3
Shape-Shifting
Still living with his grandparents in Washington, DC, Owsley spent the summer when he was nineteen years old working as a lifeguard at a pool in Bethesda, Maryland. While doing a “clown dive” that some Hawaiian guys in the military were trying to teach him, Owsley hit the water so hard that he suffered a middle-ear hemorrhage, which then became infected. “It was my right ear and it did something to my hearing. Both ears have an entirely different character. All the highs would come in through my left ear, which is connected to the right brain, where most art and creativity come from so I’ve been developing my right brain since I was nineteen.”
The way Owsley’s hearing was affected eventually shaped the way in which he would record bands as they performed onstage. “When I got into sound and began taking acid, I developed a remarkable facility insofar as my hearing was concerned that intensified my art. I do hear in stereo, and I absolutely hear the separation, but pan pots do not move the sound for me. A stereo record done with pan pots sounds to me like a mono record. I have to put on headphones to make any difference at all, and then it’s still blurry, so I don’t ever put a single source into both channels. There’s always a second microphone, and if I want a single source in both channels, I use two because I’m only interested in differences and my ears do know that.”
At some point after that summer, Owsley moved to Los Angeles, where he began working as a rocket-test engineer for Rocketdyne, a newly formed division of North American Aviation that was then designing and manufacturing the Navaho intercontinental cruise missile. In June 1956, Owsley enlisted in the US Air Force. After somehow managing to survive eight and half weeks of basic training, he was assigned to the Rocket Engine Test Facility at Edwards Air Force Base in Antelope Valley in the western Mojave Desert.
“I wound up teaching myself electronics, which I knew nothing about. I was reassigned to the salvage yard and took apart every piece of gear that came in—and there was some pretty high-tech stuff at Edwards.” During Owsley’s time in the Air Force, he also passed the tests for both his ham radio and First Class Radiotelephone Operator’s licenses.
Discharged after eighteen months for reasons that may have had something to do with his unwillingness to adjust to military life, Owsley returned to Los Angeles and began working at various Southern California radio and TV stations, including a stint as chief engineer at an AM station in San Diego.
“I was twenty-three and all kinds of things were going on in Los Angeles, but I couldn’t get a regular job as a broadcast engineer because of the union, so I had to work summer relief. I’d make three or four hundred dollars a week, which in those days was a lot of money. I’d save it all up and live as frugally as I could, and then during the rest of the year, I’d draw unemployment and go to school.”
During this period, Owsley attended Los Angeles City College. He was also arrested after being caught with a fourteen-year-old girl in a motel room, but was released after being given a lecture by the judge. In May 1959, Owsley went to the Shrine Auditorium to see the Bolshoi Ballet perform on their groundbreaking eight-week tour that generated widespread public attention in America for ballet.
“I was very impressed with Vladimir Vasiliev. I would say he was the most remarkable dancer I’d ever seen in my life. He made Baryshnikov and the rest of those guys look like amateurs. He did things I did not think were humanly possible. And then I tried to talk to him and he couldn’t speak English, so I decided to study Russian and ballet. I went down and signed up to do both, and I stayed with it for about six years. I was taking two ballet classes a day five days a week, each about an hour and a half long, so I was way overtrained. I should have started when I was eleven or twelve when I first came across ballet and thought it was fascinating, but I hadn’t.
“For the last couple of years that I was into it, I did little parts in local companies, but I knew by then that although I really loved it, there was no way I could ever develop the kind of skill I would have needed. I didn’t have the turnout. I didn’t have the point. I had the strength. I had tremendous elevation. Probably because of my diet. That was how I got on it. I couldn’t dance and eat a mixed diet, so I switched to meat and everything was fine.”
In 1961, Owsley married a girl from La Cañada, California, in a ceremony in Tijuana that turned out to be invalid. She gave birth to a son named Peter, but the marriage ended a year later when Owsley left her. He then married another woman with whom he had a daughter, named Nina, but the two were soon divorced as well. One of his ex-wives would later call him “just a little boy afraid to grow up—a Peter Pan.”
Returning to Daytona Beach, Florida, where he had lived with his first wife, Owsley was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct in 1963. The police returned him to Los Angeles, where he was wanted for having written $645 in bad checks. As part of a plea bargain designed to keep him from going to jail, Owsley informed the judge that he now intended to turn over a brand-new leaf in his life by returning to college to earn his degree. He was given a six-month suspended sentence, fined $250, and placed on three years’ probation.
Having learned a lesson that he never forgot, Owsley then began conducting all of his business transactions in cash. “I bounced some checks and got into trouble, and I realized I couldn’t deal with the regular, commercial form of finance.… I regretted it. I thought it was a terrible breach of honor and everything else on my part; I was just appalled at what I had done. The judge gave me probation, and when the probation ended, I sort of felt like I had been released from something.”
By any standard known to man, Owsley Stanley to this point in his life could only have been described as an oddball, a weirdo, and an eccentric. In many ways, his life had followed a classic fifties paradigm—the loner, the outsider, the rebel without a cause who knew only that everything he had been offered so far did not suit his needs and that no matter how hard he tried, he would always be an extremely square peg in a very round hole.
