Read any book about the sixties scene in San Francisco and you’ll run into Stanley “Mouse” Miller. Born in Fresno and raised in Detroit, Mouse moved to San Francisco in 1965, where he was commissioned by the concert organizer Bill Graham to illustrate the rock posters for which he would become best known. Mouse spent the years around the Summer of Love hocking T-shirts, designing posters for hundred-dollar commissions, running a successful hot-rod memorabilia company, and eventually designing album covers for the likes of the Grateful Dead, Journey, Neil Young, and Jimi Hendrix.
A new book, California Dreams, pays tribute to Mouse’s imagination and colorful, explosive aesthetic. He honed his style on the hot-rod scene in Detroit, where he pinstriped cars, sold T-shirts featuring drag-racing characters, and custom painted dashboards for six-packs of beer, all while still in high school. His early art portrays the speed and metal of American automobiles, but it’s also heavily influenced by the deformed monsters who took center stage in the golden age of TV sci-fi circa the 1950s, a cathartic genre for post–A-bomb Americans and their cold war anxieties.