Bear

by Robert Greenfield

  After having attended a show at the Fillmore by his old friends Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen, Bear and Sheilah left for the airport the next day to board their flight back home to Australia. They only got as far as Sausalito before Bear realized that he had left his briefcase containing their tickets at the house in San Anselmo where they had been staying. Missing yet another flight, they had to put off their return for another week.

  Having seen Bear in action, this was no great surprise. Believing that “there is no past and no future” because “everything exists only in present time,” it had never occurred to him to drive five minutes out of his way after leaving my office to visit the Monterey Fairgrounds. Forty years earlier, it was there that his high-powered rocket fuel had helped to usher in the all-out careening psychedelic madness that then became known all over the world as the Summer of Love. For Bear, this had just been another day on the road.

  22

  On the Way Home

  On November 7, 2009, Bear flew to Victoria to address the annual conference held by Entheogenesis Australis, a group formed to promote “open discussion about psychoactive plants and chemicals.” In the two years since he and Sheilah had traveled around the world, Bear had aged so dramatically that he now looked truly old for the first time in his life. His graying hair was thin and sparse. His eyes were sunken in his head. The skin on his face was mottled and tightly drawn.

  Far thinner than he had ever before been, Bear sat slumped in a chair with a bunch of tissues in one hand as he talked softly into the microphone he was also holding. Although his mind was still as sharp as it had ever been, he looked in every way like a shrunken replica of the physical specimen he had once been.

  “Bear did look terrible,” Sheilah would later say. “I hadn’t realized it at the time, but when I saw the footage later, I was shocked. He spoke well at the conference and was very well received. The audience loved him, but he looked bad. He still had such an amazing presence and had not lost his joie de vivre. Both Starfinder and I were very proud of him.”

  Sixteen months later, on Friday, March 11, 2011, Bear and Sheilah flew to Sydney so he could visit his oncologist for his final checkup to ensure that he had been cancer-free for five years. As always when they traveled these days, Bear and Sheilah missed a couple of flights, and so she was particularly exhausted by the time that they finally checked into their hotel room.

  As Sheilah began filling the tub so she could take a bath, Bear carefully extracted a cotton string from the room’s Oriental carpet. Putting the string into a dish, he poured a ring of oil around it, pulled up the stem of the string, and lit it. He then brought the glowing dish into the bathroom so Sheilah would have a candle by the bathtub.

  “I was deeply touched by the gesture. We’d both had a really rough time of it that day, and he encouraged me to relax in a bath and let the day go and then surprised me with this candle he had made for me. It really was one of the sweetest, most romantic things he had ever done for me, and I appreciated how clever and inventive he was. There were so many beautiful things he did for me that, looking back on it now, I can see how much love he had for me and how he showed it in so many ways. We really loved one another.”

  The next day, Bear received what for him was both good and bad news. The good news was that he was still cancer-free. The bad news was that when Bear asked the doctor if stem-cell treatment could help him, his reply was “No.” “You know,” Bear told the doctor, “anyone else who had just gotten the news you’ve given me would be in a fetal position in the corner. But I’m not going to let it get me down. I’m going to go with this and do whatever I can to get my life back.”

  Just before Bear and Sheilah boarded their return flight to Cairns, he suddenly said, “Hold on a minute. I’ll be right back.” Running into a store in the airport, Bear returned holding a card with a big heart on it and said, “I want to give this to you. I love you.” As Sheilah later recalled, “There was just something about that day. As though he had a sixth sense about what was going to happen.”

  By the time they arrived in Cairns, Bear’s daughter Redbird and her husband had already brought Sheilah’s Toyota Land Cruiser station wagon from their home to the airport. Although Bear had the keys to the car with him, he lost them at the airport, and he and Sheilah had to spend some time searching before he found them again. After they finally got into the car, Bear decided he wanted to go buy something. Sheilah told him it was already getting late, but Bear drove to a stereo store only to learn that it had already closed for the day.

