July 4, 2015

"The first time artist Stanley 'Mouse' Miller and drawing partner Alton Kelley were hired to do a concert poster for the Grateful Dead, they spelled the name wrong."

"They’d never heard of the band, so when they got a second chance, they tried just a little bit harder, creating a bleached skeleton wearing a crown of red roses to reference the name Grateful (not 'Greatful') Dead. 'Kind of life and death together,' says Mouse, who had always liked to draw skeletons. 'I colored it in and did the lettering, and it changed art history.'... It was January 1966, the year before the Summer of Love, and the whole scene unspooled before him as he transitioned from drawing hot rods to drawing posters for the rock dances.... Kelley was an idea man, and Mouse did the drawing and lettering. Their first poster was a knockoff of the reefer-toking Zig-Zag man for a double bill of Big Brother & the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service... The Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver, Big Brother, Steve Miller, Captain Beefheart, out-of-town acts like Jimi Hendrix. Everybody went to the shows and dances in Edwardian outfits from thrift shops. 'Every day was like a month, with so much stuff happening,' Mouse says. 'The scene was just crazy. Wild.'... Then it collapsed under the weight of all that importance.... 'This wonderful, colorful scene just kind of died,' says Mouse, who left when Eric Clapton summoned him to put some flames on his Rolls-Royce in London. Clapton had totaled the Rolls by the time Mouse got there..."

From "Book, retrospective give Grateful Dead artist Mouse his due."

The book is: "California Dreams: The Art of Stanley Mouse."

9 comments:

Quayle said...

Did he doubt or did he try?
Answers aplenty in the bye and bye,
Talk about your plenty, talk about your ills,
One man gathers what another man spills.

Laslo Spatula said...

On this Fourth of July we should take a special moment to commemorate 50 years of Boomer self-celebration.

I'm going to do my part by watching the end of "Easy Rider" over and over again.

I am Laslo.

Expat(ish) said...

"it changed art history"

Unless you have a time machine you can't really do that.

I would argue that it didn't even really make much more than a ripple even in US pop art. Look, in the mid 80's, CD's captured, tortured, and mortally wounded the album and thus album art, so we're talking less than a 20 year window after this cover. And while I was a huge dead fan (most records, most tapes, all CD's) the album art I remember is my denim cover Sticky Fingers or my Sex Pistols Bollocks cover or Destroyer. I bet if you made a list of 10 albums whose art you remember it won't include more than one, if that, from the Dead.

Happy 4th, I gotta go make a Kiss Pandora station and see what streams.

-XC

Expat(ish) said...

@laslo - you win

tom swift said...

I never understood the big deal with the Greatful Dead poster. All I could see was that somebody did a straightforward ripoff of one of Edmund Sullivan's illustrations for a 1913 publication of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Of course Sullivan's drawing (as published) was all B&W, so the big '60s innovation was adding red to the roses. That crayon work was Mouse's contribution. Big deal. Obviously your man in the street has no idea who Edmund Sullivan was, but it was clear enough that the drawing was definitely not "organic" to the 1960s.

Carol said...

ha, artistes tend to have problems with words, whether using crayons or a Mac.

Roger Sweeny said...

To see how close the famous Dead poster is to "Edmund Sullivan's illustrations for a 1913 publication of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam," compare

http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/sullivan/rubaiyat.html

http://www.sb.kraljeva-sutjeska.com/foto/themes/rainy_day/images/___grateful%20dead%20skeleton%20art

BTW, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has a permanent exhibition of '60s concert posters. They are at least as good as some of the pricier modern art in the vicinity.

Known Unknown said...

I'm 'curating" an Album Covers We Love um, photo album on Facebook.

It's the royal "We" I suppose.

Right now, has only 2 covers in it, but that's because I turned the project into a FB photo album, rather than just random posts which I've been doing the better part of 2 years.

I'm going to be adding a ton more, but many are of the post-CD variety. Vinyl is still big in certain circles.

Laslo Spatula said...

@EMD:

Clicked your lik:

Sorry, this page isn't available

The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed.


Just so you know.

I am Laslo.