The image also became the band’s logo, used on stationery and business cards.Īround 1993, Kastor, who owned the legendary Greenwich Village art gallery Psychedelic Solutions, popped into a preview of an auction at Christie’s in New York, with an eye toward buying a rare Velvet Underground piece of art. (Part of the accompanying poem, which was not used in the poster, read, “One thing is certain, that life flies one thing is certain, and the rest is lies.”)Īfter it was used in the poster for the show, the Dead cropped it to the skull for the cover of their 1971 live album Grateful Dead (also known as “ Skull and Roses,” or sometimes by the name the band preferred, “Skullfuck”). Using a pre-Xerox Photostat machine, they made a copy of the drawing, and Mouse colored it in and added the now-iconic lettering. So Kelley cut it out of the tome with a pen knife, sneaked the page out of the library and brought it to the studio they were using. The problem, as Mouse admits, is that the book was so valuable that it couldn’t be checked out of the library. Given how old the illo was by then, Mouse adds, “It seemed pretty copyright-free.”Īlso See The Weeknd’s ‘Dawn FM Experience’ is Musical World-Building at Its Best “We saw that skeleton and said, ‘This says Grateful Dead all over it - we have to use this,’” Mouse recalls. This particular edition, from 1913, featured illustrations by British artist Edmund Joseph (sometimes E.J.) Sullivan, and one in particular spoke to them: a black-and-white drawing of a skeleton surrounded by roses, with a crown of them atop its head. Back to the library they went, and in the stacks, they found The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a collection of 11th century poems by the Persian writer. That year, the duo was recruited to make a poster for the Dead’s September 1966 show at the Avalon Ballroom.

For inspiration, the two would sometimes drop into the San Francisco Public Library to peruse rare art and poster books. By 1966, artists Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley, two San Francisco-based artists, had formed a partnership and were already tapped into the Dead world. Untangling the saga of that illustration is nearly as long and strange a trip as the Dead’s saga itself. He snapped it up, and now that piece (titled “A Skeleton Amid Roses”) can be seen publicly, for the first time in more than three decades, in “Field Trip: Psychedelic Solution, 1986-1995,” part of the Outsider Art Fair at the Metropolitan House in New York. About 30 years ago, artist, curator and art collector Jacaeber Kastor was checking out a gallery auction and came across the nearly century-old ink drawing that served as the basis of the Dead’s logo and album art. The duality of virgin floral beauty and the cult of death was of a piece with the message of a band known for saying, 'a friend of the devil is a friend of mine.Anyone perusing a new psychedelic-era artwork exhibit in New York is bound to pause along the way and think, “Wait, isn’t that a Grateful Dead album cover?”Īnd they would be partly correct. The Rose was the artistic work of Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley. The first was the creation of sound engineer Owsley Stanley, also known as 'the Bear,' who says he wanted to put a mark on the band's equipment so he knew who owned what at multiact music festivals. Two skull-based logos that hold up include the red, white and blue lightning bolt and the rose. The Dead wove the image of the skull through much of their presentation, from album design to music-festival art. Could there be a better insignia than a tie-dyed skull to celebrate the revenge of the turned on, tuned in and dropped out?

But it was the Dead, among other acts, who set the tone for the let-it-all-loose rebellion of the '60s. The Beatles, of course, would eventually come around in agreement. When the group formed in 1965, the Dead provided an American alternative to the overpolished and squeaky-clean Beatlemania still captivating the world. To become a deadhead was to adopt a persona, which often meant the consumption of a psychotropic substance or two and an embrace of an aesthetic symbolized by the psychedelic skull.

Grateful dead skeleton