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Category: Inductees

Created: Monday, 19 June 2023 15:33

Written by Gary Johnson

Stanley George Miller was born on October 10, 1940 in Fresno, California. He is better known as Mouse or Stanley Mouse, an American artist who is notable for his 1960s psychedelic rock concert poster designs and album covers for the Grateful Dead, Journey, and other bands. 

Mouse grew up in Detroit, Michigan. He was given the nickname ‘Mouse’ as a ninth grader. He was expelled from Mackenzie High School in 1956 for mischievously repainting the façade at The Box, a popular restaurant across the street from Mackenzie. Following his junior year at Cooley High School, Mouse completed his formal education at Detroit’s Society of Arts and Crafts.

By 1958, Mouse had become fascinated by the Weirdo Hot Rod art movement that had begun in California a decade earlier. Having developed skills using an airbrush, he began painting t-shirts at custom car shows. There he met and worked with Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, the leading exponent of Weirdo Hot Rod art.

Mouse was also strongly influenced by Rick Griffin, with whom he would later collaborate on posters and album covers. In 1959, Mouse and his family founded Mouse Studios, a mail-order company, which sold his products.

In 1964, he was invited to help in the design of Monogram automobile model kits using the “monster” cartoon characters he had developed to compete with Roth’s “Rat Fink” character. 

In 1965, Mouse traveled to San Francisco, California, with a group of art school friends. Settling initially in Oakland, Mouse met Alton Kelley, a self-taught artist who had recently arrived from Virginia City, Nevada, where he had joined a group of hippies who called themselves the Red Dog Saloon gang. Upon arrival in San Francisco, Kelley and other veterans of the gang renamed themselves The Family Dog and began producing rock music dances.

In 1966, Chet Helms assumed leadership of the group and began promoting the dances at the Avalon Ballroom, and Mouse and Kelley began working together to produce posters for the events. During this time, Mouse and Alton Kelley lived and worked at 715 Ashbury, across the street from the house that the Grateful Dead inhabited. Family Dog

From September 1967 through December 1967, Mouse and Kelley also created psychedelic posters for shows at Helms’ The Family Dog Denver. That same year, Mouse collaborated with fellow artist Kelley, Victor Moscoso, and Wes Wilson to create the Berkeley Bonaparte Distribution Agency. In addition, Mouse and Kelley worked together as lead artists at Mouse Studios and The Monster Company, producing album cover art for the bands Journey and the Grateful Dead. The Monster Company also developed a profitable line of t-shirts, utilizing the four-color process for silk screening.

The psychedelic posters Mouse and Kelley produced were heavily influenced by Art Nouveau graphics, particularly the works of Alphonse Mucha and Edmund Joseph Sullivan. Materials associated with psychedelics such as Zig-Zag rolling papers were also referenced. Producing posters advertising musical groups like Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead led to meeting the musicians and making contacts that later proved to be fruitful.

In 1968, Helms and Bill Graham began turning to other artists for their poster work, and Mouse’s career languished. After brief periods in London and Massachusetts, he moved to Toronto where he ran a Yorkville waterbed store with the walls covered with his artwork. 

Mouse then returned to California to live in Marin County near Kelley. The pair resumed their partnership in 1971, produced commercial artwork related to the Grateful Dead and later Journey. The pair are credited with creating the skeleton and roses image that became the Grateful Dead’s archetypal iconography, and Journey’s wings and beetles that appeared on their album covers from 1977 to 1980.

In 1977, Mouse, with Kelley, created the Styx album cover for “The Grand Illusion” with a pastiche of Rene Magritte. k memorabilia until 1980. Mouse continued to produce album cover art and other music-related graphics through the 1980s. Early in the decade, he moved to New Mexico where he began producing fine art in a variety of media. In 1999, he contributed a portrait of Skip Spence to the tribute album, “More Oar: A Tribute to the Skip Spence Album.”

Stanley Mouse filed a lawsuit against to producers of the film Monsters Inc, in 2002, alleging that the characters of Mike a Sulley were based on his drawings of Excuse My Dust, which he unsuccessfully pitched to Hollywood producers in 1998. A Disney spokesperson responded that the characters in Monsters Inc. were “developed independently by the Pixar and Walt Disney Pictures creative teams and do not infringe on anyone’s copyrights.”

Mouse currently lives in Sonoma County, California, where he continues to paint and create music. Stanley Mouse was inducted into the Michigan Rock and Roll Legends Hall of Fame in 2023.

Source: Wikipedia (Stanley Mouse)