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Twenty-four vintage Grateful Dead t-shirts — tour shirts, city-specific one-offs, tie-dyes, a local-crew-only shirt never sold to the public, and a design the band pulled and destroyed before it ever reached a show.This collection documents the remarkable growth and development of the Dead's scene as they emerged from the 1970s and made the road their home in the 1980s, claiming all America as their stage. Tour shirts are art, history, and more, talismens&nbsp;of how the band turned every concert into a work of art. This collection traces how Dead t-shirts came to be one of the most artistic and evocative signs of the band's identity, art that reminds us all of the transformative nature of the Grateful Dead. This auction offers a selection of shirts never collected together in this condition and range.Every lot is individually photographed front, back, and tag, with condition called out honestly in each listing — vintage pieces are graded on their own terms, and high-grade doesn't mean flawless. See each item's photos for the full visual record.No reserve. Every lot opens at $49.95.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

This one predates the Rex Foundation by two years, a Pre-Rex benefit run with proceeds going to the Pacific Alliance, part of the anti-nuclear movement the Dead lent their name to well before benefit shirts were a routine part of touring. Mouse and Kelley, the poster-art duo behind the band's core visual identity, drew it.Black shirt, a circular emblem front and center: a skull holding a rose in its teeth, "Stop Nuclear Power" arched above, "Grateful Dead" scripted below. Small and direct, built more like a protest shirt than tour merch.Runs small even for the marked size — tagged Small (34-36), but fits closer to a modern kids' or petite small. Measurements are worth confirming before bidding.Size S · Mint · Runs smallAs with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1981 Grateful Dead Stop Nuclear Power T-Shirt — Mouse & Kelley, Size S

The Dead played very few shows outside North America. In November 1982 they played the Jamaica World Music Festival at the Bob Marley Performing Arts Center in Montego Bay, on a bill with the Wailers, Toots &amp; the Maytals, Gladys Knight &amp; the Pips, and Jimmy Cliff, one of the only times the band performed outside the continent.Merchandise from that trip is scarce and doesn't look like typical tour gear. This is a collared knit polo in cream white, with a small screen-printed circular graphic on the left chest rather than a full-back design. It reads more like something a promoter handed out than a t-shirt stand item.Clean overall, with the fabric still bright.Size S · Near Mint · Polo, collared.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1982 Grateful Dead Jamaica World Music Festival Polo Shirt, Size S

Alton Kelley co-created the visual language of psychedelic rock before the Dead had left the Bay Area, the Fillmore posters, the skull and roses. By the eighties he was still drawing for the band, and this shirt is his.A skeletal hand grips a big, glowing apple on the front, New York spelled out beside it in a wobbling rainbow outline; the Grateful Dead wordmark runs down the back in the same style. Navy shirt, bold color separation, no fading.Graphic is sharp with strong color throughout.Size XL · MintAs with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1983 Grateful Dead New York T-Shirt — Alton Kelley Big Apple, Size XL

A fiddler in a rowboat, printed in red, an odd, folkloric image that reads more like a woodcut broadside than rock merchandise, which is exactly the sort of thing the Dead's art was doing in the early eighties.Long sleeves are the harder find. They cost more new, so fewer were printed, and the ones that sold got worn every cold night of the tour and every winter after. A 1983 long sleeve that never went through that is a genuinely scarce object.Both sleeves and body clean.Size M · Mint · Long sleeve.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1983 Grateful Dead Long Sleeve T-Shirt — Red Fiddler in a Boat, Size M

Rick Griffin drew some of the Dead's most recognized artwork, including the 1969 Aoxomoxoa album cover, and stayed closely identified with the band until his death in 1991. This piece pairs his Minuteman image, a skull draped in an American flag, sword in hand, with "Twenty Years So Far", marking two decades since the band's 1965 start.The back reads "Local Crew" in plain block type. This wasn't sold at the merch table; it was made for the people working the tour, which makes surviving copies harder to find than the fan-facing version of the same design.Multiple small stains are visible on the shirt, pictured for reference; the graphic and lettering are otherwise intact.Size XL · Good · Local crew shirt, not sold to the public.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1985 Grateful Dead Local Crew T-Shirt — Rick Griffin Minuteman, Size XL

The band's Chinese New Year run at Oakland's Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium, February 18-20, 1985, became an annual kickoff to the touring year, this one landing in the Year of the Ox and marking the Dead's 20th year as a band. A Chinese orchestra opened the shows, and a dragon dance wound through the crowd during Drums.The design keeps it simple: a blue ox rendered on a black panel, Grateful Dead lettered beside it. Long sleeve, blue body.There are stains on one sleeve, pictured for reference; the graphic itself is unaffected.Size M · Fair · Long sleeve.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1985 Grateful Dead Chinese New Year Run T-Shirt — Year of the Ox, Size M

