“Although Starfinder’s genetic makeup is as different as possible from mine, he looks, sounds, and thinks more like me than any of my other children. He is so much like me that it’s scary. I now also have grandchildren, and I just became a great-grandfather, so I guess I really am getting old after all.”
In 2004, while Starfinder and his mother were visiting Bear in Australia, he took his son’s hand and placed it on the left side of his neck so Starfinder could feel the lump that had appeared several months earlier just below Bear’s jaw. Assuming that it was just an inflammation caused by a persistent toothache, Bear had gone to a dentist, who extracted the tooth and then placed Bear on a course of antibiotics that had done nothing to reduce the swelling.
A week after he had been examined by a local ear, nose, and throat doctor, Bear went to Cairns for a biopsy, which revealed that the lump bulging out of a muscle on the side of his neck was “stage four squamous-cell carcinoma that had started in my tonsils. I smoked tobacco from the age of eleven to thirteen and then quit, but I had spent years in smoky bars and venues and limousines and been backstage with people like Jerry Garcia who smoked like chimneys, and so I had been exposed to lots and lots of secondhand smoke.
“The smoke that comes off the end of a cigarette doesn’t go through a filter or anybody’s lungs. You just breathe it in, and secondary smoke is four times as carcinogenic as what goes through a nonfilter cigarette like a Camel, and that’s where I think the cancer came from.”
That his all-meat diet might also have contributed to the condition never occurred to Bear. “Normally within six months or a year of this cancer appearing, it has metastasized throughout your body. It is one of the most aggressive cancers you can get. I’d had it for at least three years, but it had grown very slowly and never left the left side of my neck. The reason for this was that I am a total carnivore. I don’t eat carbohydrates. The glucose turnover in my blood is very, very small, and cancers grow on glucose. In other words, this cancer was living in a desert.
“There is also something conscious about cancers. They grow their own nerves and blood vessels. They are completely painless until they are hit with some light radiation. Within ten minutes of my getting my first dose of radiation, I was in the most exquisite pain I’d ever experienced in my life. I was popping painkillers like they were going out of style. I had to sleep sitting up because mucus was forming in my mouth that would choke me every hour or so. I was in a zone for weeks, and if it hadn’t have been for Sheilah, I don’t think I would have survived. I know I would not have.”
By the time the biopsy had identified the cancer in Bear’s neck, it had already crushed a nerve. Although the preferred method of treatment at the time in America for this form of cancer was surgery, Bear boarded a plane for the three-hour flight to Sydney, where Starfinder stayed with him for a month as Bear began undergoing a grueling series of radiation treatments.
“What they did was push me to within an inch of dying. Over seven weeks, five days a week, they gave me seven grays of radiation. A gray is a hundred rads [i.e., “radiation absorbed dose”]. It’s twice what the body can tolerate in a single dose. If they give you thirty-five rads inside of an hour, you’re dead in two weeks.
“Over seven weeks, they gave me seven hundred rads and it knocked the living shit out of me. My body was fighting it all the while I was getting it, and as soon as it stopped, my body said, ‘Whew, that’s over,’ but it was really hard for me to get out of bed.”
Although the radiation killed the cancer, the aftereffects would alter Bear’s life until the day he died. Three years after completing the treatment, he said, “Half my throat still doesn’t work. It’s hard for me to swallow food because I have no saliva and just one vocal cord, and so when I eat, stuff goes up my nose. I basically have to drink all my food because chewing it creates little particles that cling to my mouth for hours and are hard to wash out.
“I can’t open my mouth very well, and all the muscles in my neck are shortened. The radiation also reset my biological clock. I now weigh thirty pounds less than I did before the treatment. I carry almost no body fat and look like an anatomy lesson. My muscles are smaller and it’s been hard for me to get back into a proper exercise regime. Permanent damage has been done to my body, and I will never recover fully from the treatment. Almost all my beard is gone. I have no whiskers on the side of my face and neck, and an edema that won’t go away. But I’m still here, aren’t I?”
