Who designed the Grateful Dead’s logo?
It’s all any Deadhead needs to see on the street or across a crowded bar anywhere in the world. If they spot that shorn-off skull couched in red and blue, with a circular mind blown apart by a lightning bolt, they know they’ve found a kindred spirit. A true fan of Jerry, Bobby, Pigpen and the rest, who likely saw the Grateful Dead in the flesh at some point during their three-decade freakout.
Now known as ‘Steal Your Face’ (or SYF for short), which is Deadhead code-blowing someone’s mind with a crazy jam that lasts at least eight minutes, this logo has become the ultimate symbol of the world’s ultimate live band. It originally took its name from the Dead’s 1972 song ‘He’s Gone’, which includes the line “Steal your face right off your head” in reference to the father of band drummer Mickey Hart, a notorious thief who’d stolen from the band. Its subsequently adopted meaning among fans feels far more fitting, though, especially since the band anointed it with an album title of its own in 1976.
On the cover of Steal Your Face, the iconic red, white and blue blown-out skull first appeared in an official capacity, and it’s become universally recognised ever since. Yet the history of the logo actually goes back much further. And we owe Owsley Stanley, better known as Bear, the pioneer of psychedelia and legendary sound engineer for every single one of the Dead’s 2300+ shows, for keeping this history alive.
On his own website, Bear has related his own role in the creation of this inimitable image. In fact, he claimed to have come up with the idea for it himself. He was driving along the California freeway one day in 1969 when he saw a sign, in his words, “a circle with a white bar across it”. Unlike the Dead’s logo, “The top of the circle was orange,” but it was Bear had his own colour preference.
At that moment, a lightbulb went off in his head. “If the orange were red and the bar across were a lightning bolt cutting across at an angle,” he thought, “Then we would have a very nice, unique and highly identifiable mark to put on the equipment.” However, Bear was better at mixing up the medicine and the Dead’s live sound than he was at drawing. For the design of the logo, he had to defer to a graphic artist.
So, who was the designer?
That artist was Bob Thomas, a Los Angeles-born friend of Bear’s, who was looking after the Grateful Dead’s warehouse in Novato at the time. Thomas would later design the covers for the band’s albums Live Dead and Bear’s Choice. When Bear told him about his idea, he immediately made some sketches of what later became ‘Steal Your Face’, except without the skull at the bottom.
Bear’s initial reason for wanting a band logo was to demarcate the Dead’s live equipment from the equipment of other acts they were touring with. “We put it onto all our gear,” he explained. “It helped make it easier to find our stuff in the crunch.”
But once he saw how it looked, he got excited about developing it further. He asked Thomas to elaborate on his design by writing the words “Grateful Dead” underneath the red and blue circle in the shape of a skull. Thomas didn’t quite manage the words but instead incorporated the circle into the image of a skull. According to Bear, that version was “the design we know and love”. And it remained that way through 25 years of records and live performances.
