Grateful Dead Sound Man Supplied ’60s With LSD

Owsley Stanley, the grandson of a former Kentucky governor, made and supplied the LSD that fueled acid rock and California’s hallucinogenic culture in the 1960s.

Mr. Stanley died Sunday at age 76 after an automobile accident in Queensland, Australia, where he had emigrated in the 1980s.

An early patron and sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, Mr. Stanley was memorialized in the band’s song “Alice D. Millionaire,” named after a newspaper headline about his arrest for dealing LSD.

Mr. Stanley was credited with distributing thousands—some say millions— of doses of high-purity LSD, often for free at concerts and “acid tests” run by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Notoriously press-shy, Mr. Stanley thought he was helping introduce a new form of consciousness. Renegade Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary agreed, calling him “God’s Secret Agent A.O.S. 3” (Augustus Owsley Stanley III was his given name).

But authorities demurred, repeatedly busting him and finally convicting him for drug possession in 1969.

“I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for,” Mr. Stanley told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007. “What I did was a community service.”

Mr. Stanley was the rebellious scion of an eminent Kentucky family. His grandfather, Augustus Owsley Stanley, was a U.S. senator after serving as governor. The younger Mr. Stanley was described by a former schoolmaster “almost like a brain child,” but was kicked out of the Charlotte Hall Military Academy in 9th grade for “getting the whole campus intoxicated” on smuggled booze, he told a biographer of Jerry Garcia, the late guitarist for the Grateful Dead.

After that, he bounced between schools and enrolled briefly at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering. He enlisted in the Air Force, which sent him to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. There, he acquired expertise in electronics, and later worked at radio and television stations.

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