eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
The creator of the dancing bear logo and designer of the Wall of Sound for the Grateful Dead, Augustus Owsley Stanley III, better known by his nickname, Bear, was one of the most iconic figures in the cultural revolution that changed both America and the world during the 1960s.
Owsley's high octane rocket fuel enabled Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters to put on the Acid Tests. It also powered much of what happened on stage at Monterey Pop. Owsley turned on Pete Townshend of The Who and Jimi Hendrix. The shipment of LSD that Owsley sent John Lennon resulted in The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour album and film.
Convinced that the Grateful Dead were destined to become the world's greatest rock 'n' roll band, Owsley provided the money that kept them going during their early days. As their longtime soundman, he then faithfully recorded many of the Dead's greatest live performances and designed the massive space age system that came to be known as the Wall of Sound.
Award-winning author and biographer Robert Greenfield’s definitive biography of this Grateful Dead legend masterfully takes us through Owsley's incredible life and times to bring us a full picture of this fascinating man for the first time.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466893115 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2016 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
A former Associate Editor of the London bureau of Rolling Stone magazine, ROBERT GREENFIELD is the critically acclaimed author of several classic rock books, among them the New York Times bestselling Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia and S.T.P.: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones, as well as the definitive biographies of Timothy Leary and Ahmet Ertegun. With Bill Graham, he is the co-author of Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out, which won the ASCAP- Deems Taylor Award. An award winning novelist, playwright and screenwriter, his short fiction has appeared in GQ, Esquire, and Playboy magazines. He lives in California.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Bluegrass Roots
In a state where politics was right up there with Thoroughbred horse racing as the sport of choice, and extremely colorful and vitriolic campaigns for local political office always seemed to be going on, if only to provide Kentuckians with "an excellent excuse for having community picnics, fried chicken dinners, and fish fries," Augustus Owsley Stanley was an authentically larger-than-life figure whom his grandson would later describe as "the last of the great silver throated Southern orators."
Born on May 21, 1867, in Shelbyville, Kentucky, Nuddicut Owsley Stanley was ten years old when he persuaded his parents to change his given name to Augustus after his maternal grandmother, Augusta Stanley, so that he would never be referred as No Stanley. For wildly different reasons, one hundred years later Augustus Owsley Stanley III would follow in his grandfather's footsteps by also changing his name to suit his particular needs.
On both sides of his family, A. O. Stanley's lineage was impressive. During the Civil War, his father, William Stanley, had served as a captain in the Orphan Brigade of the Confederate Army, a unit commanded by Major General John C. Breckinridge, who had been the youngest vice president in US history. After having worked as the associate editor of the Shelby Sentinel, William Stanley became a Campbellite minister. A. O. Stanley's mother, Amanda Rodes Owsley, was the niece of former Kentucky governor William Owsley, after whom the state's Owsley County was named.
In 1885, A. O. Stanley entered the Kentucky Agricultural and Mechanical College in Lexington. After graduating from Centre College in 1887, he served as chair of belles lettres at Christian College in Hustonville, and then as the principal of Marion Academy in Bradfordsville and Mackville Academy in Mackville, while studying law at night. Admitted to the state bar in 1894, he began practicing in Flemingsburg, where his father served as the minister of a local church.
Moving to Henderson with less than $100 in his pocket, A. O. Stanley established a thriving law practice and began campaigning for Democratic candidates in local elections. In 1900, he was named an elector for William Jennings Bryan, who was then defeated in the presidential election by William McKinley.
Two years later at the age of thirty-five, A. O. Stanley was elected to Congress from Kentucky's Second District. He then married Susan Soaper, whose father was a prominent figure in the state's tobacco industry. A laissez-faire progressive and a disciple of Thomas Jefferson, A. O. Stanley fought to end the federal tax on tobacco. After President William Howard Taft called a special session of Congress to repeal the tariff, what became known as the Stanley Bill was passed into law.
While serving as chairman of the congressional commission charged with trust busting, Stanley sponsored and then conducted an investigation into the monopolistic business practices of the US Steel Corporation and introduced three antitrust bills that eventually led to the passage of the Clayton Act. After he had been reelected to Congress in 1912, Stanley entered the Kentucky senatorial campaign on a proliquor platform, but was defeated in the Democratic primary.
