My pleasure. If you’re going to credit me, you can use my real name (Eric M. Bram). I like most sorts of music, though I mostly sing and play folk music. I also occasionally do research into old folk music lyrics and derivations, for example the article I wrote about the lyrics to “Wildwood Flower”/”I’ll Twine Mid the Ringlets” to which I’ve linked in my profile.

Not so fast! While in law school I heard an interesting story about those bears. As I heard the story, there was a fellow who, in the early easy-going days of the Grateful Dead, followed the band around and sold Grateful Dead paraphernalia including many items that had the band’s signature “dancing bears” on them. One day, after rock had become big business and the band had become “corporate,” the band’s “suits” sent a “cease and desist” letter to this vendor demanding he stop using the band’s “copyrighted dancing bears” without a license and demanding he pay damages to the band and give them a cut of all future sales.

The copyright attorney who took this guy’s case (from whom I heard this story), believing the dancing bears had been designed by artist Bob Thomas to appear on the back cover of the band’s 1973 release, The History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 1 (Bear’s Choice), contacted Thomas, thinking the artist might still own the copyright for the dancing bear design. The album designer wrote back explaining where those bears had actually originated. The copyright attorney wrote the Grateful Dead’s corporate lawyers telling them the bears on the album had come from the illegal “Owsley Acid” LSD distributed by the band and band employees at their concerts and asking if they still wanted to contest ownership of that design. The vender never heard back from the band’s “suits” after that.

So according to the copyright attorney who told me this story circa 1991–92, Bob Thomas told him the “dancing bears” blotter acid (LSD) wasn’t patterned after the 1973 album, but the other way around.