Grateful Dead First Album Promotional Poster Elephants Mouse / Kelley 1967

Grateful Dead - First Album Promotional Poster - Elephants - Mouse / Kelley 1967. This is going to be a very detailed listing. So there is story here (next) and then a word about the provenance and history of this specific poster. Warner Brothers commissioned Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley to create both the Grateful Dead's first album cover and this promotional poster for the band's first LP and press kits. Management had a small number of copies of the poster printed on thicker stock to promote the album in the Bay Area, but most copies of this extremely scarce poster were printed slightly later by Warner Bros. Records, on thin glossy stock. This is one of those rare copies.

They were factory folded to fit into Warner Brothers press kits. The poster was a typical Mouse and Kelley composition, with Kelley selecting this group of.. Maybe Hannibal's Carthaginian war elephants? Marching toward the viewer as the central image and Mouse doing all of the illustration work around it.

As the book had become more widely read, some had mistakenly assumed that the band had taken their name from the quote: We now return our souls to the creator, as we stand on the edge of eternal darkness. Let our chant fill the void in order that others may know. " They hadn't, and because Garcia worried that it seemed "pretentious, and the band were uneasy about being seen as beholden to any specific philosophy or doctrine, they asked the artist, Stanley Mouse, to stylize the script so that all but the band name were illegible. The central image depicts a 12th-century Chola sculpture of Yoga-Narasimha, an avatar of Vishnu. The bandmates traveled to Los Los Angeles in January 1967 to record their eponymous debut album The Grateful Dead. The young and inexperienced artists were given only four days to record and cut the project. At the release party in North Beach's Fugazi Hall on March 20th 1967,, Joe Smith, wearing a dapper Warner Bros. Blazer, rose to announce, I want to say what an honor it is for Warner Bros. Records to be able to introduce the Grateful Dead and its music to the world.

The Dead's Jerry Garcia stood up and, deadpan, responded that the Dead were proud to introduce Warner Bros. It was the first chapter of what would be the Grateful Dead's eternally ambivalent relationship with the record business. This poster appears in the book Grateful Dead Family Album - by Jerilyn Brandelius. Here is the story behind this poster - told by Eric Schwartz himself - My red and blue elephant poster is the one Jerilyn used in the family album, it was lent to her by laird grant or a friend of his. It says property of Alan trist in pencil on the back so it he would get it back to return to the Pacific north west after it was photographed.

So it's got some cool provenance being the example in her book. You can make out one or 2 flaws that match perfectly from the book to the one I have framed. They are from the collection and due to the sheer volume of records to sell, they are individually un-tested as to playability. This listing comes from the Lone Star Dead Radio estate, of Eric Schwartz.

It is something of his. I know that a lot of this memorabilia holds special sentimentality for fans of both the band, and of Eric. I hope that in purchasing this, you take a moment to remember Eric, and do something good and positive in his memory. Let me know if you have any questions.