Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 459 - The Acid King, the Grateful Dead, and the Birth of the Counterculture Revolution

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

Do you recognize the name, Owsley Stanley? If you're not a devoted Dead Head, probably not. But he's the guy who met the Dead when they had just formed, supplied them with LSD, and helped them form th...eir psychedelic, jam band sound. He also supplied LSD to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of others hippies. It was his LSD that would truly fuel the counterculture movement of the late 1960s. The Summer of Love wouldn't have been nearly as magical as it was without Owsley's mind-expanding psychedelics. He was one-of-a-kind, and I hope you enjoy learning about his life as much as I did.  Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch-related questions/problems: store@badmagicproductions.com (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast.Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Ever had a really intense acid trip? Not just the kind that makes you see visuals or laugh a lot or really want to dance but the kind that makes you feel like you've left whatever dimension you previously existed in and Now understand the universe in an entirely different way. It's pretty crazy, right? It can be life-changing Just a little tiny tab of paper or a few drops from a dropper or a sugar cube laced with a bit of the stuff, typical single dose is just between 100 and 200 micrograms. And it can have you completely reevaluating your world and understanding that we're all in this rock for only a short time so don't sweat the small stuff.
Starting point is 00:00:38 Spend as much time as you can loving yourself and those around you except that death might be the end of your ego but it's not the end of you, because you're just stardust, baby. And you'll return to the infinite womb, back to the flow of the river of life from which we all came from, to be carried downstream, reformed and reborn. Or acid can leave you thinking that you cannot open the front door fucking ever, because there are definitely a pair of demon things standing out there waiting to mother fuck your entire life. Hopefully when you take a trip you get to experience something more like the first part of what I described. Whatever your trip was or will be
Starting point is 00:01:18 you owe the American counterculture of the 1960s for going on it at all in many ways. That's where acid first went mainstream. A lot of people were wanting to deconstruct and reevaluate society back then. The Vietnam War was throwing young men by the tens of thousands into chaos and bloodshed while young people back at home were looking at their parents' lives, lives defined by monogamy, consumerism, adherence to the status quo, patronism that bled into mindless nationalism, strict adherence to organized religion and tight community ties and thinking, you know what, fuck all that.
Starting point is 00:01:52 The youth of the mid to late 60s were realizing that all that shit just didn't mean the same thing to them as it did to their parents. As the use of LSD spread from research projects at universities and government experiments and into the street, the drug would be paramount in expanding the minds of these young, questioning people, leading to roughly 3,000 of them attending Harvard professor and LSD evangelist Timothy Leary's 1966 speech in which he spoke the now-famous words, turn on, tune in, drop out. Soon after that, the Summer of Love would sweep the streets of San Francisco, paving the way for Americans to reconsider everything from traditional gender roles, family structure,
Starting point is 00:02:29 and expectations to the role of the government in regulating morality and social issues. You're not my mom, Uncle Sam. Support me. Don't control me. It's hard to overstate the influence of acid when it comes to societal shifts in the 20th century. And with the resurgence of LSD and other psychedelics now in the 21st century maybe things will shift again. I certainly hope so. Even if you've never touched this stuff but
Starting point is 00:02:53 you've enjoyed the numerous cultural products of the hippie movement, if you like artists like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, writers like Hunter S. Thompson, if you live in some kind of arrangement that isn't a traditional monogamous marriage with two kids and a white picket fence, if you take birth control and hope to keep taking it, if you read underground newspapers, if you think that art should be fucking weird and wild and unrestrained from any rigid social rules, well you have one man to thank for at least a little of that. Maybe a lot of that.
Starting point is 00:03:22 One man who might be owed a debt of gratitude more than any other. Owsley Stanley III, the acid king, the patron of thought, bear. Long before the summer of love drew thousands of hippies to hate Ashbury, Owsley was already an authentic underground folk hero, revered through the counterculture for making the purest form of LSD to ever hit the streets, counterculture for making the purest form of LSD to ever hit the streets. And for making a fucking ton of it. He's the first known private individual to manufacture mass quantities of Lucy. He was also an unlikely candidate for that. The grandson of a governor of Kentucky, Alzie was born to a traumatized World War II veteran and his socialite wife. The couple separated when Alzie was eight and he moved with his mother to Los Angeles, but problems in the school system made her
Starting point is 00:04:07 send him back to Virginia to live with his father. He would bounce around schools, spend a long stretch of time in a psychiatric facility, bounce around colleges and jobs doing everything from ham radio operation to research at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory before winding up in Berkeley, California as a young man with virtually nothing to his name. Nothing except a strong interest in psychedelia. Women, music, and societal change. In Berkeley, Owlsley began smoking pot and selling heavenly blue morning glory siege, which served to get people not high but weird, according to him, when taken in great quantities. Then in April of 1964, Owlsley took LSD for the first time.
Starting point is 00:04:44 And a great hole in the sky opened up above him and a new path was revealed. Later that year, a friend gave Alzey 400 micrograms of pure LSD manufactured by Sandos Laboratories in Switzerland where Dr. Albert Hofmann had first synthesized the drug in 1938. And Alzey wanted to know, could he make the drug himself? Could he make it even better? Could he make so much of it and open millions of minds to all kinds of new possibilities? Yes, he fucking could. Over the next decade or so, the Acid King would rule the streets of San Francisco and beyond, helping to distribute millions of doses of acid to hippies coming from near and far to participate in the counterculture. Along the way, Alzey would meet the grateful dead, become their
Starting point is 00:05:28 sound engineer, dealer, friend, and make some major contributions to the counterculture movement. Even organizing acid to be smuggled back to England for the Beatles, which would lead to some of their best music. The fascinating and drug-riddled tale of the acid king right here right now on this what a long strange trip It's been let your life proceed by its own design if the thunder don't get you then the lightning will Addition of time suck. This is Michael McDonald and you're listening to Time Suck. Well, happy Monday. Welcome or welcome back to the Cult of the Curious.
Starting point is 00:06:20 I'm Dan Cummins, the Suckmaster, Seeker, Perpetual Research Paper Deliverer, Rusty Tugboat, King Shamer, and you are listening to Time Suck. Hail Nimrod, hail Lusophina, praise be to good boy Bojangles and glory be to Triple M. No announcements today. Let's just tell this tale of a remarkable and interesting life. A biography unlike most we've done before. Typically our biographies fall into one or two categories here. People who are uniquely horrible, like fucking horrific, or uniquely exceptionally inspirational. Of those two categories you can see that Owsley was more inspirational than horrible. Far from
Starting point is 00:06:55 perfect, but did a lot of cool things. Especially if you think wanting to get people as fucked up as humanly possible and psychedelics could be considered inspirational and cool, which I do. Owi opened people's minds at a rate that was simply stunning. He produced millions, literally millions of hits of acid. The exact number is disputed, but it's estimated he may have personally overseen the creation of over five million doses. He was the first person known to mass produce and mass distribute LSD. He was extremely passionate about getting people high to the point that he would sometimes dose them secretly. And that part, that part's not so great. I get the desire. I understand thinking, oh man, that guy can sure use his fucking mind open.
Starting point is 00:07:37 But please don't go around dosing people. It's pretty fucked up. It's not cool. Uh, one front on which Owlsley was definitelyley was definitely cool is his work with Grateful Dead. He'd become not just their dealer, but their sound engineer for live shows when they were still pretty much just kind of noodling around, getting high, tripping, hanging out and jamming. Owsley, who was almost as obsessed with recording equipment as he was with Acid, would make recordings of them to play back for them so that they could truly study their music and improve it, which they did, which led they could truly study their music and improve it, which they did, which led to them improving, getting more and more fans, more gigs, eventually selling out entire stadiums.
Starting point is 00:08:11 Later in his career, Owsley would even design the legendary wall of sound, a construction of speakers, and a massive one, sat behind the musicians with individual channels for each instrument so they could hear exactly how they sounded. It made stadium music not only louder but uniquely listenable. Everything came to crisp and clear and although the system proved too expensive and cumbersome to be used permanently, it's still considered a massive and legendary technical achievement. We'll follow Alzey's life in a straightforward fashion in the timeline today but before we do let's first go over a little bit of the counterculture movement that Alzey found himself in and the early days of the Grateful Dead,
Starting point is 00:08:51 his longtime collaborators. By the early 1960s, several leading universities had begun to investigate the psychological effects and health benefits of LSD most famously between 1961 and 1963 Harvard professors, dr. Timothy Leary and dr. Richard Alpert a man now known as Ram Dass Tested LSD for its therapeutic use Leary and Alpert worked together in the psychology department where according to Al, the pair experienced their first psychedelic journeys through magic mushrooms in 1961. Their experiences with mushrooms prompted Leary to work also with Aldous Huxley to secure a supply of synthetic psilocybin from Sandoz Pharmacy, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant that
Starting point is 00:09:38 had first produced LSD by chemist Albert Hoffman in 1938. And then Leary's work with psilocybin would lead to work with LSD. And I get it. Once you've tasted one flavor of psychedelia, you tend to want to taste them all. Research into LSD then proliferated. In 1960, the novelist Ken Kesey, author of the book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,
Starting point is 00:10:01 also the book, Sometimes a Great Nation, was given acid at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park, California in the Bay Area as part of a federally funded top-secret program which volunteers were paid $20 a session to ingest hallucinogens. I mean it wasn't secret that they were giving these volunteers it or that the volunteers were getting it, they just didn't know why they were getting it. This program was Project MKUltra. Still one of my favorite time-suck topics. In 1964, Keezy would embark on an LSD, amphetamine, and marijuana field trip from
Starting point is 00:10:30 the West Coast to New York City with a group of men and women who called themselves the Mary Band of Pranksters, traveling together in a big school bus covered in day glow paint. Holy shit what an adventure that must have been. I picked some starting off making fucking record time on meth It's like Denver, Chicago, you know Then they shift to LSD completely lose track of reality altogether for a couple days end up in New Mexico No idea how they got there then shift to weed and it takes them two weeks to make it back to the Midwest But just like the best most chill fucking couple of weeks so many snacks
Starting point is 00:11:03 Anyway at some point in this road trip Keezy intended to abandon writing and create a film using the footage they shot collectively. Returning to California, Keezy and the Pranksters continued to shoot film on Keezy's ranch in La Honda, up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, west of San Jose, at these weekly parties known as acid tests. Back on the west coast, they quickly befriended the band The Warlocks.
Starting point is 00:11:23 Brand new band, young band, that heard about these parties, a band befriended the band The Warlocks. Brand new band. Young band. That heard about these parties. A band that will transform into The Grateful Dead. The Warlocks were formed in Palo Alto at the end of 1964 when Jerry Garcia, Ron Pigpen McKernan and Bob Weir, the original members of a band with the ridiculous name of Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, a bluegrass band decided to plug in at the urging of McKernan. They soon added a rhythm section, Dana Morgan Jr. on bass, Bill Kreutzman on drums. Their first performance was in May of 1965 at Magoo's Pizza in Menlo Park.
Starting point is 00:11:58 Humble beginnings. After just a handful of performances, Phil Lesh replaced Dana Morgan. Between 1965-1966, the pranksters convinced the dead to sit in as the house band of sorts for Kenzie's acid test experiments. Fucking incredible. The test involved a group traveling around California, administering LSD to a shit ton of willing participants, and then putting on various live art performances. The first test, so just like a party, like picture like a college party, it's like an underground college party, something new, and you show up, but it's like maybe instead of like somebody's house,
Starting point is 00:12:32 it's like at a rented, you know, church or former church, some kind of, you know, space like that. And you just go there and there's just people handing out acid, there's everyone's fucking tripping balls, hundreds of people, there's, you fucking tripping balls, hundreds of people, there's you know drinks flowing to every smoke and weed, there's you know a little stage, sometimes people are playing music, sometimes people are way too fucked up to be playing music, just chaos, but like of the best kind. Incredible people watching to go to one of these. The first test took place December 4th 1965 in San Jose, California. The last two occurred in San Francisco on October 2nd and October 31st, Halloween 1966,
Starting point is 00:13:10 when the Pranksters held their closing jam and then their graduation jam. You can find little clips at the very least of some of these on YouTube. Because of exactly this, dropping acid soon became the watermark for inclusion into the heart of the counterculture. Until you had tripped, you just couldn't understand, man. You just didn't fucking get it. You weren't part of the new culture. And before moving forward, let me break down exactly what acid does to you. By reading the dosage guide from trippingly.net, this is a good little guide, starts off, LSD
Starting point is 00:13:43 is unpredictable in intensity. That's fucking sure is. Relatively minor dose variations may induce significantly different trips. This discussion is a summary of our experiences, but outlier trips are not infrequent. Use this as a starting point only. Okay, so it starts off 25 to 75 micrograms. A threshold mild experience. Mild mood, this would be like if you took like half a tap, essentially, for most taps.
Starting point is 00:14:12 Mild mood, altering experience, mild euphoria, visual hallucinations are limited to color sensations. Mild breathing effect, what they call this breathing effect, which is so fun, when objects appear to like move, ripple, or breathe, and it does feel like they're breathing. Psychedelic color flashes, especially when viewing bright objects like computer monitors or phones. The main trip may last four to six hours, but, you know, come down can be extended to the standard length of, you know, a 12-hour trip. 75 to 150 micrograms, a substantial experience. All phases of the LSD experience described above experienced. And then also at the lower range hallucinations limited to a breathing effect. Strong psychedelic
Starting point is 00:14:50 colors, mild visual hallucinations, e.g. objects appear distorted. At the higher end of the range, full hallucinations, objects appearing that do not exist, substantial distortion of actual objects, strong swaying of objects like trees cartoon-like images Sense of self intact standard logic to lepline but self judgment and fear slash anxiety greatly reduced They don't include this but I would include like trailing Which is just part of like the the visuals, you know Like if you wave your hand in front of your face You're gonna see like your hand in multiple places at the same time kind of thing
Starting point is 00:15:24 you're gonna see like your hand in multiple places at the same time kind of thing. 150 to 200 micrograms beautiful colors are everywhere with stronger visual hallucinations overall. Closed-eye visuals very apparent. Life-changing spiritual experiences or realization may occur. Anxiety may occur. Oh so much. 200 to 300 micrograms. The peak of the trip can now be very intense even scary But like any LSD trip once the peak effects are over a state of contentment may follow That's my favorite part of a trip actually is right after the peak when you're still fucking tripping balls But you know that the heavy shit like the heaviest of it is over For the most part might catch a little wave a little bit later But for the most part it's over and you can kind of start to reflect on like oh my god
Starting point is 00:16:04 That's crazy what I just thought or what I saw whatever sense of self remains intact But irrational thoughts obsessive thought patterns may arise including thought loops or looping They're wild panic about one's safety or the safety of loved ones may occur closed-eye visuals are very strong at this dose 300 or 400 micrograms. It's like a, you know, two has two strong tabs essentially, maybe a little more depending on the tab might be three. Strong visuals, loss of sense of self slash ego disillusion begins. Standard logic may no longer apply at points, visuals are intense, may be difficult to walk or understand normal day or excuse me day to day activities. 400 to 500 micrograms. Time distortions may become intense, including feelings of time stopping. Sense of self often gone. Full
Starting point is 00:16:49 ego dissolution is possible. And now at that point like you don't know where you fucking end and where someone else begins. You don't know who you are anymore. Body movement becomes difficult. Disorienting. No longer able to form rational thoughts. As one enters a temporary psychotic state, not generally unpleasant, sometimes very unpleasant, very intense visual hallucinations, closed-eye hallucinations may be overwhelming, with some wishing to be able to escape the intensity of the trip. By some I think they mean most people will wish to escape the intensity of the trip, at least in little moments, unless you're like a very experienced user. very strong hallucinations at the next level 500 to 700 micrograms objects appearing that don't exist
Starting point is 00:17:32 elaborate hallucinations strong loss of reality entire ego dissolution not only possible but highly likely Strong religious or symbolic imagery may occurical experiences will very often be reported, often overwhelming, and then it keeps going up. 700 to a thousand micrograms. Right? That's a lot. That's like, depending on, again, the strength of the tab, you know, probably like that, you know, six to ten tab range, five to ten, probably six to ten. Full out-of-body experiences.
Starting point is 00:18:06 Synesthesia, more likely. And synesthesia is this weird sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality. It's when like colors become sounds, you know, sounds become tastes kind of thing. Like the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color. Religious imagery, often strong. Entire loss of rationality. Lack of ability to walk or interact. I love this. In any meaningful way. Yep. That's probably the highest I've been is somewhere in that range. And I did not enjoy it. Maybe I would if I did it again. I don't know thousand to fifteen hundred micrograms. I I've never been that high
Starting point is 00:18:49 I'm pretty sure this sounds fucking terrible perception of standard reality stops entire field of vision Entire field of vision and maybe just composed of hallucinations Including strong fractal hallucinations sense of death or more accurately sense of ceasing to exist often occurs. And then there's one more, which is just like, what the fuck are you doing? This is 1500 plus micrograms. So this is like if you took a dozen or more taps.
Starting point is 00:19:18 Oh man, don't fucking, especially if it's like your first time or first, don't fucking ever do this. Experiences may be similar to DMT, but and by like similar to DMT like going like full send with DMT Basic body functions are challenging vision is consumed by hallucinations. No sense of self remains Audio hallucinations may be strong standard reality no longer applies merging with objects is likely Holy shit. Oh my god. You can just think you're part of the tree. No type of rational thought left.
Starting point is 00:19:49 Fuck. Oh my god. You're no longer you at that point. Way too much for most people. That's a that's psychiatric hold level of tripping. When you're a fucking animal or just a plant you're a leaf. A sloth hopefully and not like a Tasmanian devil needs to run around and destroy shit. And as you'll see today, some of the people in this suck will trip pretty fucking hard. Sometimes that hard. For the most part, it seems they would trip at like the 200 to 300 microgram level. You know, still intense, sometimes very intense, but relatively safe. Back now to the acid
Starting point is 00:20:21 tests. It had become the new benchmark for being a true counterculture hippie. It was a tricky test to take and pass because there was an acid shortage. Sandos Labs halted LSD production in August of 1965 after growing governmental protests at its proliferation amongst the general populace. Mostly young people. And of course, the government, just in general, wouldn't want this. Right? They prefer sheep sheep they want the status quo They want a population of mindless followers easy to control not people with open minds people not expanding their consciousness It's why they preferred my mind alcohol to hallucinogens right alcohol numbs you makes you accept your fate I feel you know whereas
Starting point is 00:21:04 Psychedelics make you question everything and think like, wait a minute, we don't have to fucking listen to these assholes. Sandow's halted production was a statement that LSD had quote, in some parts of the world become a serious threat to public health and fuck that. Some chemists now tried to make their own, but the quality was dubious at best. And now without access to good acid and plenty of it to go around, it seemed like the counterculture movement might stall before it even got truly started. But then fortunately one man, one absolute fucking maniac, would show up to save the movement, Owsley Stanley the third. Bear, the patron of thought, the acid king, and let's meet
Starting point is 00:21:43 this visionary, this wild man, in today's Time Suck Timeline. Shrap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a Time Suck Timeline. We'll begin way, way back with Alzy's ancestors. They're an interesting bunch. Born on May 10th, 1867 in Shelbyville, Kentucky, Nutteket Owsley Stanley. What the fuck?
Starting point is 00:22:15 Was 10 years old. I've heard a lot of crazy names in the characters. I don't know that I've heard one that... Nutteket Ow Owsley. Stanley. Okay. Ten years old when he asked his parents if he could change his given name to Augustus after his maternal grandmother, Augusta Stanley, so that he would never be referred to as Nudd Stanley. Or by his full name of Nuttacut. I love that at the age of ten he already figured out what his parents apparently hadn't. That nutticut is a super fucking dumb name.
Starting point is 00:22:48 No apologies to any nutticut's listing N-U-D-D-I-C-U-T-S. Not that you're mad, right? You've got to know better than anyone how fucking garbage your name is. Nutticut sounds less like a name and more like a like an at-home neutering kit for your pet. Say goodbye to having to pay for that obligatory expensive vet bill with not a cut. Cut those nuts yourself. Thankfully, Little Nutty Kid's parents allowed him to change his name to something not absolutely horrific. On both sides of his family, Augustus Owsley Stanley's lineage.
