WHAT A LONG STRANGE TRIP IT’S CONTINUED TO BE… It is my highest honor to present to you the second part of my Grateful Dead trilogy in collaboration with Bottleneck Gallery - GRATEFUL DEAD PT. II - ELECTRIC BOOGALOO - THE SECOND PART.
I’m not totally sure when Joe and I decided that we needed to make a second Grateful Dead print, or an eventual third one for that matter. I just know at one point in time - we both decided that it had to be done. Bertha needed her man - her Jack Straw, her Saint Stephen, her partner for eternity. The concept was pretty direct - create a piece that mirrored elements from the initial Grateful Dead poster, while still also creating a new poster that could stand just as strong on it’s own. I’ve done many side-by-side views of the two, and trust me… it’s like church. They pair up like no other.
Going into this, I was presented with an interesting set of obstacles. The first obstacle was “sonofabitch I’m really gonna draw all of this for a second time”. The second obstacle was “what am I gonna do when I finish the Dune saga audiobooks and this still isn’t done”. And the third obstacle was… How do you create a paired follow up piece to your most successful poster of all time? The first Grateful Dead poster literally changed my career, I had no idea how to continue off that. This is something I kinda chewed on for weeks, I had so much internal back and forth of being like “I need to change these elements and these elements” and “this has to be better than that” and “how can I somehow make this piece better than the first, when it’s just supposed to be more of a mirrored piece as opposed to something completely new?”
Eventually I figured out the answer - I just gotta do it exactly how I did the first, one little line at a time. I came to accept that it’s not meant to be a brand new piece or even a BETTER piece - it’s meant to be a partner, the continuation of the story. When you write a sequel to a book, you don’t throw out all the characters and settings from the first book and start from scratch - you build off what you’ve already got, and continue to tell that story. This is the second part of the story, and I’m really very proud of how it was written.