Frank Beacham's Journal

Owsley Stanley was born 86 years ago today

Owsley Stanley was born 86 years ago today.

Stanley played a pivotal role in the San Francisco counterculture of the 1960s. As a crafts-person, he became best known simply as “Owsley” – the LSD "cook" (underground chemist).

Under the professional name of "Bear," he worked with the Grateful Dead's international fan "family."

Bear was an early soundman for The Grateful Dead, a band he met when Ken Kesey invited them to an Owsley Acid test party. As their sound engineer, Bear frequently recorded live tapes behind his mixing board and helped "The Dead" become the first performers since Les Paul to custom-develop high-fidelity audio components and sound systems.

Stanley was the first private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD. Between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced more than 1.25 million doses of LSD.

Stanley died in an automobile accident in Australia on March 12, 2011 at age 76.

Albert Hofmann, the father of LSD, was born 115 years ago

Albert Hofmann, the father of LSD, was born 115 years ago.

Hofmann was a Swiss scientist known best for being the first person to synthesize, ingest and learn of the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD).

Hofmann also was the first to isolate, synthesize and name the principal psychedelic mushroom compounds: psilocybin and psilocin. He authored more than 100 scientific articles and a number of books, including LSD: My Problem Child.

In 2007, he was ranked a shared first place, alongside Tim Berners-Lee, in The Telegraph's list of 100 greatest living geniuses.

He died in 2008.

Illustration by Alex Grey

Eddie Condon, the jazz banjoist, guitarist and bandleader, was born 115 years ago today

Eddie Condon, 1946

Photo by William P. Gottlieb

Eddie Condon, the jazz banjoist, guitarist and bandleader, was born 115 years ago today.

A leading figure in the "Chicago school" of early Dixieland, he also played piano and sang on occasion.

Born in Goodland, Indiana, Condon was the son of John and Margaret Condon. He grew up in Momence, Illinois and Chicago Heights, Illinois, where he attended St. Agnes and Bloom High School. After some time playing ukulele, he switched to banjo and was a professional musician by 1921.

He was based in Chicago for most of the 1920s, and played with such jazz notables as Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden and Frank Teschemacher.

In 1928, Condon moved to New York City. He frequently arranged jazz sessions for various record labels, sometimes playing with the artists he brought to the recording studios, including Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller. He organized racially-integrated recording sessions — when these were still rare — with Waller, Armstrong and Henry “Red” Allen.

He played with the band of Red Nichols for a time. Later, from 1938, he had a long association with Milt Gabler's Commodore Records. From the late 1930s on, he was a regular at the Manhattan jazz club, Nick's. The sophisticated variation on Dixieland music which Condon and his colleagues created there came to be nicknamed, "Nicksieland."

By this time, his regular circle of musical associates included Wild Bill Davison, Bobby Hackett, George Brunies, Edmond Hall and Pee Wee Russell. In 1939, he appeared with "Bobby Hacket and Band" in the Warner Brothers and Vitaphone film musical short-subject, "On the Air."

Condon also did a series of jazz radio broadcasts from New York's Town Hall during 1944-45 which were nationally popular. These recordings survive, and have been issued on the Jazzology label.

From 1945 through 1967, he ran his own New York jazz club — Eddie Condon's — first located on West 3rd Street in Greenwich Village and then 52nd Street near Sixth Avenue (the present site of the CBS headquarters building). Later, it moved to the south side of East 56th Street, east of Second Avenue.

In the 1950s, Condon recorded a sequence of classic albums for Columbia Records. The musicians involved in these albums — and at Condon's club — included Wild Bill Davison, Bobby Hackett (cornet), Billy Butterfield (trumpet), Edmond Hall, Peanuts Hucko, Pee Wee Russell, Bob Wilber (clarinet), Cutty Cutshall, Lou McGarity, George Brunies (trombone), Bud Freeman (tenor sax), Gene Schroeder, Dick Cary, Ralph Sutton (piano), Bob Casey, Walter Page, Jack Lesberg, Al Hall (bass), George Wettling, Buzzy Drootin and Cliff Leeman (drums).

Condon toured Britain in 1957 with a band including Wild Bill Davison, Cutty Cutshall, Gene Schroeder and George Wettling. His last tour was in 1964, when he took a band to Australia and Japan.

Condon's men, on that tour, were a roll-call of top mainstream jazz musicians: Buck Clayton (trumpet), Pee Wee Russell (clarinet), Vic Dickenson (trombone), Bud Freeman (tenor sax), Dick Cary (piano and alto horn), Jack Lesberg (bass), Cliff Leeman (drums) and Jimmy Rushing (vocals).

In 1948, his autobiography — We Called It Music — was published. The book has many interesting and entertaining anecdotes about musicians Condon worked with. Eddie Condon's Treasury of Jazz (1956) was a collection of articles by various writers co-edited by Condon and Richard Gehman.

A latter-day collaborator, clarinetist Kenny Davern, described a Condon gig: "It was always a thrill to get a call from Eddie and with a gig involved even more so. I remember eating beforehand with Bernie (Previn; trumpet) and Lou (McGarity; trombone) and everyone being in good spirits. There was a buzz on, we'd all had a taste and there was a great feel to the music."

Eddie Condon toured and appeared at jazz festivals through 1971.

He died in New York City at age 67 in 1973.

Here, Condon and his band perform “Figety Feet” in 1952

Harry Houdini died of peritonitis in a Detroit hospital on this day in 1926 — 94 years ago

Harry Houdini, the most celebrated magician and escape artist of the 20th century, died of peritonitis in a Detroit hospital on this day in 1926 — 94 years ago.

Twelve days before, Houdini had been talking to a group of students after a lecture in Montreal when he commented on the strength of his stomach muscles and their ability to withstand hard blows.

Suddenly, one of the students punched Houdini twice in the stomach. The magician hadn't had time to prepare, and the blows ruptured his appendix.

He fell ill on the train to Detroit. After performing one last time, he was hospitalized. Doctors operated on him, but to no avail. The burst appendix poisoned his system. On October 31, Houdini died.

Houdini was born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, the son of a rabbi. At a young age, he immigrated with his family to Appleton, Wisconsin, and soon demonstrated a natural acrobatic ability and an extraordinary skill at picking locks.

When he was nine, he joined a traveling circus and toured the country as a contortionist and trapeze performer. He soon was specializing in escape acts and gained fame for his reported ability to escape from any manacle. He went on his first international tour in 1900 and performed all over Europe to great acclaim.

In executing his escapes, he relied on strength, dexterity and concentration — not trickery — and was a great showman.

In 1908, Houdini began performing more dangerous and dramatic escapes. In a favorite act, he was bound and then locked in an ironbound chest that was dropped into a water tank or thrown off a boat.

In another, he was heavily bound and then suspended upside down in a glass-walled water tank. Other acts featured Houdini being hung from a skyscraper in a straitjacket, or bound and buried — without a coffin — under six feet of dirt.

In his later years, Houdini campaigned against mediums, mind readers and frauds who claimed supernatural talents but depended on tricks.

At the same time, he was deeply interested in spiritualism and made a pact with his wife and friends that the first to die was to try and communicate with the world of reality from the spirit world.

Several of these friends died, but Houdini never received a sign from them. Then, on Halloween 1926, Houdini himself passed on at the age of 52.

His wife waited for a communiqué from the spirit world but it never came. She declared the experiment a failure shortly before her death in 1943.

Houdini shown in 1912