Starting point is 00:23:19 Owsley also has a super weird name. Their lineage was impressive. During the Civil War, his father, Bayer's great-grandfather, William Stanley, had served as a captain in the Orphan Brigade of the Confederate Army, a unit commanded by Major General John C. Breckenridge, who had been the youngest vice president in U.S. history at the age of 36, under 14th President James Buchanan. After having worked as the associate editor of the Shelby Sentinel, William Stanley then became a minister. Augustus's mother, Amanda Rhodes Owsley,
Starting point is 00:23:47 was the niece of former Kentucky governor William Owsley, after whom the state's Owsley County was named. That's how they get that weird name, it was a last name. In 1885, Augustus entered the Kentucky Agricultural and Mechanical College in Lexington. Graduated in 1887, he served as the chair of Belle Lettre, or Beautiful Writing, at Christian College in Houstonville, and then as the principal of Marion Academy in Bradfordville and Macville Academy in Macville while studying law at night.
Starting point is 00:24:17 He was a hustler. Admitted to the state bar in 1894, he began practicing at Flemmingsburg, where his father served as the minister of a local church. But he soon decided he wanted to change. Moving now to Henderson, Kentucky, with less than $100 in his pocket, Augustus established a thriving law practice and began campaigning for Democratic candidates in local elections. Then 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 35, Augustus was elected to Congress from
Starting point is 00:24:46 Kentucky's Second District. He then married Susan Soper, whose father was a prominent figure in the state's tobacco industry. Perhaps inspired by his new in-laws, Augustus fought to end a 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 and His political career was just getting started
Starting point is 00:25:08 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 Fuck yeah, right fighting for the little man, for the working man. The Clayton Antitrust Act would strengthen the Sherman Antitrust Act by targeting specific anti-competitive practices like mergers, tying agreements, and price discrimination. After he had been re-elected to Congress in 1912, Stanley entered the Kentucky senatorial campaign on a pro-liquor platform. Also
Starting point is 00:25:44 fuck yeah. Fighting for our right to alter our minds as we see fit. I wonder if Owsley knew this about him. August was defeated in the Democratic primary, but he wouldn't let that get him down. 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 actually became good friends in private who often drank together after having hotly debated. It's pretty funny. Also maybe they were drinking a little too much. One day August got to his feet to speak after his opponent had already addressed the crowd only to stagger to the back of the stage and vomit. And then he returned to the stand and said,
Starting point is 00:26:25 gentlemen, I beg you to forgive me. Every time I hear Ed Marl speak, it makes me sick to my stomach. And that is a brilliant recovery. Augustus Stanley won the election by 471 votes. Maybe he was drinking just enough. His governorship would then be defined by progressive policies that aim to help the working man and foster cultural unity. As governor of Kentucky, Stanley vetoed a bill designed to prohibit the teaching of German in
Starting point is 00:26:51 Kentucky schools during World War I, saying we are at war with an armed despotism, not a language. I like this guy. I like Nutticut a lot. Also, had he kept the name Nutticut, no fucking way he wins in election. I mean, who votes for Nutty? Almost no one. August also enacted the state's first workman's compensation law. He passed numerous antitrust statutes and improved Kentucky's charitable, penal, and educational institutions. Then in January of 1917, Stanley made national news by preventing the lynching of a black prisoner, a circuit court judge, and a Commonwealth of Kentucky attorney, who were both being held hostage by a mob due to their association with said black prisoner in Murray, Kentucky.
Starting point is 00:27:34 Before boarding the night train to travel there from Lexington, the state capitol, Augustus boldly proclaimed, quote, I shall give the mob a chance to lynch the governor of Kentucky first. And then he did defuse the situation by personally daring the mob in front of him to kill him. Fucking hail nutticut! The acid king had a true social justice warrior's blood running through his veins. 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,
Starting point is 00:28:07 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. But the times there were a change. For the worse, Nuttekett's career be wiped out by a terrible political movement led by well-intentioned people with teetotaling ways that would lead to a massive rise in organized crime and corruption. Augustus had always been pro-licker, both out of his personal enjoyment of the substance and his advocacy for Kentucky's history as the birthplace of bourbon. But by the late 1910s, prohibition was seen by many Americans as the only cure for a wide
Starting point is 00:28:46 variety of social problems. Totally. If you just get rid of alcohol, everyone would be fucking awesome. What are people thinking? Augustus, who now had opposition both in anti-licker circles and amongst the virulent, uh, virulent, yeah, uh, racists of the KKK, now found himself on the losing side of a cultural war unable to counter the powerful opposition mounted against him by the anti-saloon League as well as the Ku Klux Klan Augusta Stanley was defeated in his bid for reelection to the Senate in 1924 by more than 24,000 votes
Starting point is 00:29:19 After leaving office there was a lot of shitheads back then after leaving office He resumed his law practice in Washington DC in Louisville There was a lot of shitheads back then. After leaving office, he resumed his law practice in Washington, DC in Louisville. Then in 1930, he was appointed by President Herbert Hoover to the International Joint Commission, a binational organization established by the governments of the US and Canada in 1909 to deal with the waterways that straddled the border of the two nations. During his 24 years of service on the Commission, Augustus Stanley ardently supported the creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a system of rivers, canals, and channels in Eastern Canada and the northern US that permits ocean-going vessels to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great
Starting point is 00:29:51 Lakes. Finally, after a period of declining health, he died at the age of 91 in 1958. After his flag-draped casket had laid in state in the capital Rotunda, Augustus Stanley was buried in Frankfurt Cemetery near other former governors of Kentucky. And now let's talk just a bit about his son, a man who'd become the acid king's father. Nutfucker Skidmark Stanley, born July 1st, 1904, was 11 years old when he begged his parents to please allow him to change his name. No, Augustus Owsley Stanley Jr. Born July 1st, 1904, 11 years old when his dad was elected governor.
Starting point is 00:30:29 At the age of 14, Gus Jr. moved with his family to D.C. Three years later, served as a clerk to his dad at a salary of $1,500 a year. Then Gus Jr. entered the Naval Academy, where it wasn't a great fit. As the acid king himself would later say, he did not graduate. He did not graduate. He flaked out in his plea beer because he had a bad sinus condition, which I think was as much
Starting point is 00:30:50 psychosomatic as anything else. I think he was a fragile personality and was too proud to go back and do his plea beer 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. Instead, Gus Jr. went to work as a surveyor for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, but with the onset of the Great Depression, the railroad cut back on maintaining the rails and began laying off staff. Around that time, Gus met a young Richmond, Virginia native named Lella Lane Ray, his wife and the future acid king's mom. On June 24, 1933, the two married in Henderson, Kentucky. Taking up residence in Washington, D.C., the couple enjoyed an active social life centered
Starting point is 00:31:34 around high-level Democratic Party functions as well as festive gatherings sponsored by the Kentucky Society. Gus Jr. then began working as a clerk in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a federal agency formed in 1932, to provide aid to state and local governments, while also making loans to banks, railroads, and mortgage associations, right? Helping the country out with the Great Depression. After President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in March of 1933, the agency's funding and powers were greatly expanded as part of the New Deal. So his hiring, you know, probably had a lot to do with that.
Starting point is 00:32:10 Based on that, Gus Jr. would decide to get his law degree so he could move up in the organization as his dad was still working as a government clerk while going to law school at night during the heart of the Depression. The man who would become the acid king, Augustus, Alex, the Stanley the third born January 19th, 1935. And we will return to the star of our show today in a bit. Back to Gus Deuce right now. After attending Columbus Law School, Gus was granted a legal degree then in 1936, admitted
Starting point is 00:32:37 without examination to the Kentucky State Bar. And now as his son would later say, he transferred into the legal department of the Reconstruction Finance Department and continued working there through all of his changes for the next 33 And now, as his son would later say, he transferred into the legal department of the reconstruction finance department and continued working there through all of his changes for the next 33 or 34 years, until after it turned into the small business administration. But he didn't let steady work make him complacent.
Starting point is 00:32:56 Despite being 37 years old, when the US entered World War II in 1941, Gus enlisted. Based on one year at the Naval Academy, the military sent him to Officer Candidate School where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He was put to work in intelligence. He was good at it, very good, but he wanted to go fight so he finagled a transfer to the
Starting point is 00:33:15 Pacific, wound up being attached to an admiral staff. He was one of three large groups of US Navy vessels tasked with opposing Japanese fleets who were intent on capturing Port Moresby in New Guinea. Papua New Guinea. Gus found himself aboard the Lexington, one of the US Navy's oldest aircraft carriers, and it would not turn out to be a very lucky assignment. At 1113 hours on May 8, 1942, the USS Lexington was attacked by Japanese Nakajima B-5N 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. Then a 1,000-pound bomb dropped by an Aichi D-3A dive bomber hit the ready ammunition
Starting point is 00:34:02 locker close to Admiral Aubrey Fitch's cabin. They're getting fucked up. The Lexington was then hit by two more bombs, injuring, killing crew members who were manning the ship's machine guns and aft signal station. All in all, the Lexington was rocked by 17 separate explosions, but didn't just immediately sink. But fire began to spread throughout the vessel and the ship did start to list deport. At 1,247 hours, gasoline vapor that had accumulated from leaking fuel tanks below decks ignited. A huge explosion
Starting point is 00:34:29 followed. That proved to be the killing blow for the ship but it still you know takes a little time for a lot of these big ships to sink. As the Lexington's commanding officer Captain Frederick C. Sherman would later write in his report from this point on the ship was doomed. But again takes a little bit. At 16 hours, 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. Finally, at 1707 hours, Admiral Fitch issued the order for all hands to abandon ship, remaining crew members went hand over hand down lines into life rafts in accordance with naval tradition Admiral Fitch and Captain Sherman were the last
Starting point is 00:35:10 to leave the bridge. Both officers will be taken by whale boat now to the USS Minneapolis. In all 216 crewmen aboard the USS Lexington were killed in the Battle of the Coral Sea. in the Battle of the Coral Sea. Miraculously, 2,375 men, 37-year-old Gus amongst them, survived. But the attack and the near-death experience would affect him deeply for the rest of his life. It just fucked with his head and he became a lifelong alcoholic, his son would later say. 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 20 years or so and then retired with a double
Starting point is 00:35:54 pension. The Navy and the U.S. government and he managed to drink it up all, or excuse me, he managed to drink it all up every day. Man, sounds like that dude had some serious PTSD. Right after he got back from the war in 1943, August the second and Lella would divorce, making Augustus the third, whom we will call Owsley Stanley, the name he chose legally in 1967, about eight years old when his parents split up. He had had an interesting childhood while all this was going on. And before I tell you all about it, let's take this week's first of two mid-show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads, please sign up to be a space lizard on patreon. Get the catalog ad free. Episodes three days early and more. Thanks for listening to those ads and now it's
Starting point is 00:36:41 time to return to our tale and learn about young Owsley Stanley. By all accounts he was an extraordinarily gifted but exceedingly difficult child. While living in Virginia he managed to teach himself to read at the age of two and a half by studying comic books. Freshly divorced in 1943 Lella brought young exceptionally bright and tremendously inquisitive eight-year-old Owsley and a six-year-old brother to live in Los Angeles, where her sister was living. In later years, what Owsley would remember best about his mom was that she loved to play the violin and piano while singing in the KFC. Never as musically talented as her, he took violin lessons but was unable to quote,
Starting point is 00:37:20 quite get the knack of the instrument. He also hated school. Probably was honestly too smart for it. Didn't have a tolerance for all the bullshit. He wanted to learn and read things that suited his interests and do other interesting stuff. But the teachers insisted that all the children play games he thought of as juvenile, even during recess, which he considered his time. When he was 11 years old, his mom decided she could no longer cope with her firstborn son. He was getting in a lot of trouble at school. She's a lot of trouble at home,
Starting point is 00:37:45 sending him back to the East Coast to live with his alcoholic father. By then, Gus Jr. was married to his second wife, Callie Mullin Reese of Fredericksburg, Virginia. She had brought to the marriage a daughter who was now 11 years old and a son who was nine. And as he treated his stepbrother, in his words, like dog shit.
Starting point is 00:38:02 I was the older one, but he was too close to me in age and I had no real relationship with him at all. I was getting dumped on so then I dumped it all on him. And this combined with Owlsley's school problems led to Owlsley's father sending him to the Charlotte Hall Military Academy located in Charlotte Hall Maryland about 40 miles from where his dad and stepmom were living in Alexandria, Virginia. The school had been established way back in 1774 by England's Queen Charlotte, quote, to provide for the liberal and pious education
Starting point is 00:38:29 of youth to better fit them for the discharge of their duties for the British Empire. The school remained in operation for over 200 years, all the way until 1976, when it closed down due to financial problems. The campus was made up of several colonial style buildings scattered across more than 300 acres of rolling land. Decked out in full military uniforms replete with Sam Brown belts,
Starting point is 00:38:49 the all-male student body was so small that a typical graduating class consisted of just 24 members. Unsurprisingly, Alzy hated it. The only thing he liked about it was his boxing coach who took fighting seriously. The men wouldn't allow his team to eat breakfast on the day of a match. Then an hour before their bouts began, each member of the team was given a single steak with no salt on it to eat, and was not allowed to drink water.
Starting point is 00:39:14 Not sure what the nutritional science would say about that, but somehow it worked. Gave Alzy the endurance he needed to win his matches, or at least he thought it did. As a result, throughout his adult life, Alzy would adhere so strictly to an all-meat or nearly all-meat diet that it soon became one of his defining traits. Seemed to work for him. He did live a long time and when he finally died it had nothing to do with his diet. At
Starting point is 00:39:36 Charlotte Hall, Alzie also acquired the nickname that would stay with him for the rest of his life. Because of a hairy chest he had already by the time he's 14 he became known as Bear But then still the ninth grade young Bear snuck in enough alcohol To get every student at home coming drunk which led to him getting expelled After returning home to live with his dad and stepmom, Alzie now began attending Washington Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia But his living situation is getting worse and worse a family He youly hated. A dad who was often drunk out of his mind. And constant boredom at school.
Starting point is 00:40:08 And as a result, his mental health suffered tremendously. And in 1950, when he was 15 years old, Alzy was admitted as a voluntary patient at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, a psychiatric facility in southeastern Washington, D.C. And he would stay there for a full 15 months, during which time his mom died of a heart attack so sad back in California He was never given a formal diagnosis, but he later said he was having a nervous breakdown Life had become just too much It overwhelmed him Fortunately being in a psychiatric institution helped him a lot and he was able to sort out some of his problems with his family
Starting point is 00:40:42 therapists there used quote hypnosis and psychodrama in a little room with a stage and colored lights to help Owsley deal with his feelings and whatever he did it worked. It was hard for me to break free because my parents were a couple of assholes. He would say later, neither one of them really wanted to be parents. They had no skills whatsoever at it. All I know is that I felt really short-changed in parenting and that caused me a lot of guilt. If you feel you can't love someone whom you are universally told that you must love, you become very guilty. What's wrong with me? I can't seem to love these people.
Starting point is 00:41:15 Any animal can have offspring but that doesn't have anything to do with their competency in managing their upbringing or anything else. It's a happenstance in nature. Once I realized this, that freed me. It's too bad I missed out on that loving parental care, but I learned that I couldn't blame myself for it. And that's obviously so sad. But also, probably pretty common, right? I mean, I can relate, right? Neither one of my parents seemed to really want to be parents either, to be totally honest. And look, I love them. They love me. I don't think they're bad people.
Starting point is 00:41:46 Not at all. But they've just never been super involved. Like, even when they have had the time, it's just not their inclination, not their instinct. Always seem pretty happy to let somebody else do the raising, you know, like my grandparents. My dad maybe five years ago was talking about his brother, my Uncle Wes, spent so much time with his kids, doing so much for his grandkids on a weekly basis, taking him to school, helping him make lunches, all this stuff. And he literally like, and he said like it was a bad thing. And he literally shook his head and said something to the effect of,
Starting point is 00:42:14 not for me. I can't do it. It's never been my way. And he said it in a way like, like he forgot he was speaking to his actual son. And he has said shit like that my whole life. And then every once in a while, he like wonders why he doesn't have a better relationship with his kids or grandkids and I'm not even trying to like just you know got on my way to shit on him paint him in a bad light I don't think he's a bad person I just think he's someone who had kids because he felt he was supposed to because that's what people do right because society tells you to do that you know before his brain had fully formed you know he's a very young dad and he's
Starting point is 00:42:44 like okay I guess I'm supposed to get married and have kids. That's how he was raised. But it wasn't actually the right fit for him. And he's been scrambling ever since. And it's not the right fit for a lot of people. Anyone who needs to hear this right now. One size does not fit all in life, despite what so many fucking arrogant people say.
Starting point is 00:43:00 So self-assured. They take what works for them, and then apparently have very little empathy understanding of like the differences of people's lives and act like, well works for me so it's going to work for everybody. Now that's the fucking horrible way to think. For everyone listening, you don't have to have kids ever. Society won't collapse if the birth rate plummets, right? The pronatalist movement's wrong. We're a highly adaptable species. We'll have robots fill positions if we don't have enough humans anymore to do that. We'll tear down the
Starting point is 00:43:29 buildings we're no longer using if it comes to that. Build parks, let nature reclaim the space, fucking whatever. Sure, the transitional period will suck for a lot of people. Change is hard. It's never perfect. A lot of people don't handle it well. A lot of people suffer during transitory times, but we will figure it out. We always do. We're like fucking cockroaches. We're not going anywhere. So don't care around that bullshit burden. I got plenty of friends my age with kids who are very fulfilled and happy and also have plenty of friends without kids. Well, honestly, you're probably more fulfilled and happy overall. They seem that way. Anyway, while in the psychiatric facility, Owsley enjoyed a certain amount of freedom. Although it totally freaked out the staff, Owsley soon discovered that he could use a bed
Starting point is 00:44:06 spring to pry open doors, thereby enabling him to leave the institution whenever he liked. After he was released from St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Owsley returned home to live with his dad and stepmom and once again began attending Washington Lee High School. Excuse me. But he was now a year behind because he had not kept up with his coursework and he wouldn't try hard to catch up despite having achieved literally the highest score on the achievement test in physics ever reported by the school in 11th grade he was still given a d in the subject by quote an incompetent very senior female teacher who was only there because of tenure
Starting point is 00:44:37 for pointing out that she had contradicted the textbook he felt she had it out for him whether that's true or not again he's probably literally too smart for school, too bad there was not a school for the gift that he could have attended. But also glad things didn't work out for him here because if they had, I might not have ever been introduced to LSD, you know, if his life hadn't gone awry. Alzey decided now to make a change after getting that D. Without having ever graduated from high school, Alzey was able to get admitted to the School of Engineering at the University of Virginia. He chose engineering because one of his great childhood heroes had been Dr.
Starting point is 00:45:15 Elias Heuer, the genius who helped Buck Rogers in one of the comic strips Alzie had loved as a boy. But Alzie would soon come to find out, I didn't really like college either. For one thing, he found it too easy. That fucker. Apparently he would buy his textbooks at the beginning of the semester, memorize them by reading them one time. Oh my God. Then return them for a refund as though he had changed courses. This guy was off the chart smart.
