The five best Grateful Dead album covers
They say that album artwork is a dying form in the age of streaming. Since music is now an amorphous app that lives on our phones with no real meaning anymore, crafting a compelling visual identity for a piece of music makes about as much sense as giving it flavour. Despite my words, I actually don’t think this is quite the case. Not because album artwork is making a comeback, but quite simply because not many bands have the visual identity of someone like the Grateful Dead.
It’s a little rich to talk about the holy nature of album art when most album covers were stock images found under a sofa in the label offices. Most likely, they were shoved in front of the band manager’s face for half a second before he said “fuck it, sure” in a cocaine-fueled haze. It’s actually quite rare to have had a band that cared enough to make their album sleeves pop just as much as the music within them, but the Dead were that band, most of the time.
After all, the group was so insanely prolific that, especially when you take into account their live albums, I’m sure most of the time the above statement was true even for a band that really cared the way Jerry Garcia’s psychedelic mob did. The vast majority of the band’s releases are some slapped-together eyesore featuring garishly painted versions of the band’s signature ‘Steal Your Face’ skull.
So, let’s go through the band’s full back catalogue and find some choice album artwork that shows that the band could get just as visually psychedelic as they could musically.
Five of the best Grateful Dead album covers:
‘Blues for Allah’ – 1975
We begin with one that may seem a little low on the list, especially if the more die-hard Deadheads in our fine readership find this article. The sleeve to one of the band’s most celebrated albums is great, but I feel it’s one that slightly misrepresents the contents, knocking it a few points lower than the music deserves. True, it passes the basic Grateful Dead album cover test of “would look great airbrushed on the side of a Dodge van”.
However, the murky, metallic cover palette and robed skeleton playing the violin takes this away from the hippie vibes the band are normally known for. In fact, it looks more like the other end of the Dodge van aesthetic, recalling ’90s prog metal, such as Tool, more than Jerry Garcia’s band. Call me fastidious, but a sleeve has to represent what’s within it, and this record doesn’t to me.
<em>'</em>American Beauty<em>’ </em>- 1970
Speaking of the Grateful Dead’s most beloved records, we move on to arguably the band’s best moment. Like the music within, the cover of their 1970s masterpiece is simple yet effective on the surface: a photo of an airbrushed metal disk, a rose in the centre, and the words ‘American Beauty’ painted in suitably groovy font. Except, is that what they actually say?
If you look a little closer, you see the twist. The word on the bottom half of the album cover can be read two ways. If you follow the blue top half of the word, you get the album’s title proper. If you follow the pink bottom half of the words, you find the word “Reality” instead. Given how partial the Deadheads are to mind-expanding substances, one can only imagine how mental the first person to realise that must have gone.
‘Workingman’s Dead’ – 1970
At number three, we have a complete outlier. Most Dead records have a painted album cover so unrepentantly hippie-coded that the smell of patchouli seems to follow them around more or less inherently. Workingman’s Dead, much like its title, goes for something a little less out there and a little more rustic.
In fact, the photo on the album cover, in all its faded, old-timey Americana glory, looks like it could have been taken in the 1860s. Until you realise that the cowboys on the cover are in fact The Grateful Dead themselves, and they’re standing on a dolled-up street corner in San Francisco. Still, that mix of old and new visions of Americana is a perfect summation of what to find in the record, so it makes the midway point of this list.
‘Europe ’72’ – 1972
This one’s just fun. As mentioned previously, the Dead have more live albums to their name than drug busts, and that’s saying something. Unlike most bands of their stature, they didn’t quite have the pop hits to make them money through record sales, but could tour like nobody’s business. So it made sense to make as many recordings of those (often astonishing) concerts and sell them back to their devoted fanbase to make up for the losses the band encountered on the road back then.
The vast majority of these releases had about as much thought put into their covers as the material those covers were printed on, but we’ve got a charming exception here. On a bright, wordless cover, a rainbow-encapsulated world sees a well-worn shoe stepping across from North America to Europe. It’s cheerful, accessible, yet says everything you need to know about the contents of the record. Only the fact that the sleeve lacks a little of that signature Grateful Dead weirdness keeps it off the top spot.
‘Anthem of the Sun’ – 1968
Well, now we’re talking. In January of 1968, Phil Lesh asked his friend, celebrated artist Bill Walker, to create the cover for his band’s then-upcoming second record. It says a lot that the initial project wasn’t even half finished by the time the band needed to release the record. Yet what Walker had created was so astonishing that they took it, gave it a fetching purple background, and one of the most eye-catching record sleeves of the late 1960s was complete.
Walker then spent the next three decades completing the piece, as he detailed in his self-written pamphlet, Anthem Guide, which gives incredible insight into his creative process on the work. He says, “The drawing unfolded intuitively and spontaneously…I had the sense that my eyes were merely transferring, out of a boundless and radiant space, the image onto the canvas, and all I had to do was effortlessly delineate or play the patterns I was seeing… A dynamic sense of rhythmic unity and symmetry imposed itself, and the patterns and colour evolved out of that sense of resonant harmony and symmetry.”
In essence, what he’s describing sounds to me like taking the artistic journey the Grateful Dead took with their music and transferring it to a visual medium. Because of that, at every level, Walker’s cover for Anthem of the Sun is deservedly at the top of this list.
