Hot Rods & Rock and Roll

Stanley Mouse, 'Original design for Journey poster, Day on the Green’. The Mouse that Rocked: The Art of Stanley Mouse.

The artwork of Stanley Mouse for the Grateful Dead, Journey, the Steve Miller band, and others helped to launch a new pop vernacular that defined the look of the rock and roll revolution. Many of these seminal works are featured in our PhillipsX selling exhibition The Mouse that Rocked: The Art of Stanley Mouse, in partnership with Casterline|Goodman Gallery, and on view 20 March through 17 April at Phillips' West Hollywood galleries.

Here, discover the grand adventure of how it all came to be, as Blake Koh, the Regional Director of Phillips Los Angeles, queries the legend about the origins of his extraordinary oeuvre.

Stanley Mouse, Grateful Dead, Oxford Circle (blue red lavender). The Mouse that Rocked: The Art of Stanley Mouse.

Blake Koh: I’m interested in the way you started as an artist in Detroit with the car scene. There's a visual sort of shape to cars. Hot rod painting has been a thing for a long time. I'm interested in you being an artist and then combining that with car culture. It's not an obvious thing, is it? Was there car art when you started? Was there already some kind of imagery around cars?

Stanley Mouse: I think very, very little. One thing that comes to mind is the car culture in Detroit and Los Angeles. They would chop the tops, so the windows were real skinny, and they'd remove all the emblems and even the door handles to make the cars real smooth. Now, all the new cars have them. They're all chopped and channeled, with very few emblems.

There was one thing about the Detroit and Los Angeles connection. It was started by guys who were trained as mechanics in the war. When they came back, they had nothing to do, so they started tinkering with old cars. They first started messing around with ‘32 Fords and then ‘51 Mercuries. Then the drag races and the car shows started, and it was quite a thing for many years. That’s how the whole hot rod scene came about.

BK: There was clearly an appetite for your work. You had a successful business as a young person making visual art around that car culture, right?

SM: Yeah, I drew my way through school. As a teenager, I was all about monsters and cars, and then I started pinstriping and painting pictures in names on cars. My driveway was always full of them — just a line of cars for me to work on. It got out that I'd stripe a dashboard for a case of beer, so all these guys were driving up with cases of beer.

I started flaming cars with a spray gun and I really liked the freedom of it. Then, I got into airbrushing and just went crazy with it. At the time, there were guys in LA who were pinstripers who then went into airbrushing on sweatshirts, and it became a kind of a little fad, and I jumped onto it — and I called myself 'Striper Stan' from LA.

I started constructing sunglasses at the hot rod shows, then started airbrushing shirts. It got really big. I must have painted thousands and thousands of shirts across those shows, all over the Midwest and the East. I went to all of them and even had a contract to be their official shirt painter.

At one of the shows, Big Daddy Ross came in and painted with me. He asked me permission and I said, “Yeah.” He said he'd show me a difference between making a hundred bucks and three hundred. And I said, “Okay…”. But it turned out that I made a thousand and he only made three hundred. He was funny. He had this little, tiny easel and painted only black and white shirts. He also had a lot of people working for him that were really, really good. Like this guy called Newton — a really good airbrusher.

BK: You talk about the freedom that the airbrush gave you. Did you use it for both detail and that sort of atmospheric look?

SM: Definitely. The brush didn't touch the surface. It was like the freedom of your hand just dancing. You could get very detailed in the foreground and then go into the background by pulling your brush away from the canvas.

BK: Those early hot rod designs, the t-shirts, the posters, and also some of your most famous pieces — like the one you did for Jimi Hendrix, Journey, and American Graffiti — all use airbrushing techniques?

SM: Yes. I'd use frisket [a type of transparent stencil] on certain parts of the designs and then I’d airbrush the color in.

Stanley Mouse, Love Ride,1988. The Mouse that Rocked: The Art of Stanley Mouse.

BK: It feels like there's a kind of rebel nature to the hot rod culture that translates a little bit to a different kind of rebel nature that was happening in San Francisco. When you went there, was there already an existing visual landscape for posters and things?

SM: There was Beatnik art. It was cool and had a certain flavor to it. I think the psychedelic poster drew from that style — probably unconsciously. It was what was going on in San Francisco. Also, billboards of the ‘50s were designed to let you see the message in ten seconds and everything had to be really literal. It was boring, really boring. We lashed out at all those norms that were happening at the time.

BK: I love that idea, that the lettering is fully part of the design, right? Instead of legibility being important, it's the image that mattered.

SM: The lettering got you involved in looking at the posters. People said you had to be stoned to read them. It made looking at one into a happening. We wore colors that way, too — a lot of opposing and flashing colors.

Stanley Mouse with Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead.

BK: You did posters for bands at their very beginnings. Did you start to hear back from the bands about what they liked? What was it like to work with them?

SM: Actually, things were working so well. The bands and the promoters never said anything. The artists had total freedom. Later on, it changed. The bands would tell you what to do. The roadies would too — and even their wives and girlfriends... But, at that time in the ‘60s, nobody told you what to do and you had total freedom. It was really, really cool. And everybody stepped up to the plate. There were so many poster artists and we all competed against each other, in a friendly way. Every time somebody came out with a poster, we’d try to one up them. I remember I did a poster and Rick Griffin’s wife was living in San Francisco at the time and saw it. She grabbed the poster and took it down to Rick and he made a beeline up to San Francisco to join in the poster movement.

BK: I love that the imagery you're best known for all started with you. It wasn't the bands saying, “Oh, try this or that.” It was you creating it. I've read that you and your partner, Alton Kelley, looked at a lot of different imagery and you were borrowing things in some of those posters and photographs. It feels like there's certain Art Nouveaux or late-19th or early-20th century lettering. Were there any particular things you were looking at a lot?

