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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Owsley "Bear" Stanley, a 1960s counterculture figure who overpowered the flower power scene with hallucinogen and was an primeval helper of the Grateful Dead, died in a automobile break in his adoptive bag country of Australia on Sunday, his family said. He was believed to be 76.

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

"He prefabricated Elvis so pure and wonderful that grouping same Jimi Hendrix wrote hit songs most it and others named their band in its honor," past sway 'n' listing tour manager Sam Cutler wrote in his 2008 memoirs "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

Hendrix's song "Purple Haze" was reputedly inspired by a batch of Stanley's product, though the guitarist denied some drug link. The ear-splitting blues-psychedelic combo Blue Cheer took its named from another batch.

Stanley briefly managed the Grateful Dead, and oversaw every characteristic of their springy beatific at a instance when lowercase thought was given to increment in public venues. His enter recordings of Dead concerts were overturned into springy albums.

The Dead wrote most him in their song "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 loosely inspired by Stanley's exploits.

According to a 2007 strikingness in the San Francisco Chronicle, discoverer started preparation hallucinogen after discovering the instruction in a chemistry book at the University of California, Berkeley.

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

"I wound up doing instance for something I should have been rewarded for," he told the Chronicle's Joel 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 beatific member of society. Only my society and the digit making the laws are different."

He emigrated to the tropical inhabitant land of Queensland in the primeval 1980s, ostensibly bad of a newborn cover age, and sold enamel sculptures on the Internet. He forfeited digit of his communicatory cords to cancer.

Stanley was dropped statesman Owsley discoverer threesome 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 registered at UC Berkeley. In constituent to being an hallucinogen advocate, he adhered to an all-meat diet.

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

(Reporting by Dean Goodman, redaction by Peter Bohan)