It’s a lot more fun to imagine the bears dancing along to the music, though, so we’re happy to pretend that Bear never made that distinction.Īfter the release of the album, the dancing bears started appearing on Owsley Stanley’s blotter art, which also happened to be in heavy circulation at Grateful Dead concerts. Stanley later clarified on his website that while the bears are commonly perceived to be dancing, they are actually doing a high step march. There are five different Grateful Dead bears on the album cover, in colors red, orange, yellow, green, and blue, though bears have since appeared in many different colors in different Grateful Dead related artworks. Thomas used that leaden bear as his basis for the design, which features a more cartoon style bear doing the “dancing” motion. Before the album and the bears, there existed a 36-point lead slug that was used in printing as a font type. As the name implies, the live recordings that appear on the album were hand-picked from Stanley’s personal archives by Owsley himself, with minimal input from the band. The first appearance of the Grateful Dead bears in the public sphere was on the back cover of the Bear’s Choice album. He also designed the Steal Your Face logo in collaboration with Bob Thomas, and the Grateful Dead bears were inspired by his association with the band. That’s an entirely different story for another day, but basically, Bear Stanley was an extremely important person to both the Grateful Dead and the countercultural movement of the 1960s. He was basically the one who started the entire tape trading culture that surrounded the Grateful Dead, as he always recorded soundboard masters when he ran sound at a show, and inevitably the tapes ended up in the hands of Deadheads, and spread from there.

Owsley “Bear” Stanley both engineered and recorded to tape many of the shows that the Grateful Dead performed in the 60s and 70s. In addition to being the band’s sound engineer in the early days, Stanley was also the chemist behind the creation and distribution of a large proportion of the LSD that was being consumed in the United States in the 1960s and beyond.

Dancing bear grateful dead neon