Augustus Owsley Stanley III, to give him his ridiculous name, was an American sound engineer by day and an underground chemist also by day, night and sometimes morning. In perhaps the most influential story of the ’60s ever published, Stanley became the sound man for the grateful dead after meeting the group at Ken Kesey’s (author of We flew over a cuckoo’s nest) sour evenings. Although calling him a sound man is also a misnomer, he essentially mobilized the music to the point where it could actually be played in stadiums, but you shouldn’t blame him.

In addition to mixing the wall of sound that exploded The Dead’s concerts into a sonic maelstrom that changed the shape of live music and helping design their now-iconic logo, Stanley was also the first individual known to begin mass manufacturing LSD. It’s quite a CV.

During his period of acid use, it is alleged that Stanley produced at least five million doses of some of the finest wall moving tabs ever put on the market. The Heisenberg musical enjoyed the good times of legality as he, his girlfriend Melissa Cargill, a talented chemist and scion of the very wealthy Cargill-MacMillan family, and a leg man nicknamed Scully, brewed LSD in a sub -California soil. Looking back on that time, many questions arise as to why it took three years for laws to be passed against this substance – a substance that Charles Manson and many others who crossed the line into puff have tried to a degree of debauchery.

Hell, the CIA was also more than anyone aware of its dangerous potential. In 1953, the organization began an illegal program experimenting with the potential of using LSD and other psychoactive drugs to achieve mind control. This is not a conspiracy theory; This is all declassified truth… one way or another. At the time, the CIA purchased the world’s entire supply of LSD for $240,000. They had so much that they gave 297 mg to Tusko, a three-ton Asian male elephant. In five minutes, the poor thing shit itself and died.

But this beleaguered animal wasn’t the only test subject. With plenty of acid to administer, the CIA quickly sought to recruit volunteers to conduct tests. Robert Hunter, who would become the chief lyricist of the Grateful Deadwas one of the first to sign up.

“I couldn’t understand why they were paying me a lot of money to take these psychedelics,” Hunter said. Reuters when reflecting on his involvement in MK-ultra. “At first they gave me LSD, then the next week I think it was mescaline, the next week it was psilocybin, and the fourth week it was all three. .”

He explains that the purpose of this psychoactive cocktail was to see “if I was more hypnotizable when I took it than when I didn’t take it. I didn’t find that to be the case. I didn’t find myself hypnotized.” Part of the reason was that he was beside himself. He couldn’t even concentrate on what they were saying, much less carry out a secret mission for them. So, from this point of view, MK-ultra may have failed at mind control, but he managed to figure out the opposite: how to make someone lose control of their own mind.

While many Dead acidheads would argue otherwise and explain to you that LSD can increase your control and induce heightened states of consciousness, the troubling setback of people derailing and abandoning the counterculture movement altogether proves the opposite. is simply as possible. Stanley’s own life even serves as proof since he eventually left the front lines of his strange and noble cause behind and headed for the Australian outback – but for a time he was at heart, enjoying a windfall of good fortune.

Additionally, not only did it benefit from dealer administrative oversight, but once crime was imposed in 1966, Stanley and Cargill simply moved production to a laboratory in Denver, Colorado, and resumed brightening up the daydreams of counterculture children. Their new headquarters was located across the street from the Denver Zoo, and stories are abundant in the area’s subterranean realms that old acidheads would look fondly at a gibbon or other higher simian and have evolutionary epiphanies in their confused minds while the funky primates looked on wondering. why the hippie who had just ripped his pants had been looking at them for hours.

Sadly, the famous zoo visits are just a side note that has nothing to do with Steely Dan. But the question of why children of the counterculture were able to get high freely thanks to Stanley’s acid supply remains relevant. Many have argued that the answer came from the time Stanley was finally arrested in 1970. “You saw this dark hippie descend into drug-related depression,” Joni Mitchell once said. “Right after Woodstock, we went through a decade of fundamental apathy in which my generation sucked their thumbs and then decided to be greedy and pornographic.” They gave up in a different way – in a politically canceled way.

Woodstock was 1969, and in many ways it was the counterculture’s last hurray. As Mitchell suggests, eventually things became commercialized and flower power fell into the collapse of a reflective dirge. The prelapsarian dream was over; with it, acid was largely exchanged for less cerebral substances. But for a while he had a good run, perhaps he embarked on one trip too many. Does the acid demise of the anti-establishment movement have anything to do with the fact that the establishment itself tactfully turned a blind eye to the dealings while systematically discovering that it was not a substance with which had to star in his own experiments (i.e. giving 297 mg of LSD to an elephant and killing it almost immediately) is a foil for another day.

However, something requiring less careful consideration is the number of people in Stanley’s circle who have succumbed to the sad aftereffects. It is difficult to find a single member of the Bay Area movement who has not met a tragic fate, or controversial circumstances, or who has not sunk into a strange darkness, as if carried away by the sound of caravanning. This twisted irony didn’t bother Steely Dan, the most marginal band in rock’n’roll history – if, indeed, they can even be said to belong to rock’n’roll history given their disdain. for the genre.

Alas, with Stanley out, Manson rich, and Woodstock plagued by its own problems, the ’60s were over when Steely Dan decided to revisit the zeitgeist in 1976; in fact, it had collapsed like Charlemagne’s Roman Empire. While the verse lyric about a car running out of gas can form a nice metaphor for this in the song, it also alludes to Stanley’s eventual arrest after his car runs out of gas and the police discovered substances scattered around her when they later picked him, proving Fagen and Walter Becker’s undying love for an allegory or double entender.

The brilliant duo suture this wild tale, with its surge of connotations, into a jazzy jam that sees guitarist Larry Carlton produce a solo that he says is the pinnacle of his career – a fittingly frenetic venue for such a feat.

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