The Bear is Dead, Long Live The Bear
the monkey and the engineer
Owsley “Bear” Stanley III is dead. Considering the life he led, it was a major achievement for him to still be alive in 2011. The trials of time, however, did not take him. Instead, his death would be caused under the influence of man’s most dangerous invention – the car.
The Bear, of course, is the pioneering chemist and impresario who manufactured and distributed the LSD that would become the headlining attraction for the infamous Acid Tests of the 1960s. Owlsey was the grandson of a Kentucky governor and he reportedly found the recipe for the drug in a chemistry book while he was pursuing his higher education at UC Berkeley.
It was a eureka moment for the young man from the Bluegrass State and he presumably used his native-bred moonshine skills to cook up over 5 million hits of LSD. His reportedly “clean” acid inspired band names (Blue Cheer), songs (Purple Haze) and the expansion (as well as the occasional dismantling) of young minds across America. Not only was he the benefactor to the Grateful Dead in their early days, but he also designed their sound system, as well as their “steal your face” logo. The ubiquitous dancing bear, an icon of the Dead, is an homage to the manufacturer of the drugs that made their music so palatable to so many.
luring children into drug use since 1966
Stanley was imprisoned for two years in the early 1970s for drug distribution, but he remained delightfully unreformed by his time in the California penal system. “I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for,” he said. “What I did was a community service.”
Unappreciated for his significant contributions to the culture, he left the US for Australia in the 1980s. He was reportedly convinced that North America was on the verge of being engulfed in an ice age. He died on a road near his home in Queensland, which ironically has been recently ravaged with rains and floods, theoretically caused by global warming.
read the Wiki here.
The Dead wrote a song about him: “Alice D. Millionaire.”
Grateful Dead – Alice D. Millionaire MP3
Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne” is also allegedly about the wayward Bear.
It was so cold that night. I should have known better – I had learned to bring my stupid red winter jacket to ballgames at Candlestick that summer – but I was freezing. I was lucky enough to be witnessing one of the true geniuses of the 20th century in a beautiful venue with a girl I was in love with. It should have been a perfect night. To be 20 years old and realize how good you have it, is it even possible? That August evening I had it all, but I was miserably cold and I couldn’t get over it and now my memory of this show is solely a tale of my own idiotic discomfort.
For me, the point of live music is hopefully to reach some sort of transcendence, to escape the confines of my head and become part of something larger than myself. It’s a lot to hope for, maybe too much. But when everything is clicking, a musical performance becomes a celebration of life. Of course, a lot has to go right for that to happen: a free-flowing synchronicity between the band, the audience, and the venue …. and the thoughts in my mind – which is, naturally, the wild card in the mix. Or more specifically, to clear the thoughts in my mind. That is the great challenge of our existence: to be present, to be in the moment. And that night, instead of letting Miles Davis work his magic, all I could think is I’m cold, I’m cold, I’m cold …
To further complicate the tyranny of my memory, or lake thereof, I looked up the weather on that day and it supposedly was 58 degrees in Oakland at 10pm. While the Bay Area is full of micro-climates, I am further chagrined. Maybe it wasn’t that cold at all.
While I’m losing trust in the veracity of my recollections, I’m quite sure I didn’t realize just how cool Miles Davis’s version of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” was that evening. I probably thought I was listening to muzak. So much was lost on me then, I can only wonder how I possibly had the sense to get tickets for Miles Davis in the first place.
That night was just a blip of my youth. As I’ve grown older, it’s become harder and harder to overcome myself and meet the music on its own terms, to turn off the chatter in my brain. I’m cold is just an extreme rendition of that chorus, usually it’s something much less urgent, more mundane. Am I too close to that girl? Am I in the way of the people behind me? Do I look like someone’s dad? Will I make the ferry home? It’s so easy to erect walls between the moment and ourselves; it’s so hard to tear them down. When I was young, I used to dance at concerts. I wasn’t good, I’m sure, but I didn’t care what other people thought. It didn’t even occur to me. Now, I sway and maybe if the moment really moves me, I shuffle. But I don’t dance. I came of age going to Grateful Dead shows, where everyone danced and no one cared if you looked silly doing it. For a long time, I was embarrassed by my Grateful Dead days. These days, it seems, I’m more likely to embarrassed for myself.
I’m cold. At least that night, I had an excuse. No matter what the thermometer said, it was cold. (Maybe if we’d been dancing, I would have felt differently). Now, more often than not, when I let the outside world get in between me and the music, the only environment I have to blame is the one I’ve created in my own head.
————————————————————————–
The videos are from Stuttgart, performed a few months earlier with the same line-up: Miles Davis (tp, syn) Kenny Garrett (ss, as, fl) Adam Holzman, Robert Irving (syn) Joe “Foley” McCreary (lead b) Benny Rietveld (el-b) Ricky Wellman (d) Marilyn Mazur (per)
Thankfully, I would get the chance to see Miles Davis again in a few short months, a do-over. This time at the climate-controlled confines of University of Iowa’s Hancher Auditorium on October 7, 1988 – although, sadly a stub from that event does not survive.
Song of the Day: Yellow Ostrich – Whale
This song is completely hypnotic. I suspect if I was a whale and I was being serenaded with it, I would go wherever that song took me.
Yellow Ostrich – Whale MP3
Miles Davis – So What – April 2, 1959
after the jump, there is more …
Dennis Wilson’s “Pacific Ocean Blue” came out in 1977. It’s an astonishingly beautiful album and the only solo offering he would release during his too-short life. This collection is more heartfelt and soulful than any album his brother Brian would ever record outside of the Beach Boys – quite an accomplishment on its own, all the more so considering that despite being the only Wilson who could actually surf, Dennis was reportedly only included in the band at his mother’s insistence.
In this effort, Wilson wears his heart on his sleeve, but he’s earnest without being maudlin. The album is an incredible document of southern California in the 70s, just as poignant and reflective of its time as the Beach Boys’ recordings defined the region a decade earlier.
Dennis Wilson would die at 39, diving in the waters of Marina del Ray. The ocean he did so much to immortalize took his life … As he sings, “It’s no wonder that the Pacific Ocean is blue …”
lonesomebeehive 