Dark Star Palace: Owsley "Bear" Stanley: The Dark Star Palace Coffee...

Artifacts of the Week: Owsley aka Bear!

Belt Buckles / Business Card / Signed Wall of Sound Photo

Tape of the Week: 6/20/86 (Bear Recorded!)

Some years back, on my 35th birthday, I was getting ready to head over to Alfred's Steakhouse in San Francisco to celebrate my big day with my girlfriend (now wife). As we were getting ready to leave our loft, my cell phone rings. Since the number didn't look familiar, I let it hit voice mail. When I checked it, there was a rough voice on the line saying "Hey Unterfunken, it's Bear. What's the point of having a cell phone if you don't answer the damn thing? Call me at this number." Owsley was back in town after being out of the United States for seven years and wanted to meet up while he was here so I could get a buckle. As last week's Tapes of the Week were Owsley-recorded, I thought it would be a nice transition this week to link to a "new" recording of his that has just hit circulation a few weeks ago. I thought I would pair this with a few stories and artifacts from when I had coffee with Owsley "Bear" Stanley.

After touching base with him, Bear decided he wanted me to meet up with him on Sunday for some coffee over by the Grateful Dead's old business office in San Rafael. Despite my girlfriend not having any interest in this hook-up, I told her that she should really meet Bear... it would be like meeting Thomas Edison and da Vinci. Or at least Ben Franklin. She decided to go. So off we went. It wasn't until we got to the coffee shop that I realized I wasn't totally sure what Owsley looked like these days. For one, he had never allowed himself to be photographed! But I shrugged this aside as Ms. Funken and I sat and tried to figure out which of the characters that were passing by the coffee shop window might be Bear.

Finally, in he came... dressed in a black leather vest, a grey ponytail and a funky leather sack. He looked very much like a older funky Deadhead. Bear spotted me right away and greeted me with a "You must be Funken!" Owsley and I had been emailing for about a decade at this point... I remember I was first put into contact with him due to a dispute over even vs. odd-ordered harmonic distortion in solid state / vacuum tubes for recording preamp devices. We totally disagreed on this topic (I being against solid state and insisting it could not do even-ordered harmonics)... but in the end, Bear ended up being right. I found out then that Bear has no problem letting you know that he knows he is usually right! And it's true... his path of "empirical evidence=reality" does seem to make him quite right most of the time.

For the next few hours, my girlfriend and I were treated with wonderful tales that only Owsley could tell. Topics included: his 40+ year diet of eating only meat/animal products (and no carbohydrates), the role of line arrays in the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound, descriptions of his process for making sculpture, how to make a "meat-shake" if you can't chew steak (due to some personal issues going on with him), X-rated stories from Janis Joplin's dressing room circa '68 that are so frickin' nasty that my girlfriend still brings them up with a shudder, how he came to be known as "Bear" (see Chewbacca attached photo for a clue), his theories on stereo/surround/mono recordings, how fame is perceived and how it made Jerry Garcia and John Lennon fall (and why he wouldn't let me have a pix of the 2 of us), why omnidirectional microphones are his favorite mics for stereo recording, how his father was a United States Senator and State Govenor, and of course, a few tidbits on the psychedelic landscape and how he became one of the key figures of making the 1960's, well, the 1960's. Obviously, there was about 300 nooks and crannies that we mined as well! This was all after we spent some time checking out Starbucks blenders that he wanted to buy for grinding up his meat. Funky!

Before he left, he pulled a slew of his hand-made jewelry out of his sack. From mind-boggling / uber-detailed owl rings to peaceful moon-face buckles... it was an amazing collection of his artwork. There must have been 20+ amazing pieces. Unfortunately, I couldn't afford any of these! But the real deal was a 1983-vintage Grateful Dead Steal Your Face bronze buckle that he had just found when clearing out his old storage space during this current trip. This is our first Owsley Artifact of the Week!

It was "new old stock," and was something he knew I wanted to buy from him (Owsley, of course, designed the Dead's Steal Your Face logo with Bob Thomas in 1969). He talked Ms. Funken and I through his process for making the buckles, discussed bronze vs. silver, and went into detail on how he came up with the design for the buckle while in Egypt with the Dead in 1978 (see attached poster for the shows). One will notice that there is a sun disc and two serpents above the Steal Your Face on the buckle. These images come directly from the Egyptian Book of the Dead (and related hieroglyphs) that represent the sun god "Ra" and the union of upper and lower Egypt (via the 2 snakes).

After looking at various coffee grinders that he wanted to bring back home with him, Bear agreed to sign a small Wall of Sound photo I had... this was after he refused to sign anything saying that he "never signed anything unless it was an artwork of his." I countered that the Wall of Sound WAS an artwork of his, so therefore he shouldn't have an issue with it. He agree with that logic and proceeded to sign it: "I made this! - Bear."

About a year after meeting up with Owsley, and well after he had returned to Australia, he hooked me up with a second SYF buckle as I had described to him how I wanted have the buckle be the centerpiece to an Egyptian falcon-winged inlay that would go into the amp-rack stand for the Dark Star Palace's Grateful Dead McIntosh MC75, MC275, and MC2300 amplifiers. Bear thought I was nuts to use the buckle for this purpose, so initially offered to hand-mold the same design in plastic so I could back-light the mold. But, this turned out to be a hassle for him, so he just sent on another buckle, as well as a business card (attached, though I removed the email/phone info) via his North American art agent. Of course, he also thought my surround sound layout for the Palace was a "recipe for crap sound" and that I would be better off using a line-array as was used in the Wall of Sound. Of course, I disagreed. It appears that some things will never change.

On to this week's Tape of the Week, which is an amazing new discovery for Deadheads. It is one of Owsley's late-career personal "sonic journal" recordings. It began circulating just a few weeks ago, on January 19, 2010, on Owsley's 75th birthday. The show is from June 20, 1986 at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. Jamie Waddell digitally edited and mastered Bear's master audio cassette. When seeded, the info on the tape was that it was recorded from "a combination of microphones and select console feeds" at the soundboard via help from Dead sound man, Dan Healy. When doing the mastering, Jamie mentioned that "no patch-work was performed (via audience recordings). This is what he (Owsley) chose to tape. Tape flip in LIG (Let It Grow). There is a good deal of reverb in places, but overall it is a very nice tape; certainly unique. This single cassette came anonymously last week in the mail, with a private tale of ownership. It is a confirmed master cassette. No more tapes are available from this person."

As the fan photo (on the left) shows from this show, Jerry's health was on the decline. Just a few weeks after this performance in Berkeley, Jerry lapsed into a diabetic coma on July 10. He didn't come out of the coma for five days, and was not released from the hospital until his birthday on August 1st. Jerry had been severely impacted by the coma, and with the help of old friend and collaborator Merl Sanders, spent the next several months having to re-learn how to play the guitar from scratch.The Grateful Dead returned to the stage in December of 1986. By June of the following year, their new LP (In the Dark) was released, and the Dead would be bigger than they had ever been in their 20+ year journey... Check out the links below for the Owsley Matrix, as well as the audience recording that you can stream.

Set One
01. In The Midnight Hour
02. Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo
03. El Paso
04. West L.A. Fadeaway
05. Me And My Uncle ->
06. Mexicali Blues
07. Candyman
08. Let It Grow

Set Two
09. Uncle John's Band ->
10. Playing In The Band ->
11. Comes A Time ->

[ Drums -> Space ->
I Need A Miracle -> ] <---missing

12. Black Peter ->
13. Around And Around ->
14. Good Lovin'
MISSING: Encore- Mighty Quinn