Theee
13 point Grateful Dead lightning bolt is located inside of the stealie. The logo was always on the bands equipment and eventually symbolized the band itself. When you see the
13 point bolt(or of course... the stealie) you have encountered a fractal of the Grateful Dead's essence, a piece/part of them.
SMILE!!!
The 13-point lightning bolt was derived from a stencil Owsley
Bear(along with his close friend Bob Thomas)created to spray-paint on the Grateful Dead's equipment. Owsley was an underground lsd cook/ longtime soundman and financier for the dead)
The Dead in those days had to play in a lot of festival style shows where the equipment would all wind up at the back of the stage in a muddle, it was created to
help the
crew find the Dead's equipment in the jumble of multiple bands' identical black equipment boxes at festivals.
The lightning bolt design came to him after seeing a similar design on a roadside advertisement: "One day in the
rain, I looked out the side and saw a sign along the freeway which was a circle with a white
bar across it, the top of the circle was orange and the
bottom blue. I couldn't read the
name of the firm, and so was just looking at the shape. A thought occurred to me: if the orange were red and the
bar across were a lightning bolt cutting across at an angle, then we would have a very nice, unique and highly identifiable
mark to put on the equipment."
