The Cover Uncovered: How the Grateful Dead created the artwork for ‘Skull & Roses’
On September 24th, 1971, The Grateful Dead released their second live double album. Jerry Garcia and co. wanted to call it Skull Fuck. Rather unsurprisingly, their label wasn’t so keen. Instead, it was decided the album would be published without a title appearing anywhere on the album cover. Of course, Deadheads need something to differentiate one album from the next, so they looked to the cover art for inspiration, just as Beatles Fans had done with The White Album. On inspecting Alton Kelly and Stanley Mouse’s psychedelic illustration, they settled on Skull & Roses.
By the 1960s, the art of the 19th century was back in fashion – in a countercultural sense, of course. In both Britain and America, there was a burgeoning sense that the modern world was becoming a rather grim place to be.
In London, for example, much of the city’s Tudor, Georgian and Victorian architecture had been obliterated and replaced with grim, modernist housing. With Britons feeling the walls of their cities closing in on them, it’s little wonder they started looking backwards. Even The Beatles – widely accepted as the most forward-thinking pop group of the era – found themselves embracing the aesthetics of Victoriana.
Though America had been left relatively unscathed by the war, there was a huge interest in 19th and early 20th-century artists there, too, which is perhaps why, in 1965, a San Franciscan art gallery decided to launch an exhibition dedicated to artists like Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and the like. The Jugendstile Expressionism exhibit was visited by countless designers who would go on to pioneer the hippy aesthetic.
Poster designer Wes Wilson, for example, would later tell Time Magazine that he’d been inspired by the expressionist, pre-raphaelite and art nouveau artists on display, who he respected for “really putting it out there.” His posters took the aesthetics of such artists and injected them with vibrant technicolour, a popular technique among designers of the era. Sometimes, they’d even pull images directly from art nouveau and add high-contrast colours to make them even more eye-catching, which is precisely what Kelly and Mouse did for their now-iconic poster for The Grateful Dead’s concert at the Avalon Ballroom, Oxford – later used as the cover art for Skull & Roses.
On being commissioned, the duo began exploring their local library, where they came across The Rubaiyat, a collection of 11th-century poems by the Persian writer Omar Khayyam. To their amazement, this particular 1913 edition featured illustrations by British Artist Edmund Joseph, one of which depicted a skeleton – drawn in black and white – surrounded by a canvas of roses. “We saw that skeleton and said, ‘This says Grateful Dead all over it — we have to use this,’” Mouse told Rolling Stone. “Given how old the illo was by then, it seemed pretty copyright-free.”
The only problem was that the book was so valuable that it wasn’t available for loan. Kelly wasn’t bothered, quickly cutting the illustration out of the priceless book with his penknife. It was then brought to the studio and copied using a Photostat machine. With the drawing copied, mouse-coloured it in and added the accompanying lettering, which they’d taken from the Khayyam poem. “One thing is certain, that life flies,” it reads, “one thing is certain, and the rest is lies.” And with that, one of the most iconic album covers of the psychedelic era was born.
