Alton Kelly, 68, Rock Poster Pioneer

Alton Kelley, a graphic artist whose mind-blowing posters and album covers for the Grateful Dead, Big Brother & the Holding Company, and legendary San Francisco concert halls ushered in the psychedelic rock ‘n’ roll era, died Sunday at his home in Petaluma, Calif. He was 68 and had been suffering from osteoporosis.Kelley and his long-time collaborator, Stanley “Mouse” Miller, created some of the most distinctive and memorable images in rock music, including the famous skull-and-roses emblem for the Grateful Dead and the “Girl With Green Hair” poster that advertised a concert at the Avalon Ballroom.His work, with its colorful swirls, spiral designs, and exaggerated hand-drawn lettering, plastered telephone poles, head-shop windows, and vacant buildings in San Francisco in the 1960s. The handbills cost about $5 to print and were given away at the end of concerts. They now sell for tens of thousands of dollars to art collectors who compare them to the belle epoque art of such masters as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha.Kelley and Mr. Miller scored their first big hit with a 1966 poster advertising a concert of Big Brother & the Holding Company and the Quicksilver Messenger Service. The art was based on the logo of the Zig-Zag cigarette rolling-paper company.“When Stanley and I did that poster, we got really paranoid,” Kelley said. “We figured, ‘Oh no. Now they know we smoke dope!’ And we took what little pot we had and flushed it down the toilet.”The word on the streets of San Francisco at the time was that if you could not read the poster, you should not go to the concert, said rock historian Paul Grushkin, who wrote “The Art of Rock: Posters from Presley to Punk” (1987).A native of Houlton, Maine, who had worked as a mechanic in a helicopter factory in Connecticut, Kelly raced motorcycles and drew cartoons of hot rods before he moved to San Francisco in 1964. He lived in a group house in Haight-Ashbury where he launched the Family Dog, an enterprise that set up weekend concerts with dancing and light shows, featuring local bands such as Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & the Fish, and the Grateful Dead.“Stanley and I had no idea what we were doing,” Kelley told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007. “But we went ahead and looked at American Indian stuff, Chinese stuff, art nouveau, art deco, modern, Bauhaus — whatever. We had free rein to just go graphically crazy.”Musicians including Pete Townshend and Mick Jagger sought out the pair, and Kelley moved into album art, designing six Grateful Dead album covers, the Pegasus image for Steve Miller’s 1977 album “Book of Dreams,” and three Journey albums in the late 1970s.Corporations eventually took over the rock ‘n’ roll music scene. Kelley worked for a few years on album covers, then returned to an earlier love, hot rods. He illustrated the cars in fine-art oil paintings, then sold the images for T-shirts and other merchandise.

Alton Kelly, 68, Rock Poster Pioneer

Alton Kelly, 68, Rock Poster Pioneer

More from the New York Sun

Bolsonaro Calls for Annulment of Election After Brazilian Court Orders Precincts To Stay Open, Lula Pulls Upset Victory

El-Sayed Primary Challenger Credits Republican Rogers With Courting Detroit’s Black Community

Abstaining From Politics Falls Out of Favor in Hollywood

Republicans Sound Alarms About Collapse in Rural Turnout but Try To Temper Panic in Final Week of Early Voting

Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown Looks Likely To Ride This Year’s Anti-GOP Wave Back to the Senate

Benjamin Button Ages Badly in the Latest Curious Afterlife of Fitzgerald’s Short Story

A Coming of Age Tale a Decade in the Making

Twinsy Names on Alaska Senate Ballot May Cause Voter ‘Confusion,’ Violate Election Law, Blanche Contends

More from the New York Sun

Bolsonaro Calls for Annulment of Election After Brazilian Court Orders Precincts To Stay Open, Lula Pulls Upset Victory

El-Sayed Primary Challenger Credits Republican Rogers With Courting Detroit’s Black Community

Abstaining From Politics Falls Out of Favor in Hollywood

Republicans Sound Alarms About Collapse in Rural Turnout but Try To Temper Panic in Final Week of Early Voting

Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown Looks Likely To Ride This Year’s Anti-GOP Wave Back to the Senate

Benjamin Button Ages Badly in the Latest Curious Afterlife of Fitzgerald’s Short Story

A Coming of Age Tale a Decade in the Making

Twinsy Names on Alaska Senate Ballot May Cause Voter ‘Confusion,’ Violate Election Law, Blanche Contends