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Unable to make out the name of the firm it was advertising, all of Bear’s attentions were given to the visuals… and that’s when he had an idea. The top of the circle was orange, the bottom was blue. The sign was a circle with a white bar running through it. After glancing to the side, his eyes were drawn to a particular sign. In Bear’s case, the light bulb moment came as he was driving along the freeway one night in the rain. Sometimes, inspiration strikes you in the most unlikely of places. I decided that we needed some sort of marking we could identify from a distance,” he’s since recalled on his blog. We would spend a fair amount of time moving the pieces around so we could read the name on the boxes. Since every band used the same type of gear it all looked alike. “The Dead in those days had to play a lot of festivals where the equipment would all wind up in a muddle bacstage. In 1969, the Dead were doing the festival rounds – great for raising their fan numbers, maybe, but a nightmare for Bear and the other members of crew who had to sort out their gear from the other bands. Along with being the first known private individual to manufacture mass amounts of LSD, Bear was the Dead’s very first soundman.
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It all started with a man called Augustus Owsley Stanley III, or ‘Bear’ for short. Weirdly enough, it was created less from intent and more by necessity. As intrinsically linked to the band as psychedelia, it’s been a part of the Dead’s history for more years than most of us have been alive. If you’ve heard of the Grateful Dead, you’ll know their ‘Steal Your Face’ lightning skull logo. And why would they need to when they had such a fabulous array of images to choose from? But for most people, there’s one design in particular that screams ‘Grateful Dead’ – the “Steal Your Face” lightning skull. With so much visual iconography to draw from, it’s little wonder they struggled to put their name behind just one emblem. As the Dallas News notes, they were one of the first bands to use psychedelic light shows and among the first of their peers to realize the pulling power of a well-designed gig poster. As anyone who knows their music history will tell you, the Grateful Dead has a long, proud association with the visual arts. When it comes to band emblems, though, few are quite so legendary (or quite so many) as the Grateful Dead’s. The Roling Stones’ “Hot Lips”, Social Distortion’s dancing “Skelly”, Led Zeppelin’s “Zoso”… all iconic bands, all made that little bit more iconic thanks to their excellent choice in logos. It’s not fair to say a band lives and dies by the quality of its logo, but a good one doesn’t exactly hurt.