Pubdate: Sat, 19 Mar 2011
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2011 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Michael Walker
Note: Michael Walker is the author of "Laurel Canyon: The Inside
Story of Rock 'n' Roll's Legendary Neighborhood."
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hallucinogens.htm (Hallucinogens)
Bookmark: http://mapinc.org/people/Owsley+Stanley

ELECTRIC KOOL-AID MARKETING TRIP

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 "insanely 
great," Mr. Stanley's perfectionism had the effect of 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.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom