Grateful Dead Tour Sticker/Decal - Blacklight Wizard Wear Skull with Horns and Chains

 

price/"$16.90" 

 author/"1990s" 

full-width

 

 Vintage 4 1/2" wide Grateful Dead sticker/decal. These are high quality art decals. This type sticks on the outside of glass or a mirror or your pocket. They are in mint condition and can still be used. They are marked "Wizard Wear copyright 1989 (in light white writing along the side)". Jerry Garcia was called the Wizard, and so "Wizard Wear" made t-shirts and stickers called Wizard Wear. Some say the Wizard Wear artwork was the best of the underground artists. 

The decal features a blacklight skull with a headband with horns and chains above his head. Excellent unused condition.

These Grateful Dead stickers/decals are old tour merchandise. I found them wrapped in plastic in boxes in master cases. They came from a distributor who sold them to tour vendors. 

 

The condition is pristine and they still will work as a car decal or window/mirror sticker. We found them packed away in storage boxes dated 1992 (many are older than that) and 1995 (year Jerry Garcia died). They are high quality artist renderings of Grateful Dead themes. Back in the day, the Dead did not monitor copyrights and that sort of thing, and in fact, at one point encouraged artists to do designs. The LA times explained it well “

 

The Grateful Dead was famously lax in enforcing it’s intellectual property rights and trademarks, allowing fans to create their own designs using the band’s expansive iconography”. Since there was no serious monitoring or much concern back then, a lot of up and coming artists got involved in designing them. 

 

This is how some of them got their starts. Some of the sticker artists who designed these stickers went on to produce official licensed works for the Grateful Dead and other famous groups. These stickers include some by now famous designers including David Opie, and others. These 1995 and older stickers are very hard to find anymore.