By Aidin Vaziri, San Francisco Chronicle Pop Music Critic
Via SF Fage
Owsley Stanley, an icon of Bay Area counterculture in the 1960s and a longtime associate of the Grateful Dead, died Sunday in a car accident in his adopted home of Queensland, Australia, according to family spokesperson Sam Cutler. He was 76.
Mr. Stanley had been driving to his home near the city of Cairns during a storm and lost control of the car, Cutler said. He died instantly. His wife, Sheila, suffered a broken collarbone.
Known as “Bear,” Mr. Stanley came to prominence as the first to manufacture LSD in quantity. Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” was believed to have been inspired by a particularly potent batch of Mr. Stanley’s product. The Dead wrote the song “Alice D. Millionaire” in his honor after a headline in a 1967 newspaper article referred to him as an “LSD Millionaire.”
Dead backer
Mr. Stanley was the band’s first financial backer and briefly served as manager before taking on the sound engineer role. He created the first public address system specifically dedicated to music in 1966 and was responsible for the Dead’s signature Wall of Sound.
He was also instrumental in founding high-end instrument manufacturer Alembic Inc. and Berkeley’s concert equipment maker Meyer Sound Laboratories, which retrofitted sound equipment for AT&T Park and, more recently, Zellerbach Hall.