California Dreams by Stanley "Mouse" Miller

Author:Stanley "Mouse" Miller [Jackson, Blair; R. Crumb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619024229
Publisher: Soft Skull Press

Closing of Winterland 1978

Original Blue Winterland Rose 1978

airbrush

Mouse and Kelley did some of their finest work there, together and separately, in the mid and late ’70s, including several album covers such as the Dead’s From the Mars Hotel (1974) and Terrapin Station (1977), Dead lyricist Robert Hunter’s Tiger Rose (1976), several albums by the popular Bay Area band Journey between 1977 and 1981, Jerry Garcia’s Cats Under the Stars (1978, by Mouse alone), and one of their most popular pieces, Steve Miller’s 1976 Book of Dreams, depicting Pegasus with bright multicolored wings.

Of that last image, Mouse says, “Our T-shirt business was floundering, so we did this beautiful flying horse, thinking maybe it could save our T-shirt company. It was sitting there in our studio, and we weren’t there and Steve Miller walked in looking for an album cover. Somebody in the room said, ‘How about that?’ and he said ‘Perfect!’ So that became his album cover. Then Journey saw that and then they wanted something.”

Bill Graham’s Winterland Productions tapped Mouse and Kelley to airbrush sleek, modern posters for big tours by Paul McCartney’s band, Wings (1976), and the Rolling Stones (1977), and they also created a spectacular winged heart image (surrounded by psychedelic lettering) for posters advertising the film More American Graffiti. Mouse designed the cover of the program for the Dead’s historic performances at the Great Pyramids in Egypt in September ’78, while Kelley did a painting that became a commemorative poster. They collaborated on the famous “Blue Rose” poster for the Grateful Dead’s New Year’s Eve 1978 concert—the final show in the old but soulful Winterland arena.

By this time, Mouse increasingly felt like he “wanted more independent self-expression” apart from Kelley, and he was also dissatisfied with what he viewed as a toxic drug environment that had developed among some of the artists in the San Rafael building, “so one day I just said, ‘I’m moving!’ I wanted to go to Petaluma [in northern Marin County], get out of there, escape the drug scene. They said, ‘You can’t do that,’ because I was the landlord; I was the guy collecting the money. When they couldn’t pay the rent I paid it for them. I was their safety blanket. But I did leave, and I moved to Petaluma and it was wonderful. I started doing my own thing and I met a really beautiful woman named Marli, and we ended up having two children together.

“I’d been going down to Santa Fe to visit a friend and it was a really great art scene there, so after my daughter Oceana Rose was born, we moved there and I tried making it down there without anyone knowing I was a Grateful Dead artist. I had an art show and nobody showed up! Then word got out who I was, and the Grateful Dead connection, and the newspaper did an article, and then suddenly the whole place was swamped with people. I called it ‘Escape from the Dead,’ but it didn’t work,” he laughs.

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