Cultural References
A newspaper headline identifying Stanley as an "LSD Millionaire" ran in the Los Angeles Times the day before the state of California, on October 6, 1966, criminalized the drug. The headline inspired the Grateful Dead song "Alice D. Millionaire."
Stanley is mentioned by his first name in the song "Who Needs the Peace Corps?" by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, which first appeared on the band's 1968 album We're Only in It for the Money ("I'll go to Frisco, buy a wig and sleep on Owsley's floor.").
In Mirkwood, A Novel About JRR Tolkien (Steve Hillard, 2011), a fictional character named “Osley” is modeled loosely after Owsley Stanley and is described as a fugitive from the 1960s and the “Henry Ford of Psychedelics.”
The song "Owsley" from the Songs for Owsley EP (1996) by the band Spectrum is an obvious reference to Owsley.
In the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode Santa Claus, they refer to Mr. Owsley when Santa sends a mind-altering drug under the door of some children.
The Steely Dan song "Kid Charlemagne" from the 1976 album, The Royal Scam, was loosely inspired by Stanley.
Stanley's incarceration is lamented in Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as one of the many signs of the death of the 1960s.
Stanley is referenced to in the Jefferson Airplane song "Mexico" on the Early Flight album.
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Famous quotes containing the word cultural:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)