All that changed when Owsley moved to Berkeley in 1964 to take classes at the University of California. In a city where the counterculture in America was then already beginning to be born, he found the calling that would eventually transform him into a man of power whose name then become known all around the world.
4
Berkeley, 1964
In January 1964, Owsley presented himself at the front door of a run-down rooming house on Berkeley Way known as the Brown Shoe, where a room was for rent. Since everybody who lived there was already smoking grass and Owsley began talking about drugs as soon as he saw the room, the current occupants literally begged him to move in.
Charles Perry, who was living there while completing his studies in Middle Eastern languages at the University of California, Berkeley, before going on to write the dope column for Rolling Stone magazine under the pseudonym Smokestack El Ropo, had given the rooming house its name after seeing a cartoon drawn by a friend lampooning a popular radio commercial for Buster Brown shoes and because the house was “so very, very brown.”
As Perry would later write of his first meeting with Owsley Stanley, “Forty-five minutes later, when he hadn’t stopped talking about drugs, we weren’t so sure he was cool. Not really tall, he had a sort of hulking manner anyhow and a wary look as if constantly planning an end run.… His conversation was like a series of lectures on the radar electronics he’d learned in the air force, the Russian grammar he’d studied when he was thinking of becoming a Russian Orthodox monk, the automotive technology he’d mastered while redesigning the engine of his MG.”
When Owsley moved into his room, he brought with him “boxes full of stuff like ballet shoes, a complete bee keeper’s outfit, and a painting in progress that showed the arm of Christ on the cross, portrayed more or less from Christ’s point of view.” As Perry soon learned, “the most amazing thing” about “this flagrant advocate for drugs” was that “he had only been smoking grass for a few weeks when he first moved in.”
During the recent semester break, Owsley had driven down to Los Angeles. At “a funky little coffeehouse near LA City College,” he ran into an old friend named Will Spires, who was going to Pasadena to score some pot. Owsley gave Spires a lift and then smoked marijuana for the first time in his life with Spires in Owsley’s MG while it was parked on the side of the road. Promptly getting stoned, Owsley felt disoriented but thought the experience was interesting. He then got more and more into it over the next few weeks.
After he had returned to Berkeley, Owsley got hold of “a huge stash of Heavenly Blue morning glory seeds,” which contained a chemical similar to lysergic acid. Although Owsley would later say that he never took any of them himself, he did put up three-by-five cards on virtually every bulletin board on campus advertising 250 morning glory seeds for sale for a dollar along with the address for a post office box. Eventually, he wound up trading all of the seeds for speed.
During his methedrine phase, Owsley began driving everyone in the rooming house crazy by running around all night long and then racing outside to ride his motorcycle at three thirty in the morning. Having already dropped out of the university after taking classes for two semesters, he was now working as a technician at KGO-TV in San Francisco. Not long after he had persuaded everyone at the rooming house to shoot speed with him, Owsley was evicted and moved to 1647 Virginia Street.
Searching for a scale to weigh some of the speed he had acquired in exchange for his morning glory seeds, Owsley walked into the chemistry lab in Latimer Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, on a gorgeous spring Friday afternoon. Clad in a black leather jacket, jeans, and leather boots, he went up to the only other person there, an attractive young woman with dark hair in a lab coat who was busily dismantling the glassware she had just used in a distillation experiment.
After she told him that the female student he was looking for had left an hour ago, he asked her why she was studying chemistry and how much she knew about psychedelics such as marijuana and morning glory seeds, which he considered an interesting field of research. Although she had already told him that she was engaged to a biologist, Owsley invited her to join him and his girlfriend for coffee at the Caffe Mediterraneum, the well-known Berkeley hangout on Telegraph Avenue where caffe latte may have been invented. After she had agreed to do so, he went off to use the Ainsworth electronic scales in the adjoining “clean” room.
Three days after she had sat down with Owsley and his girlfriend for coffee and baklava at Caffe Med, he had somehow pried “her away from her boyfriend who smoked a pipe and wore tweed suits with leather elbows, and she changed her mind about grad school.”
Then twenty-two years old, Melissa Diane Cargill had grown up in the San Joaquin Valley, where her father had picked crops on various farms. The youngest of five children, she had been able to afford to attend the University of California, Berkeley, on loans designed to aid students who were interested in studying science. After her first year at the university, she had also begun working part-time to help support herself.
Before meeting Owsley in the lab at Latimer Hall, her career goal had been to become a research chemist in the life sciences. Charles Perry would later describe her as “a cute little honeybee with tender, intellectual eyes.” She and Owsley were soon living together at what would in time come to be known as the Green Factory at 1647 Virginia Street.
There, Owsley got turned on to Meet the Beatles!, the first Beatles album released in America, and LSD. “I remember the first time I took acid, and I walked outside and the cars were kissing the parking meters. But that went away after a while.” The first dose he ingested contained about one hundred milligrams of acid. He was then given a number four capsule with white powder inside that had been synthesized either by the Sandoz pharmaceutical company in Switzerland or in Czechoslovakia.