  Although their original plan had been to visit Redbird and perhaps spend the night with her in Cairns, she had only recently given birth to twin boys. Since it was now dinnertime and “pandemonium at their house,” Sheilah said, “Let’s just go home.” After calling Redbird to let her know what they were doing, Bear began heading north on the Kennedy Highway.

  Nearly two hours later, as they drove through the rain up the steep, winding road past Davies Creek on their way home, Bear heard Miles Davis playing on the radio. As he reached over to turn up the volume, the Land Cruiser hit an oil slick. Bear lost control of the wheel, and the station wagon slid into a deep pool of mud and water on the side of the road. Flipping sideways, the vehicle then slammed into a large ironbark tree on Sheilah’s side of the car. Although Bear had always liked to drive as fast as possible, he had not been doing so before the accident.

  Because the roof of the car had collapsed and the dashboard had flown up between them, Sheilah couldn’t not see Bear, but she could still hear him. It was starting to get dark and the rain was really pouring down. Sheilah kept calling out for Bear, but he did not answer. A team of paramedics quickly arrived on the scene. As one of them began putting a brace on Sheilah’s neck, she said, “No, no, no. I want you to pay attention to my husband. He’s not responding. I’m okay. Please just pay attention to him. He needs your help.”

  After the paramedics began working on Bear, one of them told Sheilah that they had gotten a heartbeat, and she said, “Well, that’s really good.” As the car had begun sliding across the road, Bear had put his arm across the seat to protect Sheilah from the impact. She had then continued to hold on to his hand while calling out his name without getting any response. Sheilah herself was trapped in the front seat of the totaled car for an hour as the rescue team worked to cut her from the wreckage.

  “Suddenly after a few more minutes, I noticed that no one was saying anything. It was very quiet and I felt that something was wrong. ‘What’s going on?’ I said. ‘What’s happening? Why aren’t you looking after my husband? I don’t need you. He does.’ Sounding annoyed by my questions, the paramedic finally said, ‘He’s dead.’

  “This was from a paramedic! Someone who was supposed to feel compassion and know just what to say at such a time. He just told me that flat out, and I could not understand how someone could be so heartless. I was stunned. I became very quiet and could not believe what I had just heard. How could Bear be dead? He couldn’t be dead. It was just horrible. Absolutely horrible.

  “I had just been given the news that my husband was dead. I did not want to leave. I wanted to stay right there until they came to get him. I felt like my heart had been torn out and I refused to move. I had just lost everything that meant anything to me. I could not even cry. I just sat there in disbelief. Finally, a very lovely fireman came and spoke to me so gently and kindly. Like a rag doll, I reluctantly followed his instructions.

  “For the longest time afterwards I just kept thinking that Bear would come driving down the driveway. That it had all just been a bad dream and he was going to come driving down that driveway just like he had always done before.”

  That Sheilah had escaped relatively unscathed from the accident seemed like a miracle to those who saw the wreck. Luckily, she had been wedged in the only place in the car where anyone could have survived. Perhaps the only mercy about any of it was that Bear had only recently said that he would not know what to do if Shei
lah passed away before him.

  Having flown to Australia a few days before the accident with his wife so that he could introduce Bear to his one-year-old granddaughter, Starfinder had spent some time with his father before Bear and Sheilah had flown to Sydney. After learning about the accident, Starfinder called his mother, who was in India, and she flew to Australia as well.

  Bear’s funeral was held on March 22, 2011, at a time when his friends in California could watch it on Skype. Sam Cutler, who as the road manager for the Rolling Stones had been involved in hiring the Hells Angels to act as security at Altamont, flew from Sydney to attend the service. Bear’s daughter Nina was also there, as were Melissa Cargill and her husband.

  Draped with flowers from his property, Bear’s coffin was also adorned with the Grateful Dead skull logo and thirteen-point lightning bolt that Starfinder had drawn. An illustrated program with Bear’s artwork was handed out at the service as “Black Peter” from Bear’s Choice and “Attics of My Life” from American Beauty played in the background.