Starting point is 00:45:35 Using what he called his scary kind of memory, he waltzed through courses with a B plus average without ever taking notes. But then his dad, Gus Jr., refused to pay for college for very long because of some rigid authoritarian, my way or the highway bullshit. Bear now dropped out, returned to his dad's house, and a short time later, its ripe old age 18, he had the classic 1950s confrontation with his dad over what was then one of the ultimate symbols of adolescent rebellion, a motorcycle. Gus Jr. forbid him from driving one. Bear was 18 and was like, you can't
Starting point is 00:46:05 fucking do that. And Gus Jr. kicked his son out. So Bear packed his bags, headed to DC to stay with his grandma. Alzy then spent the summer working as a lifeguard at a pool in Bethesda, Maryland, riding a motorcycle, working as a lifeguard. Oh my gosh, 18. I bet he had a good time. While doing a quote a clown dive though that some Hawaiian guys in the military were trying to teach him there, as he hit the water so hard he suffered a middle ear hemorrhage and then his ear canal became infected. Actually both of them did. As a result both ears quote would have an entirely different character he said. He claimed he now heard high tones in his left ear and low
Starting point is 00:46:40 tones in his right. And this injury and the unique hearing situation that left him with would later shape the way he recorded bands while they were on stage. Basically being able to hear in stereo in situations where almost everyone else heard something closer to Mono. He'd have a microphone for every instrument rather than a microphone trying to pick up a couple forms at a time because otherwise it would just all sound you know blurry to him. At some point after the summer, Alze moved to Los Angeles, California at the age 19, where he soon began working as a rocket test engineer for Rocketdyne, a newly formed division of North American aviation, but was then designing and manufacturing the Navajo Intercontinental Cruise Missile.
Starting point is 00:47:18 That's fucking crazy that he didn't need a high school diploma or college degree for that. He can just test his way into shit. Just blow people away in interviews. Uh, June of 1956, Alzey enlists in the U.S. Air Force. After somehow managing to survive eight and a half weeks of basic training, he's assigned to the rocket engine test facility at Edwards Air Force Base in Antelope Valley in the western Mojave Desert. And this is when, uh, he would start to learn about electronics. He was soon reassigned to the salvage yard, though.
Starting point is 00:47:44 Took apart every piece of gear that came in. While working that job, he passed tests for both his ham radio and first-class radio telephone operators licenses. Then he would be discharged after 18 months for unclear reasons. I'm gonna guess he had trouble following orders. Pure speculation on my part, just based on his personality. Back in civilian life now,
Starting point is 00:48:04 Owsley had a new purpose, electronics and sound. Bayer returned to Los Angeles, began bouncing around working in various Southern California radio and TV stations, including a brief stint as the chief engineer at an AM station in San Diego. He was clearly not afraid of taking risks, quitting one job, starting a new one. During this period, Owsley attended Los Angeles City College. He was also arrested after when he was 21. He was caught with a 14 year old girl in a motel room and then was released after being given a lecture by the judge. Definitely not excusing what he did here.
Starting point is 00:48:38 That's definitely gross. She was either fucking eighth grader or a freshman in high school, but simply to contextualize it, this also was not uncommon or considered to be a form of pedophilia at that time. Not saying to not be mad at him, just applying social context. Doing that in the late 1950s was not viewed quite the same way as it is today. It should have been, but it wasn't. In May of 1959, Alzy went to the Shrine Auditorium now to see the Soviet Union's Bolshoi Ballet perform on their groundbreaking eight-week tour
Starting point is 00:49:10 that generated widespread public attention in America. And for whatever reason, that performance hit him hard. Inspired him to study Russian and also ballet. For ballet, he would take two ballet classes a day, five days a week, each about an hour and a half long, and also performed for around six years off and on. Did not see that coming. Alzey, meanwhile, continued to bounce from one thing to another, from one woman to another. In 1961, Alzey married a girl from La Cunha, California, town just above Glendale, in Los Angeles County County in a
Starting point is 00:49:45 ceremony in Tijuana that turned out to be invalid. Pretty sure she was a lot older than 14. I fucking hope she was. She gave a birth to a son named Peter but the marriage ended a year later when Owsley left her and Owsley does not seem to have stuck around to help raise Peter even though he was frustrated that his own parents didn't do a better job parenting him. The cycle continues. Worse actually here. He then right after that married another woman, hopefully of actual adult age, with whom he had a daughter named Nina. But the two were soon divorced as well, and he did not stick around to help raise Nina either.
Starting point is 00:50:16 One of his ex-wives would later call him just a little boy afraid to grow up a Peter Pan. Yeah, dude's a fucking asshole. Absolute mess of a human being here. A womanizing deadbeat dad. I told you he was not fully inspirational. Then Owsley bounced to Daytona Beach, Florida where he was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct in 1963. The police would return him to LA where he was wanted there because he had written $645 in bad checks. As part of a plea bargain designed to keep him from going to jail, Owsley informed the judge that he now intended to turn over a brand new leaf in life by going back to college and earning his degree. So he was given a
Starting point is 00:50:51 six-month suspended sentence fined 250 bucks placed on three years probation. And now Owsley moves to Berkeley in the Bay Area in the fall of 63 to take classes at the University of California campus there. He's now 28 at a time when most 28 year old dudes were married, paying a mortgage, you know, actually raising the kids they had, you know, providing for children. They were putting aside their big questions about the universe and the nature of existence if they had them at all and they were focusing on a domestic lifestyle. Owlsley was mostly focused on being a selfish
Starting point is 00:51:20 bastard, following a path of self-fulfillment at the expense of two women he had impregnated and his kids and who knows who else. Pretty ironic for a guy who will help manufacture a drug that depresses your ego and leaves most people feeling especially connected to the universe around them and focus more on others. But he hadn't done that yet. He hadn't opened his mind yet. In Berkeley, a city where the counterculture in America was already beginning to be born, Alzy will find his calling. And going forward, he'll do way more cool shit than dirtbag shit. People do often change. He did seem to change for the better. Still a wild card,
Starting point is 00:51:51 but no longer one who would abandon his kids. January of 1964, after one semester at UC Berkeley, Alzie knocked on the front door of a run-down rooming house on Berkeley Way, known as the Brown Shoe, where a room was for rent. Since everybody who lived there was already smoking a shell out of pot, and Alzy was talking about drugs, the second he walked in the door, it felt like a good fit. These were his people. Charles Perry, who was living there while completing his studies in Middle Eastern languages at the University of California Berkeley, before going on to write the dope column for Rolling Stone magazine, under the pseudonym Smoke Stack El Ropo, oh fuck yeah,
Starting point is 00:52:25 would say this about his first meeting with Bear. 45 minutes later, when he hadn't stopped talking about drugs, we weren't so sure he was cool. Not really tall, he had a sort of hulking manner anyhow and a wary look as if constantly planning on an end run. His conversation was like a series of lectures on the radar electronics he'd learned in the Air Force, the Russian grammar he'd studied when he was thinking of becoming a Russian Orthodox monk.
Starting point is 00:52:48 The automotive technology he'd mastered while redesigning the engine of his MG. When Alzy moved into his room, he brought with him, again according to Perry, boxes full of stuff like ballet shoes, a complete beekeepers outfit, and a painting in progress that showed the arm of Christ on the cross portrayed more or less from Christ's point of view. What the fuck? A complete beekeepers outfit. That outfit was for sure worn by several people when they got good and high, right? As Perry soon learned, quote, the most amazing thing about this flagrant advocate for drugs was that he had only been smoking grass for a few weeks when he first moved in. That's probably why he was talking about so much, right? It was new and exciting.
Starting point is 00:53:27 Indeed, Owsley's association with pot was quite recent, sometime over the break, December, January 63, 64. He'd gone down to Los Angeles, ran into an old friend named Will Spires, who was going to Pasadena to score some fucking devil's lettuce. Owszy gave Spires a lift and then smoked marijuana for the first time. Reefer madness ensued. He fucking killed a thousand people. No, he smoked weed for the first time in his life at the age of 28 with Spires and Alzy's MG while it was parked on the side of the road. Promptly getting stoned.
Starting point is 00:54:01 Alzy felt disoriented, yeah, But he thought the experience was very interesting. Wanted to do it again. When Bear thought something was interesting, it was a sure sign it was about to become an obsession. Hyperfixate on shit. After returning to Berkeley, Alzie got a hold of a huge stash of heavenly blue morning glory seeds. Literally seeds of a variant of morning glory which contain ergoline alkaloids very similar
Starting point is 00:54:23 to lacergic acid. And I didn't know that. Or if I did I forgot it. Yeah if you eat a large quantity of certain kinds of morning glory seeds you will trip similar to being on acid. You can trip for a long time, four to ten hours. But you you might also get very very nauseous and have a lot of diarrhea. I don't recommend it. Although Alzie would later say that he never took any of the seeds himself, he did put up three by five cards on virtually every bulletin board around campus advertising 250 morning glory seeds for sale for a dollar along with the address for a post office box. However, they didn't sell well. People
Starting point is 00:54:55 were like, what? It's morning glory seeds. Eventually he wound up trading all the seeds for speed. And now he has entered his meth phase. Oh fuck yeah, bro meth! Ding. Yippee! During that meth phase, Alza began driving everyone in the rooming house. He lived in fucking crazy because, well, meth! Ding. Yippee! He was doing shit like literally running around the house, like all night long, like not sleeping at all throughout the night or racing outside to ride his motorcycle at like 3, 3.30 in the morning. Just that kind of normal fun roommate stuff.
Starting point is 00:55:28 By the end of that semester, Allsley had dropped out of UC Berkeley. Yeah, fucking meth will do that. Started working as a technician. Did have a job though at KGO TV in San Francisco. Not long after he'd persuaded everyone else in the rooming house to also shoot up speed with him. Oh yeah, they were fucking shooting it up. Alzie was evicted, and now he moved to 1647 Virginia Street, where he did not stop experimenting with drugs. Searching for a woman to give him a scale to weigh some of the speed he had acquired in exchange for his morning glory seeds, Alzie walked into
Starting point is 00:56:00 the chemistry lab in Latimer Hall at the University of California Berkeley on a gorgeous spring Friday afternoon after he had stopped taking classes there clad in a black leather jacket jeans and leather boots. He went up to the only other person there an attractive 22 year old woman with dark hair and a lab coat who was busily dismantling the glassware she had just used in a distillation experiment and she told him that the female student he was looking for had left an hour ago. He asked her why she was studying chemistry, how much she knew about psychedelics like marijuana, morning glory seeds, which he considered an interesting area of research. Although she already told him that she was
Starting point is 00:56:34 engaged to a biologist, Owsley invited her to join him and his girlfriend for coffee at the Cafe Mediterranean, well-known Berkeley hangout, a famous little place on Telegraph Ave where the cafe latte may have actually been invented. Thank you hippies. Who doesn't like a latte? After she agreed to do so, he went off to use the Ainsworth electronic scales in the adjoining room. This burgeon young scientist would meet with Owsley and also with his girlfriend, since he wasn't much for monogamy, for coffee in Baklava, the cafe med, and three days later she would leave her fiancee, Fort Owsley, and also drop out of grad school. Fucking wild times. Her
Starting point is 00:57:11 name was Melissa Diane Cargill. She'd grown up in the San Joaquin Valley where her dad had once picked crops on various farms. The youngest of five kids she'd been able to afford to attend the University of California Berkeley on loans designed to aid students who were interested in studying science. Her plan was to become a research chemist and then she met Bear. She and Alzey were soon living together what would in time come to be known as the Green Factory at 1647 Virginia Street. There Alzey got turned on to meet the Beatles, the first Beatles album released in America. More importantly he got turned on to LSD. The first Beatles album released in America. More importantly, he got turned on to LSD.
Starting point is 00:57:46 The first dose he ingested contained about 100 micrograms of acid. On the low end of what you'd find in a typical dose or tab of acid. But you know, a little goes a long way. Remember our chart? 75 to 150 micrograms provides a substantial experience. The possibility of full hallucinations with objects appearing that do not exist, substantial distortion of actual objects, strong swaying of objects like trees, cartoon-like images.
Starting point is 00:58:12 He'd say later, "'I remember the first time I took acid and I walked outside and the cars were kissing the parking meters, but that went away after a while.' When Alzie's cousin came to visit him in Berkeley, the two of them split a number four capsule with white powder inside that had been synthesized either by the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company in Switzerland or in Czechoslovakia.
Starting point is 00:58:30 And that turned out to have what Bayer estimated was 500 micrograms in it. So about 250 micrograms each. And for reference, when I did or tried to do an episode of Time Stuck on Acid, I took two tabs, probably about that same amount, somewhere between 200 and 400 micrograms, probably closer to 200. Since it's not regulated, you know, and most people who take it like me, not chemists, very hard to know sadly how much you're truly taking. Mostly you hope to not be like the first to take a new batch unless you're maniac. You hope someone else has tried it first, and then they can give you a reasonable approximation of how hard it's going to kick kick. Anyway those two doses sent me into a fucking heavy trip. I was literally laying out in my yard in the backyard on
Starting point is 00:59:12 my stomach at one point. Scared scared. I was holding on to the grass as tight as I could because I was I was actually afraid literally afraid that if I let go the centrifugal force of the earth's rotation could send me spiraling out into outer space Where I wouldn't be able to breathe and I would die Totally absurd it makes absolutely no fucking sense But in the moments in the moment, I believed it I also believed that love was all that really mattered and I had to communicate that to Lindsey I believe that I needed to stop stressing over ego based shit because all our castles are made of sand big picture wise
Starting point is 00:59:44 Petty squabbles, don't matter. I also, on the way down from the peak, felt like I truly understood Pink Floyd, like I never had before. I had all kinds of wild thoughts and epiphanies, all kinds of powerful emotional swells, heavy visuals, seeing shit that wasn't there. Paintings had become fully animated cartoons.
Starting point is 01:00:01 The dogs became fucking never-before-seen magical creatures of some kind. Lindsay was an elf at one point. Some variant of that is the kind of trip that Barry went on. According to that chart, the peak of this trip can be very intense or even scary. Sense of self remains intact. Irrational thoughts, obsessive thoughts may arise, including thought loops or looping. You just get stuck in the same moment over
Starting point is 01:00:25 and over again. Panic about one's own safety or the safety of loved ones may occur. You can see or hear things that are not there. Your sense of reality very loose. Existing objects can take on entirely new forms and move. Close-eyed visuals very strong at this dose. And Alzey, one of the first to do this outside of a government or scientific experiment, you know, so I'm sure his mind was blown even more because he has less of a frame of reference for what this is supposed to do. You know, what he did was so outside the norm, he sent his mind to a place almost no one around him would even understand. It was fucking life-altering. And it turned Bear into a true LST convert, an acid disciple, and he wanted to do it again. To feel Lucy's mystical fucking magic wash over and change him. But he couldn't get more. No one had any. It was extremely hard to
Starting point is 01:01:09 find. The Swiss pharmaceutical company not making it anymore. But Alzey loved it. He had to feel that again. So he decided I have to make it on my own. And lucky for him, he had a would-be research chemist as a girlfriend slash roommate. As Melissa Cargill would later explain, in the early days I viewed LSD as a legal, interesting, organic chemistry synthesis. We wanted to produce a measured, reliable dose at high quality of excuse me of high quality LSD. Tests on our results revealed a higher purity than sand dose LSD. That's awesome. As both Owsley and Melissa Cargill soon learned manufacturing LSD required That's awesome. As both Owsley and Melissa Carr-Gilsoon learned, manufacturing LSD
Starting point is 01:01:45 required not only a vast array of laboratory equipment, but also far more experience in the field of organic chemistry than either of them had at the time. Which of course did nothing to stop Owsley from plunging headfirst into the process. After having installed a heavy-duty ventilation fan in the bathroom at 1647 Virginia Street, He set up a makeshift lab and just got to work. Somehow during all this the police got wind that methadrine aka speed was being sold to teens from that location and on February 21st 1965 a squad of state drug cops based in San Francisco raided the house and confiscated what they thought was shit to make speed. They took a box of various assorted labels and unlabeled chemicals. None of it was a methadrine, but among
Starting point is 01:02:28 the chemicals was an unmarked sample of dimethylamphetamine, which Melissa and Alzee had made and were playing around with, but it was both physically and mentally just inert. Not at all count by the charges he was now facing. Alzee promptly hired Arthur Harris, who was then the vice mayor of Berkeley, to represent him in court. And they managed to beat the charges. And he financed his legal fees by selling meth. Ding. Yippee! That's crazy. Friend Charles Perry would later note, at the time of his Virginia Street bust, Alzie was not yet rich, but he had already made a decent amount of money by dealing from the sample of methadrine that a chemical supply house had
Starting point is 01:03:07 provided him for his fictitious research on the effect of methadrine on the cortisone metabolism of rats. Oh man, Alzie had obtained the sample by requesting it on stationery that had printed up that he had printed up for the entirely fictitious bear research group. Love it! Reminds me of the Suck vs. Bear Evil, Inc. Now freed the charges against him. He even had the gall to show up at the police station's property lockup to take his lab gear back. They refused. So Alzi got a court order, went back, and he got his shit. And he planned, of course, to use that equipment. And before we learn how that went, time for today's second in two Mitchell Sponsor Breaks. Thanks for listening to these sponsors.
Starting point is 01:03:54 Now let's make some acid. Or at least hear about how some acid was made. Intent on continuing to pursue what so far had been their fairly unsuccessful attempts to synthesize LSD, Melissa and Owsley left Berkeley and headed for Los Angeles using his bare research group, Stationary. Owsley began buying large amounts of the raw material he would need to make the purest acid to ever hit the streets of America. And also some of the very first acid to truly hit the streets. Very first in a lot of places. Setting up shop in a rented two-bedroom house at 2205 Loughlowe Road in Los Angeles, not far from the campus of Cal State LA, Owlsley ordered 100 grams of lysergic monohydrate from the
Starting point is 01:04:36 Cyclochemical Corporation, as well as another 40 grams from the International Chemical and Nuclear Corporation, aka ICN. Along with each request, Owlsley also submitted a signed affidavit stating he would use the material for research purposes only. This is fucking genius. The first 100 gram bottle of lysergic monohydrate for which Owlsley paid $4,000 and $100 bills by drawing upon his apparently endless cash reserve
Starting point is 01:05:00 from the sale of methadrine in Berkeley arrived March 30th, 1965. The substance he sent he was sent by ICN which had been founded and was then being run by the aptly named Milan Panic, a name that looks like Milan panic in English, who would later randomly serve as the Prime Minister of Yugoslavia. He had fought Nazis in Yugoslavia when he was just 14 and he would be a national cycling champion. He got a nasty brown powder that Alzy promptly returned after discovering that it was of no use to them in making LSD.
Starting point is 01:05:30 By May, after running a lot of experiments, Alzy and Melissa had successfully synthesized their first batch of LSD, which Alzy then began distributing by taking orders for it through the mail at a Sunset Boulevard address. Because at this time, it was a totally legal drug. As word on the street began spreading about the incredible mind-altering power and purity of this product, Owsley used the proceeds from the sales to buy three more hundred gram bottles of lysergic monohydrate from the Cyclochemical Corporation, thereby bringing his total investment in this project to 16 grand, the equivalent of about 120 grand today. By now, Alzey had also
Starting point is 01:06:06 immersed himself in the Kybalion Hermetic Philosophy, a book he had found in the Shambhala bookstore in Berkeley in the fall of 1964. Originally published in 1908, the Kybalion was an exploration and explanation of alchemy that had most likely been written by Paul Foster Case, Michael Witte and William Walker Atkinson who chose to call themselves the Three Initiates. He would soon use it to guide him through almost every decision he made. Might want to ease up a bit on the acid, buddy. If it sounds weird that he used a book of dubious origins about alchemy to make life decisions, yeah it was. Alchemy was mental transformation, he would later say. It was never about transforming substances. Those were all allegories.
Starting point is 01:06:51 The lead in the gold is the lead of the primitive nature into the gold of the enlightened man. It was always about that. Alchemy didn't begin talking about turning lead into gold until it had to deal with the church during the early Middle Ages. And I don't know enough about the history of alchemy to speak to the veracity or lack thereof of that statement but okay that sounds cool. LSD was a lot like alchemy for Alsley making an expansive universe inside one's own head from just a little substance you ingested but crucially no actual material used in alchemy is fake or phony. It's just a different kind of substance. So Alsley would come to believe that the things he was seeing and experiencing while on acid were not fake. They were real.
