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Artisan of Acid

Augustus Owsley Stanley III, Artisan of Acid, is dead at 76

Blogpost by schoth Sun, March 20, 2011 09:15:14

Owsley Stanley, the prodigiously gifted applied chemist to the stars, who made LSD in quantity for the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and other avatars of the psychedelic ’60s, died on Sunday in a car accident .

Mr. Stanley, the Dead’s former financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer, was in recent decades a reclusive, almost mythically enigmatic figure. He moved to Australia in the 1980s, as he explained in his rare interviews, so he might survive what he believed to be a coming Ice Age that would annihilate the Northern Hemisphere. Hè was 76 and lived in the bush near Cairns, in the Australian state of Queensland. His car swerved off a highway and down an embankment before hitting trees near Mareeba, a town in Queensland, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Stanley’s wife, Sheilah, was injured in the accident.

Some words from his website thebear.org:
THE music of the Grateful Dead is an important assistant to the revival of tribality. Because it has to do with the way things are. It’s not somebody’s idea about the way things might be, or the way things could be or should be. It’s what it is. It’s real music about real things. The whole thing is about a social movement. It’s tribalism. Which is the only social structure that is truly human.

The structure of the world today runs on feudalism–governments, companies; all those structures are feudalistic, arranged in a hierarchy which at the root of it follows Parkinson’s law. That is, once you create a hierarchy or bureaucracy, it has only one purpose, and that is: To Continue. There’s nothing else. But that has nothing to do with the tribal entity. The tribal entity exists so as to abide in harmony with its environment. It’s something that benefits everyone, not just this one structure.”

Reel > cass Recorded by the Immortal Owsley Stanley.

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A dime for a cup of coffee

Some songs of the Grateful Dead will take time and several listenings to appreciate. Other songs of them give you the goose-bumps at first listening… Wharf Rat is such a song. The band never released a studio version and the song featured here is from a beautiful cd bootleg called Floating Celestial. It’s the complete recording of the new year’s eve concert of 1991 in Oakland in crisp and crystal clear soundboard quality. The first (and only) new years concert without famous rock-promoter Bill Graham who died that year in a tragic helicopter accident.

August West

It’s these lines that make this song work so good for me:

… I know the life I’m livin’s no good I’ll get a new start live the life I should …

When Bob Mayes and myself followed the band on the german and english concerts in the ninetees, I still remember the gig in the International Congress Halle in Berlin. There were a lot of US DeadHeads present at that concert. Maybe even more americans than european fans. It was a great concert and when the first notes of Wharf Rat emerged I was thrilled! But american fans react very different at the dead’s music and I was really pissed off when they began shouting and yelling at the song’s most sensitive moment…! Now, twenty years further along the way, i realise it’s the same emotion. It’s just another way of showing it… Above is a picture of August West by Jerry Garcia. Below is the YouTube video I made of the song from the ‘Floating Celestial’ bootleg, lyrics included.

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Brokedown Palace

… it took me 3 years before i learned to like “Brokedown Palace”…

The original song of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. This version brings it up to date to the 2000’s. It lacks the heartfelt voice of Capt. Trips but the piano playing of Jeff Chimenti is beautiful too…. Directed by Justin Kreutmann and recorded at the TRI Studios.

FOG with Jeff Chimenti