A Rose a Day No. 3

The cover of the iconic hippy band Grateful Dead’s second album, released in 1971, shows a drawing of a skull garlanded with red roses, which was lifted and adapted from an illustration in an early translation of the Sufi classic, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. 'I've got this one spirit that's laying roses on me’, said band member and lyricist Robert Hunter. ‘Roses, roses, can't get enough of those bloody roses. There is no better allegory for life, dare I say it, than roses."

Grateful Dead’s lyrics often include references to the rose, most famously in the song ‘It Must Have Been the Roses’, which begins: ‘Annie laid her head down in the roses. / She had ribbons, ribbons, ribbons, in her long brown hair. / I don't know, maybe it was the roses, / All I know I could not leave her there.’ Annie, it seems, is dead. Another album is called ‘American Beauty’, and features cover art of the eponymous red rose (of which, more later on). Their 1991 compilation live album is called ‘Infrared Roses’. There’s a Grateful Dead gig poster of a blue rose (see below) which you can buy on-line. The Dead seem to dwell on the connection between the rose and death, a theme to which I will return in relation to future images of roses.

The album cover featuring the roses and skull was going to be called ‘Skull Fuck’, but for obvious reasons the band’s record company vetoed the title, so the album went title-less. ‘Skull fucking’, by the way, was Hippy slang for ‘blowing your mind’. But as Bob Dylan sang in the early 1960s, ‘The times they are a-changin’, and the on-line Urban Dictionary informs me that nowadays ‘skull fuck’ means, ‘the act of grabbing a partner's skull and putting your dick in their mouth, grabbing their skull and holding it still, therefore having sex with their skull.’ 

 Here’s some more pictures with roses for all you ‘Deadheads’: