Grateful Dead Warner Brothers 1971 Album Promotion

The double live album, Grateful Dead, aka Skull & Roses, was released on October 24th – and this poster was released at the same time, as a record store promotion. The photo of the band is from the interior of the album, and was taken by noted psychedelic era photographer Bob Seidemann. It was one of several relics from the fall 1971 period and here is the backstory:

 
The Grateful Dead delivered two successful albums to Warner Brothers in 1970. While Warner had initially considered the Dead a sort of prestige cult act in the 60s, the band had surprised the label by releasing the very accessible Workingman's Dead in June 1970, just as FM radio was becoming a nationwide phenomenon. They followed it up with American Beauty in November 1970, which FM DJs liked even better. Warner Brothers rewarded the Dead with $100,000 in marketing dollars for Skull and Roses – and part of that money was spent on promotions like this poster.

Manager Rock Scully came up with a radical plan for the rest of the money.

The bulk of the rock audience in 1970 was young people in suburbs and colleges. Many of them might have heard of the Grateful Dead in a sort of legendary way, but they weren't that familiar with them beyond maybe a few songs on FM radio.

 
Up until this time, there had been relatively few live FM broadcasts of rock bands. The Dead pushed to spend the rest of the Warner promotional money on buying out 4 hours of advertising inventory on a local FM radio station in 15 cities - live broadcasts of complete concerts all across the country.

Such an extravaganza was never duplicated again, but it had far-reaching implications for the Dead, spreading their music and legend far and wide to young rock fans who would not otherwise have been able to see them. Interestingly, no other band dared broadcasting live shows across the country - perhaps out of fear that they would be implicitly conceding that every show they did was the same, or the fear of bootlegging

 
The cross-country radio broadcasts and local record store promotions like these helped propel the album into gold record status. Once purely a hippie band, the Grateful Dead were now big business.