autographed grateful dead dancing bear posters

in Santa Rosa, which beganin that same warehouse to design and make more modern instruments for theband than were at that time available.AJ Masthay will be dropping a new Grateful Dead art print today via Bottleneck Gallery, entitled Grateful Dead: Forever Grateful. The print is on heavy, off-white watercolour paper 14' by 17'.Īnother logo that he designed at around the same time was the one for Alembic Guitar Co. Please write if you are interested in getting one of the ones left, the money goes to his family. He gave the last of the prints to me (a few months before he died) to help sell them. He liked the test block so well that he decided to pull 50 prints, signed, numbered and hand coloured them. In 1992, Bob decided to produce hand-pulled prints of the logo as a hardwood block engraving, but first he cut a test block in pine, to see how the design looked as a woodcut. Any way a fewhours later he came down from the loft with the design we know and love. It helped make it easier to find our stuff in the crunch.I still have an old toolbox with one of the stencils on it.Ī few days later I was talking to Bob and suggested that perhaps the words'Grateful dead' could be placed under the circle, using a styleof lettering that would appear to be a skull if you saw it from a distance(I guess I was influenced by too many posters of the time). This was the first version, and we put it onto all our gear. Then with one side up, the red half circle went on top ofthe dried white paint and after wiping off the red and turning the stencilover, the blue was applied. Then he held the stencil to an amp and sprayed a circleof white paint. But it was a half circlewith a jagged edge. One was a circular hole, about 5 1/2 inches in diameter, and the otherwas a part of a circle 5 inches in diameter. A thought occurred to me:if the orange were red and the bar across were a lightning bolt cuttingacross at an angle, then we would have a very nice, unique and highly identifiablemark to put on the equipment.Īt the warehouse I told Bob the idea that I had, and he made a quick sketch.A mutual friend, Ernie Fischbach, who was visiting with Bob, said 'Giveit to me, I'll show you an easy way to put it on the boxes.' Whereupon he proceeded to cut holes in a couple of pieces of stencilpaper. I couldn't read the name ofthe firm, and so was just looking at the shape. One day in the rain, I looked out the side and saw a signalong the freeway which was a circle with a white bar across it, the topof the circle was orange and the bottom blue. I was in the habit of driving from Oakland to Novato in a little MGTF whichhad plastic side curtains, which were not very transparent, due to agingof the plastic. I decided that we needed some sort of markingthat we could identify from a distance. Wewould spend a fair amount of time moving the pieces around so that we couldread the name on the boxes. Sinceevery band used pretty much the same type of gear it all looked alike. The Dead in those days had to play in a lot of festival style shows wherethe equipment would all wind up at the back of the stage in a muddle. Bob Thomas, an old friend of mine had just moved fromLA to the Bay area and needed a place to stay, and we needed someone tolook after the warehouse, which had had a problem with break-ins.īob was a superb graphic artist whose work is now familiar to most Deadheadsin the form of the Live Dead album cover and the Bear's Choice cover, onwhich the popular Dancing Bears appeared. Iwas sound man for the band at the time, and lived in Oakland.

In 1969 the Dead were renting a warehouse in Novato, California. This is the logo that Bob Thomasand I designed for Grateful Dead

Autographed grateful dead dancing bear posters