Rock’s Most Famous Band Logos Were Drawn by Men Nobody Names

—

In 1946, Republic Pictures put out a twelve-chapter serial called The Crimson Ghost. It played Saturday matinees, made nobody famous, and vanished. Its villain wore a skull mask.

Eighty years on, that mask sits on more chests than the film ever sold tickets. A New Jersey punk band stamped their name across it in 1979 and never took it off.

Most rock band logos with a skull in them work roughly like that, and the bands didn’t draw them. Several were lifted from something older, and one of the most famous started life as a way to stop roadies losing gear in a field. The men who did the drawing are on record, and almost nobody can name them. Here’s what the paperwork says about five of them.

A Serial Almost Nobody Has Seen Is on More Shirts Than It Sold Tickets

Jerry Only’s account of finding the image is unglamorous. He and Glenn Danzig were digging through monster magazines for a T-shirt venture when the Crimson Ghost turned up, and they put the Misfits name across it. The first record sleeve reliably tied to the image is the 1979 Horror Business single.

Illustration: a 1940s serial reached its audience as reels in cans. The Crimson Ghost’s mask outlived the film it was built for.

The claim that follows the picture everywhere is that the serial fell into the public domain, so the band could take it freely. Federal copyright records don’t support that. The serial was registered in two halves, and both halves were renewed — chapters one to six in 1973, chapters seven to twelve in 1974. A renewed 1946 work can run for 95 years.

So the image the Misfits built four decades of merchandise on was, on paper, still somebody’s property. The band’s own long-running legal fight was over the Fiend Skull, between Danzig and Jerry Only. It was never about the Republic film underneath it.

Worth knowing: Danzig didn’t draw the Crimson Ghost, and nobody in the Misfits did. It was a film costume from three decades before the band existed, and 2026 marks 80 years since it first appeared.

The Dead’s Skull Came Out of a 1913 Book of Persian Poetry

Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley drew the skull crowned with roses for a Grateful Dead and Oxford Circle bill at the Avalon Ballroom on 16 and 17 September 1966. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art files it as Family Dog poster FD-26 — sixty years ago this September.

They didn’t invent the composition. It was taken directly from an illustration for the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, a book of Persian verse. The artist was the Englishman Edmund Joseph Sullivan, and the edition was published in London by Methuen in 1913. Mouse’s telling is that the two of them found it while hunting for ideas in a San Francisco library, and that Kelley cut the page out with a penknife.

Mouse has said the picture “seemed pretty copyright-free” to him at the time. That was an impression rather than a legal finding, and no renewal search settles it either way — which makes the borrowing casual, not cleared.

It wasn’t even the band’s first skeleton. Wes Wilson had already drawn a cigar-smoking one for their Avalon shows that June, three months earlier. The version that stuck was the borrowed version.

So What Was the Steal Your Face Skull Actually For?

Not a logo. Owsley “Bear” Stanley wanted a mark he could spot across a field of identical black boxes at a multi-band festival. His answer was a red-and-blue circle split by a lightning bolt, stencilled onto the road cases. The prototype is documented on gear from June 1969.

Illustration: before it was a logo, the Grateful Dead’s mark was a stencil sprayed on road cases so the crew could find their gear.

He then asked Bob Thomas to work the band’s name into the design. Thomas did something else instead — he turned the dividing line into a skull. That finished version dates to 1971, and it reached an album sleeve on Bear’s Choice in 1973 — three years before the record that gave it a name.

The bolt has thirteen points. The Stanley family’s explanation is that “Owsley Stanley” has thirteen letters in it, which is family recollection rather than a note from the drawing board. Players have been quietly loading meaning into the objects they carry. Bikerringshop’s guide to rock and roll rings follows that habit through the pieces musicians actually wore on stage.

Snaggletooth Isn’t Human, and Eddie Isn’t a Skull

Joe Petagno made Motörhead’s horned creature in 1975. Label trouble held it back until the band’s debut album in 1977, so the widely repeated “designed in 1977” is off by a full two years.

