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Stanley George Miller (born October 10, 1940), better known as Mouse or Stanley Mouse, is an American artist who is notable for his 1960s psychedelic rock concert poster designs and album covers for the Grateful Dead, Journey, and other bands. [1]
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Stanley George Miller (born October 10, 1940), better known as Mouse or Stanley Mouse, is an American artist who is notable for his 1960s psychedelic rock concert poster designs and album covers for the Grateful Dead, Journey, and other bands. [1]
Mouse was born in Fresno, California on October 10, 1940, [2] [ better source needed ] He grew up in Detroit, where he was given the nickname Mouse as a ninth grader. In 1956, he was expelled from Mackenzie High School for mischievously repainting the façade at The Box, a restaurant across the street from the school. [3] He spent his junior year at nearby Cooley High School, and completed his education at Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, which is now the College for Creative Studies.[ citation needed ]
By 1958, Mouse was fascinated with the so-called weirdo hot rod art movement that had was founded a decade earlier in California. Having developed skills using an airbrush, he began painting T-shirts at custom car shows, where he met and then worked with Ed Roth, the leading exponent of Weirdo Hot Rod art. Mouse was also strongly influenced by the art of Rick Griffin, with whom he would later collaborate on posters and album covers.
In 1959, Mouse and his family founded Mouse Studios, a mail-order company, which sold his products.
In 1964, he was invited to help in the design of Monogram automobile model kits using the "monster" cartoon characters he had developed to compete with Roth's "Rat Fink" character.
In 1966 and 1967, Mouse and Alton Kelley lived and worked from 715 Ashbury across the street from 710 Ashbury, where members of The Grateful Dead resided. [4] [5]
In 1965, Mouse travelled to San Francisco with a group of art school friends. Settling initially in Oakland, Mouse met Alton Kelley, a self-taught artist who recently arrived from Virginia City, Nevada, where he joined a group of hippies who called themselves the Red Dog Saloon gang. Upon arrival in San Francisco, Kelley and other veterans of the gang renamed themselves The Family Dog, and began producing rock music dances.
In 1966, when Chet Helms assumed leadership of the group and began promoting the dances at the Avalon Ballroom, Mouse and Kelley began working together to produce posters for the events. The pair also later produced posters for promoter Bill Graham and for other events in the psychedelic community. From September 1967 to December 1967, Mouse and Kelley created psychedelic posters for shows at Helms’ The Family Dog Denver.
In 1967, Mouse collaborated with artists Kelley, Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso and Wes Wilson to create the Berkeley Bonaparte Distribution Agency. [6]
Mouse and Kelley also worked together as lead artists at Mouse Studios and The Monster Company, producing album cover art for the bands Journey and Grateful Dead. The Monster Company also developed a profitable line of T-shirts, utilizing the four color process for silk screening.
The psychedelic posters Mouse and Kelley produced were heavily influenced by Art Nouveau graphics, particularly the works of Alphonse Mucha and Edmund Joseph Sullivan. Material associated with psychedelics, such as Zig-Zag rolling papers, were also referenced. Producing posters advertising for such musical groups as Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Grateful Dead led to meeting the musicians and making contacts that were later to prove fruitful.
In 1968, Helms and Graham began turning to other artists for their poster work, and Mouse's career languished. After brief periods in London and Massachusetts, he moved to Toronto where he ran a Yorkville waterbed store called The Waterbed Gallery, whose walls featured his artwork.
In 1971, Mouse returned to California, living near Kelley in Marin County, and the pair resumed their partnership, producing commercial artwork related to the Grateful Dead and later Journey. The pair are credited with creating the skeleton and roses image that became the Grateful Dead's archetypal iconography, and Journey's wings and beetles that appeared on their album covers from 1977 to 1980.
In 1977, Mouse, with Kelley, created the Styx album cover for The Grand Illusion , featuring a pastiche of René Magritte. Mouse and Kelley continued to work together on rock memorabilia until 1980.
