Who was Steely Dan’s ‘Kid Charlemegne’?
As far as protagonists go, Augustus Owsley Stanley III is one of the more interesting to have a song dedicated to him. King of an acid empire, ‘Owsley’ set about distilling some of the purest, high-quality acid 1960s San Francisco could handle. As well as having a hand in the blossoming counterculture, in 1976, he was subject to a Steely Dan reimagining of his chemical career.
It goes without saying that in the ’60s, acid was in high demand. Everyone was drinking the Kool-Aid, all wanting a taste of ego death and the ability to listen to a Grateful Dead record from start to finish. Owsley was their man. Between him and then-girlfriend Melissa Cargill – a wealthy chemist, of all things – hippies throughout the West Coast were furnished with the finest LSD they could conjure in a lab.
Steely Dan nodded to the underground operation with the lyrics: “On the hill, the stuff was laced with kerosene / But yours was kitchen clean.” As Walter Becker explained, the figure they wrote about was a “kind of an ‘Owsleyesque’ figure that existed in our mind’s eye”.
Donald Fagen also claimed that the song was set somewhere between 1968 and 1976, by which time Owsley’s cachet as a drug kingpin had fizzled. A few stints in prison after various drug busts certainly contributed, but the frenzied psychedelic era of music was also slowly being phased out, giving way to disco and rock. The changing tide of culture was also echoed in the lyric: “This life can be very strange /
All those Day-Glo freaks who used to paint the face / They’ve joined the human race / Some things will never change.”
“I think he was based on the idea of the outlaw acid chef of the ’60s who had essentially outlived the social context of his speciality,” said Becker. “But, of course, he was still an outlaw.” As time marches on within the song, Kid Charlemagne seems to fall from grace, much as Owsley did.
Steely Dan set the story to a searing Larry Carlton solo, who completed the one featured in the middle of the song in only two takes. Both were so good, and each part wound up on the song, and Carlton’s improvisational jam wraps up the psychedelic story. It remained a live favourite, not least for its driving groove – but the lyric: “Is there gas in the car, yes there’s gas in the car!”, which Becker said audiences sang along to every set. In a humorous parallel to the often ludicrous nature of the hippie counterculture Owsley helped produce, an unlikely party once took Becker to task over the lyric.
“A cab driver once told me that that was the stupidest line he’s ever heard.”
