This continued for 20+ years after the bear was first introduced, and still continues to this day.
#Grateful dead dancing bears free#
All of a sudden people were wearing the bears at Dead shows and elsewhere, and the symbol continued to gain momentum while also being free advertising for the band.
Soon fans began to bootleg the original Grateful Dead bears as well as spin-off designs onto t-shirts, stickers, and whatever else they could dream up. It’s easy to see how the symbol became so heavily associated with the band, and have come to represent the music, the energy, and of course, the LSD. So, people were tripping on Owsley’s dancing bear acid while watching the Grateful Dead, who had recently released a live album with the bears on the cover. It’s a lot more fun to imagine the bears dancing along to the music, though, so we’re happy to pretend that Bear never made that distinction.Īfter the release of the album, the dancing bears started appearing on Owsley Stanley’s blotter art, which also happened to be in heavy circulation at Grateful Dead concerts. Stanley later clarified on his website that while the bears are commonly perceived to be dancing, they are actually doing a high step march. There are five different Grateful Dead bears on the album cover, in colors red, orange, yellow, green, and blue, though bears have since appeared in many different colors in different Grateful Dead related artworks. Thomas used that leaden bear as his basis for the design, which features a more cartoon style bear doing the “dancing” motion. As the name implies, the live recordings that appear on the album were hand-picked from Stanley’s personal archives by Owsley himself, with minimal input from the band.īefore the album and the bears, there existed a 36-point lead slug that was used in printing as a font type. The first appearance of the Grateful Dead bears in the public sphere was on the back cover of the Bear’s Choice album. History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 1 (Bear’s Choice) back cover He also designed the Steal Your Face logo in collaboration with Bob Thomas, and the Grateful Dead bears were inspired by his association with the band. That’s a story another day, but basically, Bear Stanley was an extremely important person to both the Grateful Dead and the countercultural movement of the 1960s. Jerry Garcia and the rest of the band didn’t mind, and later encouraged fans to record their shows, and it spread from there. Stanley always recorded soundboard masters when he ran sound at a show, and inevitably the tapes ended up in the hands of Deadheads. In this way, the entire tape trading culture that surrounded the Grateful Dead can be traced back to him. Owsley “Bear” Stanley both engineered and recorded to tape many of the shows that the Grateful Dead performed in the 60s and 70s. Owsley Stanley with Jerry Garcia, late 1960s. In addition to being the band’s sound engineer in the early days, Stanley was also the chemist behind the creation and distribution of a large portion of the LSD that was being consumed in the United States in the 1960s and beyond.
#Grateful dead dancing bears full#
Initially designed by artist Bob Thomas to appear on the back cover of the band’s 1973 release, The History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 1 (Bear’s Choice), the bears have become deeply ingrained in the culture surrounding the Grateful Dead, and have taken on layers of symbolic meaning over the years.īefore you understand the full meaning behind the Grateful Dead bears, you have to look at the man who they were designed for: Owsley “Bear” Stanley. Whether or not you consider yourself a Deadhead, you’ve certainly seen the iconic Grateful Dead “dancing bears” a time or two.
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