Cal Golden Bears to Wear Grateful Dead Helmets for “Grateful Bears” Night This Weekend

What a long, strange trip it’s been… The Golden Bears are going full Deadhead on Saturday night.

The California Golden Bears unveiled Grateful Dead-themed helmets for Saturday’s game against the Wake Forest Demon Deacons, all part of the university’s first-ever “Grateful Bears” night at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley.

The helmet is a gold/yellow shell with a matching facemask; on each side is the Grateful Dead’s famous “Steal Your Face” skull design recoloured to match Cal’s navy and gold, with the scripted “Cal” wordmark logo across the top. The centre stripe is blue with white trim, filled in with a blue tie-dye pattern, topped with a chain of white lightning bolts running front to back. Not a touch of grey to be found.

On the back, circling the rear bumper, is a parade of the Dead’s dancing bears, one of which is wearing a navy “CAL” sweater and cap.

The Grateful Dead formed in Palo Alto, California, in the mid 1960s and spent three decades as the quintessential American jam band — kinda like Phish, but they did it first. Led by Jerry Garcia, their devoted “Deadheads” followed the band from city to city until Garcia’s passing in 1995. The “Steal Your Face” skull, the lightning bolt, and the dancing bears make up one of the most recognizable visual identities ever created, especially for a musical act, which is a large part of the reason why the band has managed to maintain a prominent place in mainstream culture after all these years.

That’s all fine and good, but why is Cal wearing helmets paying tribute to The Grateful Dead? Surely Dick Clark has a bevy of up-and-comers that could pair well with a football helmet, right?

Well, there are some connections between the band and the region. They came up in the Bay Area and, according to the school, played more concerts on or near that campus than at any other university. Not to mention playing off the school’s “Bears” nickname with the band’s famous Dancing Bears design, which artist Bob Thomas drew in honour of the band’s sound engineer Owsley “Bear” Stanley; Stanley and Thomas also designed the “Steal Your Face” logo together.

Last year, the Oregon Ducks did their own tribute to the band when they played their “Tie-Dye Out” game against the Wisconsin Badgers, wearing tie-dye uniforms with the Steal Your Face logo reimagined as a Duck. So again, the question “why?” Well, Oregon’s claim leaned on Eugene being, in the words of Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux, the band’s “home away from home,” with more than twenty shows played there.

As for Cal, their tribute to the Dead is going beyond the fancy helmet; they’ve replaced their social media profile picture with that Skull/Cal logo and released a “Grateful Bears” line of merchandise featuring tie-dye T-shirts, hoodies, caps, and jackets.