In 1915, he ran for governor against Republican Edwin P. Morrow. Appearing together day after day throughout the state during the campaign, the two men attacked one another relentlessly in public but soon became good friends who often drank together after having debated one another. Indicating that he may have had a bit too much fondness for Kentucky bourbon, A. O. Stanley got to his feet to speak one day after his opponent had already addressed the crowd only to stagger to the back of the stage so he could throw up. Returning to the stand, he said, "Gentlemen, I beg you to forgive me. Every time I hear Ed Morrow speak, it makes me sick to my stomach." A. O. Stanley won the election by 471 votes.
As governor of Kentucky, Stanley vetoed a bill designed to prohibit the teaching of German in Kentucky schools during World War I while saying, "We are at war with an armed despotism, not a language." He also enacted the state's first workman's compensation law, passed antitrust statutes, and improved Kentucky's charitable, penal, and educational institutions.
In January 1917, Stanley made national news by preventing the lynching of a black prisoner, a circuit court judge, and a Commonwealth of Kentucky attorney in Murray, Kentucky. Before boarding the night train to travel there from Lexington, the state capital, he boldly proclaimed, "I shall give the mob a chance to lynch the governor of Kentucky first." He then defused the situation by going to where the judge and the Commonwealth attorney were being held hostage and daring to mob to kill him.
In 1918, Stanley was elected as the junior senator from the state of Kentucky. A strong supporter of women's suffrage and the League of Nations, he consistently denounced laws that limited individual freedom and was once quoted as saying, "You cannot milk a cow in America without a federal inspector at your heels." He was also frequently mentioned as a Democratic candidate to succeed Woodrow Wilson as president.
Throughout his political career in a state that considered itself the birthplace of bourbon whiskey, A. O. Stanley had always been dogged by his pro-liquor position. At a time when Prohibition was seen by many Americans as the only cure for a wide variety of social problems, Kentucky voters had narrowly approved a state constitutional amendment banning the sale and distribution of alcohol two months before the Volstead Act established Prohibition as the law of the land in 1920.
Unable to counter the powerful opposition mounted against him by the Anti-Saloon League as well as the Ku Klux Klan, A. O. Stanley was defeated in his bid for reelection to the Senate in 1924 by more than twenty-four thousand votes. Despite his progressive views on a wide variety of issues, his career as an elected official came to a sudden halt, primarily because of his stance on a substance that was now illegal in America. In time, his grandson would suffer far harsher consequences for synthesizing and distributing a far more powerful substance that also allowed individuals to alter their consciousness.
After leaving office, A. O. Stanley resumed his law practice in Washington, DC, and Louisville. In 1930, he was appointed by President Herbert Hoover to the International Joint Commission. During his twenty-four years of service on the commission, A. O. Stanley ardently supported the creation of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. After a period of declining health, he died at the age of ninety-one in 1958. After his flag-draped casket had laid in state in the Capitol Rotunda, A. O. Stanley was buried in Frankfort Cemetery near other former governors of Kentucky.
Born on July 1, 1904, his son Augustus Owsley Stanley Jr. was eleven years old when his father was elected governor. At the age of fourteen, A. O. Stanley Jr. moved with his family to Washington, DC. Three years later, he served as a clerk to his father at a salary of $1,500 a year. A. O. Stanley Jr. then entered the Naval Academy.
As his son would later say, "He did not graduate. He flaked out in his plebe year because he had a bad sinus condition, which I think was as much psychosomatic as anything else. I think he was a fragile personality and was too proud to go back and do his plebe year all over again because he had only completed one full semester. After the Naval Academy, he went to engineering school, but he didn't finish that either."
Apparently seeking some sort of career that would allow him to emerge from the shadow of his father's outsized personality, A. O. Stanley Jr. went to work as a surveyor for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. In his son's words, "Then the Depression came along and they stopped maintaining the rails and began laying off staff. About that time, he met my mother and got married."
