ALTON KELLEY, 67; ARTIST CREATED PSYCHEDELIC POSTERS FOR ROCK GROUPS

Alton Kelley, a San Francisco graphic artist whose psychedelic posters
and album covers captured the mood and music of the Grateful Dead, the
Steve Miller Band, Journey and other top rock 'n' roll groups of the
'60s and '70s, has died. He was 67.

Kelley died Sunday at his home in Petaluma, Calif., according to
publicist Jennifer Gross. The cause was complications from
osteoporosis.

With his creative partner Stanley Mouse, Kelley helped launch a poster
art revolution in the mid-1960s, turning out vividly colored works for
concerts at the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium, where Jimi
Hendrix, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver
Messenger Service were among the headliners.

"Kelley was one of the first to see it coming, the rise of the
psychedelic era in San Francisco," Paul Grushkin, who wrote "The Art
of Rock, Posters From Presley to Punk" (1987), said this week. "He was
a pioneer."

Using images inspired by vintage prints and lettering that flows like
smoke, Kelley and Mouse designed graphics now considered emblems of
the psychedelic age.

The best known of them all is a skull and roses design they created
for the Grateful Dead.

"Kelley had the unique ability to translate the music being played
into amazing images that capture the spirit of who we were and what
the music was all about," Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead said in a
statement this week.

The album covers that came out of the Kelley-Mouse collaboration with
the Grateful Dead included "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty"
in 1970.

The idea for a skull and roses came from an illustration in "The
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam," a collection of poems by the Persian poet
who died in 1123. Kelley once explained that he found the illustration
in a library book, enlarged the image, and added color and other
details that dramatically changed it. "I knew right away it was a
classic, " he said in a 1995 interview with the Palm Beach Post.

He and Mouse created several other graphic images that became
signatures for certain bands. Among them is a Pegasus that looms from
the album cover of the Steve Miller Band's "Book of Dreams" in 1977
and a scarab on the album cover of "Departure," by Journey in 1980.

"Images Kelley and Mouse put on playbills, posters and album covers
became a major part of the music experience of the time," Dell Furano
of Signatures Network, which merchandises rock artworks, said in an
interview this week.

Kelley was born June 17, 1940, in Houlton, Maine. After high school he
worked as a mechanic and took art classes but never graduated from art
school. He moved to San Francisco in about 1965 and helped found the
Family Dog Collective, a group that produced some of the first
psychedelic dance concerts in San Francisco, with light shows, dancing
and poster art as part of the program.

He met Mouse about a year after he arrived in San Francisco. At the
time, the Haight-Ashbury district was starting to bubble over. "It was
really fun. Everybody was really enjoying themselves," Kelley told the
San Francisco Chronicle last year. "We all came out of the rock 'n'
roll world."

When they began working together, "Stanley and I had no idea what we
were doing," Kelley told the Chronicle. "We had free rein to just go
graphically crazy."

Their posters combined images borrowed from Native American and
Chinese art, Art Nouveau and Art Deco, reworked in acid colors and
swirling letters that were a dramatic break with tradition. "Before
that, all advertising was pretty much just typeset with a photograph
of something," Kelley told the Chronicle.

"It was a glory period for record album covers," Grushkin said of the
artists' inventions. "Kelley and Mouse created art that captured what
the music sounded like."

Kelley continued working as a graphic artist throughout his career,
sometimes teaming up with Mouse. Their most recent project was for the
March induction ceremony of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum
in Cleveland.

Kelley is survived by his wife, Marguerite; three children; two
grandchildren; his mother, Annie; and his sister, Kathy.