The Grateful Dead, The Grateful Dead (Warner Bros.-Seven Arts WS 1689, stereo, 1968)
The band’s first album, and one of the oddest packages to come out of the San Francisco poster scene. Mouse Studios drew the swollen gold lettering, and Alton Kelly built the collage: band members cut out and repeated, a solar flare behind them, a bronze idol squatting in the middle. The script across the top looks like ornament until you work it out letter by letter. It spells a line about the ship of the sun, taken from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Flip it over. The back runs the band photo twice, once as a positive and once as a mirror-image negative, with the hand-drawn title reversed to match. Anyone who designs with symmetry or value inversion will want to study it.
This is the green-label Warner Bros.-Seven Arts stereo pressing from 1968. Disc and jacket are clean, with light edge wear on the jacket and faint spindle marks on the label. The back cover carries the name Jeanette Lendino in ballpoint. That’s my wife, before she married me.
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