The walking, sneaker-footed lightning bolt on the front is the Dead's own riff on Reddy Kilowatt, the cartoon mascot electric utilities started using in 1926 to market electricity as safe and friendly. Inside the band, Reddy Kilowatt was also Phil Lesh's own nickname, earned for his restless, high-voltage energy, according to Dead biographer Dennis McNally. Putting him on a 20th-anniversary tour shirt, flanked by the "65" and "85" on the front, reads as an inside joke made public.Spring Tour 1985 was a season of theaters and small arenas rather than the football stadiums that came later, and the back maps that spring's Northeast leg inside a star-and-stripes emblem, with a Steal Your Face marking the tour's start.Blue long-sleeve tour shirts from this run turn up rarely and almost always washed thin. This one keeps its shape: the blue is still saturated, the print is unbroken, and the collar and cuffs have their original form.If you are building an eighties tour set, the long sleeves are the pieces that usually stay missing.Size M · Mint · Long sleeve.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1985 Grateful Dead Spring Tour Long Sleeve T-Shirt — Reddy Kilowatt, Size M

A Fall/Winter 1985 run that swung from Florida up the East Coast and back out to California: Tampa, Rochester, Miami, East Rutherford, Columbia, Richmond, Worcester, Oakland, Long Beach, and Atlanta, all ten stops listed on the back.The front carries an early version of the skull-in-roses image inside a red and blue circle, raglan-style with black sleeves against a natural body. The Knits tag, size S.Print and color are sharp on both sides.Size S · Mint · Raglan sleeves.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1985 Grateful Dead Fall/Winter Tour T-Shirt, Size S

Madison Square Garden's own Dead history got the King Kong treatment: a giant ape works over MSG the way the original scaled the Empire State Building, moved a few blocks over and handed to a New York crowd that took the joke as a compliment.Bright yellow shirt, the Kong-and-Garden artwork centered on the chest, Grateful Dead lettered above in outline type. Anvil tag, size L.Please see photos for the full graphic and any wear; color is still strong.Size L · Good As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1988 Grateful Dead Madison Square Garden T-Shirt — King Kong, Size L

New York City, September 1988: nine dates at Madison Square Garden, September 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, and 24, all printed on the back inside the same purple tie-dye burst as the front.The front centers a torch-bearing, star-crowned figure in a triangular frame, roses at either side, a Statue of Liberty stand-in rendered in the band's own house style rather than a literal likeness.Fruit of the Loom tag, dye still vivid with a clean radial pattern.Size L · Mint · Tie-dye.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1988 Grateful Dead New York City Tie-Dye T-Shirt — Statue of Liberty, Size L

A Fall Tour 1988 shirt built around a jester's skull, bold graffiti-style lettering carrying the tour name and date worked directly into the design rather than listed separately underneath.Black shirt, bold color separation in red, yellow, and blue against the black ground.Hanes Beefy-T, graphic sharp with no cracking.Size L · Mint.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1988 Grateful Dead Fall Tour T-Shirt — Jester Skull, Size L

Rick Griffin's artwork for the band's planned run through Miami, St. Petersburg, New Orleans, Houston, and Dallas paired the tour's crossed-sabers-and-skull imagery with a Confederate battle flag background.Before the shirts reached a single show, the band pulled the design and had the run destroyed rather than sell an image built on the Confederate flag to their own audience. Very few copies escaped that recall. It's a strange kind of collectible: not valuable because the band got something right, but because they caught themselves getting something wrong and acted on it immediately, not after the fact.Rick Griffin's daughter, Flaven Griffin-Clayton, has said her father grew up on pirate movies, old Westerns, and Civil War pictures where the Confederate flag stood in as visual shorthand for "the South" — the same reflex he used elsewhere in his work, a surfer for California, King Kong for New York. By her account he likely reached for it as the nearest symbol at hand for a Southern tour shirt, without thinking through what it represented, and she has said the family is glad it never went into circulation.Hanes Beefy-T, full color intact front and back.Size L · Mint · Withdrawn design, rare survivor.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1988 Grateful Dead Southern Tour T-Shirt — Rick Griffin, Size L

The Wall of Sound was the band's own PA system for the 1974 tour, hundreds of speakers stacked behind the stage so the music reached the crowd without a delay tower in front of them. It cost a fortune to move and was retired after that tour, but it stayed the reference point for what the Dead were willing to try.The "XXV" on the back places this shirt to 1990, the band's 25th anniversary, looking back at the Wall rather than being sold at the 1974 shows themselves. The Oneita tag, pre-shrunk cotton, made in USA, size M (38-40), fits that dating.There's a small hole at the underarm seam where the sleeve meets the body, pictured for reference; the front and back graphics are otherwise clean.Size M · Good As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1990 Grateful Dead Wall of Sound Commemorative T-Shirt, Size M

Boston Garden hosted the Dead for decades before the building was replaced, and by September 1991 the room had its own particular relationship with the band, well-worn, loud, and reliably sold out.Chris Pinkerton's graphic plays it straight for the building's other tenant: a skeleton dribbling a basketball, worked into a full tie-dye spiral of orange, black, and blue-purple that wraps front to back with the Grateful Dead wordmark arcing around it.There is some staining and discoloration within the dye, visible on close inspection; the artwork and color saturation are otherwise strong.Size XL · Excellent · Tie-dye.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1991 Grateful Dead Boston Garden Tie-Dye T-Shirt — Basketball Playing Skeleton, Size XL