Better than anyone else, Sheilah understood how deeply every aspect of Bear’s life had been affected by all the radiation. “All the while Bear was going through the treatment, he would say to me, ‘My body created this, and with the help of my mind, my body can destroy it.’ After finishing his cancer treatment, Bear was so glad to finally have it over. He was also truly spent but determined to make it.
“As time passed, he realized that the quality of his life had been profoundly jeopardized by the treatment. In 2005, they knew how much radiation would kill you, but had not yet figured out how much was just enough. I feel that Bear was overradiated. Perhaps someone made a mistake in the calculations, taking him too close to the threshold. He suffered enormous damage from the radiation as well as the chemo.
“Bear was determined to get his health back and he tried hard and was very brave about it. He had lost a lot of weight and was very tired, and it was obvious that he had a long road back to recovery to even get close to attaining the kind of health he had previously enjoyed. It was devastating to both of us.”
Despite his physical limitations, Bear continued to work on improving his property while producing just as much art as he possibly could. Just as obsessive as he had always been, Bear also turned his attention to other pursuits, most notably ridding his land of the toxic Bufo marinus toads that had been introduced into Australia in 1935 in a vain attempt to control the greyback cane beetle.
Weighing more than two pounds and phenomenally ugly, the mature female toads could lay over a thousand eggs at a time and were so toxic that if a dog picked one up in its mouth, the dog would be dead in thirty minutes. Because the toads had begun breeding and then poisoning the fish in Bear’s acre-and-a-half lake, he would go out at night during the summer months, shine a light on them, and then reach down to pick up each toad with his hands “like you would pick strawberries.”
After spraying them “with a Lysol-like material called Det-Sol, which is highly toxic to them,” Bear would drop them in a bucket and then dump them all in the woods the next day. In a single night, he might kill as many as 225 toads. During a single month, Bear destroyed 1,400 toads. “Every one I caught couldn’t come back and lay more eggs. And if the eggs hatched, I’d throw the tadpoles onto the ground and stomp on them.”
In a court filing to appeal the assessed value of his property, Bear would later estimate that from 2004 to 2007, he had killed 3,803 poisonous toads on his land. Rebutting what was then a popular myth about the toads, he also said, “By the way, the venom does not get you high. It does not contain a psychedelic. None. Zero. Zilch.”
In 2005, Bear was delighted to learn he had been given what he always considered to be the single greatest honor of his life. “Do you know my name is in the Oxford English Dictionary? I guess it was so commonly used on the street in England to describe an exceptionally pure and potent form of LSD that they put it in there as a noun with a lowercase o. An owsley.
“There are not many people whose names are nouns. There’s the guy who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and survived, which is called taking a Brody, but that’s in the vernacular, not in the dictionary. I mean, it’s been forty-odd years since I had anything to do with making acid, so it really floored me. I mean, it literally blew my fucking mind.”
By then, Bear was well aware that his most enduring legacy would be the massive collection of sonic journals he had recorded during his time on the road with the Grateful Dead. “I think they should release every one of them because the period when I was the
ir soundman was their peak and their golden age, and my recordings are so far superior to everyone else’s.”
Although he had “no clue” as to how many tapes his collection comprised, they were all being stored in Santa Rosa, California. “I didn’t want them in the hands of any record company. I said, ‘And what happens if I die? How are my kids going to get them?’ Besides, I was not about to sell any of my analog tapes. Those are mine. I mean, Garcia didn’t sell his guitar. He sold the music from it.
“I sell the music off those tapes, which I mixed and reflect my production values, and I get them digitized and I give that to the record company, and that is all they get. They don’t get the actual analog tapes because those are priceless. They are artifacts. Some are cassettes and some are seven-inch two-track reel-to-reel. Nothing lasts, so eventually they will all have to be converted to digital and then archived, but that takes a lot of time and a good deal of money.”
Despite having regularly journeyed from Australia to America for years, Bear had scarcely traveled anywhere else except while on the road with the Grateful Dead. In 2007, his old friend John Meyer, whose sound company had become phenomenally successful, gave Bear and Sheilah a pair of first-class tickets to fly around the world.
