(Owsley Stanley, left, with Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead in a 1969 publicity photograph. Mr. Stanley was a financial backer of the Dead and also provided the band with a supply of LSD. Photo Rosie McGee, via Reuters)
Sorry to drag you into this fevered dream of long ago. Oh, hell, no I am not. It is still aas psychedelic as it was then, the old order under siege by paisley and pot and unrest in the streets.
The years that saw the murders of a President and his lover- by person or persons known or unknown, were also the years of Owsley.
Owsley Stanley just died a year ago, having survived the whole long strange trip. He was the applied chemist to the stars, who made LSD in quantity for the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and other avatars of the psychedelic ’60s. He died at the age of 76 in a car accident in Australia just last year. He was 76, and lived in the bush near Cairns, in the Australian state of Queensland.
The police said his car swerved off a highway and down an embankment before hitting trees near the hamlet of Mareeba. His wife was injured but survived.
Owsley was the Dead’s former financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer. He had become a recluse in his later years, an enigmatic icon of his age. He moved to Australia in the 1980s, as he explained in his rare interviews, so he might survive what he believed to be a coming Ice Age that would annihilate the Northern Hemisphere.
So much familiar here. It wasn’t global warming, then, it was the fear of the next Ice Age. So much is strangely inverted in the stories of the fevered acid-fueled age of the ’60s have been sobering and still filled with surprise and wonder. I knew about most of the weird stuff that is painfully true (which may include an imminent ice age, or maybe that is some sort of collective flashback) as we all have, but the juxtaposition of the unfolding racial struggle, drugs, and the wars and the political killings are so very unsettling.
I doubt if I will ever get over the grim fascination with the Day in Dallas that seemed to set everything in motion.
If you lay the strands all out, side-by-side, it is mind-boggling. Putting Mary Pinchot Meyer in the middle of it, rather than the slain President, makes it all seem the stranger. All of Georgetown society is in the story (it must have been something to have attended the memorial service at the Washington. Did they look one another in the eye?) and it was clear that the national security community had its fingers in everything.
The leadership of that community really never retreated from their war-time mindset (it was less than 20 years from their time as junior officers in a world at war) to the hit on a sitting President.
The plots against Castro, the murders of Trujillo and Lumumba, the organized assassination teams of Operation Phoenix in Vietnam are the operational backdrops that make it all plausible that there was something going on, something big.
Even sifting through the wild claims and assertions about the biggest murder of the century make my brain overheat. Mary Pinchot Meyer and her death put it all in perspective: her little house is still there in Georgetown, the place from which she set out to join the mystery forever.
We won’t solve anything in The Daily. Other people have driven themselves crazy over the details, and dissolved in hallucinations as powerful as Owsley’s acid.
Or that was the perception, anyway. Life seems to be more about perception than objective reality anyway, right?
And I never did get to the paranormal wars. Oh well.
Koo Kook a Choo.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com