![]() ![]() Stanley later clarified on his website that while the bears are commonly perceived to be dancing, they are actually doing a high step march. There are five different Grateful Dead bears on the album cover, in colors red, orange, yellow, green, and blue, though bears have since appeared in many different colors in different Grateful Dead related artworks. Thomas used that leaden bear as his basis for the design, which features a more cartoon style bear doing the “dancing” motion. Before the album and the bears, there existed a 36-point lead slug that was used in printing as a font type. As the name implies, the live recordings that appear on the album were hand-picked from Stanley’s personal archives by Owsley himself, with minimal input from the band. The first appearance of the Grateful Dead bears in the public sphere was on the back cover of the Bear’s Choice album. He also designed the Steal Your Face logo in collaboration with Bob Thomas, and the Grateful Dead bears were inspired by his association with the band. That’s an entirely different story for another day, but basically, Bear Stanley was an extremely important person to both the Grateful Dead and the countercultural movement of the 1960s. He was basically the one who started the entire tape trading culture that surrounded the Grateful Dead, as he always recorded soundboard masters when he ran sound at a show, and inevitably the tapes ended up in the hands of Deadheads, and spread from there. Owsley “Bear” Stanley both engineered and recorded to tape many of the shows that the Grateful Dead performed in the 60s and 70s. What's really being asked for here is to be kept in the plane of the enlightened rather than spit back out on Earth to live life again.In addition to being the band’s sound engineer in the early days, Stanley was also the chemist behind the creation and distribution of a large proportion of the LSD that was being consumed in the United States in the 1960s and beyond. Lord, until the sun goes down, 'til it goes down Why don't you arrest me? Throw me in to the jail house It's all night pourin', but not a drop on me Ran into a rainstorm, I ducked back into a bardo That interpretation clarifies why Garcia begs to be arrested. You die, spend time in the bardo, and then are born again (unless you've achieved enlightenment). ![]() Where things get really interesting is with the line "ducked back into a bar door," which could be play on the word "bardo." In Buddhism, bardo is the place or state-of-existence between two lives. That why, if you please, I'm on my bendin' kneesīertha don't you come around here, anymore ![]() If we look at "Bertha" as "birth," then the chorus: So, in "Bertha," Garcia's saying (with Hunter's words) that he's tired of running through the birth-death-reincarnation cycle over and over again. A simplified view on the Buddhist belief is that we have to keep cycling through lives until we achieve enlightenment, at which point we can get out of the run around and escape the game. The song is then about a fellow going through the cycle of birth, death, and reincarnation. Going by Hunter's statement, though, the song is far more interesting that that. The song is fun and upbeat, so the silliness of the lyrics seems fitting. The simple surface interpretation of "Bertha" is that some unnamed character runs from a window, into a tree, and then into a bar, where he takes shelter from the rain. ![]()
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