By William Grimes
International Herald Tribune
Published: June 5, 2008

Alton Kelley, whose psychedelic concert posters for artists like the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and Big Brother and the Holding Company helped define the visual style of the 1960s counterculture, died Sunday at his home in Petaluma, California. He was 67.

The cause was complications of osteoporosis, said his wife, Marguerite Trousdale Kelley.

Kelley and his longtime collaborator, Stanley Mouse, combined sinuous Art Nouveau lettering and outré images plucked from sources near and far to create the visual equivalent of an acid trip. A 19th-century engraving from "The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám" inspired a famous poster for a Grateful Dead concert at the Avalon Ballroom in 1966, a work that showed a skeleton wearing a garland of roses on its skull and holding a wreath of roses on its left arm.

The Grateful Dead later adopted this image as its emblem. Kelley and Mouse also designed several of the group's album covers, including those for "American Beauty" and "Workingman's Dead."

Kelley was born in Houlton, Maine, and grew up in Connecticut, where his parents moved to work in defense plants during World War II.

His mother, a former schoolteacher, encouraged him to study art, and for a time he attended art schools in Philadelphia and New York, but his real passion was racing motorcycles and hot rods. He applied his art training to painting pinstripes on motorcycle gas tanks.

After working as a welder at the Sikorsky helicopter plant in Stratford, Connecticut, he moved to San Francisco in 1964, settling into the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. With a group of friends he helped stage concerts in 1965 at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada, by the Charlatans, an electric folk-rock band. On returning to San Francisco, he became a founding member of the Family Dog, a loose confederation of artists, poets, musicians and other free spirits who put on some of the earliest psychedelic dance concerts, first at the Longshoremen's Hall and later at the Avalon Ballroom.

Kelley was in charge of promoting the concerts with posters and fliers, but his drafting ability was weak.

That shortcoming became less of a problem in early 1966, when he teamed up with Stanley Miller, a hot-rod artist from Detroit who worked under the last name Mouse. The two formed Mouse Studios, with Kelley contributing layout and images and Mouse doing the distinctive lettering and drafting work.

From 1966 to 1969 Kelley worked on more than 150 posters for concerts at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore, publicizing the most famous bands and artists of the era, among them Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Butterfield Blues Band and Moby Grape, as well as the Dead, Big Brother, Hendrix and Country Joe and the Fish. They created three posters for concerts headlined by Bo Diddley, who died Monday.

With the waning of the 1960s, Kelley and Mouse diversified. They formed Monster, a T-shirt company, in the mid-1970s. They also designed the Pegasus-image cover for the Steve Miller album "Book of Dreams" and several albums for Journey in the 1980s.

In their final collaboration, in March of this year, they contributed the cover art for the program at the induction ceremony at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On his own, Kelley designed posters and created hot-rod paintings, which he transferred to T-shirts.

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