Grateful Dead Shirt

I have owned my first Grateful Dead shirt for four years.  I have two other Grateful Dead shirts that I bought in the past two years.  I love them all.  I know, I know, four years is a long time to own a shirt, but most Grateful Dead fans would be more than "OK" with this.  lol  In fact, my husband has a shirt that has one of the underarms ripped out of it.  Ew!!!  But what can I say?  I don't blame the guy.  It's a really nice shirt that holds many memories for him.  And he always wears a long sleeved shirt over top so that the hole is not obvious.

Let's face it.  The Grateful Dead had many different logos that became popular over the years.  It's odd because many bands rarely have a logo that they use and that fans know of, but the Grateful Dead had more than five.  So when it comes to choosing for your Grateful Dead shirt, you know you have a lot of variety.

The Steal Your Face skull is arguably the most popular and recognized.  It is the one that is pictured above with the white skull with red and blue background with a lightning bolt striking through it.  How something so eerie could come from a band that preached about love is a bit funny.

Another popular logo was the Dancing Bears.  This is my second favourite logo and the favourite logo of my children.  Each of my children own a dancing bear and each also own a Grateful Dead dancing bear shirt.  They are super cute!!  I recently read that the bears are actually marching and not dancing, but seriously...  it's much more fun to think they are dancing.

The last logo I'm going to mention is the skeleton and roses.  This one was designed in 1966!  Not many bands were interested in developing artwork like the Grateful Dead did.  They always made certain that the images were very eye catching.

Initially the Grateful Dead "Steal Your Face" skull logo was not actually a skull. The idea of putting the blue and red in a circle and separated by white, was by a gentleman I can only figure to be "Bear". He explained his vision to Bob Thomas who then used a lightning bolt instead of just a white straight line.

The original design was used only to mark their equipment so they could find it when mixed with other musicians instruments. "Bear" had figured this would make identifying their stuff much faster and with much less confusion.

A few days later, he presented the logo as you know it today.