  Sheilah had called Robert Hunter’s wife, Maureen, in California to ask if they had heard the news. After Maureen Hunter told her that they had, Sheilah asked, “‘Do you think Robert would consider writing an eulogy for Bear?’ And she said, ‘Of course he would. I think that’s a great idea.’ And he did. He sent something to me within a day. He must have gotten right on it or maybe it had been filtering through his mind ever since he had heard the news and he was prepared, and he e-mailed it to me.”

  At Bear’s funeral, Starfinder read the fifty-three-line free-verse epitaph, entitled “An Anthem for the Bear.” The concluding lines read:

  Was there ever a man who changed so many

  while, himself, changing so little?

  A Cardinal sign, were there ever one

  fixed like a bright white star in dark-blue heaven.

  Save sentimental eulogies for lesser men

  and leave it that he was the King of Many Things

  of perfected personal taste and detailed opinion

  first and last a scientist and a propounder

  of a brand new species of reason

  No bucolic Heaven for such as Bear,

  rather a Rock of Ages from where

  an eagle in full flight might dare

  a sudden detour into endless dawn.

  Sail on, dear brother Bear, sail on.

  When he died on a rain-slicked highway in Australia, the land where he had gone to escape the ice-age storm that he was convinced would lay waste to the entire northern hemisphere, Augustus Owsley Stanley III, aka Bear, was seventy-six years old.

  Epilogue

  More Anthems for the Bear

  Not surprisingly, many of those who had known and loved Bear first learned of his death on the Internet, the medium he himself had so quickly embraced as his preferred method of communication with the world at large. John Perry Barlow seems to have been the first to spread the news in a tweet in which he described Bear as an “Acid King, Annealer of the Grateful Dead, and Master Crank” who “died with his boots on.”

  Four years earlier, Barlow had said of his old comrade-in-arms, “He is as American as apple pie. Bear has always been exactly the same age. The main thing to know about Augustus Owsley Stanley III is that his trajectory through life has been flatter than any other person I have ever known. In his essence, he has been undeviatingly himself. Even though battered by the most astonishing winds of change and fashion and frippery and ups and downs and deaths and rebirths and marriages and madness, he has always maintained himself in precisely this configuration. And although I always know exactly what he is going to say about goddamn everything, that doesn’t spare him from saying it anyway.”

  The day after Bear died, Phil Lesh, who had always been Bear’s closest ally in the Grateful Dead, posted a eulogy on the Internet entitled “A Beautiful Mind.” In part, it said, “Bear, for me, was a true kindred spirit; when we first met, it was as if I had met a long-lost brother from another lifetime. I am heartbroken and devastated at his passing.

  “He was a friend, a brother, an inspiration, and our patron at the very beginning of our creative lives. We owe him more than can be counted or added up—his was a mind that refused to accept limits, and he reinforced in us that striving for the infinite, the refusal to accept the status quo, that has informed so much of our work.…

  “A mind like Bear’s appears only very rarely, and it’s been my privilege and honor to have known and loved two such minds—Jerry and Bear.… I am eternally grateful for all of the gifts Bear brought to the scene and to the music. Fare thee well; I love you more than words can tell.”

  The extensive coverage that Bear’s passing generated throughout the world in what had once been known as “the straight media” would have delighted no one more than Bear himself. The Australian in his adopted homeland, as well as The Telegraph, The Guardian, and The Independent newspapers in the United Kingdom, all ran lengthy obituaries of him.

  The New York Times devoted twenty-two paragraphs to a full-blown account of Bear’s life and times, accompanied by the iconic Rosie McGee photo of Bear in a slouch hat standing beside a bushy-haired and thickly bearded Jerry Garcia with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Two days later, the newspaper ran a long personal reminiscence of Bear on the first page of its Arts section entitled, “Heads Bowed in Grateful Memory.” Bear was memorialized yet again in the annual issue of The New York Times Sunday Magazine that celebrates the lives of those of note who have passed away during the previous year.

