Owsley Stanley Facts for Kids

Quick facts for kids Owsley Stanley
Stanley in 1967 at his arraignment
Born	Augustus Owsley Stanley III (1935-01-19)January 19, 1935 Kentucky, U.S.
Died	March 12, 2011(2011-03-12) (aged 76) Queensland, Australia
Nationality	American
Other names	Bear
Citizenship	Naturalised Australian
Occupation	Audio engineer
Known for	Wall of Sound
Title	"Patron of Thought"
Spouse(s)	Sheilah Stanley
Children	4
Relatives	Augustus O. Stanley, grandfather

Augustus Owsley Stanley III (January 19, 1935 – March 12, 2011) was an American-Australian audio engineer and clandestine chemist. He was a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area hippie movement during the 1960s and played a pivotal role in the decade's counterculture. Under the professional name Bear, he was the sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, recording many of the band's live performances. Stanley also developed the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound, one of the largest mobile sound reinforcement systems ever constructed. Stanley also helped Robert Thomas design the band's trademark skull logo.

He died in a car accident in Australia (where he had taken citizenship in 1996) on March 12, 2011.

Biography
Personal life and death
Owsley Stanley Foundation
See also

Biography

Early life

When he was fifteen, Owsley spent fifteen months as a voluntary psychiatric patient in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. Without having graduated high school, he was admitted to the University of Virginia, where he studied engineering for a year. Despite maintaining a 3.4 grade point average with minimal effort, he dropped out because of his disinclination for slide rules and mechanical drawing. Despite his dearth of formal education, he secured a position as a test engineer with Rocketdyne in Los Angeles; in this capacity, he worked on the SM-64 Navaho supersonic cruise missile. In June 1956, he enlisted in the United States Air Force as an electronics specialist, serving for 18 months (including stints at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Edwards Air Force Base's Rocket Engine Test Facility) before being discharged in 1958. During his service, he secured an amateur radio license and a general radiotelephone operator license.

Later, inspired by a 1958 performance of the Bolshoi Ballet, he studied ballet in Los Angeles, supporting himself for a time as a professional dancer. In 1963, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. He dropped out after a semester, took a technical job at KGO-TV.

Involvement with the Grateful Dead

Stanley met the members of the Grateful Dead during 1965. He both financed them and worked with them as their first sound engineer. Along with his close friend Bob Thomas, Stanley designed the band's iconic 'Steal Your Face' lightning bolt-skull logo. The lightning bolt design came to him after seeing a similar design on a roadside advertisement: "One day in the rain, I looked out the side and saw a sign along the freeway which was a circle with a white bar across it. The top of the circle was orange, and the bottom blue. I couldn't read the name of the firm, and so was just looking at the shape. A thought occurred to me: if the orange were red and the bar across were a lightning bolt cutting across at an angle, then we would have a very nice, unique and highly identifiable mark to put on the equipment."

During his time as the sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, Stanley started what became the long-term practice of recording the Dead while they rehearsed and performed. His initial motivation for creating what he dubbed his "sonic journal" was to improve his ability to mix the sound, but the fortuitous result was an extensive trove of recordings from the heyday of the San Francisco concert/dance scene in the mid-1960s. (Another reason for the first recordings was that Stanley had hearing damage in one ear from a swimming-pool diving accident when he was 19, and wanted a way to check himself.)

In addition to his large archive of Dead performances, Stanley made numerous live recordings of other leading 1960s and 1970s artists appearing in San Francisco, including Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, early Jefferson Starship, Old & In the Way, Janis Joplin, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Taj Mahal, Santana, Miles Davis, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, and Blue Cheer.

Post–Grateful Dead career

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Stanley briefly served as the live mixing engineer for Robert Hunter and Jefferson Starship. Stanley moved to Australia in 1982, and frequently returned to the United States to sell his jewelry (which commanded high prices) on Grateful Dead tours. He retained backstage access during this period, and his clientele included such notable figures as Keith Richards.

Stanley's level of access to the group's inner echelon (including complimentary food from the band's caterers) was somewhat controversial among the band's employees, with one staffer opining that "he had the sales tactics of a Mumbai street peddler"; on one occasion, Garcia and Weir were forced to intervene when Stanley provoked Chelsea Clinton's Secret Service detail as he attempted to conduct business with the then-First Daughter.

Notwithstanding his tour activities, Stanley made his first public appearance in decades at the Australian ethnobotanical conference Entheogenesis Australis in 2009, giving three talks during his time in Melbourne.

Personal life and death

Stanley believed a "thermal cataclysm" related to climate change would soon render the Northern Hemisphere largely uninhabitable, and moved to Australia in 1982. He became a naturalized Australian citizen in 1996. Stanley lived with his wife Sheilah (a former clerk in the Grateful Dead's ticket office) in the bush of Tropical North Queensland, where he worked to create sculpture and wearable art. From at least the mid-1960s until his death, Stanley practiced and advocated an all-meat diet, believing that humans are naturally carnivorous.

Stanley died after a car accident in Australia on Saturday, March 12, 2011, not Sunday, March 13, as reported in most publications (a widely propagated error stemming from the Monday release to the press of the initial family statement, which was written on Sunday, stating he "died yesterday"). The statement released on behalf of Stanley's family said the car crash occurred near his home, on a rural stretch of highway near Mareeba, Queensland.

His ashes were placed on the soundboard at the celebration of the Grateful Dead's 50th anniversary at the Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead shows in Chicago, on July 3–5, 2015.

Owsley Stanley Foundation

After Stanley's death in 2011, his family and some close friends created a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization called the Owsley Stanley Foundation. The foundation is dedicated to restoring and preserving the archive of Stanley's recordings, which he called his "sonic journals".

Owsley Stanley facts for kids

Contents