Lemmy’s brief to him was specific, and very Lemmy: something between a rusty, rotten, falling-apart robot and a knight of the realm. Petagno built it from a gorilla and a wolf skull, then added oversized boar teeth and horns. Look closely and there’s no human skull in it anywhere.

Iron Maiden’s Eddie isn’t one either. Derek Riggs has described the idea as a corpse in a T-shirt, and that’s what he painted — a gaunt, decomposing head with the teeth showing, not a clean anatomical skull. The distinction matters to anyone reproducing these shapes in metal, and it separates a faithful piece from a generic one in a Bikerringshop case full of them.

Eddie’s debut gets misremembered too. His first official artwork was the Running Free single of 8 February 1980, where Riggs deliberately kept the face out of frame. The self-titled album followed on 14 April. Before either of them there was a stage prop, a mask that pushed fake blood out of its mouth, described years later by the band’s former lighting engineer.

The Most Copied Rock Logo of All Isn’t a Skull

John Pasche was a Royal College of Art student when Mick Jagger commissioned the tongue and lips in 1970. He was paid £50, then a further £200 in 1972 — so the familiar “he only got fifty quid” line quietly drops the second payment.

It reached the public on Sticky Fingers in April 1971. In 2008 the Victoria and Albert Museum bought Pasche’s original artwork at auction for $92,500.

And Andy Warhol didn’t design it. Warhol handled the Sticky Fingers outer cover concept, a separate job on the same record — a mix-up that has been in print for decades.

Nobody Has Explained Why It Had to Be Skulls

Each of these artists explained his own picture and stopped there. Mouse said Sullivan’s skeleton had the Grateful Dead all over it. Petagno said his creature signalled trouble. Riggs called Eddie a symbol of wasted youth.

Illustration: the 1970s album-art trade, where Snaggletooth and Eddie were painted by hand — by men the fans rarely name.

What’s missing is anyone on record explaining the wider convention — why the skull, specifically, became rock’s default shorthand. Go looking for that answer and you find plenty of confident theories, and no sourced statement from the people who actually drew the things.

In the accessories trade the same gap shows up from the other end. Buyers ask for these shapes by sight rather than by story. The questions that come back are practical: which way the skull should face, whether the darkened recesses will wear smooth. The provenance almost never comes up, which is a shame, because it’s the better story.

Questions People Ask About These Logos

Who designed the Grateful Dead’s skull and roses logo?

Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley drew it for a September 1966 Avalon Ballroom poster. They adapted it from an Edmund Joseph Sullivan illustration published in a 1913 London edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. No member of the band was involved in designing it.

Is the Crimson Ghost image in the public domain?

The common claim that it is doesn’t match the federal record. The 1946 serial was registered in two halves and both were renewed, in 1973 and 1974. Renewed works from 1946 can carry a 95-year term, so the underlying film was not simply free to take.

Was Iron Maiden’s Eddie based on a real person?

Not a named one. Derek Riggs has said Eddie wasn’t anybody, and described him as a corpse standing in for wasted youth. He has also said he worked from a war photograph of a dead soldier’s head, so the character drew on a real image without depicting a real individual.

Did Andy Warhol design the Rolling Stones tongue?

No. John Pasche designed it in 1970 while studying at the Royal College of Art. Warhol worked on the outer cover concept for Sticky Fingers, the same album where the tongue first appeared, and that overlap is where the confusion started.

The bands got the credit and the merchandise. The drawings came from a student on a £50 commission, two poster artists in San Francisco, an airbrush painter in England, and whoever built a mask at Republic Pictures in 1946. None of them played a note on the records their work now stands for. The names are all on record — just not on the shirts.

Author bio: The author has worked in the sterling silver jewellery and accessories trade for years. His interest is in how symbols travel from art and film onto the things people wear. He writes about craft and symbolism at Bikerringshop.

—

This content is brought to you by Alexander Reid

Photos provided by Alexander Reid