And so it was that after they had spent a month journeying from Australia to Bangkok, London, Amsterdam, Zurich, Bern, Florence, Barcelona, Milan, Paris, Boston, New York, Washington, DC, Saratoga Springs, and Los Angeles, I finally met Bear in person for the first time.
21
A Visit from Bear
On a day in May 2007 when the fog on the coast of California was so thick that no one would see the blue moon scheduled to appear that evening, Bear and Sheilah Stanley were getting ready to leave the quaint and charming motel in which they had spent the night after driving up from Los Angeles.
Although the posted checkout time was 11:00 a.m. and it was now well past one o’clock, Bear seemed in no great hurry to vacate his room even though a young woman from the front desk had already knocked twice on the door to remind him that she needed to get someone in there right now to clean up.
All things considered, it might have been far better for everyone that Bear had carried on both of those conversations without ever opening the door. Having turned up the heat in the room so high that it felt like a tropical greenhouse, Bear was stark naked. Stalking back and forth like an emperor who needed no clothes, he just kept doggedly sorting through the astonishing array of electronic devices, small appliances, and gear strewn across the floor, all of which he had only recently purchased here in America.
Bear and Sheilah in Florence, Italy, on May 13, 2007, during their trip around the world. (©Amalie R. Rothschild)
Having lost all the muscle mass that he had worked so hard to develop over the years, Bear had been reduced to literally nothing but skin and bone. For someone who was seventy-two, he did however still look to be in tremendous physical shape. Amazingly cut, the outline of each and every muscle in his body was clearly visible beneath the skin. With a full goatee and a $4,000 hearing aid as well as a small gold earring in his left ear, Bear in person was a worn, elflike man who had the distracted air of a world-class surgeon or some famous professor of literature.
Utterly focused on the task at hand, Bear finally found what he had been looking for. Dumping a handful of the coffee beans he had grown on his property into a large, state-of-the-art conical burr grinder, Bear loudly reduced them to a fine powder. Filling a small white funnel-shaped device with water from the bathroom tap, Bear then began packing up his Braun food mixer and his beard trimmer as he waited patiently for the water to boil.
As soon as it had done so, Bear poured the water into a conical filter mounted on a ceramic cup. Opening up a cooler packed with blue ice, he took out a small container of raw cream from Whole Foods to top off what by any standard known to man had to rank as the world’s most perfectly brewed cup of coffee.
Explaining that he needed to drink this right now because he and Sheilah had been denied the free breakfast that came with the room after having arrived three minutes after the dining room had closed this morning, Bear promptly knocked the cup of coffee over onto the carpet. He then spent an inordinate amount of time mopping it all back up again. Having never cared about punctuality, Bear had now made being late an integral part of his lifestyle.
During his extended voyage around the world, Bear had missed nearly every flight on which he and Sheilah had been booked. In a vain attempt to find out where he was and why he hadn’t yet arrived, the friends with whom Bear was scheduled to stay had been calling one another constantly.
Three days after he was supposed to have been here, Bear finally began putting on a pair of jeans, which were now two sizes too big on him. Taking one last sip of his coffee, he headed toward the door. Sheilah, who was the soul of patience with Bear and always completely solicitous of his well-being, sighed softly and said, “I’ve learned to go with the flow. And these days, the flow is very slow.”
Stepping outside the motel, Bear pulled a brown Thinsulate stocking cap over his protuberant gremlinlike ears. With his gold earring, dark brown goatee, and the cap, he looked an older, careworn version of the Edge from U2. Pausing for a moment before the rented car in which he had already been stopped by the police for driving erratically, Bear began lamenting that his inability to swallow solid food had now made it impossible for him to enjoy the social joys of eating with others. Suddenly, his eyes reddened and he was nearly reduced to tears. Resolutely reeling himself back in, he said, “But, hey, I’m alive, right?”