In the early 1980s, Mouse moved to New Mexico, where he began producing fine art in a variety of media.[ citation needed ] In 1999, he contributed a portrait of Skip Spence to the tribute album, More Oar: A Tribute to the Skip Spence Album , being a collection of cover versions of songs by the co-founder of Moby Grape performed by such artists as Beck, Tom Waits and Robert Plant.
In 2002, Mouse filed a lawsuit against the producers of the film Monsters, Inc. , alleging that the characters of Mike and Sulley were based on his drawings of Excuse My Dust, which he unsuccessfully pitched to Hollywood producers in 1998. [7] A Disney spokeswoman responded that the characters in Monsters, Inc were "developed independently by the Pixar and Walt Disney Pictures creative teams, and do not infringe on anyone's copyrights". [8]
The Summer of Love was a social phenomenon that occurred during the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people, mostly young people sporting hippie fashions of dress and behavior, converged in San Francisco's neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury. More broadly, the Summer of Love encompassed the culture of hippie music, hallucinogenic drugs, anti-war sentiment, and free-love throughout the West Coast of the United States, and as far away as New York City.
Psychedelia usually refers to a style or aesthetic that is resembled in the psychedelic subculture of the 1960s and the psychedelic experience produced by certain psychoactive substances. This includes psychedelic art, psychedelic music and style of dress during that era. This was primarily generated by people who used psychedelic drugs such as LSD, mescaline and psilocybin and also non-users who were participants and aficionados of this subculture. Psychedelic art and music typically recreate or reflect the experience of altered consciousness. Psychedelic art uses highly distorted, surreal visuals, bright colors and full spectrums and animation to evoke, convey, or enhance the psychedelic experience. Psychedelic music uses distorted electric guitar, Indian music elements such as the sitar, tabla, electronic effects, sound effects and reverb, and elaborate studio effects, such as playing tapes backwards or panning the music from one side to another.
The Charlatans were an American folk rock and psychedelic rock band that played a role in the development of the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury music scene during the 1960s. They are often cited by critics as being the first group to play in the style that became known as the San Francisco Sound.
The Human Be-In was an event held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park Polo Fields on January 14, 1967. It was a prelude to San Francisco's Summer of Love, which made the Haight-Ashbury district a symbol of American counterculture and introduced the word "psychedelic" to suburbia.
Richard Alden "Rick" Griffin was an American artist and one of the leading designers of psychedelic posters in the 1960s. As a contributor to the underground comix movement, his work appeared regularly in Zap Comix. Griffin was closely identified with the Grateful Dead, designing some of their best-known posters and album covers such as Aoxomoxoa. His work within the surfing subculture included both film posters and his comic strip, Murphy.
The Print Mint, Inc. was a major publisher and distributor of underground comix based in the San Francisco Bay Area during the genre's late 1960s-early 1970s heyday. Starting as a retailer of psychedelic posters, the Print Mint soon evolved into a publisher, printer, and distributor. It was "ground zero" for the psychedelic poster. The Print Mint was originally owned by poet Don Schenker and his wife Alice, who later partnered in the business with Bob and Peggy Rita.
Chester Leo "Chet" Helms, often called the father of San Francisco's 1967 "Summer of Love," was a music promoter and a counterculture figure in San Francisco during its hippie period in the mid- to-late 1960s.
Psychedelic art is art, graphics or visual displays related to or inspired by psychedelic experiences and hallucinations known to follow the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, and DMT. The word "psychedelic" means "mind manifesting". By that definition, all artistic efforts to depict the inner world of the psyche may be considered "psychedelic".
Victor Moscoso is a Spanish–American artist best known for producing psychedelic rock posters, advertisements, and underground comix in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s. He was the first of the rock poster artists of the 1960s era with formal academic training and experience. He was the first of the rock poster artists to use photographic collage in many of his posters.
Alton Kelley was an American artist known for his psychedelic art, in particular his designs for 1960s rock concert posters and album covers. Along with artists Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso and Wes Wilson, Kelley founded the Berkeley Bonaparte distribution agency in order to produce and sell psychedelic poster art.
