John Van Hamersveld - Skull T-Shirt

John van Hamersveld recalls ‘The Skull Tongue started with a trademark I was drawing for the Grateful Dead manager "Rock Skully" in the early 70s, then Warner Brothers wanted an ad for the Deads new single for the trades.  I hook-up the the skull onto the body of what is the new PINNACLE trademark now as “Truckin’,” “Casey Jones,” drawing’. 

The Skull Tongue image is hooked up to the Skeletons From The Closet album cover with the skelton giving the "FINGER" to go with the song “Friend of the Devil”!

Although it didn’t chart particularly well -- Deadheads had little use for a greatest “hits” compilation -- Skeletons From The Closet does a good job of putting the band’s more popular work on a single record.

Not surprisingly, the best tracks come from the band’s best albums, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. Two tracks from Aoxomoxoa are also featured, “St. Stephen” and the delicate “Rosemary” (the latter seems an odd choice).

The disc splits the songs pretty evenly between Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir; Weir’s “One More Saturday Night” from Europe ’72 and “Mexicali Blues” from his first solo album, Ace, are good representatives of his style (“Sugar Magnolia” is even better).

The decision to start with “The Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion)” from their first record is questionable, since there were better live tracks to choose from, but ending things with “Friend of the Devil” draws no complaint from me.

The most obscure selection is a live version of “Turn On Your Love Light” from the promotional LP, The Big Ball.

Skeletons is recommended to listeners who like the handful of Grateful Dead songs they’ve heard on the radio -- “Truckin’,” “Casey Jones,” etc. -- and don’t mind hearing them interspersed with other tracks from that same period (the early ‘70s).