Members of the band Grateful Dead in 1985, from left rear, Bill Kreutzman, Phil Lesh, Jerry Garcia, and Mickey Hart. In front are Brent Mydland, left, and Bob Weir.

A COUNTER-culture figure at the centre of the rock and drug scene in San Francisco in the 1960s has died on a lonely road at the back of the Atherton Tableland in North Queensland.

Owsley "Bear" Stanley, the former manager of the Grateful Dead, an LSD guru who turned on thousands of people in San Francisco in the 1960s and provided the substances for the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour, died in a car crash on Saturday.

Stanley had been living in Australia for the past 20 years, but until Saturday was a very real figure to those who keep the spirit of the 1960s alive.

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His death caused internet consternation to "dead heads" - as Grateful Dead fans called themselves - all around the world, and tributes were posted in media as diverse as "Celeb Stoner", jambands.com, German web sites, and the Brooklyn Vegan.

While the Queensland Police Service issued a media release referring to "a man in his 70s" who died when his car went off the Kennedy Highway and crashed into trees between Davies Creek and Koah, inland from Kuranda, Bear's demise was broadcast to a wider audience when it was tweeted by John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist and now a rancher in the frontier state of Wyoming rancher.

In his tweet, Barlow described Stanley as an "Acid King, Annealer of the Grateful Dead, and Master Crank" who "died with his boots on.".

Stanley was the product of an establishment American family who fled to the west coast in the 1970s and dived into the emerging "flower power" scene.

One of his achievements was as the Grateful Dead's sound man for several years, who he pioneered the live recording of performances onto albums (Bear dates from pre-CD days). The album History of the Grateful Dead, Vol 1 released in 1973 was subtitled "Bear's Choice".

But his bigger contribution to the psychedelic era was in drug production. Working out of an old chemistry book from the University of California at Berkeley in San Francisco, he produced more than a million doses of LSD, to the extent where he was described yesterday by Celeb Stoner as "San Francisco's first acid chemist".

In the emerging acid rock scene of the time he became the supplier of choice for many musicians. Jim Hendrix's "Purple Haze" was allegedly inspired by Stanley's product.

He did two years prison for marijuana possession in the early 1970s, and about 20 years ago, fearful of a new ice age, he left the US and emigrated to North Queensland, where he pursued an all-meat diet and sold enamel sculptures on the internet.