As soon as he had swept into my office, Bear immediately made the space entirely his own. Utterly focused on what he was doing, Bear did not notice that he had just used my favorite coffee cup as a receptacle for the protein-rich, soupy mixture that now sustained him. Composed in part of a gelatinous paste that Bear had made by boiling down countless chicken legs, it was not something that anyone would ever have eaten by choice.
Slurping up the stuff as he lowered himself onto the couch, Bear opened an aluminum briefcase that fastened with a lock. The outside of the briefcase was festooned with wrinkled rock ’n’ roll stickers. The Grateful Dead at the Dean Smith Center at the University of North Carolina on March 24, 1993. The Who. Jackson Browne. The Grateful Dead at Wembley Stadium in London on October 3, 1990. Good Ole Grateful Dead. The dancing bears. And, of course, the Stealie, which he had helped create.
On the inside lid of the briefcase, Bear had pasted a multitude of his backstage passes one on top of another in layers, thereby creating a road map of where he had been. Methodically, he began sorting through the impossible jumble of items that his briefcase contained. In no particular order, Bear brought out several small and exquisite pieces of his jewelry, the black felt boards on which they could be viewed, a high-powered jeweler’s loupe, numerous rolls of tape, a portable memory drive, a small metric scale, a plethora of tiny plastic film canisters, and $10,000 worth of scraps from the gold and platinum coins he had used to make his carvings.
As he scrolled through digital images of his work on his laptop while talking about the pieces that he had sold to Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac and a host of others, Bear began burning a CD of Big Brother and the Holding Company live at the Carousel Ballroom. No doubt taking notice of my reaction to the way in which Bear had laid waste to my entire office in no time flat, Sheilah kindly offered me some DHEA. When I asked her what it was for, she said, “Stress.”
Rooting through his briefcase yet again, Bear produced the doctor’s letter that allowed him as a cancer survivor to board airplanes with all forms of food as well as bottles of water that no one else would have been permitted to bring with them. After handing me a film canister containing some of the high-grade weed he had grown on his property in Australia and then blithely carried with him through customs all over the world, Bear began filling a plastic Baggie with some of the Australian peppercorns that he considered to be the finest in the world.
Not so much a stranger in a strange land as a creature who was completely at home in a world in which no one else had ever dwelled, Bear started talking about the extensive profile of him I had been working on for months that was scheduled to run in the fortieth-anniversary “Summer of Love” issue of Rolling Stone magazine in six weeks’ time.
Although I had already spent countless hours talking to Bear on the phone from Australia and gone through all the lengthy e-mails he had sent me providing yet more information about his various exploits over the years, none of it had prepared me for what it was like to encounter him in person at such close range. Utterly sweet and genuine, Bear was not so much a force of nature as somebody whom no one could control.
Although I had already done my best to communicate this to those at Rolling Stone who were trying to help me shepherd the piece to publication, no one there was accustomed to dealing with someone who was unwilling to do virtually anything to appease the magazine. Despite their repeated entreaties, Bear was still just as camera shy as ever and so had steadfastly refused to sit for a current photograph of himself to accompany the article.
For a variety of reasons, most of them related to his continuing efforts to maintain tenure on his land, Bear told me that the last thing in the world he needed right now was for the Australian authorities to be reminded that he was once, as the article would eventually call him, “The King of LSD.” Lest I think he was unduly paranoid about this, Bear told me that some kid whom he had met at a Grateful Dead show in 1987 had only recently come walking up his driveway in Australia as though he had just arrived in the promised land. As always, Bear wanted to be known, but only in a manner that suited his needs.
After having left my office in ruins, Bear headed off to San Francisco with Sheilah for what he said would be a two-week stay. Five weeks later, he was sitting barefoot in black jeans and a T-shirt in a Starbucks in San Rafael in Marin County talking to Joel Selvin of the San Francisco Chronicle. Telling Selvin that two bands he really liked these days were Wolfmother and the Arctic Monkeys, Bear said, “Anytime the music on the radio sounds like rubbish, it’s time to take some LSD.”
Bear Page 16