Grateful Dead - Car Window Tour Sticker/Decal - Dancing Terrapins
$15.00
Vintage 5" wide Grateful Dead sticker/decal. These are high quality art decals that were made for car windows. I peeled the cover off for the picture. They are in mint condition and can still be used. This one is from around the late 1980s. It features a two dancing terrapins (turtles). The one with a guitar is a skeleton terrapin. There are butterflies in the air and four tiny bears dancing at their feet.
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 older stickers are very hard to find anymore.