Grateful Dead is a live album by rock band the Grateful Dead. Released on September 24, 1971 on Warner Bros. Records, it is their second live double album and their seventh album overall. Although published without a title, it is generally known by the names Skull and Roses and Skull Fuck. It was the group's first album to be certified gold by the RIAA and remained their best seller until surpassed by Skeletons from the Closet.
The San Francisco sound refers to rock music performed live and recorded by San Francisco-based rock groups of the mid-1960s to early 1970s. It was associated with the counterculture community in San Francisco, particularly the Haight-Ashbury district, during these years. San Francisco is a westward-looking port city, a city that at the time was 'big enough' but not manic like New York City or spread out like Los Angeles. Hence, it could support a 'scene'. According to journalist Ed Vulliamy, "A core of Haight Ashbury bands played with each other, for each other"
Robert Wesley Wilson was an American artist and one of the leading designers of psychedelic posters. Best known for designing posters for Bill Graham of The Fillmore in San Francisco, he invented a style that is now synonymous with the peace movement, the psychedelic era and the 1960s. In particular, he was known for inventing and popularizing a "psychedelic" font around 1966 that made the letters look like they were moving or melting.
The Avalon Ballroom was a music venue in the Polk Gulch neighborhood of San Francisco, California, at 1244 Sutter Street. The space is known as the location of many concerts of the counterculture movement, from around 1966 to 1969. It also had a reopening 34 years later, from 2003 to 2005.
Gary Grimshaw was an American graphic artist active in Detroit and San Francisco who specialized in designing rock concert posters. He was also a radical political activist with the White Panther Party and related organizations.
Robert "Bob" Emett Seidemann was an American graphic artist and photographer. He was known for his portraits of musicians and bands from San Francisco's counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of his images were published by Rolling Stone, by record labels, and in books.
The Maritime Hall is a historic 3,000-capacity concert hall in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood that operated from 1995 through 2001 as a popular music venue and nightclub. It was located at 450 Harrison Street at the Sailors Union of the Pacific building.
Bonnie MacLean, also known as Bonnie MacLean Graham, was an American artist known for her classic rock posters. In the 1960s and 1970s she created posters and other art for the promotion of rock and roll concerts managed by Bill Graham, using the iconic psychedelic art style of the day. MacLean continued her art as a painter focusing mostly on nudes, still lifes, and landscapes. Her work has been placed alongside the "big five"—male Haight-Ashbury poster artists who were seminal to the "iconography of the counterculture scene."
The Family Dog Denver was a concert dance hall located at 1601 West Evans Avenue in Denver, Colorado. Opened from September 1967 to July 1968, it is regarded as a seminal music venue that launched Denver on its trajectory to its current status as a major concert destination by introducing never-before-seen acts like The Doors, Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Buffalo Springfield, Janis Joplin, Chuck Berry, and many others. Many acts, like The Doors and Van Morrison, for example, had yet to become famous when they played The Dog, evidenced by the poster artists having to stylize the names of their leading songs into the poster art for the shows. The Family Dog is also seen as a cultural turning point in Denver from the conservative, western-minded sensibility of the early and mid-20th century to the current, liberal-minded climate. The venue's history, surrounding drama and ultimate impact had been largely unknown and unrealized until it was unearthed and detailed for the first time in the 2021 documentary The Tale of the Dog, produced and directed by Dan Obarski & Scott Montgomery and distributed by Cinedigm. As there are no useful photos, no video and little written history remaining of the Family Dog Denver, the film's oral history format told in first person by the people who were there serves as a definitive reference for “The Dog.”
Jacaeber Kastor is a writer, artist, gallery-owner and curator of psychedelic art. He is former owner of the successful Psychedelic Solution gallery in New York’s West Village.
Mouse is renowned for his psychedelic posters and album covers of 1960s and 1970s San Francisco that featured The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and other iconic bands.
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