Owsley: "What I did was a community service"

With the graying days of sixties' culture well underway, it's inevitable that iconic figures are passing rapidly from view and their life and times become memorials to a different age. Very few sixties' figures achieved the infamy of Owsley Augustus Stanley: his name became a noun in the language of drug culture, a form of hip tribute that ensured not a little legal trouble in the years that followed.

Even rarer were the times that Owsley, nicknamed Bear, spoke publicly about his life and work. Here are excerpts from a 2007 interview Owsley gave to Joel Selvin at the San Francisco Chronicle. Owsley was ill with cancer but could still show flashes of his cantankerous nature. Then again, as Wavy Gravy comments, Owsley had come a long way at the age of 71: sometimes he could actually be sweet.

Sporting a buccaneer's earring he got when he was in jail and a hearing aid on the same ear, he keeps a salty goatee, and the sides of his face look boiled clean from seven weeks of maximum radiation treatment for throat cancer. Having lost one of his vocal cords, he speaks only in a whispered croak these days. At one point, he was reduced to injecting his puree of steak and espresso directly into his stomach.

"I never set out to change the world," he rasps in recalling his early manufacture of LSD. "I only set out to make sure I was taking something (that) I knew what it was. And it's hard to make a little. And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too. Of course, my friends expanded very rapidly." ...

He found the recipe for making LSD in the Journal of Organic Chemistry at the UC Berkeley library.

... "If you make some, you've got to move some to get some money to make it," he says now. "But then you had to give a lot away to keep the street price down. So anyway, I'm sort of embedded in this thing that I'm tangled up in. ... Just as soon as it became illegal, I wanted out. Then, of course, I felt an obligation."

Bear, chemist to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, was involved with the Dead almost from the band's beginnings at Kesey's notorious Acid Tests. Bear was the Dead's first patron and, briefly, their manager. He bought the band sound equipment and began to use the Dead as a laboratory for audio research.

... Bear has always lived in a quite particular world. "He can be very anal retentive, on a certain level, on a genius level," says Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane. "I've seen him send his eggs back three times at Howard Johnson's."

His all-meat diet is a well-known example. When he was younger, Bear read about the Eskimos eating only fish and meat and became convinced that humans are meant to be exclusively carnivorous. The members of the Grateful Dead remember living with Bear for several months in 1966 in Los Angeles, where the refrigerator contained only bottles of milk and a slab of steak, meat they fried and ate straight out of the pan. His heart attack several years ago had nothing to do with his strict regimen, according to Bear, but more likely the result of some poisonous broccoli his mother made him eat as a youth. ...

"He's come a long way," says Wavy Gravy, who visited Bear in Australia this year. "He used to be real snappy and grumpy. Now he can be actually sweet."

His four children are grown. He has five grandchildren, and his oldest son, Pete, in Florida, just became a grandfather, making Bear a great-grandfather for the first time. His other son, Starfinder, a veterinarian, hosted a party for him last month at his Oakland home attended by the old Dead crowd, a tortoise and a caged iguana. He has two daughters, Nina and Redbird, and maintains his own Web site (www.thebear.org) where he sells his sculpture and posts various diatribes and essays.

Owsley Stanley (he legally dropped the "Augustus" 40 years ago) has also not joined the ranks of the penitent psychedelicists who look on their experiences as youthful indiscretions.

"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for," he says. "What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different."

(Photo of Owsley Stanley by Perlstein/Redferns/Getty)

"Label 228": un-sticking an art medium between the pages

It was only a matter of time before Andre the Giant really did have a posse.

The black-and-white image of wrestler Andre the Giant on stickers affixed to stop-signs and telephone poles was an "experiment in phenomenology" begun in 1988 by design student Shepard Fairey, who in 2008 designed the now-famous Obama "Hope" image. Twenty years later, Fairey's original experiment has become an art form that appears virtually everywhere an artist can stick a label.

