San Francisco — Owsley Stanley, an icon of Bay Area counterculture in the 1960s and a longtime associate of the Grateful Dead, died Sunday in a car accident in his adopted home of Queensland, Australia, according to family spokesperson Sam Cutler. He was 76.

Stanley had been driving to his home near the city of Cairns during a storm and lost control of the car, Cutler said. He died instantly. His wife Sheila suffered a broken collarbone.

Known as “the Bear,” Stanley came to prominence as the first to manufacture LSD in quantity. Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” was believed to have been inspired by a particularly potent batch of Stanley’s product. The Dead wrote the song, “Alice D. Millionaire,” in his honor after a headline in a 1967 newspaper article referred to him as an “LSD Millionaire.”

Stanley was the band’s first financial backer and briefly served as their manager before taking on the role of its sound engineer. He created the first public address system specifically dedicated to music in 1966 and was responsible for the Dead’s signature “Wall of Sound.” He was also instrumental in founding high-end instrument manufacturer Alembic Inc. and Berkeley’s concert equipment maker Meyer Sound Laboratories, which retrofitted sound equipment for AT&T Park and Zellerbach Hall.

Many of Stanley’s live recordings of the Dead were released as albums. Along with Bob Thomas, he also designed the band’s famous lighting bolt skull logo, known officially as “Steal Your Face.”

“Bear, as we knew him, was one of my all-time biggest influences,” Bob Weir, a founding member of the Dead, said in a statement. “Always, when I think of him, I think of the endless stuff he taught me or somehow made me realize; all stuff that I’ve been able to use to the benefit of countless people.”

Born Augustus Owsley Stanley III (he legally shortened his name in 1967) in Kentucky on Jan. 19, 1935, his namesake grandfather was the governor of that state from 1915 to 1919 and represented Kentucky in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.

Before enrolling at the University of California at Berkeley in 1963, Stanley served in the U.S. Air Force and studied ballet in Los Angeles. He dropped out of the school after one semester once he discovered the recipe for making LSD in the Journal of Organic Chemistry at a UC Berkeley library.