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.