in the late 70s, with the white background, but it was too limited a pressing to take hold and plus, by then it was too late. There was a remix of the album released by Warner Bros. Skully also attributes the cover art to the wrong artist, so I would perhaps take what he says with a grain of salt. Skully says the band was pissed to see that their album had been released with a purple background, as it took away from the vision that they had creatively. Records overrode them and instead went with purple, perhaps to draw a connection between the Dead and the Jimi Hendrix song “Purple Haze”, which was massively popular at the time. The painting used as the album cover was done by Bill Walker, whom had been asked to do the album cover by Phil Lesh earlier in 1968.Īccording to Rock Skully, who was a Grateful Dead manager from 1965 to 1985, the band had initially wanted to give the record a white background, but Warner Bros. Anthem of the Sun (1968)Īnthem of the Sun came a little more than a year after the band’s debut album, and both the music and the album cover was more in line with the psychedelic sound that the Dead had been exploring at the time. One blogger dives deep into how Kelley may have acquired that photo. Jerry Garcia, 1969Īlso featured on the cover is a low-angle shot of a statue of the Man-Lion avatar of the Hindu god Visnu, Yoga-Narasimha, which was on display at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City at the time. The result of that has been that all the places we’ve been where people have had the album, we’ve been able to hear their translations. So we talked to Stanley and said could you do something that almost says something but doesn’t quite. We didn’t like it because we thought it was a tad pretentious. Apparently the reason for this was spontaneous, as Jerry Garcia explained in an interview with Ralph Gleason in 1969: The words at the top read, “In the land of the dark the ship of the sun is driven by the / Grateful Dead”. This was the first of many times that we would see the Dead using typography that is intentionally difficult to read. The photo of the band was taken by Herb Greene, and then Kelley turned it into a collage and mouse assembled the actual cover design. The Grateful Dead ‘s first album cover was designed by Stanley Mouse in collaboration with Alton Kelley, a pair that would create a whole lot of trippy Grateful Dead art over the years. Keep on truckin’! The Grateful Dead (1967) Since I couldn’t help myself, I’ve also included a bonus image-only section after the main releases with more cool Grateful Dead album art that I’ve dug up on the web. So for the scope of this article I’ve stuck with just the thirteen studio albums and the main live albums that were part of their major label obligations. Some of them even have interesting stories attached to them.Īs much as we would love to list out every single Grateful Dead release, including all the live albums and Dick’s Picks and all that good stuff, we would all be here for the next three months. Each album features a unique design that goes hand-in-hand with the psychedelic and goofy nature of the band. While the music is certainly very special, for this article we’re going to focus on Grateful Dead album covers. In fact, the Grateful Dead machine is still releasing new live albums to this day, and have continued to do so ever since the late 1960s, when they released their first live album, Live / Dead (1969). The Grateful Dead released a respectable thirteen studio albums over the course of their 30 years as as band, and of course hundreds of live albums, their bread and butter.
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