![grateful dead fonts web based grateful dead fonts web based](https://www.free-fonts.com/images/free/dead-the-letter.png)
Already, they knew that direct contact with fans was a key to survival. They were kidding, of course, but they were very serious about the mailing list. staff that this was the name they would use, promotional consequences be damned.) (Fans quickly nicknamed the album Skullfuck, honoring its aesthetic and emotional impact, as well as the band’s well-told tale of gleefully tormenting label executive Joe Smith and the Warner Bros. Sullivan’s illustration of the skeleton surrounded by roses for the iconic Family Dog poster.
![grateful dead fonts web based grateful dead fonts web based](https://d144mzi0q5mijx.cloudfront.net/img/S/T/Struck-DeadA.png)
The real explosion of mail followed their creation of the Dead Heads mailing list the following year, with their famed announcement in their eponymous live album, nicknamed Skull and Roses for its spectacular re-envisioning of the image by Mouse and Kelley adapted from Edmund J. That artistic engagement and encouragement would be a defining theme of the Grateful Dead phenomenon, and the Correspondence series in the Archive is one of its most palpable and evocative expressions.
![grateful dead fonts web based grateful dead fonts web based](http://www.gypsyrose.com/products/images/products/ph1258.jpg)
Brief as it is, the letter makes it clear that already, the band’s fame had spread to Europe-and already, fans intuited that the Dead expected them to be artists, not only of their own lives but of their shared experiences with the band. Only a few survive from then, but even those early efforts are revealing: the first is written from (then) West Germany, penciled on the back of a wonderful wood-block print and hopefully asking if the Dead would perform there. The earliest letters in the Archive date to 1970, after they had set up shop at what would become their longtime headquarters at Fifth and Lincoln in San Rafael. The Archive does not own Corwin’s letter, though he graciously shared a reading of it, immortalized on video by former Grateful Dead staffer and videographer Steve Brown. It was part of why the Dead were viewed as de facto community leaders in the Haight, not just the preeminent band to make its home there, as New York critic Richard Goldstein observed during his visit in the fall of 1966. Later featured in an exhibition at the Archive, the letter is a testament to the sense of responsibility the band felt for their fans-something that early Dead freaks (as they were then known) already recognized and responded to. When a young fan named Craig Corwin wrote to Garcia in 1966, after the band’s show in Sacramento, Garcia sat down a few weeks later and wrote a three-page reply, answering his questions in detail. They were keenly conscious of their media footprint, and they already knew that their fans were the key to their survival, artistically and economically it’s little surprise that this awareness would produce the earliest and most extensive parts of the Archive.Įven their earliest fans understood that. The care with which the Dead had stewarded those series was revealing, and it was an apt reflection of the band’s priorities, even in their early years. When the first part of the Grateful Dead Archive arrived at UC Santa Cruz in the summer of 2008, the two most extensive series, or sections, were Press (discussed in the first blog), and Correspondence. Remembering the Dead, Part 2 - Letters to the Dead: The Correspondence Series of the Grateful Dead Archive