The year before, he’d crawled into a cave near Chattanooga to die: drugs, drink, divorce. Whoever passed through got journaled, and dosed.Ĭash was in the early stages of a resurrection. Last week, the foundation released a true jackalope, the “otoro of this tuna,” as Bell put it: “Johnny Cash at the Carousel Ballroom, April 24, 1968.” At that time, the Carousel, operated by the Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and others, was a psychedelic dance hall and, effectively, Bear’s sonic laboratory. On hearing the Watson, Jimmy Carter sent a note praising it as “a welcome addition to my collection.” He added that he and Rosalynn “look forward to your Allman Brothers release.” The foundation obliged: “Fillmore East 1970.” They have since got through almost nine hundred reels and released eight performances, including rarities from Doc and Merle Watson (1974), Commander Cody (1970), Tim Buckley (1968), and Ali Akbar Khan (1970). “It was essential that we preserve this pivotal point in American musical history, where all this explosive creativity was happening,” Hawk, now a lawyer in Pittsburgh, said. This was more than the Stanleys could afford, and so Starfinder and Hawk, along with a Princeton friend of Hawk’s named Peter Bell and Bear’s widow, Sheilah, launched the Owsley Stanley Foundation, to finance the transfer and eventual release of the material. Some quick math determined that it would take two engineers more than two years, working full time, to digitize them. Just before he died, in 2011, in a car accident in Australia, he instructed Starfinder and Redbird to preserve them.īear left behind thirteen hundred reels of live soundboard recordings, of eighty artists. For years, he made reel-to-reel tapes of virtually every show he engineered, no matter the artist, to assess the sound of the room and the effects of his unorthodox methods. Starting out with the Dead in 1966, Bear was a mad scientist of amplified music, pioneering sound systems and, later, recording techniques. I was wound a little tight.” Now Starfinder is a veterinarian in Northern California. “My father practically had to pry my jaws open and stuff it down my throat. “I resisted psychedelics until I was in college,” Starfinder said. “My dad had four kids with four moms and didn’t raise any of us.” Starfinder grew up in the Bronx and in Westchester County, but he and Redbird, as kids, attended a circus camp among the California redwoods. Starfinder’s half sister Redbird was born three weeks later. Starfinder was born on a solstice in 1970 (hence the name) while his father, who’d been busted for distributing LSD, was in prison (hence the bodybuilding). The following spring, at a concert in Albany, Bear introduced Hawk to his son, Starfinder Stanley, a wrestler, too, and a student at Cornell. Bear and Hawk, discovering a shared obsession with fitness and diet (since the sixties, Bear had eaten nothing but rare meat), became Dead-tour weight-lifting pals, with matching membership cards to Gold’s Gym. Hawk grabbed the laminate and said, “You must be someone really important.” The back of the pass read “Bear.” Bear was Owsley-né Augustus Owsley Stanley III-the near-mythic soundman and LSD chemist. One night, at a Grateful Dead concert in Raleigh, North Carolina, while dancing (sober) out in the concourse, he came across a table promoting the Rainforest Action Network and encountered a well put-together middle-aged man with an all-access backstage pass on a lanyard. In the summer of 1990, Bill Semins, who goes by Hawk, was a wrestler who’d just finished his first year at Princeton. Johnny Cash and Owsley Stanley Illustration by João Fazenda
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