Grateful Dead, San Francisco, 12/23/1966
Artwork and commentary by Victor Moscoso 

“This was the only poster that I did for the Grateful Dead. It was kind of the luck of the draw as to who got which poster. And I did a lot of posters for the Doors; I did a lot of posters for the Brother and Quicksilver; but this is the only poster I did for the Grateful Dead, and it’s titled “Satanic Santa.” Chet Helms said that he wanted me to do a Satanic Santa, so I came up with this.

“Chet Helms threw me the scene, and I took it from there. And the interesting thing about all of these posters is that once I got the bill, you know, and in some cases the scene—which, you know, I could reject if I wanted to— nobody saw it, neither Chet nor Bill Graham, or any of my other clients. No one saw what the poster was gonna look like until the poster was done. There was no showing of sketches, none of that. No approvals. I would just finish the poster, once I had been given the bill; and the other artists—not all of them, but Alton Kelley and Rick Griffin—also worked that way. Wes Wilson had a bit of problems with Bill Graham, ‘cause Bill Graham wanted to make the lettering legible, you know. That’s how hip he was (laughs). That’s funny, that’s funny. ‘Cause he didn’t get it, man.

“So that when, say, the Family Dog people came to pick up the poster, there it was: both the posters and the handbills or the postcards, printed, chopped and ready to hang up. Nobody sees them; nobody saw them except the printer, not the clients. And that doesn’t happen very often; that doesn’t happen anymore; but there was a period of time when once the client gave me the job, that was the last he saw of me ‘till it was delivered.”

See more artwork by Victor Moscoso