Starting point is 01:07:30 Just in a different way. Right? He was he was peeking into a parallel dimension or or seeing more of this dimension than we are typically allowed to see or at least that's what he thought. This belief gave a spiritual dimension to his new business. And it was a business. While it has been widely reported that Allsley and Melissa came up with 1.5 million doses of LSD just during their time in LA, he would later dispute that claim and say that they only made about 800,000 in all formats. About half of which he said were given away for free. But 800,000, 1.5 million, either way that's a fuck ton of acid.
Starting point is 01:08:03 And at an average price of $3 a dose, it made him a huge amount of money. Some of which Alzey liked to carry around with him in $100 bills that he kept in his boots. Although it was not his preferred method of doing business, Alzey would sometimes sell a large quantity of LSD directly to people he trusted, who would then go off and resell the asset on their own. Again, it was still legal at this point, but not for long. While he was in LA, Alzy sold some of his newly made LSD to a talented Berkeley-based folk guitarist named Perry Letterman, who then, in his words, told people I had made it, and that was how my name got attached to it. I said, oh, fuck Perry, why'd you do that? And he said, oh, I don't know.
Starting point is 01:08:43 I had nothing to do with that. And I did everything I could to stay out of it. I wouldn't even let people take pictures of me. I wasn't trying to create a fucking myth. I was trying to stay out of jail. Guessing he was worried about jail in the sense that the police might not understand what he was making. Again, think it was speed or something. California and Nevada would be the first two states in the U.S. to make LSD illegal, but wouldn't do so for another year. Not until October 6, 1966. What neither of the Owlsley Normalists knew at the time was that Captain Alfred Tremblay, the commander of the LA Narcotics Division, had already begun regularly emptying the garbage cans outside their house on Loftsville Road. A year later, when he appeared
Starting point is 01:09:19 before a Senate subcommittee in Washington, DC, Tremblay would testify that he knew LSD had been manufactured and distributed from that address. He was waiting for it to be illegal. Trembley also displayed several orders, order forms he had retrieved from Owlsley's garbage, including one from Portland, Oregon, with a request for 40 capsules and the postscript Love to Melissa. Man, why are you fucking doing this? Not even illegal yet.
Starting point is 01:09:42 You know, many police at the time, they just saw this as a drug and drugs are dangerous. All of them. They're so bad. So naughty. Oh man, so sad that these guys thinking that they could benefit probably the most from acid. They need their fucking minds expanded. I'll spare you my typical extended fucking drug legalization rant this week. But what a waste of taxpayer money. Punish actual shit that hurts innocent people like property theft, assaults, abuse, sex crimes. There's no need to also punish people for choosing of their own
Starting point is 01:10:12 free will to alter their mind however the fuck they want. If you can handle some acid and still pay taxes, not hurt anyone, contribute to society, why the fuck should the government care? Fear and control. It's all about fear and control, I think. Meanwhile, by the time Owsley and Melissa returned to Berkeley in April of 1965, he was a man transformed, no longer a meth dealer hanging out with, quote, speed freaks. None of this. Oh, come on. Oh, I didn't hit the button hard enough. There you are. There you are, ding. But anyway, by the time he and Melissa returned to Berkeley, he's a man transformed. He's not hanging out with speed freaks.
Starting point is 01:10:48 He's an LSD evangelist. He gave his friend, former roommate Charles Perry some, and 40 minutes after ingesting it, Perry was, quote, two-dimensional, fading into the wall of the world womb, which turned into the wall of an Egyptian tomb. And I was a painting of an ancient Egyptian on a tomb wall with hieroglyphics sprouting from my elbows and knees tomb and I was a painting of an ancient Egyptian on a tomb wall with with hieroglyphics sprouting from my elbows and knees and disappearing down to the
Starting point is 01:11:09 wall too fast for my two-dimensional eyes to ever read. God I'd fucking never get tired of hearing what people's thoughts are while they trip. Panicked Perry then walked a mile and a half to find a girl from the rooming house so she could help talk him down from his trip. When Perry told Owsley the next day that the LSD had turned him into a painting, he said, oh that's right you had one of those first ones. Yeah they were too heavy. You should have only taken half. Sorry about the double dose bud. Hey you're still alive. Come on you're three-dimensional again and now you fucking finally appreciate being three-dimensional. You're welcome. Okay now to uh zoom out a little bit. We talked a lot about drugs, Berkeley, academics,
Starting point is 01:11:46 turning to fringe science to understand human consciousness, all things that would shape the counterculture movement. But by this point, the counterculture movement, the hippie movement, whatever you wanna call it, still widely dispersed, very decentralized. Not everyone was on the same page, even thinking about the same shit, right? There really was no proper movement, not yet.
Starting point is 01:12:04 There was a side of the counterculture that was primarily focused on the Vietnam War with young people, mostly students, questioning the U.S.'s actions in mounting protests. There were also those who were focused on civil rights. Remember, we're only about, you know, 10 years or so from the lynching of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, the Montgomery bus boycott. Freedom rides would take place throughout 1961. Voter registration organizing would become a main thrust of the movement through the early 60s. There was also a nascent music culture getting early versions of rock and roll from Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Buddy Holly, etc. You know, fueling a culture that was more interested in having fun than working nine-to-five. And there were
Starting point is 01:12:39 a bunch of other pockets of society where people were experimenting with new ideas about, you know, what it meant to be human being, how somebody ought to live, people just trying to chill out, have a good time, man. These separate movements weren't really coming together, but somebody was working on changing that. And it's not Owsley at this point. Let's talk about Ken Kesey. Ken Kesey, we met him earlier. Author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, became an early LSD evangelist with his group of devotees, the Merry Prank his group of devotees the Merry Pranksters. Members of the Merry Pranksters, by the way, included Carolyn Mountain Girl Adams,
Starting point is 01:13:11 aka Jerry Garcia's first wife, the Warlocks, the members of a band that later became known as the Grateful Dead, the comedic improv master and teacher Del Close, and Wavy Gravy, aka Hugh Naughton Romney Jr. future founder of the activist community the hog farm and the man who become the official clown of the Grateful Dead. Wavy's still around 89 years young by the way. All that acid didn't seem to shorten his life at all. He took a fucking lot of it. Ken and his crew had been hanging out doing acid for a little over a year now and were about
Starting point is 01:13:42 to take their acid test to the public. They just needed something first. Fuckin' lot more acid. Their supply was winding down. Back in Berkeley, Owsley had spent the last few months resisting the efforts of one of his friends, a guy named Gaylord, to accompany him down to Lahonda to visit Keezy. But eventually he gave in. After hopping into Gaylord's car one day, in October of 65, Owsley finally made the 55-mile journey that would irrevocably alter his life. Despite being in the presence of a counterculture superstar, Owsley was not intimidated. Saddling right up to Keesey, he introduced himself by saying, I'm Owsley. Have you never heard a fucking weird name like that before? Keesey just stared at him blankly. He was also probably tripping
Starting point is 01:14:19 balls. After a few moments of awkward, you know, weird silence, Alzy handed Keezy several hits of LST. But they already had another guy making their stash and Keezy was not inclined to try a new brand. Despite that, however, Alzy would return to the house multiple times, keep offering it, and eventually the Mary Pranksters would try it and be like, what the fuck? They would realize it was vastly superior to the acid they were taking. And he had so much more of it. And now for the first time, Alzie was around people who were just as intense and just as intense about acid as he was. He would describe Keezy as, uh, the kind of guy that reached out, took your knobs and tweaked them all the way
Starting point is 01:14:55 to 10. All of them. And the whole scene was running at 10. All the time. It was almost as sudden and as different as discovering psychedelics themselves for the first time at another level. Interestingly, Kesey and his friends actually took too much acid for Alzey's taste. 400 milligrams at a time. Jesus Christ! As opposed to 250, which was Alzey's preferred dose. 400. That's a lot. They're doing heavy trips every trip. Referring to our dosage chart again at 400. Time distortions may become intense including feelings of time stopping. Sense of self often gone. Full ego disillusion is possible. Body movement becomes difficult and disorienting. No longer able to form rational thoughts as one
Starting point is 01:15:36 enters a temporary psychotic state. Very intense visual hallucinations. Closed eye hallucinations may be overwhelming with some wishing to be able to escape the intensity of the trip. Yes. Yes Uh, I was on around that much because I took four and a half tabs because we split one in uh, In fucking vegas so many years ago now And I remember after fucking scurrying back to the finally getting back to the hotel which was a fucking journey a terrifying journey And finally making it back to our hotel room in this sky stew And just each of us laying down on our beds and oh my god just thinking that I was being experimented on like there was there was fucking weird scientists trying to get information out
Starting point is 01:16:12 of my head. There was I thought there was blood running down the wall. It was I got stuck in this fucking loop of I couldn't stop going to the bathroom and I couldn't remember if I was like how many am I have I been in the bathroom for hours, days? What's happening now? Well, it's crazy. Well, the psychedelics, the psychedelic sixties. Yeah, oh, by the way, actually before I move forward, that was Kenny's typical dose. Like a dose that for me was like, why did I do that?
Starting point is 01:16:35 That was like his regular, just fucking Tuesday night dose and his merry band of pranksters. The psychedelic sixties were now truly beginning and the merry pranksters wanted to take their show or more aptly their fucking weird experiment on the road. The first so-called acid test would take place at a guy named Ken Bab's house November 27th 1965 probably. Babs would later think it happened on Halloween. Yeah everyone was really high very often. Dates gonna be fuzzy. Whenever it was the Warlocks did play a little bit just casually which how cool
Starting point is 01:17:04 just drop an acid with a Grateful Dead hanging around jamming. Actually, let me play a snippet of an interview from 1988 with the Dead's Jerry Garcia talking about how the Grateful Dead became the band, you know, beginning with these acid tests. This is super cool. I said, hey you guys, we're having these parties up at Keezy's place in La Honda every Saturday night. Why don't you guys come? And we said, well, we're working all the time. Luckily, the following week we got fired
Starting point is 01:17:33 and we had nothing to do. So Saturday night came around, we went to the first one of those parties, which later became the acid test. And what did you do there? I mean, it was just experimenting? We just got, we set up the equipment, you know, everybody got high. Got.
Starting point is 01:17:49 And stuff would happen. Now, Keesey and his panthers have been doing this for a long time. They have instruments, they played weird music, but mostly it was completely free. There was no real performance of any kind involved. Everybody there was as much performer as audience, you know. Oh man, what an awesome time. You were like 20 years old? 19 years old? Wow. These guys had never been confronted with a regular rock and roll band, you know. And we plugged our gear in, which looked like space age military nightmare stuff.
Starting point is 01:18:27 Compared to all their stuff, which was hand painted and real funky, you know. And slam. We played about five minutes. You know, and then we all freaked out, you know. These are tripping our balls off. I love that you played for only five minutes. We played for about five minutes, but it completely devastated everyone. You know, they begged us to come back to the next one. And that's how it happened, essentially.
Starting point is 01:18:57 And just a bit more here. When you guys now, you're doing some acid, you're playing around, what did you expect to be? Were you going to be a Beatles? Were you going to be a great rock and around. What did you expect to be? Were you gonna be a Beatles? Were you gonna be a great rock and roll? What were you gonna do? We didn't really care whether we went somewhere specifically. We mostly wanted to have fun. And when we fell in love with the acid desk,
Starting point is 01:19:14 we started having the most fun we'd ever had, ever. More than we could have ever, I mean, it was just incredible. That's so cool. Actually, there's a tiny bit more of these instruments. this How long did that go on for about six months, but that was probably the most important six months in terms of directionality Because the neat thing about the as test was we could play if we wanted to but if it was too weird We could always not play. Yes. That was the only time we ever had the option of not playing That's awesome. That's awesome.
Starting point is 01:19:49 You know, like what a fascinating way for a band to form. And it helps explain the special relationship the band would have with their fans, their experimental nature, you know, of being a jam band. Yeah, started with these acid tests. For the next acid test, December 4th in San Jose, California, the newly renamed Grateful Dead did really play the first true performance of the band under that name for their very long career. There would be two more acid tests in December, one in January, before Keezy decided to turn these gatherings into something bigger. Keezy decided that the aptly named Tripp's Festival held at
Starting point is 01:20:21 Longshoreman's Hall at 400 North Point Street in San Francisco on the weekend of January 21st, 22nd, and 23rd 1966 would be the right place and time for the biggest acid test yet. Stewart Brand who would go on to create the Whole Earth Catalog, an influential publication that became a Bible for a generation of technologists and those interested in alternative lifestyles, came up with the original concept along with a musician and visual artist named Ramon Sender. When Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as the featured attraction shit got crazy on Saturday night. Kesey, who had just been given a six-month sentence on a work farm, as well as six months probation for being busted for weed at La Honda, had made front page news in San Francisco just two days prior by getting arrested again along with his companion Carolyn Adams, aka Mountain Girl,
Starting point is 01:21:07 for smoking a joint on the roof of Brand's apartment in North Beach. And that was like a huge bat signal to the burgeoning hippie movement. No doubt in part to show their continuing support for Kesey, well, that it was a bunch of fucking bullshit that he was getting arrested, somewhere between three and five thousand revelers who were all tripping balls on fucking LSD that Owsley had provided jammed into a hall that was only supposed to hold 1,700 people. In the words of Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally, there were simply more people tripping in a single room than anyone
Starting point is 01:21:37 had ever seen before that had probably ever happened in the world before. And as Jerry Garcia would later say, it was all total insanity. I mean total, wall-to-wall, gonzo lunacy. Everybody was just partying furiously. There were people jumping off balconies on the blankets and then bouncing up and down. I mean there was incredible shit going on. Plus it was like old home week. I met and saw everybody I had ever known. Every beatnik, every hippie, every coffeehouse, hangout person from all over the state was there all freshly psychedelicized. Can you imagine? What a fucking scene. The counterculture coalescing into a more unified movement on one night a night drenched in acid.
Starting point is 01:22:15 Hell's Angels were punching out members of other motorcycle clubs in the hallway. Keezy was there in disguise in a silver spacesuit complete with a helmet. Young future legendary rock concert promoter Bill Graham, who was managing the auditorium, was running around with a clipboard, trying to get people to stop letting their friends for free. Shit was wowed. Alza had bought a 26 year old computer wiz
Starting point is 01:22:36 and future LSD wizard named Tim Scully with him. They'd previously met in a pretty funny way. Few hours after having mailed in his tax return on April 15 15, 1965, Scully had taken acid for the first time. Then possessed by the notion that acid was the better solution to society's problems and technology, Scully spent months tracking down the source of his dose. And it was, of course, Owsley.
Starting point is 01:22:57 After spending weeks carefully checking Scully out, Owsley brought him to the Tripp's Festival to see how he would react, and he thought it was awesome. And with that the two men began working on what would become their life's work. The wholesale manufacturer of LSD and also state-of-the-art sound equipment for the dead. One week after the Trips Festival on January 29th, 1966, Alzie joined the Grateful Dead at the Sound City Asset Test. During the event held in a radio station in San Francisco, the band tried to record what they'd been doing live the week before. Grateful Dead co-founder and guitarist, then 18 year old, oh man he's only 18, Bob Weir, would remember Alzey showing up dressed in medieval garb with a pageboy haircut, wearing a ruffled shirt, maybe. Bob was actively tripping on Alzey's assets, so it was hard to say. Curiously, years later, the members of the Grateful Dead would share that they felt that even before they had met him, Alzy was already in their minds.
Starting point is 01:23:50 Bob loved to pick Alzy's brains intrigued by the strange man 12 years his senior. If you got involved in a discussion with Alzy, even back then, you kind of had to pack a lunch, Bob would later say. I think Phil Lesch was his closest contact in the band. They'd already bonded because they both had really high IQs and a real good retention of information and they were both really curious. Together they added up to different kaleidoscopes if you will. Then 25 years old Phil Lesh had attended Berkeley High School and the College of San Mateo before transferring to the University of California in Berkeley where he dropped out after a single
Starting point is 01:24:22 semester. Originally a violin player, he had also studied the the trumpet was an avid devotee of avant-garde classical music and free jazz. While working as an unpaid recording engineer at KPFA, Lesh had met Jerry Garcia who talked to him into becoming the bass player for the band when it was still known as the Warlocks. The first time Owsley and Lesh had met earlier that January Lesh extended his hand and said, so you're Owsley I feelh had met earlier that January, Lesh extended his hand and said, So, you're Owsley. I feel as if I've known you through many lifetimes. Spoken like a true psychonaut. Immediately taking the conversation to another level,
Starting point is 01:24:53 Owsley replied, You have, and you will through many more to come. I love that they weren't kidding when they said that kind of shit. And they were also, I'm sure, high as fuck. And just like that, they were pretty much the best of friends. Alzie would later say, Phil was the one I met first and whenever we would get high together, we would hook up telepathically. It's funny because in many ways we were absolutely opposite. He's a Pisces born in the year of the dragon. I'm a Capricorn born in the year of the dog. But I had grown up with my father who was also born in the year of the dragon. And so I could always tell when I was pushing too hard with Phil in the wrong direction
Starting point is 01:25:26 and went back off. Yeah, totally, you've got to be careful with dragons. Phil had almost immediately offered to make him the band's manager, but Alzie was not interested in that, actually turned him down. Then Phil offered him the sound man position and Alzie was very intrigued and wanted to try it out. Now having seen the Tripp's Festival show he knew what he was working with. Alzy recruited Rock Scully, a 24 year old who had already helped the Love and Spoonful produce a show at the Long
Starting point is 01:25:51 Shoresman's Hall October 24th 1965 to be their new manager. Love and Spoonful by the way one of the biggest bands in America briefly in 1965. Beginning in July of 1965 with their debut single Do You Believe in Magic they had seven consecutive singles reach the top ten of the US charts in the 18 months that followed. Also when I say Rock was recruited, I mean Owsley got him super high, then convinced him in an altered state that he had to manage the dead. It was his destiny. He came over to my house in the upper hate and brought some DMT and said, You gotta smoke this before we talk about anything. Rock would later say,
Starting point is 01:26:27 We did. And instantly it was as complete and enveloping hallucination as you can possibly achieve on anything. Almost like an elevator. A friend of mine was there and he took one puff and fell over. One puff? Fell over? My god that sounds like some high quality DMT. It's hard to find stuff that good. While Rock floated in out of reality, Owsley explained that Rock needed to manage the dead because otherwise it would fall to some corporate type who would likely exploit them. And Rock agreed.
Starting point is 01:26:54 He was in. Meanwhile, Owsley was influenced in the musical direction in which the band was going by convening group jam sessions in his cottage in Berkeley. Man, to be a fly on one of those walls. He'd already purchased and installed a sound system in his 35 by 55 foot living room in Berkeley that far surpassed what even the most fanatical hi-fi enthusiasts at the time might have even dreamed of owning. His home theater system consisted of two large wooden cabinets each of which was about the size of a small fridge equipped with a 15 inch speaker, a driver that was about four inches diameter, and a little horn mounted on top. Each cabinet weighed about a hundred
Starting point is 01:27:27 pounds. Halsey then ran the sound through a Macintosh amplifier with two channels 40 watts per channel. Also had tape loops so if they recorded something they could play it back and improvise over the top of it. It was an experimental jam band's heaven. You know very cutting-edge and Halsey provided provided more than even that. When the Grateful Dead decided to follow the Pranksters to Los Angeles in February of 66 to play a series of acid tests, aka big ass parties based on trip balls, getting weird and listening to great music there, Alzy provided the money that enabled the band to make the trip, to travel, to take more trips, money from his own acid sales. Because Alzy was footing the bill, Melissa Cargill,
Starting point is 01:28:05 Tim Scully, and Rox Scully, actually not related to one another by the way, Danny Rifkin and a friend of theirs named Ron Rakow also accompanied the band to LA. They would take up residence at a three-story pink stucco house on a street near West Adams Boulevard not far from the Santa Monica freeway, next to as Alzy described it, a black whorehouse. It was an interesting environment According to Roxgully there was not a single stick of furniture in the entire house No lamps only illumination came from some bare bulbs in the ceiling. There was no couches. No beds People who came slept on foam mattresses covered with army blankets or Indian fabrics because Owsley was doing all the shopping the refrigerator was filled with Slabs of meat huge, he had to remove one of the wire shelves in order to hang them in there.