SM: Well Kelley had a great eye for layout and composition and finding really cool things to make posters out of — like visuals of Gloria Swanson and “Zig Zag Man.” We also went to the library and found the Sullivan "Skull and Roses." We used a lot of great things from history.

Kelley was a great layout guy, and I had just painted 10,000 sweatshirts. My hand was like an Olympic athlete. With his layout ability and my hand, we did some things… We were doing so many — one every week in 1966. As we were working on maybe our tenth poster, we heard our work was already in a museum... in Leningrad!

Stanley Mouse, Grateful Dead, Skull and Roses. The Mouse that Rocked: The Art of Stanley Mouse.

BK: It's said that you were expelled from high school and you enrolled in art school.

SM: That's a fun story. My dad was a sign painter and he had a card that said “Signs” on it. There was this hangout across the street from the high school that everybody went to each morning. The jukebox was full of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and all kinds of great stuff. We’d boogie and party all morning at the hangout and then go to school. It was named The Flying Saucer Café, but everybody called it The Box, because it was a little box. One day when they were repainting the place, I saw it was all white. So, I took my dad's card over there with a letter — and my friend and I painted “Box” on it — a big sign. I signed it, too. I probably shouldn't have done that.

We also had a little rock and roll band. That same week, when the band at the school dance playing "Tea for Two" took a break, we jumped up and started rocking out on their instruments. The whole place went wild dancing. I failed to notice that the principal was there — and on Monday morning, I was expelled for causing a riot at the school dance and painting the box sign. A great way to go, you know.

That was the beginning of my music and art career. I was 16 and I got into the Arts and Crafts school downtown. There I was making figurative paintings and drawings of nude women — and I'm going, “This sure beats the hell out of high school.” At 16, it was pretty impressive. I would also follow my teacher around because I was hungry to learn how to paint, but he got mad at me. I dropped out and drove to San Francisco. Then, a few years later, I went back to Detroit and had a one-man show at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the museum connected to the art school I dropped out of.

BK: You spent some time in London also?

SM: I did that after the San Francisco scene and hippie culture died. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were shot. There was racial strife on the streets and it was dangerous to be walking down 8th Street. So, I left.

Somebody said that you could get higher on meditation than LSD. So I took it up, and I found out that it was true. While I was meditating, Eric Clapton called me and asked, “Do you want to come to London to paint my Rolls-Royce?” I said, “I'll be right there.” So, I went to London and that led to working for the Beatles and Blind Faith. Before I left for London, I did a Cream poster in San Francisco. That's when I first met Clapton.

BK: And it was a different music scene in London than San Francisco, right?

SM: Yeah, I wish I'd been there three years earlier — when Jimi Hendrix and all those bands were playing at small clubs.

We worked out of Cambridge for a company called Intermedia and they were jazzed up to have us, but they couldn't find anything for us to do. They finally asked us to create a Jimi Hendrix album cover. We worked really hard on it and airbrushed a beautiful scarab. It was an Art Nouveau Egyptian design. They called it The Power of God, which was kind of severe, but then they made us change it to Power of Soul. It was coming out really, really nice, but just as we finished the artwork, Jimmy died. Because it wasn't used, we brought it back to San Francisco and morphed it into a Journey thing.

BK: Is it right that Journey found you after seeing the Steve Miller art? Is that how that connection was made?

SM: Probably. That makes sense because the Steve Miller art came out and it was fantastic. We would run into the Journey bass player often and one day he came by the studio and asked if we could do a cover for them. That was when we had the scarab idea going, so it turned into the Journey scarab — the beetle.

BK: The one we have was a touring poster design.

SM: Oh, right, that was A Day on the Green. It was a Journey show outside. An outdoor concert.

Stanley Mouse, Guitar Player on Stage, 2009. The Mouse that Rocked: The Art of Stanley Mouse.

BK: Have you ever thought about how your work would hang in a museum or where you'd like to see it in a museum?

SM: It’d be nice to have a big five show at a museum: Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoco, Rick Griffin, Wes Wilson, and Stanley Mouse.

I have a funny story about a museum. I was looking at paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. All afternoon, I tried to get up close to them to try to figure out the technique. When I got near the front door, I was looking at a painting three inches from the surface — and the painting actually spoke to me! It said, “Stanley, don't worry about technique. Worry about actually doing it — painting.” And it was so strong that it blew me right out the museum door. Then, as I was stumbled out, I saw Picasso on the wall. He said, “And have fun doing it…!” Then, bam! I was on the street. It was a beautiful October day in New York City and I thought, “Oh wow, what happened to me?”

BK: That should be a lesson for any artist.

SM: Technique will come if you do it.

BK: You said it in that story from high school that it's sort of a confluence of the hot rod culture and the amazing music coming out of Motown and Detroit. Both were influences for you.

SM: That was the thing with me painting and Detroit with Motown music scene. Since I was a little kid, like 14, I would listen to the Black stations on the radio — which at the time was frowned upon. Then Motown happened. It crossed over and was so popular, it was like the birth of rock and roll. When I painted shirts at the Michigan State Fair, I'd have the "Motown Music Revue" behind me. I'd be painting fluorescent colors on shirts and smoking a little weed and listening to all these great Motown acts. I did an album cover for Mickey's Monkey by Smokey Robinson. I was really involved in that music scene.

BK: It's amazing. It feels like it's always been together for you — art and music.

SM: To me, there's no difference. Art is visual music. I've been trying to draw music lately — just color and form. When I got to San Francisco, I was all into art and music as a medium. They were always with me together, from the start.

BK: You were the perfect person at that moment. Really Incredible.