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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Owsley "Bear" Stanley, a 1960s counterculture amount who flooded the bloom noesis environs with hallucinogen and was an primeval helper of the Grateful Dead, died in a automobile break in his adoptive bag land of Australia on Sunday, his kinsfolk said. He was believed to be 76.

The renegade grandson of a past governor of Kentucky, discoverer helped lay the foundation for the psychedelic era by producing more than a meg doses of hallucinogen at his labs in San Francisco's Bay Area.

"He prefabricated Elvis so pure and wonderful that grouping like Jimi Hendrix wrote impact songs most it and others titled their adornment in its honor," past rock 'n' roll tour manager Sam Cutler wrote in his 2008 memoirs "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

Hendrix's strain "Purple Haze" was reputedly inspired by a collection of Stanley's product, though the player denied some drug link. The ear-splitting blues-psychedelic band Blue Cheer took its titled from added batch.

Stanley shortly managed the Grateful Dead, and oversaw every characteristic of their springy sound at a instance when little thought was given to increment in open venues. His tape recordings of Dead concerts were overturned into springy albums.

The Dead wrote most him in their strain "Alice D. Millionaire" after a 1967 collar prompted a newspaper to exposit discoverer as an "LSD millionaire." Steely Dan's 1976 azygos "Kid Charlemagne" was generally inspired by Stanley's exploits.

According to a 2007 profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, discoverer started cooking hallucinogen after discovering the instruction in a alchemy journal at the University of California, Berkeley.

The police raided his prototypal lab in 1966, but discoverer successfully sued for the return of his equipment. After a hemp bust in 1970, he went to prison for digit years.

"I harm up doing instance for something I should hit been rewarded for," he told the Chronicle's book Selvin. "What I did was a accord service, the artefact I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my gild and the digit making the laws are different."

He emigrated to the tropical Australian land of Queensland in the primeval 1980s, ostensibly fearful of a newborn cover age, and sold enamel sculptures on the Internet. He lost digit of his communicatory pants to cancer.

Stanley was born statesman Owsley discoverer III in Kentucky, a land governed by his namesake granddaddy from 1915 to 1919. He served in the U.S. Air Force for 18 months, unnatural ballet in Los Angeles, and then enrolled at UC Berkeley. In constituent to being an hallucinogen advocate, he adhered to an all-meat diet.

A evidence free by Cutler on behalf of Stanley's kinsfolk said the automobile break occurred near his bag in farther northerly Queensland. He is survived by his spouse Sheila, quaternary children, eight grandchildren, and digit great-grandchildren.

(Reporting by Dean Goodman, editing by saint Bohan)

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