane returning from Vancouver, where a university had awarded me an honorary degree, I ran into a colleague who asked me where I'd been. "To Vancouver to pick up my LL. D.," I told him. I noticed a fellow passenger looking at me with a strange expression, and when I got off the plane at Toronto Airport, two customs guards pulled me into a little room and started going over my luggage. "Do you know Timothy Leary?" one asked. I replied I did and that seemed to wrap it up for him. "All right," he said. "Where's the stuff? We know you told somebody you'd gone to Vancouver to pick up some LL. D." After a laborious dialog, I persuaded him that an LL. D. has nothing to do with consciousness expansion--just the opposite, in fact--and I was released. Of course, in light of the present educational crisis, I'm not sure there isn't something to be said for making possession of an LL. D. a felony.

"Sheen takes a swig from a bottle labeled "Tiger Blood." It's become a popular phrase since Sheen said his formula for "winning" is "tiger blood and Adonis DNA."

Leonard Freed, 1970

they come in grams—cocaine

Andy Warhol, A, A Novel

Welcome to the glamorous world of cocaine

Helmut Newton, 1988

Pop culture used to be like LSD—different, eye-opening and reasonably dangerous. It’s now like crack—isolating, wasteful and with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
–Peter Saville

your exploded body

"I am on a drug. It's called Charlie Sheen. It's not available because if you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off, and your children will weep over your exploded body." Sheen described himself as superhuman, citing a "different constitution," "different brain" and "different heart" than normal people have, allowing him to survive his drug binges. "I got tiger blood, man," he said. "My brain . . . fires in a way that is - I don't know, maybe not from this particular terrestrial realm."

A Drug Called Charlie Sheen

“Charlie is missing a room, its called the OD room, where girls, you know, they’re all living in this house, if they OD they press a little button on the wall and have an in-house doctor you know, and so that no-one has to get rushed to the emergency room."
--Kacey Jordan

"Newsflash, I’m special. The only thing I’m addicted to right now is winning. My success rate is 100%. I was shackled and oppressed by the cult of AA for 22 years. I finally extracted myself from their troll hole and started living my life the way I want to live it. I have a disease? Bullshit. I cured it right now with my mind."
--Charlie Sheen

Acid War

"Bin Laden ... this is the enemy who is manipulating people," Gaddafi said, adding: "Do not be swayed by bin Laden. You people of Zawiyah, stop your children, take their weapons, bring them away from Bin Laden, the pills will kill them. They give them pills at night, they put hallucinatory pills in their drinks, their milk, their coffee, their Nescafe."

Burned Out

"The audiences who go to the movies, must be assassinated, killed, destroyed, and they must leave the theater as new people. I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs." –Alejandro Jodorowsky

Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe

the lobsters

Although it has long been known that Sartre experienced visions of lobsters — which he sometimes referred to as crabs — Gerassi’s account offers startling new details of the philosopher’s descent into near-madness as he battled to make sense of what he had come to regard as the intellectual absurdity of his life.

“Yeah, after I took mescaline I started seeing crabs around me all the time,” he says in Gerassi’s new book, Talking With Sartre. “They followed me in the streets, into class ... I would wake up in the morning and say, ‘Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?’ I would say, ‘Okay guys, we’re going into class now . . . ’ and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang.”

Sartre was intrigued by the mind-expanding properties of the peyote cactus. His mescaline experiments started in 1935 and affected his thinking for more than a year. They proved a big influence in the writing of his 1938 novel, Nausea — now regarded as a manifesto of existentialism. Shellfish visions also featured in his 1959 play, The Condemned of Altona, in which a race of crabs sits in judgment on humanity.

In between, Sartre told Gerassi, “I began to think I was going crazy.”

He consulted a young psychiatrist named Jacques Lacan — who later became another of France’s foremost intellectuals — and they attributed Sartre’s crab-infested depression to his fear that he was being pigeon-holed as a teacher.

“That was the worst part, to have to be serious about life,” said Sartre. “The crabs stayed with me until the day I simply decided that they bored me and I wouldn’t pay attention to them.” By then it was the 1940s, France was occupied and Sartre had other things to worry about.

- "Mescaline left Jean-Paul Sartre in the grip of lobster madness" [The Sunday Times]

a tumult of visions

[Sigmund Freud's mentor] Jean-Martin Charcot was known for his sober and dispassionate nature, but his close associates also commented on his particular penchant for the bizarre, the supernatural, and grotesque. Meige recounted an anecdote from Charcot’s student days that highlights this latter characteristic and foreshadows Charcot’s interest in contorted deformities and exotic behaviors. Predating Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal by seven years, Charcot experimented in 1853 with smoking hashish: As soon as he was under the influence of the narcotic, a tumult of phantasmagoric visions flashed across his mind. The entire page was covered with drawings: prodigious dragons, grimacing monsters, incoherent personages who were superimposed on each other and who were intertwined and twisted in a fabulous whirlpool bringing to mind the apocalyptic conceptions of Van Bosh and Jacques Callot.

- "Charcot - Constructing Neurology" / Christopher Goetz, Michel Bonduelle, Toby Gelfand

Junky Relations

Kick That Man Habit

“Opium has been a good friend to me; it has taken away my sorrows,” Aziza said, seated in the corner of her one-room house, with her children looking on. "When I need it, it is a kind of an attack,” she said afterward. “I can’t resist the opium; it is stronger than I am.”

NY Times

What is Your Opium

"This week Yves Saint Laurent unveils an addictive new fragrance."

Cocaine Kate

"Opium, for women who give themselves to Yves Saint Laurent"

"Opium was the only name it wanted. It's a fragrance which evokes all the things I love—the refined Orient, Imperial China, exoticism. Nineteenth-century aesthetes, poets, and writers knew and understood the very release of imagination, dreams and mystery it evokes. Byron, Delacroix, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, they all understood the exotic beauty of the orient without having traveled there. If you don't have the power of imagination, you don't have anything."
— Yves Saint Laurent, 1978

"LSD plunged them into an orgy of violence, invaded by the man they called Lovemaster."