Owsley 'Bear' Stanley | Hippie icon, 76

Owsley "Bear" Stanley, 76, a 1960s counterculture icon who worked with the psychedelic rock band the Grateful Dead and was a prolific LSD producer, died in a car crash in Australia, his family said Monday.

Lyrics sung by the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and Frank Zappa reference Mr. Stanley and his brushes with the law, underlining his influence.

Mr. Stanley produced an estimated pound of pure LSD, or roughly five million "trips" of normal potency of the hallucinogenic drug, after enrolling in 1963 at the University of California at Berkeley and becoming involved in the drug scene that underpinned the hippie movement, according to the BookRags.com website.

He was an accomplished sound engineer who worked for the Grateful Dead and inspired the band's dancing-bear logo.

Mr. Stanley, who adopted Australia as his home country in the early 1980s when he became convinced that the Northern Hemisphere was destined for a new ice age. He was the son of a U.S. government attorney, and his namesake grandfather, Augustus Owsley Stanley, was a Kentucky governor and U.S. senator.

Mr. Stanley remained unrepentant about his pioneering role in the Californian drug culture that landed him in prison for two years in the early 1970s.

"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for," he told the San Francisco Chronicle in a rare media interview in 2007. "What I did was a community service, the way I look at it." - AP