GRATEFUL DEAD SOUND MAN SUPPLIED '60S WITH LSD

Owsley Stanley, the grandson of a former Kentucky governor, made and
supplied the LSD that fueled acid rock and California's hallucinogenic
culture in the 1960s.

Mr. Stanley died Sunday at age 76 after an automobile accident in
Queensland, Australia, where he had emigrated in the 1980s.

An early patron and sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, Mr. Stanley
was memorialized in the band's song "Alice D. Millionaire," named
after a newspaper headline about his arrest for dealing LSD.

Mr. Stanley was credited with distributing thousands-some say
millions-of doses of high-purity LSD, often for free at concerts and
"acid tests" run by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Notoriously press-shy, Mr. Stanley thought he was helping introduce a
new form of consciousness. Renegade Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary
agreed, calling him "God's Secret Agent A.O.S. 3" (Augustus Owsley
Stanley III was his given name).

But authorities demurred, repeatedly busting him and finally
convicting him for drug possession in 1969.

"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for,"
Mr. Stanley told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007. "What I did was
a community service."

Mr. Stanley was the rebellious scion of an eminent Kentucky family.
His grandfather, Augustus Owsley Stanley, was a U.S. senator after
serving as governor. The younger Mr. Stanley was described by a former
schoolmaster "almost like a brain child," but was kicked out of the
Charlotte Hall Military Academy in 9th grade for "getting the whole
campus intoxicated" on smuggled booze, he told a biographer of Jerry
Garcia, the late guitarist for the Grateful Dead.

After that, he bounced between schools and enrolled briefly at the
University of Virginia's School of Engineering. He enlisted in the Air
Force, which sent him to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, Calif. There, he acquired expertise in electronics, and
later worked at radio and television stations.

By the mid-1960s, Mr. Stanley had been married and divorced twice with
two kids, and was living with a Berkeley chemistry student who helped
him synthesize LSD in makeshift laboratories.

He had also become an audio expert, helping to create the Grateful
Dead's concert sound system that featured a multi-story wall of
loudspeakers. He also initiated the band's live recordings, which
become their hallmark.

He helped pay for the band's living expenses in the early years, and
he also came up with the Dead's trademark skull and lightning-bolt
logo-originally used to mark music equipment on tours. When the band
released its 1973 "History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 1," it was
subtitled "Bear's Choice"-Bear being his nickname.

He recorded many other artists, including Janis Joplin and the Allman
Brothers.

But it was for LSD that he was best-known, and Owsley became the
byword for the most potent and plentiful acid available. Tom Wolfe
wrote that he provided the drugs used at "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test" in Watts in 1966. It became a popular legend that Jimi Hendrix's
breakout hit "Purple Haze" was named after an Owsley concoction,
though Mr. Hendrix denied it.

After his release from about two years in prison in the early 1970s,
Mr. Stanley assumed a lower profile. He became convinced that a new
ice age was upon the world, and decided to move to Australia, where he
thought the effects would be least severe.

There, Mr. Stanley became a jewelry sculptor and sold his ceramic and
metal creations online in recent years from a website packed with
essays denying global warming and espousing his metaphysical and
dietary theories.

Mr. Stanley wrote in a recent essay on his website that psychedelics
could "renew our connection with the planet we live on and its life
forms."

His relationship to Earth's life forms included following a purely
carnivorous diet. Carbohydrates and vegetables were killers, he said.
He blamed a recent heart attack on poisonous broccoli his mother had
fed him as a child.