THE LEGEND AND LORE BEHIND THE GRATEFUL DEAD’S ICONIC IMAGERY
From Steal Your Face and Bertha to the Dancing Bears and Terrapins.
In the last few years, ’60s psychedelia has taken a central role in fashion and streetwear, with many elements anchored on one reference point in particular: the Grateful Dead. The iconic band experienced something of a cultural revival due to a confluence of factors, including John Mayer’s quasi-reformation of the band and clothing labels founded on DIY principles, such as Online Ceramics and Gallery Dept.
Calling the Grateful Dead’s resurgence a comeback, however, isn’t exactly accurate, since the band never really went away. Since their original formation in 1965, the group has consistently toured the United States, treating aging hippies and younger fans alike to their legendary non-stop live performances. Even following the death of Jerry Garcia, the band’s lead guitarist, vocalist and songwriter, in 1995, the Dead has continued to perform under various names and modifications.
Today the band is among the most culturally pervasive American rock groups of all time, embedding themselves in our collective consciousness through their aesthetics, particularly their various logos and iconography. What follows is an overview of some of the band’s most enduring graphics, logos and designs, alongside the stories behind them.
Steal Your Face
Arguably the most well-known and ubiquitous of Dead iconography, the Steal Your Face skull was so named after its appearance on the cover of a 1976 live album of the same name—but its story begins much earlier.
The design first appeared around 1969, its creation catalyzed by the band’s need to quickly identify equipment while touring. The group’s audio engineer, Owsley Stanley, took inspiration from the contrasting red-and-blue color palette of American freeway signage to produce a circle, divided in two by a lightning bolt, with contrasting colors on either side.
Stanley, better known as “Bear,” showed this design to graphic designer Bob Thomas, who elaborated the design into the graphic we know today: a human skull with an enlarged cranium containing the original lightning bolt symbol, depicted in a contrasting red-and-blue palette. The lightning bolt contains 13 spikes, interpreted by some to symbolize a 13-step process for producing LSD, or possibly the original 13 colonies of the United States. As with any subculture fueled by the swirlings of intra-communal lore, countless interpretations of the Steal Your Face skull exist among Deadheads young and old.
Bertha (Skull & Roses)
Another iconic image from the Grateful Dead roster, the Skull & Roses was first used by designers Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse on the promo posters for a series of Dead shows at San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom in 1966. The image itself predates the Dead by nearly 50 years, originally created in 1913 by the British book illustrator Edmund Joseph Sullivan, and featured in a collection of poems by the renowned 11th-century Persian poet and philosopher Omar Khayyam.
Five years later, the Dead used the image again as the cover art for their self-titled album. The first track on that album is “Bertha,” a song with cryptic lyrics about a woman of the same name, vanished or possibly even deceased, causing the Skull & Roses image to become known by the same name.
Again, rumors about the real-life inspiration for Bertha swirled. One theory was that the name referred to a large standing floor fan that would move uncontrollably around the Dead offices, on some occasions nearly cutting off one or another member’s fingers—though Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter has since dispelled that rumor. A more plausible interpretation is that the name is a play-on-words for “birth,” the song performing a poetic recollection of the cycle of life, death and rebirth.
Dancing Bears
Though the competition is stiff, the Dancing Bears loom large among the Grateful Dead’s visual lexicon.
The story goes that the same Bob Thomas responsible for the Steal Your Face skull created the image as an homage to Owsley “Bear” Stanley. As the band’s audio engineer, Stanley oversaw the soundboard at most of their live shows, which he dutifully recorded onto a tape deck. These tapes found their way into the hands of various Deadheads, gradually growing into a subculture of fans exchanging live recordings among each other.
Owsley also oversaw another crucial component in the Grateful Dead machinery: LSD production. Stanley doubled as an amateur chemist and is believed to have synthesized around 500 grams of acid during this period, equivalent to roughly five million individual doses. In other words, there are plenty of reasons why an image of a smiling bear in rainbow colors would fit into the Grateful Dead aesthetic like a puzzle piece. The graphic itself was adapted from an old, manual typesetting slug featuring a similar bear illustration, modified to make the bear happier, dancier and trippier.
The bears first featured as part of the artwork for the album Bear’s Choice, a compilation of live recordings which, as the title suggests, were hand-selected by Bear himself from his personal collection. From there, the bears found their way onto all manner of media, most notably Bear’s LSD blotter sheets, thus cementing the bears as mascots of the ’60s LSD craze.
Of note, despite their popular moniker, the Dancing Bears aren’t actually dancing. In fact, the series of five illustrations depicts a bear marching with a military high kick—fitting given the Bears’ history of marching all over the topography of American culture.
Grateful Dead Iconography, Today
Rising to stardom during the ’60s and ’70s, the Grateful Dead came around at a time when all eyes were on the United States, and all of the United States was being transformed by movements emerging out of California. These were the decades when visual representations of culture first gained traction in modern Western culture—and, like Disney’s pink elephants, the Grateful Dead was at the right place, at the right time.
But perhaps the ultimate reason why the Grateful Dead and their visual language has endured is the reciprocity between the band, the images and the cultural movements within which they were embedded. The Dancing Bears encapsulated the psychedelic movement, the psychedelic movement largely orbited around the Grateful Dead, fashion and streetwear, always on the hunt for obscure reference points, immersed themselves in the world of psychedelia, and so on.
Now, like so many icons that emerged before, these images are part of our shared language, becoming floating signifiers, elusive images that scarcely retain association with the worlds from which they emanated, copies of copies of copies that we all somehow know, even if we don’t know how. And given the fact that the band’s still going with more fans being born every day and more T-shirts being tie-dyed, it’s unlikely to stop any time soon.