Grateful dead dancing bear template3/13/2024 But he’d probably explain a lot of other things too. If you asked Bear himself, he’d explain the bears on Bear’s Choice weren’t dancing at all. It was artist Bob Thomas who put the bears in a circle around the back cover. It was also the first release of music from what Owsley called his Sonic Journals, vérité documents of his work as a sound engineer. It was a tribute to Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, who’d passed away that spring. The bears that you know first appeared in July 1973 on the Grateful Dead live album, The History of the Grateful Dead, Volume One: Bear’s Choice. But, as you may have noticed, there sure are a lot of them. That’s a lot for some little cuddly bears. In addition to being the Grateful Dead’s first in-house audio engineer and a pioneer who helped transform live concert sound, Owsley was also the most legendary underground LSD chemist in history, a story inseparable from the history of the Dead - and, for that matter, perhaps the entirety of Western culture over the past half-century. And they’re some excellent tracks to leave behind. Owsley Stanley, also known as the Bear, or just Bear, made many tapes. He was born Augustus Owsley Stanley III in 1935, though he hated the “Augustus” and had it legally changed later on. The Bear in question is also the person responsible for that recording and many more, by the Grateful Dead and others. JESSE: That was the Grateful Dead on June 28th, 1969 in Santa Rosa, California, covering Porter Wagoner’s “Ol’ Slew Foot” and answering the musical question: “Does a bear drop in the woods?” JERRY GARCIA : Only if there’s someone there to hear it. Does a bear drop in the woods? That is the question. PHIL LESH : This song is about bear drops. These bears might look cuddly and cute, but there’s a bit more to the story. But they’re everywhere, an iconography permanently associated with the Grateful Dead.īut why bears? And why are they dancing? It’s kind of like asking what egg-laying rabbits have to do with Easter, but there’s a lot more LSD involved. Maybe you love them, maybe you hate them. When there are baseball games, people wear them as costumes and dance on top of the dugout. They’re on sweatshirts and scarves and golf balls and pretty much anything you can put a dancing bear on. They’re on license plate holders and stickers that get stuck on bathroom mirrors in bars. Maybe you’ve never even heard of the Grateful Dead before and you accidentally clicked on this somehow - you’ve still seen these bears, trust me.
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