The WiZard is In
International Hazard
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From the fringes of Amateur Experimentalism - Augustus Owsley Stanley III.
New York Times March 18, 2011
Electric Kool-Aid Marketing Trip
By MICHAEL WALKER
Los Angeles
NOW that the 1960s are commodified forever as “The Sixties,” it is
apparently compulsory that their legacy be rendered as purple-
hazy hagiography. But that ignores an inconvenient
counterintuitive truth: Relatively clear-thinking entrepreneurs
created some of the most enduring tropes of the era — not out of
whole paisley cloth but from their astute feel for the culture and
the marketplace. And no one was better at it than Augustus Owsley
Stanley III.
Entrepreneur? Mr. Stanley, who was killed in a car accident last
Sunday in Australia at the age of 76, is remembered chiefly as a
world-class eccentric — his C.V. lists Air Force electronics specialist
and ballet dancer — who after ingesting his first dose of LSD in
Berkeley in 1964 taught himself how to make his own. In short
order, “Owsley acid” became the gold standard of psychedelics.
But Mr. Stanley didn’t stop there. He started cranking out his
superlative LSD at a rate that by 1967 topped one million doses.
By mass-manufacturing a hallucinogen that the authorities hadn’t
gotten around to criminalizing, Mr. Stanley singlehandedly created
a market where none had existed, and with it a large part of what
would become the “counterculture.”
At the time Madison Avenue was at sea about how to reach the so-
called youth market. “House hippies” were deputized as cultural
ambassadors but didn’t prevent travesties like Columbia Records’
infamously clueless “The Man Can’t Bust Our Music” ad campaign.
Which made Mr. Stanley’s effortless grasp of his peer group and
its appetites — he was, after all, an enthusiastic consumer of his
own product — seem all the more prescient. When his lab in
Orinda, Calif., was raided in 1967 — thanks to him, LSD had been
declared illegal the year before — the headline in The San
Francisco Chronicle anointed him the “LSD Millionaire.”
Mr. Stanley shared several qualities with another entrepreneur
who, a decade later, would imbue his company with a hand-sewn
‘60s ethic that persists today. To compare Mr. Stanley to Steve
Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple, purely on the
basis of their operating philosophies is not as big a leap as it might
seem.
Like Mr. Jobs, Mr. Stanley was fanatical about quality control. He
refused to put his LSD on pieces of paper — so-called blotter acid
— because, Mr. Stanley maintained, it degraded the potency. “I
abhor the practice,” he declared.
Whereas the formulation and provenance of most street drugs was
unknowable, Owsley LSD was curated like a varietal wine and
branded as evocatively as an iPod — “Monterey Purple” for a batch
made expressly for the 1967 Monterey Pop festival, which may
have factored into Jimi Hendrix’s chaotic, guitar-burning finale.
(Relentlessly protective of his brand, Mr. Stanley seemed insulted
that many believed the Hendrix song “Purple Haze” was about the
Monterey LSD — far from inducing haze, he sniffed, the quality of
his acid would confer upon the user preternatural clarity.)
And like Mr. Jobs’s mandate for creating products he deems
raising standards across an industry — or in this case, a culture.
He became a patron of the Grateful Dead and helped transform
them from inchoate noodlers into the house band for a generation.
Noting the dreadful acoustics at their performances, Mr. Stanley
drew on his electronics background and designed one of the first
dedicated rock sound reinforcement systems, thus making
plausible that highly lucrative staple of the 1960s and beyond, the
rock concert. (Ever the perfectionist, he later designed an
upgraded version, the legendary Wall of Sound, that towered over
the band like a monolith and prefigured the immense sound
systems at stadium shows today.)
It is said we are living through times not unlike the 1960s, the
catalyst being not rock ‘n’ roll and its accompaniments, sex and
drugs, but the communications and information revolution made
possible by the Web. Among the movement’s many avenging
nerds, Mr. Jobs alone epitomizes Mr. Stanley’s unhinged originality
and anarchical spirit — before founding Apple, Mr. Jobs and his
partner, Steve Wozniak, sold illegal “blue boxes” that allowed free
long-distance calls and later proselytized so persuasively about the
latest Apple gizmo that he was said to project a “reality distortion
field.”
Augustus Owsley Stanley III knew a thing or two about that.
Michael Walker is the author of “Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of
Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood.”
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peach
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Comparing Facebook, iPhones and Call of Duty to Go Go dancers, miniskirts and Hendrix? 
I would gladly cut off my balls to have been growing up in the 60's and 70's.
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food
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Quote: Originally posted by peach  | Comparing Facebook, iPhones and Call of Duty to Go Go dancers, miniskirts and Hendrix?
I would gladly cut off my balls to have been growing up in the 60's and 70's.
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steady on man, you'd need them to fully enjoy some of the delights that you listed
you can add a preoccupation with 'the market' and marketing to the modern side of that equation. As shown by this article. Misplaced I thought. Sod
the market.
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