Alton Kelley gave a signature look to the San Francisco sound. The posters, handbills and album covers Kelley and collaborator Stanley Mouse designed for 1960s psychedelic rock scene started out as casual counterculture but blossomed into rock’s visual aura. Kelley’s June 1st death dates rock’s sinewy, incandescent image. Yet the image hasn’t gone anywhere. While generations of musicians have rehashed the sounds of the 60s, the visuals that accompany rock still uncannily resemble Kelley and Mouse’s psychedelic designs.

Born in Houlton, Maine, Kelley grew up in Connecticut. His parents worked in defense plants during the Second World War and Kelley developed a fascination for anything mechanical, especially motorcycles and race cars. This fascination sharpened his interest in art—he would accentuate motorcycle gas tanks with painted stripes or draw hot rods. He studied industrial design briefly, but caught the 60s wanderlust and migrated to San Francisco in 1964. Living in the Haight-Ashbury district, Kelley fell in with an enterprising group of hippies and helped found Family Dog, an artist collective that staged psychedelic dance parties and concerts in Longshoreman’s Hall and the Avalon Ballroom. Big Brother & the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service were some of Family Dog’s first headliners.

Kelley took charge of promoting Family Dog events. When draftsman Stanley Mouse fell in with the crowd, Mouse and Kelley became a fiery duo. At first, Kelley would work out the poster and flyer ideas that Mouse would execute. Later, when Kelley became a better draftsman himself, the two of them would render the designs together. What started as a transient, underground scene quickly became notorious and the fame of Family Dog designs grew alongside the music. Over the course of their careers, Kelley and Mouse would design album covers and concert posters for The Grateful Dead, Van Morrison, Traffic, Jimi Hendrix, and Pink Floyd, among others.

In a 2007 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Kelley explained, “Stanley and I had no idea what we were doing. But we went ahead and looked at American Indian stuff, Chinese stuff, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modern, Bauhaus, whatever. We were stunned by what we found and what we were able to do. We had free rein to just go graphically crazy.” They made liberal cultural references and their work resembled a cross between the Wild West, modernism and mysticism. But most importantly, their work reflected the loose cross-referencing and distortion occurring in the music.

The Haight-Ashbury scene was close knit and the two artists knew everyone, including local DJs. “I’d be sitting there working on a poster at night,” Kelley told Rolling Stone in 1990. “We’d call up and talk to someone we knew: ‘Hi, this is Kelley, we’re working over here. Could you play us some Rolling Stones songs or Trouble Coming Every Day by Frank Zappa?’ They’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, no problem.’ The music would inspire us.” Kelley and Mouse made a clean break from the standardized, conservative templates that dictated albums and posters from the 1950s, responding to the hot-blooded sounds they heard with a spirited precision.

The 1966 poster Kelley and Mouse designed for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Zig-Zag Man tour depicts a bearded man smoking a joint—they reportedly flushed their own marijuana down the toilet after posting the image, afraid their blatant drug reference would summon police. The text swirls around as if on a fabric scroll and the seraph fonts morph into different versions of themselves. Capturing the languid, Americana-tinged quality of Big Brother, the design looked like the music sounded. Later, when the duo began working with the dependable but disillusioned sound of the Grateful Dead, their designs became less whimsical. The cover for The Dead’s American Beauty is straightforward and brawny. A leather-like circle sits on top of a wood-grain surface. The rose in the circle’s center could be the tattoo on a biker’s arm or an emblem carved into a tree by an unusually meticulous lover. The font is a barely readable haze of pink and purple letters.

Mouse and Kelley started designing before anyone had heard of Grace Slick, Janis Joplin, or the Grateful Dead. Rock has changed since then, but the music industry has yet to reject their psychedelic sensibility. In fact, their sensibility is stronger than ever on the album covers of today’s heady rock bands. Bands like The Decemberists, Okkervil River, and Arcade Fire function as historically informed storytellers. They seem to inhale rock’s history and exhale intricately shaped narratives steeped in nostalgia for the 60s and 70s music scene—a world they never knew. While Mouse and Kelley wandered into a metastatic moment and became culture-makers, designing an image to go with new sounds and ideas, contemporary album artists are re-embodying their visual legacy.

The album cover for The Decemberists’ single, 16 Military Wives, resembles Kelley and Mouse’s early work. The text, written on scrolled paper, vacillates in size and font and the central, hand-drawn image of a crown anchors the design. It’s an image steeped in folklore. It faithfully echoes the nostalgic bent of The Decemberists’ music, but it also looks a lot like the posters for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Family Dog gigs.

Artist William Schaff designed the cover for Okkervil River’s 2007 album The Stage Names. It depicts a gnarly hand emerging from a river, reaching up into a stylized, orange and yellow sky. Two banners—one above the hand and one below—announce the band’s name and the album’s title. Hand-crafted, the image intimately engages the nostalgia of the music.

Okkervil River frontman Will Sheff described the persisting allure of the 60s on NPR’s All Songs Considered. “There was a sense of swagger and playfulness and the 60s was a time before Prog [progressive rock] where you could have a light touch and you could be making art without realizing you were making art,” said Sheff. “Nobody was thinking it was going to last. And I think that’s one of the things that makes it so charming. There’s so little sense of a grand statement.” The light, in-the-moment touch has become a legacy for rock and roll design. Now, however, bands and album artists are more self-aware: they realize that they are making art and they realize that they are rehashing their legacy, channeling the playful, kinetic identity bred by 60s rock but expanding it with 21st Century references. They don’t care if it’s dated; they still want to relish the swagger of their inherited sound and persona.

Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse gave culture visual form as it happened. Bands like Okkervil River and The Decemberists find ways to pull that form into the present. Maybe Kelley and Mouse’s staying power evidences what artists are always reluctant to embrace: art can remain relevant without rejecting its past. Kelley’s death dates rock’s visual identity, but it also commemorates how long psychedelic imagery has lasted. Rock found a visual language that spoke volumes, and it has yet to find a better one.

>Written by d/visible contributor Catherine Wagley.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 10:04 am and is filed under Graphic Arts, Culture, Profile, Art & Design, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.