On June 24, 1933, A. O. Stanley Jr. married Lella Lane Ray of Richmond, Virginia, in Henderson, Kentucky. Taking up residence in Washington, DC, the couple enjoyed an active social life centered around high-level Democratic Party functions as well as festive gatherings sponsored by the Kentucky Society.
A. O. Stanley Jr. then began working as a clerk in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a federal agency founded in 1932 to provide aid to state and local governments while also making loans to banks, railroads, and mortgage associations. After President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in March 1933, the agency's funding and powers were greatly expanded as part of the New Deal and A. O. Stanley Jr. was most likely hired by the agency during this period.
It also seems likely that his father's long-standing friendship with Stanley Forman Reed, a well-known lawyer who had served in the Kentucky General Assembly before representing the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and was then serving as general counsel of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, made it possible for A. O. Stanley Jr. to obtain both of these jobs with those organizations. Reed, who became a Supreme Court justice in 1938, was also the godfather of Augustus Owsley Stanley III.
After having attended Colombus Law School, A. O. Stanley Jr. was granted a legal degree. In 1936, he was admitted without examination to the Kentucky State bar. As his son would later say, "He transferred into the legal department of the Reconstruction Finance department and continued working there through all of its changes for the next thirty-three or thirty-four years until after it turned into the Small Business Administration."
Despite being thirty-seven years old when the United States entered World War II in 1941, A. O. Stanley Jr. enlisted in the Navy. As his son would later say, "What happened was that with his one year at the Naval Academy, they sent him to Officer Candidate School and he got commissioned as a second lieutenant. He was working in intelligence and he was very good at it, but he wanted to go fight, so he finagled a transfer to the Pacific and wound up being attached to an admiral's staff. The admiral was on the USS Lexington during the Battle of the Coral Sea, and the Lexington was literally blown up from underneath them."
Intent on capturing Port Moresby in New Guinea, the last Allied base between Japan and Australia, three Japanese fleets comprised of two large aircraft carriers, a smaller carrier, two heavy cruisers, as well as supporting craft set sail for New Guinea and the Solomon Islands during the first week in May 1942. After having been alerted to the operation by radio intercepts, three large groups of US Navy vessels moved to oppose the Japanese fleets. The resulting battle was the first naval engagement in history in which the opposing ships neither saw nor ever fired directly upon one another.
At 1113 hours on May 8, 1942, the USS Lexington, one of the US Navy's oldest aircraft carriers, was attacked by Japanese Nakajima B5N torpedo bombers. At 1120 hours, the first torpedo hit the ship and exploded near the port forward gun gallery. A minute later, another torpedo struck near the bridge. A one-thousand-pound bomb dropped by an Aichi D3A dive bomber then hit the ready-ammunition locker close to Admiral Aubrey Fitch's cabin. The Lexington was then hit by two more bombs, injuring and killing crew members who were manning the ship's machine guns and aft signal station.
In all, the Lexington was rocked by seventeen separate explosions. As fire began spreading throughout the vessel, the ship started listing to port. At 1247 hours, gasoline vapor that had accumulated from leaking fuel tanks belowdecks ignited. The huge explosion that followed proved to be the killing blow. As the Lexington's commanding officer, Captain Frederick C. Sherman, would later write in his report, "From this point on, the ship was doomed."
At 1630 hours as the fires burned out of control, the Lexington came to a dead stop in the water. Admiral Fitch directed the USS Morris to come alongside, and personnel began disembarking from the Lexington by going down lines onto the deck of the destroyer. At 1707 hours, Admiral Fitch issued the order to abandon ship. Crew members went hand over hand down lines into life rafts. In accordance with naval tradition, Admiral Fitch and Captain Sherman were the last to leave the bridge. Both officers were then taken by whaleboat to the USS Minneapolis.
As Sherman would later write, "The picture of the burning and doomed ship was a magnificent but sad sight. The ship and crew had performed gloriously and it seemed too bad that she had to perish in her hour of victory." In all, 216 crewmen on the USS Lexington were killed in the Battle of the Coral Sea. Miraculously, 2,375 men, A. O. Stanley Jr. among them, survived.
