Dancing bear grateful dead how to#
Dancing bear grateful dead license#

We’d go into the lights and our hands, which had residue from working with chemicals, it’d be fluorescing and, like, going wild! It was crazy. We’d have these strobe lights and the lights that make everything look a certain weird color, and we would come back from making LSD and we'd go to Family Dog, Avalon, and we’d be dancing. He was great.ĭancing was a huge part of the Acid Tests. But Bear, he was light on his feet and he could dance. Big Steve, you know? What? But Big Steve wasn’t a dancer. He would tell them that and they’d be like. He used to say to the hippies, and they made fun of him, that ballet is the best exercise. That was one thing that brought us together - that we totally love to dance, and we danced at every show. RHONEY STANLEY: I loved to dance with Bear. Here’s Rhoney Stanley, partner to Owsley’s in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But first, let’s talk about Bear, dancing. JESSE: We’ll work our way back to the dancing bears.

Dancing bear grateful dead how to#

STARFINDER STANLEY: Well it did, but it was pretty challenging to reverse-engineer and figure out how to maintain. RICH MAHAN: But I'm sure it all worked flawlessly. I'm not sure I can work on this.” Because he had combined 12-volt DC, American 110, Australian 220… solar and wind. After he passed, when his widow, Sheila, went to try to get some help with the electric system, the electrical guy came in and said, “Holy cow. When he moved down to Australia, he built his own compound, put up the solar panels and put in the septic system, wired the electricity. If he was going to put time into things, he was going to do it to the best of his ability. He had many, many different interests and many talents, and he never did anything halfway. And he was really a renaissance man in every sense of the word. STARFINDER STANLEY: Bear had firm views on pretty much everything and anything you could come up with. But he’d probably explain a lot of other things too. If you asked Bear himself, he’d explain the bears on Bear’s Choice weren’t dancing at all. It was artist Bob Thomas who put the bears in a circle around the back cover.

It was also the first release of music from what Owsley called his Sonic Journals, vérité documents of his work as a sound engineer. It was a tribute to Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, who’d passed away that spring. The bears that you know first appeared in July 1973 on the Grateful Dead live album, The History of the Grateful Dead, Volume One: Bear’s Choice. But, as you may have noticed, there sure are a lot of them. That’s a lot for some little cuddly bears. In addition to being the Grateful Dead’s first in-house audio engineer and a pioneer who helped transform live concert sound, Owsley was also the most legendary underground LSD chemist in history, a story inseparable from the history of the Dead - and, for that matter, perhaps the entirety of Western culture over the past half-century. And they’re some excellent tracks to leave behind. Owsley Stanley, also known as the Bear, or just Bear, made many tapes. He was born Augustus Owsley Stanley III in 1935, though he hated the “Augustus” and had it legally changed later on. The Bear in question is also the person responsible for that recording and many more, by the Grateful Dead and others.

JESSE: That was the Grateful Dead on June 28th, 1969 in Santa Rosa, California, covering Porter Wagoner’s “Ol’ Slew Foot” and answering the musical question: “Does a bear drop in the woods?” JERRY GARCIA : Only if there’s someone there to hear it. Does a bear drop in the woods? That is the question. PHIL LESH : This song is about bear drops. These bears might look cuddly and cute, but there’s a bit more to the story. But they’re everywhere, an iconography permanently associated with the Grateful Dead.īut why bears? And why are they dancing? It’s kind of like asking what egg-laying rabbits have to do with Easter, but there’s a lot more LSD involved. Maybe you love them, maybe you hate them. When there are baseball games, people wear them as costumes and dance on top of the dugout. They’re on sweatshirts and scarves and golf balls and pretty much anything you can put a dancing bear on.

Dancing bear grateful dead license#

They’re on license plate holders and stickers that get stuck on bathroom mirrors in bars. Maybe you’ve never even heard of the Grateful Dead before and you accidentally clicked on this somehow - you’ve still seen these bears, trust me.