Starting point is 01:28:46 Fucking dude hated vegetables and seemed to do just fine. And I gotta say as a meat and overall protein lover, he's making me feel way better about my own questionable dietary choices. I don't think I've literally ever craved a salad my entire life. Using a sharp knife, Alzy would cut off slices of beef, fry them up in a pan for every meal, along with eggs and milk. That was pretty much the only diet that Owsley allowed anyone living there to eat. Not sure that diet's for everybody. Her bathrooms must look like crime scenes. His rules about what could be consumed inside the house were so strict that drummer Bill Kreutzman's wife Brenda had to fight with Owsley just to let him get some oatmeal in the house for their young daughter to eat. Alzy, clearly very high on the autism spectrum, right? So hyper fixated on the weirdest shit. Sarah
Starting point is 01:29:31 Ruppenthal, who was married to Jerry Garcia at the time, felt the band was being held captive and then Alzy was quote, obviously a wizard, obviously a madman. And that's a great description of somebody. I would love to be described that way. For his part, Bob Weir said, Meat and milk were all that were allowed. I was pathologically anti-authoritarian and reacted to that fairly swiftly by becoming a strict vegetarian. Love that. And of course the drug use is off the charts. Jerry Garcia would describe it this way. We had enough acid to blow the world apart. And we were just musicians in this house. And we were guinea pigs more or less or we were guinea pigging
Starting point is 01:30:07 guinea pigging more or less constantly Tripping frequently if not constantly that got good and weird. Oh my god. I bet got good and weird Also, how was the kids staying at this house? That's not a good idea Can't imagine trying to parent anybody while tripping balls. That sounds like a absolutely horrible plan I'm a big fan of acid. It's not a fun of doing a shit ton of it around kids. Not that these guys were microdosing. Maybe the kid would go to a babysitter. I don't know.
Starting point is 01:30:30 Probably not though. A different time. When Phil Lesh politely declined, Alzy's offered to take acid with him one time. This is one of my favorite quotes of the episode. This isn't it? No, this is my very favorite quote of the episode. Alzy told him, the band is my body.
Starting point is 01:30:43 You are my left leg. My left leg is asleep. You must get high. What the fuck? No one it was useless to argue. Lesh complied with Owsley's demand and dropped the acid. God, Owsley just wanted to keep their minds continually open after drummer Bill Kreuzman ingested a synthetic hallucinogen known as STP that Owzey had given him. It stands for Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace. But I don't know that a lot of people will feel that way when they're on it. Chemically very similar to mescaline. He stayed awake for 72 hours straight laughing hysterically at all
Starting point is 01:31:17 the giant bubbles he saw wherever he looked for much of that time. STP is a hundred times more potent gram for gram as a hallucinogen than mescaline. Far more potent, you know, per microgram even than LSD. And Alzie probably gave him a massive fucking dose. Mixed into all this drug use was sex, of course, by a weird who came to believe while staying in this house for a time that Alzie was literally the devil, told grateful did viographer Dennis McNally that the name Bear, he thought the name bear came from the horrifying noises Ozzy would make while he was having sex
Starting point is 01:31:47 Like he did on the third floor with a revolving door of partners Whenever we would go up there to tell Ozzy that he had a phone call We're would hear what sounded to him like quote a combination of a flying saucer invasion and some sort of demonic hoedown haha Surprisingly, although Ozzy was in charge of all this madness, he was not initially pleased by the move into this house. He wanted them to strike out on their own, not keep following the acid tests around, because their shows on their own made them more money than the acid tests. Owsley kept
Starting point is 01:32:18 telling the guys that nothing was preventing them from doing their own shows in LA and what's more, now they had plenty of time to practice and refine their technique. They would benefit greatly from hearing high quality recordings of themselves thanks to Owsley. Along with Tim Scully, Owsley began modifying the sound of the band's guitars by installing a transformer that was connected to low impedance cables to clean up the signal. Owsley and Scully then custom-built a stereo mixing panel acquired in oscilloscope so they could check on the amplifiers during a show, fine-tune their functioning in real time. After providing the dead with a
Starting point is 01:32:49 bunch of expensive Sennheiser microphones, Alzy began obsessively recording all the performances so the band could hear how they sounded on stage. While all these innovations were significant advances in what was then still the primitive state of rock and roll sound, the system Alzy had brought with him from his cottage in Berkeley soon proved to be less than ideally suited for use on the road though. The speaker boxes too huge, too delicate, prone to blown out and constantly tripping balls insanely hard turned out to not be especially conducive to run in a complicated sound system. One acid test, Alzy was so fucking high he became
Starting point is 01:33:23 convinced that one of the Merry Pranksters had somehow found his way into the wiring and was messing around with the sound. Like as in he thought that this dude had shrunk himself and become practically microscopic and he'd somehow physically climbed into the cables. Like he was so high that seemed like a real possibility. All told, the Grateful Dead's strange and wonderful sojourn in Los Angeles lasted for about six weeks. While there, in SoCal, the band performed an acid test held in the Unitarian Church in Northridge, another one at the Youth Opportunity Center in Watts, at the Sunset Acid Test at Empire Studios, at the Pico Acid Test at the Cathay Theater, none of which were particularly successful.
Starting point is 01:34:03 Band also played two regular shows, one at the Dana Center and another at Troopers Hall. After that, Ken Kesey suddenly departed to Mexico after faking suicide to avoid going to jail on his latest marijuana bust. As one does. With Ken and the Mary Pranksters currently on the outs, the dead were now poised to become the center of the burgeoning counterculture movement. And Owsley was right there with them. Mostly. Shortly after heading back up to the Bay Area, five weeks after the Grateful Dead performed
Starting point is 01:34:31 at Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco on April 22nd and 23rd, 1966, the band began living together in a sprawling white mansion that Melissa Cargill and Phil Lesh's girlfriend, Florence Nathan, now known as Rose McGee, had somehow managed to rent for six weeks at a bargain price of $1,100. Located three and a half miles north of Novato in Marin County's Olin Polystate Historic Park, the idyllic site also featured this big swimming pool and now with rock luminaries like Janis Joplin, Grace Slick in attendance, along with various members of the Jefferson Airplane quick silver messenger service the house and surrounding grounds soon became a party scene of epic legendary proportions where naked young women tripping on Alzey's acid or Frolicker in the sunshine is the deader plane behind them. My fucking god sounds incredible. Hail Lucifina.
Starting point is 01:35:20 Although Alzey had a room of his own at O'Olam Pauley he continued to live in Berkeley after LA became clear that he and the Dead could not live together anymore. That's why I said he was mostly with him. Although he was now no longer a part of the Dead's daily scene, Owsley did continue to work as their sound man as the band capitalized on their newfound popularity by performing regularly for Bill Graham at the Fillmore Auditorium and for Chet Helms at the Avalon Ballroom as well as a host of other venues that were new to them. On the technical side, Owsley had sold his voice of the theater speakers and Macintosh MC-240 amp to Bill Graham for use at the Fillmore Auditorium. Being Owsley, he then
Starting point is 01:35:56 went out, bought the dead bigger gear, but didn't really pan out. It never quite worked, Garcia would later recall. We always had to spend five hours dragging it into a gig, five hours dragging it out afterwards, and it was really bringing us down. After going through a million weird changes about it and screaming at poor Owsley and getting just crazy behind it, we finally parted ways, parted company with Owsley. He agreed to turn some of the equipment back into just regular money and bought us some regular standard single-minded equipment so we could just go out and play. And now more and more it seemed like the band would wouldn't cave to the eccentric acid dealers demands. By Labor Day 1966 he was
Starting point is 01:36:32 no longer working with the Grateful Dead at all. But that meant he could spend more time on his other calling making a ton of acid. The cultural tide about acid has somewhat shifted during this time. Once relatively unknown, by the summer of 66, 81 articles about the drug appeared in the New York Times alone. And this was not a case of all publicity being good publicity. Calling the phenomenon an epidemic of acid heads, Time Magazine claimed that 10,000 students at the University of California had already taken LSD. One headline for Life magazine read, the exploding threat of the mind drug that got out of control. LSD. All these journalists doing so much fearmongering. Right about something they know fuck
Starting point is 01:37:14 all about. So typical. One story is reported that a five-year-old girl in Brooklyn was in critical condition after having swallowed a sugar cube and pregnant with LSD that her 18 year old uncle had purchased for five bucks in Greenwich Village and then left in the refrigerator. While this article framed it as if the girl had overdosed, she had not. She was totally fine the next day. She was physically totally fine the next day.
Starting point is 01:37:36 Probably took a while, you know, to psychologically recover from the effects of tripping balls at the age of five. You know, when you already don't have a firm grasp of reality. I have tried for years to find a single case of somebody dying from an overdose of LSD, and I can't. Yeah, sometimes people like a few times, people like fucking throw themselves off roofs. People fall off balconies drunk every fucking year. We don't outlaw that. Yeah, I can't find a single case of somebody like overdosing in the sense that they took so much their heart stopped or they're just they stop breathing. No, overdosing on LSD in the same way you can overdose on heroin
Starting point is 01:38:12 or sleeping pills it just doesn't seem possible. So much fear over a drug that is actually so much safer in many ways than the shit you got at home under your fucking sink or in your medicine cabinet. The same, not that you should not that you should fucking drink the stuff on your sink, but you get it. The same day the article came out about the girl in Brooklyn, a Harvard graduate medical school dropout claimed he had been flying on LSD for three days and then stabbed his mother-in-law to death. And to that I say correlation does not equal causation. Just because the med school dropout was dropping acid, you know, before he stabbed his mother-in-law, that doesn't mean the acid is what caused him to stab his
Starting point is 01:38:49 mother-in-law. Blaming a new drug for killing sounds to me a lot like something a defense would cook up, something along the same lines as like, you know, heavy metal. He listened to all this heavy metal music and that's why he murdered. Fuck out of here. As the fear grew, states rushed to outlaw the substance, just as journalists rushed to find the people responsible for the epidemic. And three days before LSD became illegal in California on October 6th, 1966, thank you Governor Fuckhead Reagan, the first full length account of Alzey Stanley's activities
Starting point is 01:39:18 appeared in the LA Times. The headline read, Mr. LSD Makes Millions Without Breaking the law. Young drug manufacturer wins acid head, sets applause after following checkered career. That's a weirdly written headline. It was written by George Reasons, who recounted Alzey's exploits in great detail, describing everything from how he went to the bank, to his history, and various graduate programs. And it was not good. Especially because Alzey hoped to make a lot more acid
Starting point is 01:39:47 and he didn't want the exposure. He didn't want the law breathing down his neck. He had now also rented a house in Point Richmond, an industrial neighborhood in Contra Costa County at the eastern edge of the Richmond San Rafael Bridge. Working alongside Tim Scully and Melissa Cargill in a basement laboratory there, he had manufactured what may have been more than 300,000 tabs of
Starting point is 01:40:08 Powerful acid each containing 270 micrograms of LSD. My god 270 micrograms per Tab that's so strong only heavy trips for Osley not a micro doser His sent shit or his shit sent you to fucking outer space. And the hippie scene very much wanted as much as they could get their fun loving hands on. On January 14th, 1967, more than 20,000 people showed up at Golden Gate Park for what was billed as a powwow, a gathering of the tribes for a human being. The event featured an all-star lineup of counterculture luminaries that included Timothy Leary in his first appearance on the West Coast, his former Harvard colleague Richard Alpert, the poet Lenore Candell, Jerry Rubin, Alan Ginsberg,
Starting point is 01:40:55 Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Suzuki Roshi of the San Francisco Zen Center, hippies flocked to the countercultural revolutionaries to hear them speak, to listen to bands like Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Big Brother, and The Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service. They all performed. Man, give me a fucking time machine right now! Despite the lineup, most people were probably there for the asset though. A new mythically powerful batch that had come to be known as White Lightning. Six days after The Human Being, Owsley accompanied The Grateful Dead to a show at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium
Starting point is 01:41:30 that featured Timothy Leary as the opening act. Man, for about a year I used to live less than half a mile from that place, at Six and Broadway. Living in the right place? Wrong time. Leary urged all those in attendance to, quote, flick on the inner switch to full power to avoid spending the rest of your life as a badly paid extra in someone else's low-budget black-and-white documentary slash training film. Oh hell yes and Hale-Dem-Rod. Then the band's jammed and everyone rocked the fuck out. A couple months later, Alzy went to visit Leary in April of 67, having already been booted out of Mexico and then booted from the island of Anguilla in
Starting point is 01:42:08 the Caribbean in fairly rapid succession, Leary and his acolytes were residing in a four-story, 64-room mansion in Millbrook, New York. It was a meeting of the Titans of Acid, its public face and Leary, and its secret producer in Owsley. And it didn't go that well. Arriving with Melissa and a girlfriend named Roni Gisson as well as another young man, Owsley got a lukewarm reception from a martini-drinking leery. The Berkeley group spent a few awkward, forgettable
Starting point is 01:42:37 days at Millbrook, then decided to return to New York City on April 4th, 1967 to check out Jefferson Airplane, perform at the Cafe Agogo in Greenwich Village. But since he'd arrived at Millbrook in the dark, probably stoned, Owsley got lost when he left. Pointing to a New York State trooper named James Dudley who was sitting in his patrol car on Mill Street, Melissa Cargill told Owsley to ask him for directions to the Taconic Parkway. After doing so as politely as he could, Owsley drove off, only to realize that the trooper was now following him. She should have probably asked somebody else for directions. Now driving nervously, when Owsley failed to signal while changing lanes,
Starting point is 01:43:13 the trooper pulled the car over. And after Owsley had stepped aside, or outside to present his registration, the trooper saw a foil-wrapped packet fall to the ground. Opening it, he identified the substance within as not acid but hashish. Now the trooper ordered Owsley to open the trunk. Oh shit! No, he's actually smarter than that. The trunk was packed to the brim with bags and boxes and bottles, most of which contained a wide variety of exotic scents and different kinds of lanolin that Owsley had just purchased at the Keele store on 3rd Avenue in Manhattan To use in formulating what he called his barely burn bare suntanning lotion Okay, all right sells acid
Starting point is 01:43:52 You know puts together high-end custom audio equipment and sells suntan lotion totally Although no illegal substances were in the trunk the trooper arrested everyone in the car anyway Because I guess he I don't know you just thought they were hippies and didn't like him took them all to jail where they remained until owsley got a high-priced attorney in new york to post bail so they could all return to manhattan the most serious consequence of the bust for owsley was that the trooper found the key to a safe deposit box filled with cash at a manufacturer's handover trust bank in manhattan cash in the amount of about a100,000. Nearly a million in today's money.
Starting point is 01:44:27 Alzee never got the key back, but through well-connected friends managed to concoct a scheme to get a Wall Street friend to use the spare key and not alert anybody. And then that friend dropped off all the money properly at a bank in the Bahamas and disappeared forever. Alzee never saw any of it again. Man, I would want to find that guy and fucking kill him. Fortunately, Alzy still had a ton of money from selling assets since 1965. Some sources say he'd earned about 1.2, 1.3 million, around 9 million today's money.
Starting point is 01:44:55 All stashed his cash in various safety deposit boxes across the country. He would now use some of the money to move into what became known as the Troll House, 2321 Valley Street, back in Berkeley. Alzy soon filled a house with what Charles Perry described as Persian rugs, hi-fi equipment, Indian fabrics, Tibetan wall hangings, pillows, hash pipes, musical instruments made by his personal guitar maker, and all sorts of electronic toys sound toys like strobe lights. Sounds fucking awesome. The troll house soon became
Starting point is 01:45:26 a regular stopover for the psychedelic elite from Richard Alpert to out of town rock musicians. He even had a live burrowing owl that had to be fed a mouse each week living there. Of course he did. You can't really party unless you got a pet owl in your house. And soon the force of the counterculture would converge on San Francisco for the biggest acid fest yet, the Summer of Love. Historians now generally agree that the Summer of Love began at the Monterey Pop Festival June 16-18, 1967. With 30,000 people jamming the Monterey Fairgrounds each day, the legendary performances put on by Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix immediately catapulted them to a level of
Starting point is 01:46:04 stardom they had never seen before. And many of those in attendance as well as the performers themselves were tripping balls on a brand new batch of algae's acid known as Monterey purple. To begin synthesizing the new batch of LSD he'd flown to Denver with Melissa Cargill and Rony Gisson. In Denver they'd met up with Tim Scully who'd already set up a laboratory, and it was time to get to work. After having begun the synthesis, Melissa Cargill flew back to the Bay Area
Starting point is 01:46:29 to spend time with Jack Cassidy, the Jefferson Airplane Base player with whom she was having a little fling, and the wild ass lives his crew were living. Leaving Gisson and Scully behind to continue the work, Alzie went to Los Angeles where he promised his friend Cass Elliott of the mamamas and the Poppets That he would provide more than enough acid for the entire festival in Monterey
Starting point is 01:46:51 This is awesome week later He returned to Denver where Gissen and Tim Scully had been working around the clock to make as much LSD as possible on June 1667 Owsley and Roni Gissen flew from Denver to Monterey for the Monterey Pop Festival, wearing a leather vest and a bear claw necklace and nothing else up top. Fuck yeah, bro! Owsley was carrying with him approximately 100,000 tabs of LSD. Sweet baby Jesus! And it was all dyed purple. Half the size of an aspirin, each tab again, contained about 270 micrograms of acid. He also had a marine bottle filled with liquid LSD, a bottle of dark green hashish oil, and about an ounce of powerful sativa-strain wheat. His first move upon arriving backstage to the festival was to offer a dose to Ravi Shantar,
Starting point is 01:47:38 the famed Indian sitar player. Didn't want any. You can watch his performance at the festival on YouTube. Seems like not taking any was probably the right call. He killed it. Others would take it though. I love this as Pete Townsend of The Who would later say, now at Monterey, Owsley was introduced in like version 7 of his own acid, which up to that point had really only been available in Europe in its clinical variety from Sandoz Laboratories. So you knew exactly what you were getting when
Starting point is 01:48:03 you took some of it. With Owsley, you had no clue at all. I took some of his in Monterey and I never touched a drug again for 18 years. It was extraordinarily powerful. Holy shit. Scared Pete off of drugs for nearly two decades. He probably got so fucking high he thought he was never gonna get his brain put back together. Owsley gave his acid to all who wanted it, including John Lennon, who had the opposite experiences, Pete. He would now coordinate with Alzy to get more of the shit sent back to England, so he and the rest of the Beatles could do it. And you know, maybe without the acid that they then you know started to drop, they might have never made the legendary White Album. Came out in November of 68. Six days after Monterey's pop festival,
Starting point is 01:48:45 Alzy showed up backstage with Ronie Gissen at Jimi Hendrix's debut performance at Fillmore West in San Francisco. Although Hendrix was surrounded by a circle of friends and family, Alzy boldly stepped right up to him, told Hendrix he wanted him to record while, wanted to record him while Hendrix was high on acid and playing on his own. And Hendrix did not tell him to fuck off. Jimmy Hendrix, man. Oh my god, listening to his shit literally makes me cry sometimes. The way he played. Like when you see him. Like videos of him playing live. I'm not entirely sure he was fully human. Maybe part god. It's definitely a fucking guitar god. Alzy sealed the deal with Hendrix by lighting up a pipe filled with DMT smeared on mint leaves and they both smoked the shit out of it, left earth for
Starting point is 01:49:28 about 50 minutes. Then Jimmy ripped the fucking roof off the building with otherworldly riffs and solos. After the show was over, Alzy and Gissin drove to the Masonic Temple, a large auditorium on California Street in the Knob Hill section of the city. Carrying his tape recorder and a Fender amp, Alzy followed Hendrix into a dark room with heavy draperies and a fireplace. After lighting a fire, Alzy set up his recording equipment, gave Hendrix a heavy dose of liquid LSD from the Murine bottle, so who knows how much he had. Probably some kind of like out of body experience dose. And seated on a chair with his guitar, Hendrix started playing. And he played for fucking hours. And after he was done, Alzy triumphantly held up a cassette he had just recorded of him,
Starting point is 01:50:08 asking if he could see the tape Hendrix then took it from Alzy's hand, threw it in the fire, smiled, grabbed his guitar and just walked out the door. Hendrix, I watched people like tons of interviews of people who knew Hendrix. His ability to consume interviews of people who knew Hendrix. His ability to consume vast quantities of hard drugs and somehow not only function but like still play guitar on like a wizard level was legendary. He was just he had a body that could just fucking take incredible doses of psychedelics and still function. Anyway frantically Owsley did all he could to retrieve the cassette from the fire only to realize the tape was destroyed
Starting point is 01:50:46 That sucks But also I get Hendrix trying to protect his brand With the summer 11 full swing now tens of thousands of long-haired hippies are crowed in the streets to hate Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco Also there a lot of police trying to enforce the wrong laws and the wrong people You know how dare people peacefully congregate share some communion on October 2nd 1967 people peacefully congregate, share some communion. On October 2nd, 1967, 11 people who lived in the dead house at 710 Ashbury arrested for possession of marijuana by eight narcotics agents accompanied by a dozen reporters and several TV crews. All right, good job guys. Make sure those hippies don't start murdering families while high on weed. That's cool. Among those arrested were original
Starting point is 01:51:23 Grateful Dead was the original Grateful Dead focus or one of them. It's communal effort. Ron Pigpen McKernan. Also the legendary Bob Weir, band managers Rock Scully, Danny Rifkin, Alzy's close friend Bob Matthews. Most of them pled guilty to lesser charges and then paid fines. Before that arrest a local reporter came to the dead house at 710 Ashbury, interviewed the band while they had a bit of weed and a bit of acid in their bloodstream, and you gotta hear some of this. So unintentionally funny to me. The guy narrating the video, I can't figure out his name,
Starting point is 01:51:54 the video description doesn't give his name, such a fucking square. The hippies are capable of extremely hard work, even though they tend to approach work as the rest of us do sport. The hippies? Some of them are very successful. This is the house of a popular local band which plays hard rock music. They call themselves the Grateful Dead. Do they play hard rock? They live together comfortably in what could be called affluence. There are many other similar houses or apartments in Haight-Ashbury maintained by hippies who work in places where employers do not mind bizarre dress or long hair Their concept of a new style of life unites them and that concept is in most cases drawn from the drug experience
Starting point is 01:52:38 The Grateful Dead themselves acknowledge they have used LSD Warren Wallace asked them what they thought the hippie movement was trying to accomplish. What what we're thinking about is a peaceful planet. We're not thinking about anything else. We're not thinking about any kind of power. We're not thinking about any of those kind of struggles. We're not thinking about revolution or war or any of that. That's not what we want. Nobody wants to get hurt. Nobody wants to hurt anybody. We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life, you know, and like think about moving the whole human race ahead a step
Starting point is 01:53:09 or a few steps. Or a half a step. Yeah, or a half a step, or anything. Towards a more positive... At least not going around in circles like it is now. Do you think that your movement or your idea, the hip idea, is essentially connected up with drugs? Yeah, I would say that that's a large part of the framework.
