Grateful dead skull full#
Grateful dead skull series#

The album features material recorded in March and April of 1971 at Bill Graham's NYC venue Fillmore East, NYC's Hammerstein Ballroom, and Bill Graham's San Francisco venue Winterland Ballroom. The album is “Captured,: not “Capture.” This version has been corrected.The Grateful Dead's second official live album, which is technically self-titled (but known to most as Skull & Roses), is turning 50 this year, and to celebrate, the Dead are giving it a remastered reissue, available on 2LP, 2CD, and digitally. One of my hot rod things, I don’t want to even mention the guy’s name, he just stole it.Ĭorrection: An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the 1981 Journey album for which Miller created the cover art. Now, I find people like just stealing my stuff and putting it on posters. All the stuff we used was all public domain. Taking something like that that’s so iconic and bringing it out again in a new form. It’s like finding old stuff that’s good, that’s really cool and bringing back and presenting it again. It’s just a thing that all the artists did right then. That’s the Santa Rosa earthquake and the Santa Rosa Courthouse. Today, the posters are heavily collected and even featured in museums. The gig posters that Miller, Kelley and such artists as Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin crafted used bright colors, elaborate typesets and historic photos. It’s short and sweet and had to do with wine, women and song.Įarthquake, Bo Diddley, 1966, ink on illustration board And the poem that goes with this illustration is fantastic. 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. I always say that we Xeroxed it, but there weren’t Xerox machines then. 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. We were just going through that and looking for something.

Grateful dead skull full#

They had a back room full of books you couldn’t take out with great references. We would go to the San Francisco library and peruse the books on poster art. I went into ancient Egyptian mythology and learned myself.Īvalon Ballroom Skeleton and Roses, 1966, ink on illustration board Some Japanese media people came to interview me about it. “Escape” is the beetle breaking out of a planet, which was the dung ball he was pushing around.ĭo you think singer Steve Perry or anybody in the band knew about this? When the eggs hatch, the babies feed off the dung and become beetles. I did the “Captured” album in 1981, and it is a scarab that carries its eggs in a dung bowl. Journey’s seventh studio album spawned four hits, including “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” and “Open Arms.” I was the only kid in school with a new Corvette. I saw that and immediately started doing it in Detroit.

Grateful dead skull series#

There were a series of artists, like in Mad magazine, who did these monster faces, and a guy called Monty and he was in Los Angeles and had little ads in the back of hot rod magazines and he made these funny stickers. You call this genre “weirdo art.” How did you start down this road? The artist, now 74, spoke with us recently about five specific works in his book. “California Dreams” also includes images of the figurative oil paintings that Miller has worked on in recent years. But the artist’s work stretches from his early ’60s hot-rod-and-monster cartoons to the psychedelic posters pervading San Francisco and, later, iconic album covers for Steve Miller and Journey. Yes, Miller and his collaborator, the late Alton Kelley, did create the famous skeleton and roses logo adopted by the Dead. To be fair, Miller’s new book, “ California Dreams,” is about more than Jerry & Co. But we’re here because this is the 50th anniversary of the Grateful Dead, when products even loosely related to the band are springing up faster than salmon headed for Redfish Lake. Crumb and somehow found himself in a snapshot of John and Yoko during the famous bed-in. The artist Stanley “Mouse” Miller hung out with Janis Joplin, came of age around R. (Evolutionary Media Group, Mouse Kelley via AP) The famous Grateful Dead “skull and roses” logo designed by Alton Kelley and Stanley “Mouse” Miller.