When Owsley’s cousin came to visit him in Berkeley, the two of them split the capsule. “And I found out I had never taken real acid. God, if one person had taken that cap! It must have had five hundred micrograms in it. I swear to God. It was potent! Both my cousin and I went on quite a trip. And it was at the conclusion of that trip that I realized what real LSD was all about. And after that, I tried to get some more. I couldn’t get any, so I thought, ‘Well, shit, if I can’t get any, obviously there’s only one other way out. Go to the library.’ All the organic synthetic chemistry that I know is about the stuff I picked up in a few weeks in the UC library.”
While the myth has always been that Owsley learned how to synthesize LSD on his own, he was now living with a trained chemist who knew how to go about doing this, and who had also just taken acid with him for the first time. As Melissa Cargill would later say, “In the early days, I viewed LSD as a legal, interesting, organic chemistry synthesis. We wanted to produce a measured, reliable dose of high quality LSD. Tests on our results revealed a higher purity than Sandoz LSD.”
The substance in question, LSD-25, the twenty-fifth derivative of lysergic acid diethylamide, had first been synthesized on November 16, 1938, by Dr. Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, while he was trying to create a respiratory and circulatory stimulant. Five years later, on April 16, 1943, Hofmann accidentally ingested a small amount of the substance. Returning home, he lay down and “in a dream-like state, with eyes closed … perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.” After two hours, the condition faded away.
Three days later, on April 19, 1943, Hofmann intentionally ingested 250 micrograms of LSD. After beginning to experience intense shifts in perception, he asked his laboratory assistant to accompany him home. Because the use of automobiles in Switzerland was restricted during the war, they made the journey on bicycles. The anniversary of the first deliberate LSD trip ever taken continues to be celebrated by those enamored of the substance as Bicycle Day.
After a period of rampant paranoia and fear, Hofmann began to “enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux.” Based on his experiences with the drug, Hofmann became convinced that LSD could be used as a powerful psychiatric tool.
An odorless, colorless substance that in its pure form is mildly bitter, LSD can be derived from ergot, a grain fungus that typically grows on rye. Sensitive to oxygen, ultraviolet light, and chlorine, especially in solution, it can last for years if kept away from light and moisture at low temperature. Dissolving LSD in tap water can completely eliminate the substance because of the chlorine in the water. The well-known biochemist and psychopharmacologist Sasha Shulgin called it “an unusually fragile molecule.”
As both Owsley and Melissa Cargill soon learned, manufacturing LSD required not only a vast array of laboratory equipment but also far more experience in the field of organic chemistry than either of them had at the time. Which did not stop Owsley from plunging headfirst into the process. After having installed a heavy-duty ventilation fan in the bathroom at 1647 Virginia Street, he set up a makeshift lab and went to work.
Somehow, the police got wind that methedrine was being sold to teenagers at this location. On February 21, 1965, a squad of state drug cops based in San Francisco raided the house and confiscated what they thought was speed. “They took one box of various assorted labeled and unlabeled chemicals. None of it was unfinished methedrine. Among the chemicals was an unmarked sample of dimethyl amphetamine which I had made and was playing around with but it was both physically and mentally inert. It was not legally a drug, just a chemical.”
Not at all cowed by the charges he was now facing, Owsley promptly hired Arthur Harris, who was then the vice mayor of Berkeley, to represent him in court. Confounding all notions of what a speed dealer was supposed to look like, Owsley “showed up at
one hearing in denim trousers and jacket; at the next hearing, he wore a sharp Italian suit. He broadcast dangerous, edgy resentment rather than decent fear. He managed to beat the charges anyway.”
The way that Owsley always liked to tell the story, the bust on Virginia Street was just yet another example of how he could never be deterred by those who knew less than him. “In the charges that were filed against me, the lab analysis said the di-meth sample was speed. I thought they were simply lying as there was no way the official police lab could have been that incompetent. We had to force them in court to furnish us with a sample to submit to an independent laboratory for analysis which proved them wrong, leading to dismissal of all charges.”
The means by which Owsley had obtained enough money to hire a high-powered attorney, not to mention to also purchase the sharp Italian suit in which he appeared in court, was in fact by having sold methedrine. As Charles Perry would later note, “At the time of his Virginia Street bust, Owsley was not yet rich but he had already made a decent amount of money by dealing from the sample of methedrine that a chemical supply house had provided him for his fictitious ‘research on the effect of methedrine on the cortisone metabolism of rats.’
“It was a substantial sample, about a pound or so, and I got the impression they had provided it to him free with the understanding that if his ‘study’ got funded, he’d go to them for all his subsequent needs. In effect, the company was subsidizing Owsley’s first groping efforts in chemical synthesis by allowing him to deal lab quality meth to grateful Bay Area speeders.”
Owsley had obtained the sample by requesting it on stationery that he had printed up for the entirely fictitious Bear Research Group. On the off chance that the chemical company might suddenly decide to inspect his research facility, Owsley had then tried to inveigle Perry, who had just taken a job tending rats in one of the University of California Psychology Department animal labs, to become part of his scheme.” He wanted me to bring a dozen rat cages over to his place,” Perry would later write, “and stand around in my white lab coat.
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