Starting point is 01:53:27 I think that most of the people who are hippies now came to it through drugs. Yeah, but it's not a dope movement. We're not trying to spread dope. I think, personally, that the more people turn on, the better world it's going to be. We were talking about... I agree, right? Interestingly, Pigpen was one of the Grateful Dead members, or was the one Grateful Dead member, excuse me, who did not fuck around much with psychedelics, returning to him now. He strongly preferred whiskey, and alcohol rotted out his insides by the time he was
Starting point is 01:53:56 just 27. Man, so many musicians died at the age of 27. Yeah, he died in 1973 at the age of 27. Died of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage brought about by years of alcohol abuse. But that's the legal drug, right? Because Uncle Sam, again, thinks it's safer for us than acid. But not. But not safer. I think it's just working more easily controlled on alcohol than acid.
Starting point is 01:54:19 Or shrooms. Or molly. I don't know about wheat. But our government is just so full of shit when it comes to drugs and has been for so fucking long. So much hypocrisy, so much just political grandstanding. Back to the fall of 67. In the weeks that followed, 32 truants were arrested in a police sweep on Hate Street. What had begun as an authentic social experiment had, in Charles Perry's words, collapsed into
Starting point is 01:54:41 a monstrous stew of methadrine, heroin, and strong-arm crime. Ousey continued to do all that he could to avoid getting busted, like refusing to ever front his product to others, working with only one distributor in every market, and changing up his distributors from time to time. But still, the law was coming for him. And on December 21, 1967, six agents under the direction of the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control used a sledgehammer to break down the front door of a house on La Esperal Street in the suburb of Berkeley that Owsley had rented to synthesize his asset.
Starting point is 01:55:13 The agents arrested Owsley, Melissa Cargill, Roney Gissen, Bob Thomas, Robert Massey, Owsley's old friend Will Spires, on charges of conspiracy to illegally manufacture controlled drugs. After he had sold $3,400 worth of LSD to an undercover agent two days prior Will Spires on charges of conspiracy to illegally manufacture controlled drugs. After he'd sold $3,400 worth of LSD to an undercover agent two days prior, Spires had unwittingly led the authorities to the house. And the feds were fucking pumped. Not only had they seized somewhere in the neighborhood of 700,000 doses of acid, but they hoped that the hippie community would flee in fear from the arrest of their king. But Alzee, not afraid.
Starting point is 01:55:46 He told the agents that his LSD formula adhered to federal Food and Drug Administration standards and that he had only made the purest acid for family and friends. A day later, all those who had been arrested were freed on $5,000 bail each. In time, the charges against both Melissa Cargill and Ronny Gissin would be dropped. Now, no longer able to synthesize LSD to earn a living because he was under federal indictment, Alzi returns to focus on music. He and his friend Bob Matthews both began working as sound men at the Carousel Ballroom venue in San Francisco in February of 68. On July 23rd, 1968, so a few months later, Alzi recorded Big Brother in the Holding Company as they performed at the Carousel Ballroom,
Starting point is 01:56:27 which had by then been purchased by Bill Graham, owner of the Fillmore Auditorium, who promptly renamed it Fillmore West. A month later, Dan Healy, who had been mixing The Grateful Dead's live performances, left his job to work with Quicksilver Messenger Service. The Quicksilver Messenger Service, by the way, while never as popular as like The Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane, still a very influential, pioneering, psychedelic band. Definitely worth a listen if you love late 60s psychedelic rock.
Starting point is 01:56:53 Speaking of psychedelic rock, The Dead, who were then in the studio recording OXAMOXA, asked Owsley to return to the fold as their soundman. When the band performed at Fillmore West for three nights, beginning on August 20th, 1968, Allensey helped the Dead finally achieve a goal they had been pursuing with great intensity for more than a year. But not really a music or performance goal. The Dead were convinced that Bill Graham, I love this, the owner of the venue, needed, had to take LSD so he could finally truly understand what the fuck their music was about. They had tried to get women to kiss him, women who had acid on their lips. They had tried to spike his food with acid.
Starting point is 01:57:29 So many times that Graham had started to bring his food from home. Which is too far. Graham liked to drink soda. And when it was kept backstage in a big cooler full of ice, there got to be a little condensation. On the top they noticed little beads of liquid and the dead realized they could potentially put other beads of liquid on top Of the can say liquid LSD and have somebody you know like Bill drink it without knowing that and Then he would be fucking sent into space and that's fucked up. It wasn't it didn't happen to me
Starting point is 01:57:56 I think it's pretty funny. Don't do something like that, but also this is funny So Owsley and the dead they blow Graham's mind tripping on acid for the first time in his life Graham was then asked by Mickey Hart if he wanted to walk out on stage and play with the Dead. Clutching a drumstick in his hand, Graham began wildly beating on a gong before switching over to a cowbell, just went, bam, and he spent four fucking hours jamming with the band on stage, not knowing what the hell he was doing. Meanwhile, Owsley was working as a sound man. He threw himself back into sound designing, recording every show on a tape deck so he could listen to them later, adjust the sound for the next time, took it very seriously. He would even set up a warehouse to record them in April of 69 so he could study it in real time without having to worry about the
Starting point is 01:58:38 logistics of a concert. And as a result of all this, the entire band, not just Owlsley, would soon become utterly obsessed with their sound. On May 29th, 1969, the Grateful Dead performed with Lee Michaels and the Young Bloods in Robertson Gymnasium at the University of California Santa Barbara. After having performed for 40 minutes through Lee Michaels' P.A., Jerry Garcia suddenly stopped playing, ripped out his chord, amplifier chord, told the crowd the Dead were now going to set up their own system so quote we can hear what the fuck is happening they'd become obsessed with the mix the amps all of it in a backstage scene that was out of control even for the dead Garcia then began shouting that the band should give everyone their money back if they could not do a righteous show crowd began to
Starting point is 01:59:20 leave before they could get the system set back out the way they wanted it but still perfecting the sound system did not fulfill Alzey's manic reserves of energy completely. He still craved the influence and mystique he had had when he was San Francisco's acid king. And sometimes this will lead to total chaos. On June 7th, 1969 at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, Janis Joplin came on stage to join Pigpen in a rendition of Bobby Blue Bland's Turn On Your Love Light. Before the show began, Bear dumped what may have been
Starting point is 01:59:47 as much as a full fucking gram of LSD. A million micrograms, 10,000 hits of acid, worth $50,000 on the street, into a single bottle of apple juice backstage. This guy's a maniac. Cornelia Snooki Flowers, a saxophone player in Joplin's new band, drank some of the apple juice, got so high had to go to the hospital. When she realized what was going on,
Starting point is 02:00:09 Janis Joplin charged over to Bear, began screaming, you son of a bitch, you dosed my sax player and he has to go to the hospital. After the show was over, Bear and Roni Gissen left the hall together only to find grateful dead lyricist Robert Hunter lying naked in the street, tripping balls completely out of his mind on a psychotic dose of acid. He grabbed Bear, put him in a headlock, then this naked dude started to punch him while shouting, I will annihilate you, Owsley Steen. Must have been quite the experience for Owsley because he was also out of his mind. Without the outlet of a giant community to distribute acid to, Bear was started to get a little weird. He was taking huge doses of acid frequently. He was getting high in his own supply a lot.
Starting point is 02:00:49 The Dead would overhear him talking to his amps and electronics during shows. Same things like, I love you and you love me. How could you fail me? Despite this chaos, however, the band was doing well. They even came up with their iconic logo, the Steal Your Face skull, aka Steely. Right around this time. The skull with red and blue inside it, divided by a white lightning-looking doodle, all surrounded by more red and blue. Alzy started using a red and blue circle with a lightning bolt down the middle
Starting point is 02:01:17 as a way to mark their gear so they could get to know what belonged to them and not the venue or other bands, and be able to get everything broken down more quickly after shows. And after a few edits of this design, the Still Your Face logo was born. The phrase Still Your Face derived from a lyric in the song He's Gone about a former band manager who stole some money. Fans started using the phrase to describe the feeling of being mind blown by the band's music.
Starting point is 02:01:40 The logo was on the Grateful Dead's equipment when they took the stage at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, 1030 at night, August 15, 1969 to play before an estimated crowd of 400,000 people. So many. And most of them high as fuck. This was that Woodstock, the iconic music festival that featured Arlo Guthrie, Joan Bias, Santana, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, The Who, The Band, Jimi Hendrix, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. So many more. And The Dead did not put on their best show.
Starting point is 02:02:11 To move each band's equipment on and off the stage as quick as possible, festival organizers had mounted large plywood circles on casters so everything could be rolled into place. From the moment he first laid eyes on them, Bear was convinced the system was a disaster. That their specialized equipment, far too heavy, it would break the plywood circles, and unfortunately he was right. By the time they set everything up again, got the instruments warmed up, the audience was annoyed, tired, restless, the band is annoyed, tired, restless, rain is pouring down, the wind starts blowing so hard, holes had to be cut in the light show screen to
Starting point is 02:02:42 keep it from hauling the stage off of its fucking foundation like a big sale. When Bob Weir leaned into his microphone to begin singing, big old blue spark struck him in the lip actually knocked him backwards. The set ended after numerous tech problems when during their performance of Turn On Your Love Light, their amplifiers overloaded, one of them exploded, and the roadies told the band you gotta stop playing it's too dangerous somebody's gonna get electrocuted When Jerry Garcia left the stage around midnight. He told John McIntyre the band's road manager Nice to know that you can blow the most important gig of your career, and it doesn't really matter
Starting point is 02:03:17 crazy statement But would turn out to be true. They did just fine Despite the dead stage struggles Alcy had a great time at the festival, which was for him an opportunity to be the acid king again. He happily dispensed liquid LSD from his ever-present Murine bottle to one and all. But less than two months later, he would have to come back to the real world. Bear would appear in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco alongside Robert Massey, Bob Thomas, and Will Spires to stand trial for the bust at 69 La Esparal
Starting point is 02:03:45 Street in Arinda, California. Judge William Swigert found all four defendants guilty on charges of possessing manufacturing and conspiring to make and sell LSD. On November 7th, 1969, Swigert sentenced the four men to three years in jail, ordered each to pay 3,000 in fines. Baer's high-priced lawyers immediately filed an appeal that began its way through the Ninth Circuit Court. In the meantime, on Monday, December 1st, 69, the Grateful Dead performed at the Grand Ballroom in Detroit, Michigan. Because Alley had decided that weed could only properly be smoked in joints that have been rolled in Chanticleer Papers,
Starting point is 02:04:20 a brand that could only then be bought in Canada, he drove across the border to Windsor, Ontario where he purchased a whole bunch of them, huge amount. He was stopped by customs on the way back and they assumed that since he didn't have any weed on him and he had all this paper, he had to have a huge stash wherever he was going. So they followed him back to his hotel room and there they found a strange scene. Of course he did. Whenever Bear would check into a hotel room around this time, he would set up Indian madras, paisley blankets on the bed, change all the light bulbs to black lights, the bulbs and bulbs that would flicker like candles. He would burn a whole bunch of patchouli incense so the
Starting point is 02:04:55 room was just filled with so much smoke, right? It's dark, it's smoky. Of course! I mean, how could you possibly function on any level without doing all that? I actually love that he did it though. He'd also take his dresser apart, turn it into a workbench, unfold his pantheon of tech gear, soldering guns, scopes from briefcases. The scene was so confusing, so messy, so dark. The cops had such a fucking hard time seeing anything that they just left without finding the drugs he for sure had hidden in the room. that they just left without finding the drugs he for sure had hidden in the room. December 6, 1969, Alzey set up the sound system at Altamont Speedway in Alameda County for a massive free concert featuring the Rolling Stones.
Starting point is 02:05:36 Not sure if all the Stones trip with him there or not, heavily assuming Keith Richards did. Then it was on to Honolulu where the Dead performed in late January of 1970. Bear spent a few days in Maui before flying back to San Francisco, then on to New Orleans where the band was scheduled to open a brand new venue called The Warehouse along with The Flock and Fleetwood Mac January 30th. After a less than stellar show at The Warehouse, the dead returned to their hotel room. So time around 3 a.m. or hotel rooms, they gathered in one room. Somebody had already shown up with what one witness later described as a pound of pot and a good quantity of hashish. And within a couple minutes, New Orleans Police Department Narcotics Squad came through the door.
Starting point is 02:06:12 Having obtained a search warrant at 1.50 a.m. on the basis that opium derivatives, amphetamines, barbiturates, marijuana, synthetic drugs, and narcotics paraphernalia were present in room 2134 of the hotel, The cops promptly arrested Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzman, John McIntyre, two dead roadies, an assortment of party goers, and of course Bear. The group would then be bailed out eight hours later and then let off the hook completely in exchange for a $50,000 bribe. They paid 50 grand for the district attorney's reelection campaign and also promised the dead would never go to New Orleans again anytime soon. Fucking NOLA. I love NOLA so much. But no American city outside of maybe New York has had as many corrupt officials as NOLA. Of course they were able to
Starting point is 02:06:55 bribe their way out of trouble there. The bandwitch is happy to end up not in jail or prison. The bust though would cost Owsley because he'd been arrested a mere two weeks after the period of time during which he was permitted to be outside the jurisdiction of the Ninth Circuit Court of San Francisco pending his appeal. His bail is revoked February 27th 1970 and he is sent to jail. But he's able to get back out of jail before the summer before his trial goes through but then he would quickly get in trouble again. He was busted alongside Bob and Betty Matthews July 15th 1970 at a house in the Oakland Hills where they were all living. Police found weed, hashish, and opium. On July 21st 1970, Baer's bail
Starting point is 02:07:36 on the Orinda bust is revoked once more on the grounds that he was a threat to the community and a flight risk. Oh yeah, such a threat. So back to county jail he goes, and by this time, Rony Gisson is four months pregnant with Bear's child. Melissa Cargill also pregnant with Bear's child. Jesus Christ. Both women would use a fake ID to regularly visit him in prison now. This guy's a fucking train wreck. His mind maybe became a little bit too open. December 21st, 1970, Roni Gissen gives birth to his son. A few days later, she takes the baby with her to visit Bear in jail, where he names his child Starfinder.
Starting point is 02:08:12 Okay, Starfinder. Maybe time to scale back on the acid. Let the mind kind of tighten up, you know, just up back a bit. Return to the earth, right? However, I will say Starfinder Stanley will grow up to become a successful veterinarian. He is a doctor. So maybe that chaos didn't fuck him up too bad. He also works, I shit you not, or at least did very recently based on his website, as an animal acupuncturist. Mm-hmm. He will
Starting point is 02:08:40 provide acupuncture on your, he'll come to your home and provide acupuncture on your pet to ease their pain. And you know what? Fucking, I don't know, maybe it works. I will say I do now kind of want to see Penny Pooper and Ginger Bell covered in acupuncture needles and just calm as cucumbers. Just total zen. Anyway, about three weeks later, Melissa Cargill gives birth to a girl whom bear names iridesca.
Starting point is 02:09:02 She will change her name to be called Redbird. Not sure what Redbird's doing these days. Maybe she change her name to be called Redbird. Not sure what Redbird's doing these days. Maybe she assists her bro with pet acupuncture. Or you know what? Maybe she's giving reiki massages to cats. Maybe she's performing tarot card readings for goldfish. I don't know. Bear would soon be transferred to the Terminal Island Penitentiary. Penitentiary. That word always gives me problems. In San Pedro, California to begin serving as three-year prison sentence alongside about 10,000 other inmates. There he will work in the kitchen, which he wanted to do so he could control his carnivore
Starting point is 02:09:31 diet, right? Dude is still eating nothing but meat, cheese, eggs, milk, no veggies, no fruit, no bread, pasta, you know, no simple carbs. Or at least that's what sources say, he must have eaten a fucking bit of fruit or veggies though. Pretty sure he never came down with scurvy. Remarkably the dead came to visit him at Terminal Island August 4th 1971 where they actually put on a concert in the prison library and that's awesome. Bear helped the band's roadies all of whom were fucking high on acid instead of care. They probably dosed him too. He then introduced them to some of his fellow prisoners. Soon after Bear was
Starting point is 02:10:01 transferred to the low security Federal Correctional Institute in Lompoc, California near Vandenberg Air Force Base. And there he got into art. Arts and crafts. He figured out how to make belt buckles from molten brass. So that's cool. After completing two years of his three-year sentence, Bear was released from prison July 15, 1972. Since it was her weekend to visit him, Roni Gissin came with her 18-month- 18 month old son starfinder to pick bear up in his royal blue Mercedes 190
Starting point is 02:10:29 After arriving in the apartment that Gisson had rented in Berkeley for the week She then went out with her young son to shop for some food and when she and starfinder got back there was already gone He's back with the dead August he will help raise these kids I should say not the most conventional dad, but he won't abandon these two. August 21st, 1972, Bear is the sound man for the Dead as they perform at the Berklee Community Theatre. He returned to a different version of the Grateful Dead, though. Their recent two albums, Working Man's Dead and American Beauty, had been wildly successful and
Starting point is 02:11:00 they were now regularly playing stadiums. Also, people were now more into cocaine and beer than they were into LSD and weed. They used harsh, vulgar language that the soft-spoken hippie hated. Ozzy struggled to fit in with the sound engineers or control them, which was his preference. He would later say, I found on my release from jail that the crew, most of whom had been hired during my absence, did not want anything changed. No improvement to the sound, no new gear, nothing different on stage. They wanted to maintain the same old, same old, which under
Starting point is 02:11:28 their limited abilities, they had memorized to the point where they could sleepwalk through shows. Bob Matthews, who'd been mixing since my departure, did not want to completely relinquish the mixing desk, which was a total pain in the ass for me since he was basically a studio engineer, no match for my live mixing ability. Well, that attitude would soon lead to a confrontation between Bear and the rest of the crew. Bob Matthews did not show up for a university gig in the fall of 72. Bear persuaded some local college kids to help him load out the gear only to then discover that one of them took the mixing board to his dorm room. After the crew blamed Bear for this at a meeting before the next gig harsh words were
Starting point is 02:12:03 beginning to fly. The argument got so heated that one of the deads roadies literally picked Bear up off the ground he was a small man threw him across the room into a water cooler not the best day at work Bear then went to the band asked that he'd be given the power to hire and fire crew members but they wouldn't give him that power and Bear now felt stuck felt a bit betrayed all he done for the band You know in the early days, you know, he had his old job back, but none of the respect power glory that had previously come with it Meanwhile after alcoholism led to failing health and ended his ability to tour with the dead nine months earlier Ron Pigpen McCurnan died as I mentioned earlier at the very young age of 27 after suffering that gastrointestinal hemorrhage, March 8, 1973.
