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“I was looking at all these drawings and I stopped dead in my tracks,” he says. Kastor, who is from the Bay Area and first saw the Dead play live in 1967, instantly recognized it. In an adjoining room, he spied another auction preview gearing up, this one of artwork from the Victorian era.Īnd there was Sullivan’s original 9.5″ x 7″ ink drawing that had been reproduced in that book. 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.”)Įvery Awful Thing Trump Has Promised to Do in a Second TermĪfter 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.” “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. 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.
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