October 31, 1991 was the last Halloween the Dead ever played: the final night of a four-show Oakland run that began just two days after Bill Graham, the promoter who shaped the band's history in this building, was killed in a helicopter crash. Ken Kesey came onstage during a "Dark Star" that turned into an elegy for him, and the band closed the night with "Werewolves of London," the last time they ever covered it.Named-run shirts like this one were made for a specific handful of nights and sold to the people who were there. There is no national print run behind them.A couple of dark stains near the collar and shoulder seams, visible in photos; graphic and tie-dye colors otherwise intact.Fair · Tie-dye.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1991 Grateful Dead Halloween Oakland Tie-Dye T-Shirt, Size L

New Year's Eve with the Grateful Dead in Oakland was the hardest ticket of the year, balloons at midnight, Bill Graham's traditions carried forward after his death, and a Bay Area crowd that treated it as a civic holiday.The year carried extra weight: Garcia had collapsed with heart problems that August, forcing the band to cancel an 18-date fall tour. He returned to the stage that December, and by New Year's Eve the band was closing out the year it had nearly not finished.NYE shirts are their own collecting sub-category, and this is a strong one.Size L · Near Mint · Tie-dye.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1992 Grateful Dead New Year's Eve Oakland Tie-Dye T-Shirt, Size L

By 1993 the Garden run was a fixture of the New York fall, a stretch of nights when the Dead effectively took over midtown and Deadheads from three states organized their year around it.Tie-dyed MSG shirts from the nineties runs sit near the top of the New York category, and the good ones do not surface often in this condition.Dye saturated and print sharp.Size XL · Mint · Tie-dye.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1993 Grateful Dead Madison Square Garden Tie-Dye T-Shirt, Size XL

The 1993 Fall Tour frog, another entry in the Dead's long habit of putting an animal where a skull would do, and letting the audience decide what it means.Fall tours were the East Coast season: arenas from Boston down through the Carolinas, cold parking lots, and shirts bought partly because you needed another layer.Size XL · Mint.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1993 Grateful Dead Fall Tour T-Shirt — Frog Design, Size XL

The Dead's Vermont dates were the sort of event a small state does not forget: an open field near the Canadian border, a crowd many times the size of the nearest town, and a tape-trader's summer story for years afterward.Designed by Jester, and made for that run specifically.Strong, unfaded color throughout.Size XL · Near Mint As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1994 Grateful Dead Fall Tour T-Shirt — Autumn Skull, Size L

The Dead's Vermont dates were the sort of event a small state does not forget: an open field near the Canadian border, a crowd many times the size of the nearest town, and a tape-trader's summer story for years afterward.Designed by Jester, and made for that run specifically.Near Mint, size XL, with strong color througout.Size XL · Near MintAs with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1994 Grateful Dead Vermont T-Shirt — Jester Design, Size XL

Summer Tour 1994 stayed west: Sacramento, Seattle, Eugene, Las Vegas, and a Bay Area homecoming at Shoreline to close it out, all five stops printed on the back exactly as routed.The front art puts a skeleton on horseback in Native dress, an eagle riding alongside and a trail of roses behind, worked into a red-white-and-blue medallion. It's a busier, more illustrated piece than most of the era's tour shirts.Hanes Beefy-T, graphic clean front and back.Size L · Mint.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1994 Grateful Dead Summer Tour T-Shirt — Native American on Horseback, Size L

Dated to a specific two-night stand: July 26 and 27, 1994, St. Louis. Shirts printed against particular dates are the most collectible category in Dead merchandise, because they anchor to a setlist, a tape, and a night that a few thousand people can still describe.Mint condition, with the dates printed clean.Size L · Mint · Dated tour shirt.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1994 Grateful Dead St. Louis T-Shirt, Size L

A Stealie holding a Georgia peach, a city-specific shirt made for the 1994 Atlanta shows and sold nowhere else.These regional one-offs are the connoisseur's corner of Dead merchandise. They were printed in small quantities in a single run, and they only ever reached the people who walked through that particular door.A couple of small stains on the sleeves, visible in photos; the graphic remains bright and unfaded.Size L · Good.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

1994 Grateful Dead Atlanta T-Shirt — Stealie with a Peach, Size L

Dragonfly Clothing Company took Dead merchandise out of the t-shirt aisle. Camp shirts, bowling shirts, pieces built for wear on their own terms, not just tour nights, with the Steal Your Face on the woven collar tag instead of the chest.This one carries the Skull and Roses worked in embroidery rather than screen print, cream skull, red roses, blue stems, repeated at the breast and again lower on the body. A button-front, short-sleeve collar shirt in black, the kind of Dead shirt that reads as a shirt first.Embroidery is tight with no pulled threads, and all buttons are present.Size L · Mint · Embroidered.As with any vintage garment, please expect minor signs of age even in high-grade pieces — see photos for a full visual record.Domestic shipping is $20 per item. International shipping will be calculated and invoiced separately after the auction closes.

Dead Threads: The Vintage Tour Merch Vault