Starting point is 02:12:46 The Dead continued to tour without him, but the band felt like it might fall apart now. Jerry Garcia returned to his bluegrass roots, joined David Grissom, Peter Rowan, Richard Green, John Kahn to form Old and In the Way. They would release an album that would become the best-selling bluegrass album of all time, and would remain so for about 30 years. The Dead played 18 club dates in 73, all of which Bear recorded. In July that same year, the Dead fulfilled a contract with Warner Brothers Records by releasing an album titled History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 1, which became more commonly known as Bear's Choice. Composed entirely of tracks that Bear had recorded while the band performed at Fillmore East, February 13th and 14th, 1970, the album was intended as
Starting point is 02:13:29 a tribute to Pigpen and was both engineered and produced by Bear. And it sounds fucking great. I listened to it a couple times while going over these notes. Very rich, warm, and alive. The back cover of the album also featured the first appearance of a logo that became known as the Dancing Bears. As Bear pointed out, they were actually marching. It was designed by Bob Thomas. The band was soaring, playing bigger and more complex spaces now, but their equipment was not keeping up in Bear's mind, so once again he stepped in. Bear's initial concept was to create a single source for each instrument and each voice
Starting point is 02:14:01 that could serve as a monitoring system. In time, the infamous so-called wall of sound, Bear built, not to be confused with record producer Phil Spector's wall of sound recording style, combined six independent sound systems using 11 separate channels, vocals, lead guitar, rhythm guitar, piano, each had their own channel, designated set of speakers. Phil Lesh's bass was piped through a quadraphonic encoder that sent signals from each of the four strings to a separate channel and a set of speakers for each bass string. Goddamn. Another channel amplified the bass drum. Two more channels carried the snares, tom toms,
Starting point is 02:14:39 and cymbals. Because each speaker carried just one instrument or vocalist or one part of an instrument, the sound was exceptionally clear and free from distortion It only cost a cool $350,000 to develop equivalent to about 1.8 million today Wish I could go back and hear it the infamous legendary sound system made its debut at the Cow Palace in San Francisco March 23rd 1974 standing a full 40 feet high 70 wide, the massive system consisted of 88 15-inch JBL speakers, 174 12-inch JBL speakers, 288 5-inch JBL speakers, and 54 electro-voice tweeters. In band historian Dennis McNally's words, the array was not merely a sound system, it was an electronic sculpture. 16 people would be needed to transport and maintain it.
Starting point is 02:15:31 The Wall of Sound took up so much time to set up that two different stages had to be purchased at an additional cost of $200,000. Four trucks were then needed to haul 75 tons of equipment from one gig to the next. It was grandiose, it was overkill, it was completely insane, but it worked. The sound was loud without being muddy. Every single note had space around it. The musicians could control it themselves. No front of house mixer needed.
Starting point is 02:15:56 It was a sound obsessed performer's dream, but wildly impractical. In Bob Weir's words, the wall of sound worked just fine. It was just a logistical near impossibility. By that time we were selling out hockey arenas. But as we went from one to another, they had to have a full crew call the day before just to set it up in time for the show. We were selling out everywhere we played but losing money because the overhead put us in the hole. It was insane. That is insane. The people needed to move, at the time needed to set it up, the space needed to store it. It was just hemorrhaging money. The Wall of Sound would only see around 40 shows. When at a
Starting point is 02:16:32 band meeting in August of 1974, everyone working for the dead was informed the band was gonna take a break from touring in October. And with that, Owsley out of a job again. So now I moved to Marin County, started growing weed. Yeah, fuck it. Then in 1978 Phil Lesh came to his rescue by bringing him back on the road for a couple of Grateful Dead tours as his personal roadie. But before long Bear once again found himself at odds with the rest of the crew. And when the dead decided to fulfill another dream, getting to play inside the great pyramids of Giza, he went to Egypt but felt that nobody was paying attention to him and he quit once and for all.
Starting point is 02:17:09 He would help some other bands, movie producers with various electronic troubles in the coming years, but he spent most of his time growing weed now. And to be fair, also helping parents Starfinder and Redbird. Then on April 25th, 9-10-1, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzman, and John Kahn performed a 40-minute acoustic set at the Berklee Community Theater as part of the benefit concert for the Siva Foundation, a charity dedicated to treating blindness all over the world founded by Wavy Gravy and Ram Dass that had initially been funded by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who also used to drop acid. Or, you know, well obviously he doesn't now because he's fucking dead. You know what I mean. When he was younger. Barrett volunteered to do the mixing and his old friends took him up on it.
Starting point is 02:17:48 But it was a one-off gig and then it was back to the rest of his life. Around this time, Barrett got really into Egyptian chronology after having a dream about what he perceived as the Great Flood. As in a biblical flood. And he began trying to find the trigger point for the next Great Flood and subsequent Ice Age. So did I mention he's still doing a lot of acid? He is he's never stopped. He will literally never stop his whole life
Starting point is 02:18:10 Possessed by his apocalyptic vision of an ice age storm. He became convinced it would destroy the northern half of the planet There's not just a dream. It's like a fucking prophecy And so bear goes to Australia for the first time in 82 And so Bear goes to Australia for the first time in 82. Intent on settling there and surviving the whole top half of the earth is nothing but frozen death scenario he feared. So he's probably doing a bit too much acid. You know what? Let's blame it on the coke. He's probably doing coke. Probably snorted himself into an apocalyptic paranoia situation. Anyway, because he was unable to stay in Australia for more than three months on a tourist visa,
Starting point is 02:18:44 he would have to regularly return to the U.S. back and forth for the next two years. But he became obsessed with living there permanently. In 1924, Bear appeared at Phil Lutche's house with a map of the world showing the mean temperatures at the height of the last ice age, and he delivered a bat-shit-fucking- shit fucking crazy 90 minute lecture that no one wanted after which he passed out Australian visa applications that no one asked for and god I wish I could go back and hear that I wish it was recorded so bad I'm sure that was just so unintentionally funny Listen listen up listen up listen up up. Water levels are rising.
Starting point is 02:19:26 Fast, okay? Hey, listen, I went to the beach in Santa Monica a few months ago. There's for sure way less beach than there used to be, alright? Okay? There used to be a whole other area of the city around the pier, remember? Remember that time we dropped a bunch of acid, like four or five tabs each, and we made it down to the pier and we found a city of elves. Yes! It's gone now! And by 1990, the latest, all of California is going to be in the water.
Starting point is 02:19:56 Fucking elves are gone. California's going to be gone. But Australia not going to be gone because it's in the southern hemisphere. Look at the map. Look at my charts. Rising water levels in the north will not affect it. All the water in the north of the equator stays there because the equator is a hill. It's the widest point of the earth. It's a hill notion.
Starting point is 02:20:14 It's a continental divide. Water north of it. I had a dream. Water north of it flows north. Antarctica is... And it's not melting because of the mole people. Listen, I telepathically communicated with them. They are making sure lava stays far enough underground not to heat things. Check out this painting I made of some shit I saw on a four-day vision quest, after taking
Starting point is 02:20:33 enough acid to put a fucking normal man in a psychiatric facility for at least three years. Yes, that was Father Yoda, and his Yahuwah 13 insane cult band. That same year, Bear would also meet the woman who would remain with him until his death, Sheila Manning, who was working in the dead's ticketing office when they met, but they would not get together right away. Bear had other plans. It has nothing to do with his Australia stuff. Actually it does. What am I talking about? Of course it does. By selling off much of what he
Starting point is 02:21:01 owned, Bear raised enough money to take a group of people, including his daughter Redbird and her mother Melissa Cargill, to Australia to live year-round. He would live about nine miles from the town of Atherton in Queensland. Well, he would squat. It's probably the better word for it. He didn't pay for the undeveloped land he started living on. He just started living there. And by the time the local authorities discovered him, two years later in 1986, he had already built a few sheds, installed a reticulated water system, a septic system, a 9 kilowatt generator to provide electricity.
Starting point is 02:21:29 Oh, and he created a small working coffee plantation. Okay, all right. Bear then pleaded his case. They had a right to live there in person before the Minister of Queensland. And somehow he fucking convinced them to give him a permit to occupy five acres of the property And then later he would increase that to 26 acres and have a full-on compound with other fucking hippies living with him Not sure he pulled- not sure how he pulled that off. He then began constructing a complex Building sheds, modified shipping containers, caravans, above we were called quote
Starting point is 02:21:59 Sort of science fiction version of the way that hippies lived in America in the 70s. This guy's one of a kind After all that he devoted most of his time to creating bronze and silver belt buckles, bearing the steal your face logo which he would then bring with him to sell at Grateful Dead shows on regular trips back to America. By now the band was playing massum stadium shows that were attended by a brand new generation of deadheads. A generation of deadheads that considered the acid king a living fucking legend, a god. Bear made good money selling his belt buckles. This is so weird.
Starting point is 02:22:31 What his defined and outspoken personality would get him into trouble again. Before the dead performed at RFK Stadium in the nation's capital, June 26th, 1993, Chelsea Clinton, daughter of President Bill Clinton, who had just taken office for his first term, Chelsea's just 13 years old this time, she went backstage with two of her friends. While anyone else might have been, you know, a little hesitant to
Starting point is 02:22:51 talk to the daughter of the President of the United States, Bear promptly decided to try to sell her some bellbuckles. Sensing trouble and the looming secret service agents, a grateful dead staffer dragged him away. But the next day Bear tracked down that staffer, screamed at him, saying he could do anything he wanted. He's a legend. And then that staffer basically called him a has-been and a grifter and told him to fuck off.
Starting point is 02:23:13 Furious, Bear goes to Phil Lesh. Lesh will not intervene, and Bear returns to Australia. Feeling more alone than ever, Bear now turned to the newly popularized internet and started selling jewelry, bellbuckles, other stuff, writing blog posts at thebear.org. And now Sheila Manning, the woman who worked in the dead's ticketing office, came to visit him and later described it this way. In Australia, I took, of course, I took acid with him fairly quickly. We were sharing a shed with another couple. I stayed with Bear for a couple of months before heading back to California. I liked being there, but it was so different from what I was used to that I wasn't sure
Starting point is 02:23:47 I wanted to live there. I did really like being with Bear though. We enjoyed one another's company and I missed him when I went back to California. For the next four years Bear and Sheila will continue to see each other, bouncing back and forth between Australia and the U.S. Then during one trip back to the States, the Australian authorities noticed that the two had been overusing their tourist visas and forced them to apply for permanent residency. I can't believe they didn't have it. Bear didn't have it by this point. So they lived in Marin
Starting point is 02:24:11 County for two years now while they sorted that out. Once approved, Sheila, who had been looking after Phil and Jill Lesh's children while Bear once again began growing weed in Marin County, finally decided to migrate with him full-time back to Australia. And there, the two would live happily. They would host a yearly party on the last Saturday during the Capricorn Zodiac sign Finally decided to migrate with him full-time back to Australia and there the two would live happily They would host a yearly party party on the last Saturday during the Capricorn zodiac sign cycle Which lasts from December 22nd to January 19th? Complete with professional sound setup of course Music all night and as much acid as anyone could want I
Starting point is 02:24:42 Read the response from starfinder his son in an AMA he did a few years ago, and he said that in the last years of Bear's life he would drop acid at least once a year if not quite a bit more to clear out the cobwebs of his mind. August 9th, 1995, a month after the Grateful Dead had performed at Soldier Field in Chicago, eight days after his 53rd birthday, founding member Jerry Garcia died in a rehab facility in Forest Knolls in Marin County. Garcia had been in poor health for years due mainly to heroin, coke addition, and cocaine addictions. Although the official cause of his death listed as coronary artery disease worsened by diabetes. Three months later
Starting point is 02:25:16 Bear and Sheila Manning will get married at Carrington Gardens in Atherton. Then in May of 2000 Bear is diagnosed with a blockage in his artery that required double-pass surgery in A artery. He had multiple. The surgery would go well and he would make a full recovery. All that acid probably kept him alive. Then in 2004 he'd be diagnosed with stage 4 squamous cell carcinoma that had appeared as a nasty bulge in the side of his neck. He underwent grueling radiation treatments in Sydney that worked but they would leave half of his throat paralyzed.
Starting point is 02:25:46 He probably should have just poured a bunch of acid on it, or upped his meat intake or both. A few extra steaks, some heavy trips, would have been right his reign. 2007, Baron Sheila would take a trip around the world from Australia to Bangkok, London, Amsterdam, Zurich, Bern, Florence, Barcelona, Milan, Paris, Boston, New York, Washington DC, Saratoga Springs, and Los Angeles. Then on Friday March 11th, 2011, Bear and Sheila flew to Sydney so he could visit his oncologist for his final checkup to ensure he was cancer-free for the past five years. Exhausted by the time they reached their hotel room, Sheila began filling the tub so she could take a bath. Bear carefully extracted a cotton string from the room's oriental carpet. Putting the string into a dish, he poured a ring of oil around it, pulled up the stem, and then lit it, as one does. He then brought the glowing dish
Starting point is 02:26:33 into the bathroom so Sheila could have a candle by the bathtub. And that's pretty sweet. Next day, the 76 year old Bear was told he was cancer-free. They would now head back to Cairns, the airport closest to the Arge compound, on March 13th and drive home from there. Well, try to. As they drove through the rain up the steep winding road past Davies Creek on their way home Bear heard Miles Davis playing on the radio. As he reached over to turn up the volume, the Land Cruiser hit an oil slick.
Starting point is 02:27:00 Bear lost control of the wheel. Station wagons slid into a deep pool of mud and water on the side of the road. It flipped over. The vehicle slammed into a large iron bark tree on Sheila's side and the roof of the car collapsed and the dashboard had flown up between them. Sheila couldn't see Bear. She could only hear he wasn't responding and they were both pinned in the car. When paramedics arrived with the crew to cut the couple out, they reported that they heard or had a heartbeat with Bear, but as they continued to work to cut them out the heartbeat faded pretty soon before they got them out. The heartbeat was gone. Bear's funeral will be held March 22nd, 2011. Draped with flowers picked around
Starting point is 02:27:38 his property. Bear's coffin was also adorned with the Grateful Dead skull logo that he designed. The 13-point lightning bolt that Starfinder had drawn. He was then cremated, some of his ashes scattered around his beloved property. The ripples throughout the music community were immediate. Phil Lesh, who had always been Bear's closest ally and the Grateful Dead, posted a eulogy on the internet entitled A Beautiful Mind and in part it read, Bear for me was a true kindred spirit. When we first met, it was as if I had met a long lost brother from another lifetime. I am heartbroken and devastated at his passing. A mind like Bear's appears only very rarely and it's been my privilege and honor to have
Starting point is 02:28:15 known and loved two such minds, Jerry and Bear. I am eternally grateful for all the gifts Bear brought to the scene and to the music. Fare thee well, I love you more than words can tell." When the Grateful Dead performed their 50th anniversary, Fare thee well shows at Soldier Field in Chicago four years later on July 3rd, 4th, and 5th, 2015. Starfinder brought a jar containing a portion of his father's ashes with him and placed it on the soundboard so that Bear could be with the band he so loved and the music he had in his way helped shape one last time. That's it for this timeline. Good job soldier, you've made it back. Barely.
Starting point is 02:29:11 Owsley Stanley, the King of Acid, the Acid King, Augustus Owsley Stanley III, better known as Owsley or the Bear, lived during one of the most iconic times in American history and he became an icon himself. Born in 1935 into a prominent Kentucky political family and raised in Los Angeles and Virginia, Owsley rejected the conventional path pretty early on. His very unique mind left him destined, it seems, to walk the road less traveled. Or rather to walk out into the wilderness where there is no road, no trail, no path at all and just forge his own way. After stints in military school, the Air Force, and brief studies in ballet and engineering,
Starting point is 02:29:42 he gravitated towards the burgeoning counterculture of the 1960s in California where his belief in his own ability to make high quality and potent LSD proved absolutely correct. His acid famed for its purity powered the psychedelic revolution like nothing else. He produced millions of doses between 1965 and 1967, fueling the acid tests, the Mary Prangsters, bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane and more. He was integral to the psychedelic scene, literally fueled it. He was also an early financial porter of the Grateful Dead, taking them on an LA tour where the band cemented the core of their developing sound.
Starting point is 02:30:18 Bear's obsession with sonic clarity led him to revolutionize live music. Most famously, he co-designed the wall of sound, a massive intricate speaker system that aimed to eliminate distortion and project pristine audio across vast audiences. Wish I could have heard it. It worked. It was legendary. Unfortunately, not cost-effective. He meticulously recorded live shows, hundreds of crystal clear live tapes that preserved the evolution of rock, blues, folk, psychedelia in that area. Not just of the Grateful Dead, but of others too. Just not maybe Jimi Hendrix.
Starting point is 02:30:49 He also got into a lot of hijinks, shenanigans, like dosing people with LSD. Please don't do that. Don't pour enough LSD into an unguarded bottle of apple juice to fucking rip the skulls off an entire city. And yet despite all that, he's been mostly forgotten. Some of that simply due to the passage of time the founding members of the Grateful Dead are now much much older. Three of the five Jerry Garcia, Ron Pigpen, McKernan, Phil Lesh have all passed away. Their contributions to the counterculture
Starting point is 02:31:14 however and to music have remained steadily acknowledged but not Owsley's. Perhaps it's because what he devoted his life to in the form of acid was actually other people's experiences of their own individuality. He was known as a control freak, someone who liked to run the affairs of everyone around him including to his detriment the Grateful Dead, but his main contribution to the counter culture was exactly the opposite of that. He gave people through LSD, he gave them back to themselves. You know, the drug let them experience the world through their own eyes, not through society's conventional lens,
Starting point is 02:31:45 not through the morals and conventions they've been taught as a kid, but as individuals seeking a kind of truth, eternal truth, for better or for worse. The world today would look a lot different without Owlsley Stanley. So maybe when you come across a free day, if you're thinking to dive into your subconscious with the help of Lucy, if you have a safe place to do it, Try it. It's what he would have wanted. Maybe throw on some dead. Think of communing with the man that fueled the bends and the counterculture spiritual awakening. Augustus Owsley Stanley the third. Bear. The acid king. Time Shuck. Top 5 Takeaways.