  In an article entitled “The Dead Recall the Colorful Life of LSD Pioneer Owsley Stanley” in Rolling Stone magazine, Mickey Hart told David Browne, “I never thought the Bear would die. He was too tough and ornery. But his neck was almost bone because of the chemo.… The last time I saw him, he was pureeing meat in a veggie mixer so he could drink it through a straw. At least now Jerry and Pigpen will have someone to talk to. They’re yucking it up together, wherever ‘there’ is.”

  As always, the last word about Bear’s life rightfully belongs to Bear. As he said in 2007, “I tend to be overwhelming, so people put me out of their heads. It’s too challenging and too frightening to get me. Sometimes being me is like living in the quiet center of a tornado or a hurricane. And I’m the only thing not spinning around. But the universe does get at me, though.

  “I wish it were true that I was innocent with no evil intent and not ego driven because that’s mastery, which has always been my goal. I admire the master because if you master something, you don’t even think about it anymore. It becomes as simple and natural as breathing or riding a bicycle. That’s the way it is with me. Whether it’s sculpture or sound mixing or anything else, I don’t think about it. I just turn a few knobs and everything automatically does what it’s supposed to do.”

  After his funeral, Bear was cremated, and some of his ashes were scattered on his property. When the Grateful Dead performed their fiftieth anniversary “Fare Thee Well” shows at Soldier Field in Chicago on July 3, 4, and 5, 2015, Starfinder brought a jar containing a portion of his father’s ashes with him and placed it on the sound board so Bear could once again be with the band he had always loved as much as life itself.

  While Bear’s true final resting place would always be in the music that he had done all he could to help the Grateful Dead create, the trajectory of his utterly unconventional yet completely American life spoke volumes about the limits of personal freedom in this country. An outlier from birth who became an outlaw in the eyes of a society that perceived him as a distinct threat to the status quo, Bear was someone to whom the ordinary rules of behavior never applied.

  Despite his many glaring flaws, Bear was always so absolutely fearless in so many ways that Jerry Garcia called him a hero. At a crucial turning point in the history of this country, this was precisely the role he came to play for many who also considered themselves outcasts in the nation where they had been born.

  While the powerful s
ubstance he manufactured in bulk and with which his name will always be linked has caused a multitude of problems, it also brought about significant social change by opening people’s minds to a reality they would otherwise never have encountered. That same substance has continued to influence the culture even in our current digital age.

  Steve Jobs, who did as much as anyone to create the high-tech world in which we now all live, famously said that taking LSD was “a profound experience.” Calling it “one of the two or three most important things” he had ever done in his life, Jobs added that people who had not tried psychedelics could never understand some things about him.

  Although Bear never would have been totally on board with that statement, neither man would have agreed with the other about anything else. But then, Bear himself would never have had it any other way.

  Appendix

  Bear’s Choice: A Selected Discography

  As Bear himself so proudly noted in 2005 on his Web site, he had by then been credited with having recorded thirteen albums, as well as five collections on which his sonic journals comprised anywhere from three cuts to 63 percent of the total content.

  After Bear’s death in 2011, his family established the Owsley Stanley Foundation to preserve the vast archive of tapes that he had left behind. By eventually releasing them for sale, the foundation hopes to generate what Sheilah Stanley called “enough money to support kids who want to study any form of art, music, recording, and dance as well as fund community outreach programs for music and sound.”

  Over his long career both on and off the road with the Grateful Dead, Bear recorded more than thirteen hundred live performances on cassettes as well as reel-to-reel tapes. Although no complete list of the archive’s contents has yet been made available, bands such as the Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish, Love, Blue Cheer, and Fleetwood Mac all opened for the Dead, and so Bear recorded their performances as well.