In his son's words, "My father must have seen the most horrible warfare imaginable. There were nearly three thousand men on this huge aircraft carrier loaded with high explosives and high-octane petrol and the Japanese were dropping bombs on it and firing torpedoes at it and crew members were being burned and blown to bits.
"It just fucked with his head and he became a lifelong alcoholic. The worst kind of alcoholic I ever saw in my life. I don't know if he was in the water after the Lexington was hit because he would never talk about it. Never. Not a word. After the war ended, he transferred into the Naval Reserve and attended a meeting every Tuesday night for the next twenty years or so and then retired with a double pension — the Navy and the United States government — and he managed to drink it all up every day.
"He was magnificently dwarfed by his own father. My father was twenty percent smarter than me, but my grandfather was more than twenty percent smarter than him. He had one of the most awesome minds I've ever known in my entire life. My experience of my grandfather was as an old man and I loved him. He had the greatest stories and all the greatest books and he could quote something and then tell me where to find that quote, and he was right every time. He didn't believe in much government regulation but he really believed in the common man."
As his father was still working as a government clerk while going to law school at night during the heart of the Depression, Augustus Owsley Stanley III was born on January 19, 1935. As he would later note, "My name is not Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the leaden sobriquet I was saddled with at birth. That was my grandfather and my father's name. My dad suffered the awful brand 'Junior,' the poor bastard, and I have never considered that I am a 'third' anything.
"I so resented the media claiming I was playing on my grandfather's 'famous' name that I had it legally changed by court order in 1967 to simply 'Owsley Stanley,' which is all I was ever called during my early life anyway. I hated 'Gus' like poison — the usual nickname for 'Augustus' — and to this day, I do not understand why anyone would saddle one of their children with someone else's name plus a number."
By then, the epic generational battle between the son and grandson of a man who had been authentic bluegrass political royalty was already raging as fiercely as the fires that had destroyed the USS Lexington during the Battle of the Coral Sea.
CHAPTER 2
Growing Up Absurd
Whatever marital problems A. O. Stanley Jr. and his wife might have been having before he enlisted in the Navy and went off to fight in the Pacific seem to have only been made worse by his extended tour of duty overseas. In 1943, Lella Stanley decided to separate from her husband. She then ended their ten-year marriage by divorcing him. With both her eight-year-old son Augustus and his six-year-old brother in tow, she moved to Los Angeles, where her sister lived. In later years, what Owsley would remember best about his mother was that she loved to play the violin and piano while singing in the key of C. Never as musically talented as her, he took violin lessons but was unable to "quite get the knack" of the instrument. Although he also liked to sing as a boy, he left the choir after his voice changed.
An extraordinarily gifted but difficult child who while living in Virginia had been raised in great part by "black nannies whom we always treated very well," Owsley had somehow managed to teach himself to read at the age of two and a half by studying comic books.
As he later told Bruce Eisner, "I didn't recognize letters; I read more or less like the Chinese would. ... The word itself was like a picture. It had a shape, the shape was composed of the strokes; the strokes, of course, were the letters. I didn't know a letter could be interpreted separately. It took me a long time to learn to use the dictionary successfully because I couldn't make any sense out of a sequence for the alphabet. It was just a bunch of strokes."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Bear"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Robert Greenfield.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Prologue: The Muir Beach Acid Test,
1. Bluegrass Roots,
2. Growing Up Absurd,
3. Shape-Shifting,
4. Berkeley, 1964,
5. Making Acid,
6. Pranksters and Angels,
7. Trips Festival,
8. LA Fadeaway,
9. Olompali,
10. Print the Legend,
11. Monterey Pop, and Beyond,
12. Getting Busted,
13. Two Festivals,
14. Set Up Like a Bowling Pin,
15. Wall of Sound,
16. Growing Weed,
17. Bear's Dream,
18. The Land Down Under,
19. Real Love,
20. Old and in the Way,
21. A Visit from Bear,
22. On the Way Home,
Epilogue: More Anthems for the Bear,
Appendix: Bear's Choice: A Selected Discography,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
Also by Robert Greenfield,
About the Author,
Copyright,