Stanley "Mouse" Miller said: We [Miller and collaborator Alton Kelley] would go to the San Francisco library and peruse the books on poster art. They had a back room full of books you couldn’t take out with great references. We were just going through that and looking for something. And found this thing and thought, “This says Grateful Dead all over it.” I hate to say this, but Kelley cut it out with a pen knife. I always say that we Xeroxed it, but there weren’t Xerox machines then. I finally found it about two years ago, the actual cut-out piece, and I went, “Oh, my God.” It’s from the book of poems “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” The edition was done by an artist called Edmund Sullivan. And the poem that goes with this illustration is fantastic. It’s short and sweet and had to do with wine, women and song.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._J._Sullivan
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| Skull and Roses Album Cover - Grateful Dead Record Cover |
Owsley Said: http://www.thebear.org/GDLogo.html
In 1969 the Dead were renting a warehouse in Novato, California. I was sound man for the band at the time, and lived in Oakland. Bob Thomas, an old friend of mine had just moved from LA to the Bay area and needed a place to stay, and we needed someone to look after the warehouse, which had had a problem with break-ins.
Bob was a superb graphic artist whose work is now familiar to most Deadheads in the form of the Live Dead album cover and the Bear's Choice cover, on which the popular Dancing Bears appeared.
The Dead in those days had to play in a lot of festival style shows where the equipment would all wind up at the back of the stage in a muddle. Since every band used pretty much the same type of gear it all looked alike. We would spend a fair amount of time moving the pieces around so that we could read the name on the boxes. I decided that we needed some sort of marking that we could identify from a distance.
I was in the habit of driving from Oakland to Novato in a little MGTF which had plastic side curtains, which were not very transparent, due to aging of the plastic. One day in the rain, I looked out the side and saw a sign along the freeway which was a circle with a white bar across it, the top of the circle was orange and the bottom blue. I couldn't read the name of the firm, and so was just looking at the shape. A thought occurred to me: if the orange were red and the bar across were a lightning bolt cutting across at an angle, then we would have a very nice, unique and highly identifiable mark to put on the equipment.
A few days later I was talking to Bob and suggested that perhaps the words "Grateful dead" could be placed under the circle, using a style of lettering that would appear to be a skull if you saw it from a distance (I guess I was influenced by too many posters of the time). Any way a few hours later he came down from the loft with the design we know and love.
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https://www.britannica.com/topic/grateful-dead-folklore
grateful dead, in folktales of many cultures, the spirit of a deceased person who bestows benefits on the one responsible for his burial. In the prototypical story, the protagonist is a traveler who encounters the corpse of a debtor, to whom the honour of proper burial has been denied. After the traveler satisfies the debt, or, in some versions, pays for the burial, he goes on his way. In another version of the story, burial is prescribed for religious reasons but prohibited by civil authorities. It is this version that forms the theme of the apocryphal Book of Tobit in the Old Testament.
The hero is soon joined by another traveler (sometimes in the form of an animal, or, in the story of Tobit, an angel), who helps him in a dramatic way. In some stories the companion saves the hero’s life; in others he helps him gain a prize. In many versions, the companion offers to aid the hero, but only on condition that they divide the prize. Then, as the hero is about to comply, the companion reveals himself as the grateful spirit of the deceased whom the hero helped to bury.
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| Wes Wilson - Psychedelic Lettering |
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| Victor Moscoso - Master of Putting Extremely different colors next to each other so the image VIBRATES - especially under Blacklight... |
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| Wes Wilson Poster |
The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics.
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| Dark Star Orchestra - Surfing Bear with a Rick Griffin Flying Eyeball and Roses... |
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