Artists that once sought gallery wall space find new media for expression, and new places to display their work; today, pop culture is the medium itself, and artists find tools in the everyday material of the marketplace. Spray can, markers, pen and ink -- these seem new and logical tools as art swings wildly from gallery to print to digital, pixel to page, and back again.

Others bypass this process all together and simply go from pole to post, creating stickable art that affixes to any surface. Label 228 (Soft Skull Press) began as camden noir's call for artists to submit their art on USPS Priority Mail stickers -- those ubiquitous rectangles with their inviting white space. Six months later, 500 items had arrived from around the world.

From the Soft Skull website: "These labels are free, portable, and quick and easy to exhibit, offering artists the chance to spend more time creating their work than if they were to paint and write directly on walls, vehicles, and public objects.”

One man's stickable art, of course, is another's graffiti; it's a toss-up if these labels by Mecro, Zoso, Kegr, Robots Will Kill! and others are permanent treasures. The disposable nature of a label suggests they're not meant to be -- the viewer's appreciation here depends on the images' inclusion in book format, away from the ephemeral encounter at street level. If the irony of this is lost on the artist, to the viewer looking through Label 228 its an irony that assumes its own art form.

Jack Hardy: "This little experiment of ours"

Jack Hardy (1948-2011)

The folk scene always seems to renew itself when we really need it. No matter how bad the daily headlines or how the political machine seems to grind up our aspirations as a nation, there is a fellow with a guitar over there who knows it's only a matter of keeping on.

Jack Hardy was one of those fellows. Long after Dylan (who claimed he was no spokesman, after all) kept moving his own tent and others followed, Hardy kept to the idea that this machine kills fascists, words literally inscribed on Woody Guthrie's weapon of choice. He held workshops in his Village apartment, promoted concerts, and recorded new artists.

More importantly he made sure the music was heard: his Fast Folk musicians' cooperative provided a performance space as well as radio station distribution for Fast Folk recordings by newcomers Tracy Chapman, Lyle Lovett, Suzanne Vega, Shawn Colvin and others over three decades.

Eventually Fast Folk released over a thousand recordings, and many of these tapes are now included at the Smithsonian Institution's Folkways collection. The Monday night gatherings in his Village apartment he kept up from the late 1970s until his recent admission to the hospital for lung cancer.

Jack Hardy, 1975

Jack Hardy died Friday in Manhattan at the age of 63. He himself was writer of hundreds of songs, topical and political tunes that aimed for the heart and seldom missed the target. Two collections of his own Fast Folk performances were released in 2000. As his obituary in the New York Times quotes the songwriter remarking at the time: “I’m undoubtedly the least famous person with a boxed set.”

The twentieth century was a train

Sleek and fast and so streamlined

Steel and diesel power unchained

Cigars and oysters and black shoes shined

The twentieth century is already gone

Come to think of it the millennium is too

All those years and the buck stops here

Except I fear it's not worth as much this year

Thomas Jefferson was a man

Didn't have to grow up to be president

For no woman had to vote

Nor any man of African descent

Two thousand years of the golden rule

We still keep illegal aliens out of school

Someone's gotta wash dishes and clean toilets too

Someone's gotta play football

and someone's gotta sing the blues

This little experiment of ours

Is pretty damn new and shaky so far

We have the freedom to hang out in bars

To buy shiny new guns or shiny new cars

There's no trains left to make run on time

But that's not gonna keep them from trying

How we gonna keep 'em down on Broadway

Let's try religion, sports and a lottery a day

This car screaming down the road

Rebel flag and talk show overload

Passes a school bus on the right

Racing that train to a wreck tonight

2001 candles to blow

Twenty centuries down and one to grow

Except for ten days taken away by Pope Gregory

I lost ten days in college,

they didn't name a calendar after me

And this is the America Columbus discovered

Yeah the Vikings could have discovered this one too

The Indians fought the Braves in the World Series

Let's get serious and open another brew

Photography from the Jack Hardy website (top);
Numero Group music site from the collection
Wayfaring Strangers: Lonesome Heroes (bottom).