Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III

Augustus Owsley Stanley III, soundman for the Grateful Dead, joined up with the band in 1965. A self-taught electronics wiz, he mixed and taped more than a thousand Dead concerts and designed their unwieldy, 40-foot-tall, 70-foot-wide touring Wall of Sound system. The music may have sustained the Grateful Dead as the most popular live band in rock history, but it was amateur chemist Owsley's branded pure tabs of Blue Cheer, White Lightning or Monterey Purple that first elevated the audiences (and the band) into that "long, strange trip."

Robert Greenfield's Bear is the first full biography of the man whose obsessive drive for perfection gave the Dead their dedication to quality in their performances and recordings. The former Rolling Stone associate editor includes archival photos of the justifiably paranoid, camera-shy Owsley, interviews with the man himself and conversations with the surviving Dead and members of their global posse.

If Bear slows a bit in the second half, it's because Owsley also trimmed his sails. Busted many times, he quit the acid business and worked his last gig with the Dead in 1978. In 2011, his body wracked by chemo treatments for cancer, Bear died in a car wreck in Australia. In memory, his son placed some of his ashes on the soundboard for the Grateful Dead's 50th-anniversary Fare Thee Well concert in Chicago in 2015. Drummer Mickey Hart commented on his death: "At least now Jerry and Pigpen will have someone to talk to." Greenfield's anecdotal Bear feeds a Deadhead's jones--those who were there during that Summer of Love or their children and grandchildren. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

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