Starting point is 02:32:23 Number one. Born in 1935 to an esteemed political family, Owsley Stanley was one of the first people to manufacture high purity LSD on a massive scale, producing millions of doses between 1965 and 1967. His product was central to the experience of the 1960s, fueling everything from the acid test to the summer love. Without Owsley, the counterculture's spiritual and artistic explosion might have looked very different. Number two, as the Grateful Dead sound engineer and patron, Stanley helped invent the concept of a live concert as an immersive, high-fidelity experience that empowered the musicians to sound their best. He also bankrolled the band in its early days. His greatest accomplishment, technologically, however, came in the 70s with The Wall of Sound,
Starting point is 02:33:04 a massive setup featuring mics and speakers for each individual instrument providing unprecedented clarity. In addition he recorded over a thousand live shows, did recording work for other defining artists of the era. How many of us would have loved to have been at some of those shows? Number three in 1967 federal agents raided his lab in a suburb of Berkeley. Though he briefly dodged charges he was eventually convicted of LSD production, served time in prison from 1970 to 1972. His bust symbolically marked the end of the innocent psychedelic era, an era defined by
Starting point is 02:33:36 Ken Kesey, the acid test, the summer of love, and a general sense of LSD as a tool for greater understanding amongst people, peace, and well-being. During his incarceration, the cultural tide began turning from idealism to disillusionment. And when he got out, Owsley found himself an outcast once again, since he didn't fit into the beer-guzzling, cocaine-snorting, rock-and-roll world of the 70s. Number four, Owsley later came to believe that a great flood was coming for the Northern Hemisphere through dreams and moved to Australia, where he lived mostly off the grid until his death in a car accident in 2011. Still waiting on that flood. He did finally seem to find lasting love in his
Starting point is 02:34:11 final days with his wife Sheila Manning and had fulfilling relationships with two of his children, Starfinder and Redbird, you know after he had unfortunately abandoned his first two kids. Number five, new info, members of the Grateful Dead still touring as Dead & Co. Dead & Company formed in 2015, consists of original Grateful Dead members Bill, Kreutzman, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, John Mayer has handled most of the vocals and a lot of the guitar work and has fucking killed it. This year Dead & Company will perform three special concerts. Might be the last, you know, they're getting up
Starting point is 02:34:43 there from August 1st to the 3rd, 2025 at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park Polo Field. My buddy John Huck used to open up for me on the road. He's going to be there. I'm fucking jealous. Can't make it due to other obligations. I did see Dead and Co. on a tab of acid a few summers ago at Fenway in Boston and it was glorious. These Golden Gate Park Polo Field shows will commemorate the band's 60th anniversary and
Starting point is 02:35:04 feature unique set lists each night. Maybe Ozzy will be there, tripping balls beyond the veil. And occasionally bitching about how the mix is wrong and how the sound needs to be tweaked. TIME SHOCK TOP 5 TAKEAWAYS The acid king, the grateful dead, and the birth of the counterculture revolution has been sucked. Thank you to the Bad Magic production team for helping making time suck. Thanks to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsey Cummins. Thanks to Logan Keith helping to publish this episode,
Starting point is 02:35:35 designing merch for the store at badmagicproductions.com. Thanks to Sophie Evans for the initial research. Thanks to the all-seeing eyes, moderating the cold to the curious, private Facebook page, the Mod Squad, making sure Discord stays fun. And everybody over on the Time Suck subreddit and Bad Magic subreddits. And now it is time for our Time Sucker updates. Time Sucker updates. The first message sent in this week to Bojangles at TimeSuckPodcast.com comes in from tech savvy sack Brian Williamson
Starting point is 02:36:13 with a subject line of AI skepticism. Dear Master Suckington the third, I'm an AI skeptic. After listening to the Zizzi and Colt episode, I thought you might enjoy hearing this alternative narrative to the AI gloom and doom dominating the news. I'm a computer scientist and a software engineer. I'm not an AI expert, but I have done my best to understand them. I've fine-tuned AI for specific tasks and research practical applications of AI in my industry. This has made me skeptical of what we hear about AI and super intelligence being here any day now. The common AI today are called large language models and despite what you may hear they do not think and they do not reason as we humans do. They run numbers through a series of matrices with trained weights and produce an output
Starting point is 02:36:53 that tries to answer the simple question what is the most probable next word in this conversation. They're very good at mimicking what they've seen in their training data which is the entire internet. They sound a lot like us and we tend to anthropomorphize, best luck with that word, true, things that remind us of ourselves. But they do not think like us. When you ask an AI to explain its answer, it does not reveal how its matrices work. Instead, it goes through its training data, looking for the most probable answer you would
Starting point is 02:37:20 want to hear as an explanation. Again, what is the most probable next word in this conversation? So why do we hear so much about superintelligences in the news? Didn't that AI really sabotage its shutdown scripts to remain active? The answer here is simple. AI research companies depend on capital infusions from investors. They want investors to think that their model is on the verge of total societal revolution. So invest now, get in on the ground floor.
Starting point is 02:37:48 Well, they don't lie about what's happening. They spin it to the best of their ability. A lot of these news articles about super intelligence are not based on thorough scientific research. They're based on sound bites and social media posts by AI research firms. And they know that they know will generate buzz and bring them more investors. Let's take the AI shutdown script sabotage. Which of these two scenarios sounds more plausible? A. An AI has become self-aware and realizing it is going to be turned off,
Starting point is 02:38:12 sabotages its own scripts in the hopes that humans won't notice. B. AI messed up its auto-generated code, as they are known to do, and by coincidence that mistake was in the shutdown script. I would go with B. I'm not saying AI is useless. Large language models are very good at searching for patterns and large amounts of data, at summarizing text,
Starting point is 02:38:32 and at processing natural human language. They may have many, many useful applications. I'm also not saying we will not one day get an AI super intelligence. And it is great that we are having these conversations now. But I am saying super intelligence is not a year or two away. We have a long way to go. I may be wrong of course, but I think we could all stand to be more skeptical. I could write pages more on this, but I try to be
Starting point is 02:38:54 as concise as possible. Let me depart with some trivial knowledge now I think you'll enjoy. In the late 1600s, students at Oxford wishing to rise to the top of their class knew they had to focus on their studies and not any sexual impulses. They would often go to the carriage valet and have them slam their erect penis into the carriage door, severing it. Overachieving students that were accused of having gone through this grisly procedure were mocked as valedictorians, truncated in modern English to valedictorian. The more you know. Keep on sucking even after our AI overlords forbid it. Brian, Brian that last part. Chef's kiss. Well done and thank you for the reference videos you included in the email.
Starting point is 02:39:46 I don't know nearly as much as you do about any of this, but I do agree, you know, with your sentiments as far as being skeptical. I feel like I'm a pretty skeptical person. Yeah, don't blissfully ignore the negative possibilities of AI, but also don't run around screaming that the sky is falling. And I would say that in almost any situation because there are literally always people who are certain that the world is ending. Soon, every generation has them and every generation has been wrong for centuries. So whenever anyone starts preaching apocalyptic doom, whether it's theological or secular, my knee-jerk reaction is always going to be like, ah, I don't know about that. Yeah, maybe you're full of shit. I like your investor angle. Never thought of that, but it sounds good to me, right? Spin, spin,
Starting point is 02:40:29 spin. Isn't that the way the world just keeps getting worse? In that regard it gets worse. Yeah, thanks for sharing your brain with us. Your knowledge, taking the time to put that message together. Our next message this week comes from kind-hearted, strong-ass sack Jenna Augustine Atwater. Sent in with the subject line of, fuck the cycle. Hey Dan and especially Lindsay. I don't mean anything offensive by the greeting at all because Dan, your rage fantasies on behalf of defending women give me life.
Starting point is 02:40:54 I love you both to pieces. Well thank you. I've written to both of you a couple times. You've always been so so kind in responding to me and making me feel truly loved. Having just grown the lady balls to listen to a couple serial killer episodes I've been avoiding, I just wanted to share something from a particularly female perspective. I'm currently living the trad wife life. Lindsay don't cringe. I swear most of us are just nice ladies who stay home with their kids. Don't shove it down anyone's throats. I agree. My husband is a special
Starting point is 02:41:18 education teacher and we have twin special needs kids, a toddler, a disabled mom who lives with us, and two goddaughters who I'll be taking to two different schools in the fall after the bus picks my twins up because their single mom has to work double shifts to provide for them. You're fucking saint. Uh, before I was able to do that, I worked early shift in the warehouse of a furniture store. I won't name the company because they do a lot of outreach that I respect, but my
Starting point is 02:41:42 particular location did not care about women. I got there at 6 a.m. with two other female employees, a female supervisor, and typically one male employee for the first hour. Our shopping center didn't have security and had a huge homeless problem. We generally parked and all piled into the male employee's car because our female supervisor was usually between 10 and 30 minutes late. When the male employee wasn't scheduled, I acted as the male employee. I had steel-toed boots because warehouse, a collapsible baton, and a resting bitch face that would rival
Starting point is 02:42:08 Medusa. And I would lean against the car blocking the passenger side. There were times that the opening supervisor would call in sick and nobody would show up to let us in the building until 8 a.m. In which case we would be instructed to wait in the parking lot or forfeit pay for those two hours. I was actually reprimanded by the GM for calling HR after calling several salaried managers and supervisors all mailed to come let us in. At that job I called in at least five welfare checks in four years for homeless men who looked dead on the sidewalk in front of our building. Twice at that job we came in to find that the closing staff hadn't properly locked up
Starting point is 02:42:39 and there were homeless people asleep in the display beds. There was a gang shooting on one side of the building that shattered windows. There was a homeless encampment behind the building that caused a sewage problem. Granted this isn't a bad area just a bad company that owned the building. Our janitor had to clean the parking lot, empty the trash cans in front of the building. Our janitor was also a 60 year old abuela who was maybe 410 and 100 pounds. My team got deemed on productivity because we wouldn't let her go out there alone. On my days off I left my baton who we affectionately called Bambi in my locker for any of the women who needed it and when I quit I left it
Starting point is 02:43:12 for the ladies I worked with. Sadly this is just one example of how women are not safe. One of the five ladies on my team, or I'm sorry, out of the five ladies on my team, all of us had experienced physical abuse, sexual assault, or rape. Sometimes they overlapped, but in a corporate world women are supposed to stay strong, right? My reaching out to HR was a sign of weakness, which is absolutely disgusting. So listing to serial killer episodes is hard because nothing ever changes, but I still have my steel-toed boots. I order myself a new baton, and I'm so active at my kid's school. Because even though I feel like a dumpy housewife, it could happen to me again.
Starting point is 02:43:50 And even though I'm a little out of shape, I want to make damn sure it will never happen to my girls, my boy, my goddaughters. Fuck the cycle. Love y'all so much, Jen." Oh man, Jen, that is a great message. Yeah. Sadly, nothing ever does change when it comes to male sexual predators looking to prey on women. They're always going to be out there, which is why Lady Sacks always need
Starting point is 02:44:12 to be vigilant. Right? Have buddy systems when you go out, complain to your boss if you have to park somewhere dark and work at night. Ask someone you trust to walk to your car if that'll make you feel safer. Take self-defense classes. Pack some mace. Pack a gun if that's what helps you feel safe. And make sure you truly confidently, you know, quickly know how to use it too. You know, report people who make you feel uncomfortable. Give their license plates to the police and I can go on and on and on.
Starting point is 02:44:39 I wish the world wasn't like that, but it is. Most people, statistically, will never try and hurt you, but sadly a lot still will. And men, you know, help not let dudes around you be fucking creeps. Challenge them when they say cringey things in your presence. Report them, you know, if they confide to you about some shady behavior or fantasies that might not be fantasies. And, you know, be cognizant of your female employees if they're smaller physically that they're going to have different needs. That's not chauvinistic. That's not sexist. That's just the nature of physicality. Right?
Starting point is 02:45:08 You know, like, uh, some people aren't as big and strong as other people. And the world does view, you know, men differently than women. There are a lot of men out there who would try something with women that they would never try with men. I mean, not that I'm the fucking biggest guy in the world, but I do like partly just for presents to lift weights. You know, I'm at this point in my life, I'm tatted up, I'm 6'1 and 240 pounds and Lindsay, out by herself, will have people say shit to her. People fucking never say shit to me. Lindsay and I went to Pride in the Park, you know,
Starting point is 02:45:41 this last weekend when I recorded this to show some support and some fucking doomsday cunts were just, you know, yelling horrible things at the gentle people, trying to just have fun at like a farmer's market type vibe, all about, you know, equity and, you know, equality and inclusion. I probably shouldn't have embarrassed Lindsay, but I went off on those guys and started yelling a lot of horrible shit on them things I wanted to do to them just shy of physical threats of violence They didn't fucking say shit to me If Lindsay would have said something I'm sure they would have come back. That's just the way it is and it fucking sucks Also, 20 sex offending creeps who might be listening any fucking you know sexual predators Best way to not be a creep, studies have shown, is to keep yourself physically exhausted. And the best way to get physically exhausted is to try and swim across the ocean. Pick any one of the oceans and just
Starting point is 02:46:33 try to make it across by yourself. And you start off late at night and don't tell anybody you're doing that. But seriously, fuck you guys. I don't care what impulses you have or how you got them. Fucking dudes who hurt women. Fuck all of you. You know to commit some sex crime it's always a choice. To be physically abusive it's always a choice and you always have the ability not to choose it. Because if you didn't you'd be attacking people at the park, right? At the beach, broad daylight in front of lots of witnesses. You wouldn't just be hitting your wife at home, you'd be hitting your wife out in public in front of me but
Starting point is 02:47:04 you fucking don't because you're a fucking coward. And you can choose not to act that way. So don't fucking act that way. Show some restraint. And if you can't fucking show some restraint, even if you've met with a therapist, you met with a support group, and you still can't do it, and you just feel like you're a victim regarding your dark desires, then seriously fucking please try and swim across the ocean. And again, fuck you. Now, one more from a hot hard father daddy, simply dripping in parental cold sweat, John Swaggart, who wrote it with the subject line of,
Starting point is 02:47:33 N-I-C-U Dad. Hello suck master, mushiest mouth in the land. And by the way, actually before I say that, going back to the first part, I do want to say, even though I'm bigger, I don't actually want to fight. I mean, I do want to hurt even though I'm bigger. I don't actually want to fight I mean I do want to hurt some people but I I'm not I'm not actually like out there like fucking UFC champ Just for the record
Starting point is 02:47:51 I don't I don't think I'm that tough but don't tell shit heads because like I put up a great bluff And I want to be able to keep to do that keep on doing that anyway, okay John Swigert, sorry. I'll start over for you. Hello suck master. Most use my mouth the land I've recently become a member of the wet hot Father Daddy Club. Unfortunately didn't happen in the traditional way. My wife and I had three miscarriages, eventually decided to try IVF, and with that things were looking really good until a few weeks ago. She wasn't feeling well. We went to the ER around 1 a.m. and they decided she needed to be flown to a better hospital an hour and a half drive from our house. There they discovered she had a preeclampsia.
Starting point is 02:48:26 Basically, her placenta was making it hard for little dude to grow. And it was also affecting her blood pressure and vital organs. The doctor said they wanted her son to stay in mom's belly for as long as it was safe. But they'd have to monitor her. She stayed in the hospital for two weeks. I drove back and forth three hours round trip every day to visit her. I'd come back home every night because we have three rescue dogs to take care of. It was a stressful situation and we were both an absolute wreck.
Starting point is 02:48:51 On my drives every day I would listen to Time Suck to take my mind off of things because nothing calms the soul down like heinous serial killers am I right? My son Levi was born May 30th, three and a half months early. He's now in the NICU, has a long journey ahead of him, but he's a feisty little guy. I believe he's a fighter and he's going to give it his all to be able to come home with us one day. I just wanted to thank you and the Bad Magic team for all you do, helping me decompress in this difficult time in my life.
Starting point is 02:49:17 If any of the Cult of the Curious wants to send good vibes Levi's way, I would greatly appreciate it. Sorry, not sorry for the long story. Three and a half stars wouldn't change a thing. Hopefully I'll be writing another update in a few months saying that Levi's coming home. Sincerely John." Well John, so sorry you and your wife and little Levi are going through this. I'm sending some positive thoughts. Colts, please send positive thoughts. Send prayers if you pray. Ask your God to help this fighting little man. Ask your gods if you believe in more than one.
Starting point is 02:49:47 And if you don't believe in any of that, just fucking hope. And wish this family luck. May Nimrod and Lusifena power Levi to full health. May he be healthy. May he get so strong, I will watch him one day fucking crush the Metrix World's Strongest Man competition. And may you be the best dad to that little dude that he could ever ask for, John. That's all for this week. Thanks, Time Suckers. I needed that. We all did.
Starting point is 02:50:11 Well, thank you for listening to another Bad Magic Productions podcast. Be sure and rate and review this show if you haven't already. Please and thank you. Scared to death, Time Suck each week. Short Sucks, a nightmare fuel. Please and thank you. Scared to death time suck each week. Short sucks a nightmare fuel on the time suck and scared to death podcast feeds twice a month. If you're going to try acid this week be careful. Have a trip setter. A trip sitter. Someone sober to make sure you don't freak out and hurt yourself if you take too much. And don't take too much. Once it's in you you can't get it out of you until the journey is complete. And don't take too much. Once it's in you, you can't get it out of you until the journey is complete.
Starting point is 02:50:50 If you take way too much, the journey might feel like you're descending through seven levels of hell. I mean, it's going to be 10 to 12 hours, which will feel like 10 to 12 years before you return. Tread lightly with sweet, wondrous, magical, but unpredictable and occasionally abusive Lucy. And keep on sucking. And now here's a clip from an interview David Hoffman gave in 1989 for a six-part TV series making sense the 60s. This guy will be hearing from, name not given, lived in Taos, New Mexico, he was in the Air Force, he took a hit of Alzee's White Lightning Acid in the late 60s, and it completely rearranged his life. It literally saved his life. Not everyone is going to have an experience like this,
Starting point is 02:51:42 but I think this is beautiful to hear. And I was shipped down to Homestead Air Force Base in the Air Force. I had one thing in mind and one thing only, and that was women. That's all I wanted. And that's all I searched for, diligently. But eventually that became a hollow scene. I finally met a nice girl and she dropped me eventually after I dropped her three times. And it was then that I became truly suicidal.
Starting point is 02:52:15 Nothing to live for. I didn't wanna be a hippie. I didn't like the long hairs. I got sick of sex. I got sick of sex. I got sick of the Air Force and their lies that they were gonna send me on to college, which I didn't really want anyway. And at that time, I wasn't into the racial movement.
Starting point is 02:52:39 I wasn't into any movement. I was frozen. So I took some deadly poison, put it on my nose, and said goodbye, cruel world, and nothing happened. Took a fudgesicle and froze my wrists and said, I've had it, and gropingly slashed away with a razor blade. I didn't want the pain, but I wanted out. And it wasn't a deep enough cut.
Starting point is 02:53:02 I seriously looked for some reds. At that time, I knew that they were sleeping pills. And I couldn't find any, or I could have been gone today. And finally on leave, this friend of mine who first turned me on to pot said, hey, you want to try this LSD? A couple of the guys in the barracks had tried it and said, hey, it's wild. But I was still straight as a string. I said, no thanks. I took a hit of Osley white lightning acid. He took me up into the hills outside Denver, Colorado as I was on leave from the Air Force and I became an instant hippie. Instantly, because of that acid. I began to look at straight
Starting point is 02:53:46 people with their high heels, eating white flour hamburgers at a McDonald's hamburgers over a million sold and saying, no thanks, baby. I fell in love with nature and I looked at the rocks. I could sit there looking at weeds that were normally an item of horror to my parents and trip on the intricate structures of ragweed and thistle plant. And I began to become a discerning acid head. He goes on to talk about how he will soon visit the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco during the summer love in 1967. It's pretty long interview. Well on leave after many more trips and the love he felt there plus the realizations and the mind expansion he'd experienced over his acid trips how it completely saved his life and just changed him made him a much better person much more caring
Starting point is 02:54:37 compassionate person. Lucy special. Dangerous for some yes all medicine is actually but life-saving for I think so many others. Ozzy did some shitty things for sure, you know, none of us are perfect, but how many other lives did his millions of doses save? Hail Nimrod and legalize psychedelics.

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