Well in the very early days of the Grateful Dead they were playing bigger venues with other acts when the sound engineer Owsley “Bear” Stanley, realized that the band “Grateful Dead ‘’ netted a symbol for their music equipment. He worked with graphic designer Bob Thomas, and the 13-point bolt was born. According to Owsley, “a few days later I was chatting to Bob and proposed that possibly the words “Grateful dead” should be placed under the circle, using a style of font that, if you saw it from a distance, would seem like a skull. A few hours later, he emerged from the loft carrying the beloved design that we know and love.
Around 1969, the term “Steal Your Face” or “Stealie” had not yet been created for the skull and lightning bolt symbol. The Grateful Dead logo was all that was used to describe it. Three years after the Grateful Dead logo’s initial release, in 1972, the band released “He’s Gone.” In this song, Mickey Hart’s father, who was hired in 1969 as the bands’ manager, is described. That he was caught stealing money from the band less than a year after taking on the position, skipped town with the stolen money, and the band was left in financial ruin. However, when the song first came out, many listeners focused on the line, “Steal your face right off your head,” and took it as having your “face stolen” by the music. In basic terms, this was a way of suggesting that once you “got” the Dead, you would never be the same.
Due to this, the Grateful Dead’s emblem was first known as the Steal Your Face, or Stealie, but this term wasn’t officially adopted until the Dead’s double live album “Steal Your Face” was released in June 1976. The album was recorded between October 17 and 20, 1974, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, supposedly as a “farewell run” before an at-the-time indefinite break. The Skull logo appears on the record cover, and after that it became known as the Steal Your Face logo.
01 - Cover of “Steal Yor Face”, 1976.
