Owsley "Bear" Stanley, who died on March 15 in Australia in a car accident, will be remembered by most as a hub of the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, the enabler of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' acid tests chronicled by Tom Wolfe. Readers of FOH will also recall him as a seminal figure in live sound, who designed, financed and operated the Grateful Dead's massive sound system and mixed live sound for Hot Tuna, Starship and other bands, both before and after he was arrested and imprisoned for possession and intent to sell 350,000 doses of his trademark psychedelic, LSD, in 1967.
A Nascent Industry
But Stanley, who studied engineering in college and worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena while serving in the Air Force, helped not only further the craft of live sound but the business of it as well. He's cited by his successor, the Grateful Dead's longtime soundman, Dan Healy, as a major contributor to the Wall of Sound, the Dead's legendary, magnificent, 75-ton, 26,000-watt touring PA. Talking to writer Frank Doris a decade and a half ago, Healy recalls that what bands to that point were touring with were barely more than basic public address systems, Atlas horns on poles. "It was time to carry things [to a new level]," Healy said. "We began severely questioning what was going on in the field of sound reproduction because we needed answers! That led us to the Wall of Sound… The purpose of that system was to define distortion, distribution and dispersion; find out what happens when you stack arrays of speakers…. Nobody had any information about what to expect. Nobody had any hard core data. So we used that system to map and chart all facets of dispersion-related distortion, electronics related distortion, logistics of mechanical dispersion."
What Healy was talking about would become the cornerstone of the touring sound systems of today. The Dead's various systems helped create a viable concert business that could offer decent sound to tens of thousands of concert-goers at a time, bringing in millions of dollars of revenue a day for arena and festival shows.
The Recorded Live Show
Owsley is also the Godfather of the recorded live show. During his time as the sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, he started what became a long-term practice of recording the Dead while they rehearsed and performed. His initial motivation for creating what he dubbed his "sonic journal" was to improve his ability to mix the sound, but the collateral benefit was a treasure trove of recordings from the heyday of the San Francisco concert/dance scene in the mid-1960s. Using simple microphone setups, his archive would grow to include shows by artists including Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, Old and In The Way, Janis Joplin, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Taj Mahal, Santana, Miles Davis, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Blue Cheer (a band that took its name from the nickname of Stanley's LSD) and others.
Creator of Icons
Finally, Owsley was the mastermind, with graphic artist and friend Bob Thomas, behind the Dead's lightning bolt skull logo, which he devised as an easily identifiable mark to help the crew find the Dead's equipment in the jumble of multiple bands' identical black equipment boxes at festivals. Flight cases may still mostly be black with aluminum trim, but their artwork has been a lot more interesting since Owsley.
"There's no question the impact that he had on live sound as a business," says Bob Heil, another PA pioneer who, in 1968, ironically picked up where Owsley left off, providing his own massive Altec PA system in St. Louis for the Dead's first gig after Owsley was arrested and the PA system impounded in New Orleans. "The Wall of Sound woke everyone up to what could be done with live sound. When Owsley came on the scene in those days, it was just little column arrays on the sides of the stage. He comes in with these incredible things and people say, ‘Is this gonna work?' and he says, ‘I don't know, but we're gonna try it.' He was the leader of a movement that I was a part of, for which ‘no' was not part of the vocabulary."
The Goal: Sonic Clarity
Despite his stint at the JPL, Owsley's technical chops were not at the same level as many of those around him. But it was his relentless pursuit of ideas that others might have dismissed offhand – and his remarkable, though never fully disclosed, ability to fund them – that created much of his legacy. Recalling how Owsley persisted in trying to convince him that a studio monitor speaker could be used as a live-sound monitor, Meyer Sound Labs founder and president John Meyer says that Owsley may not have gotten the power requirements just right, but that he realized that the sonic clarity that artists were getting in recording studios was critically missing on stage. "He came at it from a non-science point of view," says Meyer. "He saw beyond what most people saw and he didn't get lost in the [details]. He knew when to let guys like me step in. And he always found the money to try things that no one else thought would work. But he wasn't motivated by money. He was very selfless in that way." (The monitor came to fruition as the UltraMonitor, one of the first flagship products of Meyer's nascent sound system company.
Science and Imagination
Owsley Stanley, Healy, Heil and others like Ron Wickersham, Rick Turner and John Curl of Alembic working within the weirdly wonderful community that the Grateful Dead fostered helped engineer the foundations of the modern live sound industry by establishing its technical core and infusing it with science and imagination, as well as the notion that this could also become a business of its own. If LSD didn't succeed in making the world the better place that Owsley thought it could, then what he created for live music certainly did.
