BONUS: Bear Drops: LA ‘66

Rich Mahan (0:05)

The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast, the official podcast of The Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarnow, exploring the music and legacy of The Grateful Dead for The Committed And The Curious.

Greetings, friends. Welcome back to The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast. We've got a special bonus episode for you today, and it's the second in our ongoing bear drop series centered around the mythical Owsley Stanley. We are in the middle of season four, and you can get new episodes of The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast right here every other week. Visit us at our website, dead.net/deadcast, and check out the extra materials we have for you to explore for this episode. And also at dead.net/deadcast are all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons one, two, and three. And you can link from there to any and all of the podcasting platforms available so you can listen where you like to listen. Please help us by subscribing, hitting that like button, and leaving a review. Thank you very much.

Listen to the River St. Louis 717273 is the new Grateful Dead Live archival release. And it's out and available now. This set includes seven previously unreleased concerts from St. Louis recorded on December 9th and 10th, 71 at the Fox Theater, October 17th, 18th, and 19th, 1972 at the Fox Theater, and October 29th and 30th, 1973 at the Keele Auditorium. Production of the 20 CD set is limited to 13,000 individually numbered copies and is also available in its entirety as a digital download exclusively at dead.net in Apple, Lossless, and FLAC 19224

dead.net has also released Light Into Ashes, Fox Theater St. Louis 101872 as a double LP, on 180 gram custom vinyl. It's limited to 7200 copies and the set focuses on an exceptional hour plus jam plucked from The Grateful Dead's October 18th, 1972 show at the Fox. The breakout show from this set is Fox Theater St. Louis, Missouri 121071 and is available as a three CD set and a limited edition five LP set on 180 gram vinyl. All of these configurations of Listen To The River, St. Louis 717273 are available now. Get more info at dead.net.

Well, today's episode is the second of our Bear Drops bonus episodes. And today's installment focuses on Owsley's time with the dead in early 1966 down in Los Angeles. And thanks to the kind help of our friend David Gans, we have a bunch of great archival Owsley interview audio to help tell the story. Besides David and Bear, our other esteemed guests include Tim Scully, Don Douglas, Rosie McGee, Denise Kaufman, Ken Babbs, Starfinder Stanley, and Hawk. Time to be heading into Los Angeles with our own tour guide, Jesse Jarnow.

Jesse Jarnow (3:43)

On December 10th, 1965, the band formerly known as the Warlocks played for the first time as the Grateful Dead at the San Jose Acid Test.

A month later, on January 8th, the Merry Pranksters and the Dead took San Francisco at the Fillmore Acid Test. It was glorious.

SPEAKER_4 (3:59)

Glittering, glowing, ever flowing neon, all the money that we're owing to the electrical company.

Jesse Jarnow (4:08)

Until the cops showed up, and then somehow, it was still glorious.

Jerry Garcia (4:18)

A chief security agent has suddenly taken over and informed.

Jesse Jarnow (4:25)

It was also the first live recording of the Grateful Dead. We went through it in detail in our episode earlier this year called Hug the Heat, or the story of the first dead tape. That night at the Fillmore Auditorium, somewhere in the swirl, the Grateful Dead met one of their newest fans.

He'd seen them for the first time the month before at the Muir Beach Acid Test, and had reacted strongly. His name was Owsley Stanley, and he'd made nearly all of the LSD available in the underground, and by all accounts, the best.

David Gans continues to be the absolute undisputed deadcast savior. In 1991, he interviewed Owsley Stanley, Bear, an incredibly riveting discussion featured in David's book, Conversations With The Dead, a cornerstone of any Grateful Dead library. Signed copies of the revised edition are available through David's web store at perfectible.net. We've posted a link at dead.net/deadcast. It's one of the only extended interviews with Owsley, and we couldn't be more thankful to David for sharing the original audio.

Owsley Stanley (5:28)

But it was scary. Pushed me to the edge, and I thought, the sound of Garcia's guitar was like the claws of a tiger. They were like, it was like...

Dangerously scary. Very, very to the point. You can't talk about this stuff. I thought to myself, one of these days, these guys are going to be greater than the Beatles.