Grateful Dead 1969 Caricature

Grateful Dead 1969 Caricature illustrated here, in 1969, (L to R) with original founders, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan (keyboards), Jerry Garcia (lead guitar), Bob Weir (rhythm guitar), Bill Kreutzmann (drums), and Phil Lesh (bass).

The Grateful Dead is an American rock band formed in 1965 in Palo Alto, CA. Ranging from quintet to septet, the band is known for its unique and eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, psychedelia, experimental music, modal jazz, country, folk, bluegrass, blues, reggae, and space rock, for live performances of lengthy instrumental jams, and for their devoted fan base, known as “Deadheads”.
Members of the Grateful Dead had played together in various San Francisco bands, including Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions and the Warlocks.
The name “Grateful Dead” was chosen from a dictionary. According to Phil Lesh, “Garcia picked up an old Britannica World Language Dictionary. In that silvery elf-voice he said to me, ‘Hey, man, how about the Grateful Dead?'” The definition there was “the soul of a dead person, or his angel, showing gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged their burial.”

Over the course of their career, The Dead is known for such hits as “Casey Jones”, “Truckin”, “Touch Of Grey”, “Friend Of The Devil”, “Uncle John’s Band”, “Ripple”, “Fire On The Mountain”, “Sugar Magnolia”, “Bertha” and “Scarlet Begonias”, amongst a host of others.

The album “Grateful Dead” (1971) cover art’s Skull and Roses, composed by Alton Kelly and Stanley Mouse, is based on an illustration by Edmund Joseph Sullivan for an old edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Though the album has been known by the sobriquet “Skull & Roses”, the original vertical gatefold cover unfolds to reveal the entire skeleton. The graphic became one of the images most associated with the band.

The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 and have sold more than 35 million albums worldwide.

On March 8, 1973, at age 27, Ron McKernan, after years of alcohol abuse, was found dead of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage at his home in Corte Madera, California, by his landlady.

Garcia struggled with bad health and was sometimes ill because of his diabetes, and in 1986, he went into a diabetic coma that nearly cost him his life.
Although his overall health improved somewhat after that, he continued to struggle with obesity, smoking, and longstanding heroin and cocaine addictions, and was staying in a California drug rehabilitation facility when he died of a heart attack on August 9, 1995 at the age of 53.

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