JERRY GARCIA : Only if there’s someone there to hear it. Does a bear drop in the woods? That is the question. PHIL LESH : This song is about bear drops. These bears might look cuddly and cute, but there’s a bit more to the story. But they’re everywhere, an iconography permanently associated with the Grateful Dead.īut why bears? And why are they dancing? It’s kind of like asking what egg-laying rabbits have to do with Easter, but there’s a lot more LSD involved. Maybe you love them, maybe you hate them. When there are baseball games, people wear them as costumes and dance on top of the dugout. They’re on sweatshirts and scarves and golf balls and pretty much anything you can put a dancing bear on. They’re on license plate holders and stickers that get stuck on bathroom mirrors in bars. Maybe you’ve never even heard of the Grateful Dead before and you accidentally clicked on this somehow - you’ve still seen these bears, trust me. From there, Deadheads began creating their own merchandise featuring the dancing bears including bootleg stickers and shirts to name a few, and the symbol was forevermore associated with the Dead.JESSE: You know the dancing bears. Because the bears were featured on the album art as well as within the social sphere of communal drug use at the band’s live performances, they quickly became a symbol deeply entwined with the culture of listening to the Grateful Dead. What does this have to do with the dancing bears you ask?Īctually a lot! Following the release of the Dead’s album, the bears motif began appearing on Stanley’s LSD blotter art, which also just so happened to be widely circulated at most Grateful Dead concerts at the time. In addition to being the band’s sound engineer, Owsley Stanley was also one of the world’s first private LSD manufacturers. The Bears originally appeared on the back cover of the Grateful Dead’s Bear’s Choice album launching the design into the public eye, but this album circulation only accounted for a portion of the rapid fame attributed to the bears. The actual principal design for the style of bear we now commonly associate with the Grateful Dead was born from a 36-point lead type slug featuring a generic bear print that Thomas found and used as his primary artistic inspiration. There is also speculation that the moniker “Dancing Bear” was attributed to Stanley in reference to his peculiar choice of dance moves at concerts while high on acid. The choice to create a symbol using bears as the focal point stems from Owsley Stanley’s nickname “Bear” given to him by childhood friends as a result of his excessive chest hair. In addition to these ubiquitous graphics, Thomas also designed the art for the The Dead’s Steal Your Face and Live Dead as well as the logo for Alembic, an American manufacturer of high-end electric guitars, basses and preamps started by Owsley Stanley, the Grateful Dead’s sound engineer. Thomas actually has a long history tied with The Dead having co-designed the band’s iconic “Lightning Bolt” logo with Owsley Stanley in 1969 as a means of keeping track of the band’s equipment while on tour. The dancing bear design was originally created by artist and renaissance man Bob Thomas for use on the back of the Grateful Dead’s 1973 album The History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 1 (Bear’s Choice). A Design Born from Artistic Collaboration
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