The Deadcast explores Steal Your Face’s iconic artwork & visits the Grateful Dead’s June 1976 return to the road, including a tour of the Dead Head culture that bloomed in their absence.
Steal Your Face 50, Part 3 supplementary notes
by Jesse Jarnow
In the late spring of 1976, the Grateful Dead put the finishing touches on Steal Your Face and prepared to hit the road for the first time since 1974. The front cover of the album contained Bob Thomas’s Grateful Dead logo, designed in 1971 from an earlier prototype by Owsley Stanley, and known to them as the “skull and lightning bolt.”
But following Steal Your Face’s release in 1976, it became known as the Steal Your Face, or the Stealie, the band’s most identifiable logo. Artist Bob Thomas, in addition to serving in Owsley’s labs, was also a musician in the long-running Renaissance Faire band The Golden Toad, whose story is told in Well Met: The American Faires and the American Counterculture by Rachel Lee Rubin.
John Brackett is the author of Live Dead: The Grateful Dead, Live Recordings, and the Ideology of Liveness, published in 2023 as part of Duke University Press’s excellent Studies In the Grateful Dead series, where he discusses the methodology behind the band’s official live releases based on extensive work in the band’s archive (as well as the new Touch of Grey, or How the Grateful Dead Became Pop Stars). He posted about the 1976 plan for Ground Records in his Grateful Documents newsletter.
Dave Davis saw the Dead for the first time June 1976 at the Boston Music Hall and operates the long-running blog-scrapbook Grateful Seconds, and last year published a source-book, The Economic History of the Grateful Dead.
Lost Live Dead (and commenters) covered the Dead and Santana’s canceled show at Wembley in August 1976.
Thanks, as always, to David Gans, who spoke with Robert Hunter in 1977 (included in Conversations With the Dead) and recovered a lost recording of Jerry Garcia speaking with late BAM writer Adam Block that same year. Block sadly passed away in 2008, but his work can be read in his archive, maintained by Fred Nemo (keeper of numerous archive sites, who himself sadly departed earlier this year). The full published interview can be found at Dead Sources.
Comment
MY hiatus
i saw the dead in ‘71, ‘72, ‘73 and ‘74. i had high hopes for the shows at the beacon, but i ended up walking out. i thought the sound was terrible. really bad. i wasn’t thrilled with the band, either. i remember phil just letting go of his bass, not playing, flapping his arms and bobbing his head like a pigeon. it just pissed me off. so i left, took the subway to penn, and didn’t see them again until 1988.