AS THE BAND’S LONG, STRANGE TRIP EVOLVED, SO DID THE ARTWORK ADVERTISING ITS EVER-POPULAR SHOWS
By Pete Howard
The Grateful Dead’s staying power as a rabidly followed, highly collected group is rivaled only by the Beatles and Rolling Stones. But unlike those two groups, the Grateful Dead’s history is absolutely jammed full of concert posters from their inception until advertising posters were made obsolete by the internet. And while the Beatles and Stones were usually represented by straight-ahead advertising posters, made attractive only by the simple use of colors, the Dead benefited from being a psychedelic band, and therefore the sky – and one’s imagination – was the limit when it came to their design.
On April 17-19, during its Music Memorabilia & Concert Posters Signature® Auction, Heritage is offering 94 Grateful Dead posters, many of them drawn from the David Swartz Concert Poster Collection – the world’s biggest and best – and the Tim Backstrom Grateful Dead Collection, known by Deadheads for decades as one of the greatest assemblages of its kind. What follows is a list of especially noteworthy Grateful Dead posters from Heritage’s auction. Featured in chronological order, the posters trace the fascinating evolution of one of the most beloved bands in music history.
Grateful Dead 1965 San Jose, California, First-Ever-Performance Acid Test Advertising Poster
This is a mind-blowingly unique, primitive hand-drawn poster advertising the first gig the band ever played as the Grateful Dead, at one of Ken Kesey’s Acid Test parties on December 4, 1965, in San Jose, California. Jerry Garcia & Company had performed as the Warlocks throughout most of 1965, but just days or a couple of weeks before this event, the group changed its name to the Grateful Dead. Fortuitously, Kesey was just throwing his first Acid Test and enlisted them as the house band. But he and his Merry Pranksters had no money, so they took colorful crayons, drew these posters and scattered them around the neighborhood. This historic poster, which hails from the Swartz collection, is the only one known to have survived. We already know about “the day the music died,” but this was the day the music was born – or, at least, the entire universe of psychedelic music.
Grateful Dead, Merry Pranksters 1965 Can You Pass the Acid Test? Poster Graded 9.8 (AOR 2.4)
Following the previous hand-drawn poster by just one week, this is the first printed poster with the Grateful Dead’s name on it. Graded 9.8 by Certified Guaranty Company, this is one of only three such posters, and none has been graded higher. Designed by cartoonist and Merry Prankster Paul Foster, the poster was created to advertise Acid Tests beginning in December 1965. In addition to the Grateful Dead, Kesey’s 1965 Acid Tests, which helped kick-start the San Francisco Bay Area’s underground psychedelic music and poster movement, were often attended by the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady.
FD-26 Grateful Dead 1966 “Skeleton & Roses” First-Printing Avalon Ballroom Concert Poster Graded 9.4
This is the most famous of all Grateful Dead posters, as well as the most recognizable. It was printed to advertise two nights of concerts in September 1966 at San Francisco’s legendary Avalon Ballroom and features iconic artwork by Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley. Heritage owns the world record for this poster at $137,500 for a 9.6-graded copy that sold in April 2022, and this 9.4 Near Mint example is just one step down in grade.
Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin 1967 “Trip or Freak” Winterland Concert Poster Graded 9.8 (AOR-2.183)
The charismatic design of this wild Halloween 1967 poster makes it a perennial favorite among collectors, and it’s easy to see why. Created for the cleverly named Trip or Freak show at San Francisco’s Winterland auditorium, the poster features horror film actor Lon Chaney not only in large form, but also in 600 little forms across the poster’s entire backdrop. Legend has it that San Francisco drug dealers would cut up the poster and use the little faces to distribute hits of LSD. Knowing the culture in San Francisco at the time, I don’t doubt it.
Grateful Dead 1968 Rare Hawaiian Aoxomoxoa Concert Poster Graded a Unique 9.8 (AOR-3.116)
Artist Rick Griffin is considered the most masterful of all the San Francisco psychedelic concert poster designers of the 1960s, and this is one of his masterworks. Its incredible, compelling design alone would be enough to make this list, but because this weekend of shows was canceled and most of the posters dumped in the trash, having one in any condition is a bragging point. But to have the world’s only specimen graded a sky-high 9.8 would be a major coup for any serious poster collector.
Grateful Dead 1970 Corvallis, Oregon, College-Campus Concert Poster
Now you might be thinking what the heck? This small, simple, amateurish black-and-white poster from a tiny town? But that’s the whole point! Still a quarter century before the internet arrived, concert posters were critical marketing tools for selling tickets; you pretty much had to have one. So, to kick off the new decade, someone with the initials of JSM – most likely a student – designed this rudimentary poster for posting around campus and possibly all of Corvallis. Hey, it got the word out, and that’s all that matters. But with no attractive psychedelic colors making the posters worth keeping, almost all of them were thrown away after the show, making this one of the rarest posters in the auction.
Grateful Dead 1971 Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Sunday Afternoon Concert Poster
This poster has beautiful pastel colors of yellow, purple and green, but despite its allure, it was mostly thrown away after the weekend. You just never see this one turn up, which is a shame because it’s a beautiful timepiece of hippiedom, complete with a couple of peace doves. Thanks to the Backstrom collection, we have it. And it sure doesn’t hurt that the group’s last two albums at the time were Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, two of the best-received LPs of their career.
Grateful Dead, NRPS 1971 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Day-Glo Concert Poster
This is an example of a non–psychedelic Grateful Dead concert poster that’s very rare, popular and valuable. It features brilliantly bright Day-Glo orange coloring, which is captivating by itself, but under a black light it jumps off the board. I also love the way Heritage procured this piece. When we featured one in our December 2024 Concert Posters auction, almost nobody knew about it because it hadn’t been sold publicly in 20 years. Well, as soon as we announced its $20,000 sale price, someone reached out and said, “Hey, I’ve got one of those!” He wasn’t a collector or a dealer, just a guy who knew there was one in the back of his closet. So now we’ve taken the timeline from 20 years for the first one to about 20 weeks for the second one.
Grateful Dead 1974 German Tour-Blank Concert Poster by Gunther Kieser (AOR-4.237)
Master German poster designer Gunther Kieser (creator of the legendary Jimi Hendrix “Wire Hair” poster) obviously had a great time designing this one, complete with Jerry Garcia’s “Captain Trips” top hat. This was the “tour blank” run through the printer first. It then would go back through the presses with information and ticket details stamped into the blank white spaces below. There was always so much fine print on these German posters that many collectors prefer the unadulterated version here. This is another great piece from the Backstrom collection.
Grateful Dead 1977 Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, Best Show Ever? Concert Poster
Besides its sublime design and terrific use of the band’s “Steal Your Face” logo, the thing I love about this poster – the first of its kind to be offered by Heritage – is the music behind it. As noted in the authoritative 2003 book Grateful Dead: The Illustrated Trip, “This night is consistently rated as an all-time favorite show by various Deadworld surveys.” And you know Grateful Dead tapers and collectors – they’ve heard ’em all. Picture having this poster hanging on your wall, playing this very night’s concert on your sound system and just imagining – or remembering! – you were there.
Go here to see the additional 84 Grateful Dead posters featured in Heritage’s April 17-19 Music Memorabilia & Concert Posters Signature® Auction, along with the auction’s other 500-plus offerings.
PETE HOWARD is Director of Concert Posters at Heritage Auctions. He can be reached at PeteH@HA.com or 214.409.1756.