Yesterday, I broke the news that the co-founders of Online Ceramics, Alix Ross and Elijah Funk, are parting ways. The reaction was a mixture of salutes—“Legends,” said Tremaine Emory on Instagram—and utter dismay, mostly from fans who might not have clicked through and read that while Ross is going solo, Funk will continue to make heady graphic tie-dyes under the Online Ceramics banner.
Their final collaborative drop, if you will, is a 348-page coffee table book published with A24. Tricker’s Cabin: The Oral & Visual History of Online Ceramics is the definitive chronicle of how two deadhead artists turned a bootleg Grateful Dead tee operation into a subcultural style touchstone. The book includes an archive of Online Ceramics designs from April 2016 to May 2023, extensive interviews with the co-founders, a side-quest into their mutual obsession with horror films, and contributions from fans and friends like Daniel Lopatin, Eli Roth, Laura Owens, Andy Cohen, and Michelle Coltrane.
Of course, no history of Online Ceramics would be complete without John Mayer. After the Dead & Company frontman caught wind that a couple art school kids from Ohio were selling uniquely creative graphic tees in the parking lots outside their shows, Mayer—a dyed-in-the-wool merch obsessive—became a quick fan and friend, inviting them to design official Dead & Company gear and helping with other practical matters, like storing cash for them in his road case backstage. (Mayer even tipped me off to Online Ceramics in an interview back in 2017, and I met and profiled them shortly after.)
The following excerpt from Tricker’s Cabin is an extensive, illuminating conversation between John Mayer, Alix Ross, and Elijah Funk, moderated by The New Yorker’s Naomi Fry. —Samuel Hine
Naomi Fry: You’ve each told versions of this story in the past, but since we’re all here together, how exactly did it happen that John came to be aware of Online Ceramics?
John Mayer: If I remember correctly, I had just joined Dead & Company. I think it was spring of 2016, and I got this sort of “welcome to the neighborhood” package, in which somebody was aggregating bootleg Dead shirts and sending them to me. Do you remember the guy’s name?
Elijah Funk: Connor Bradley.
Naomi: And who is Connor Bradley?
Elijah: He’s a Deadhead kid from Philly that just reached out to us. By now he’s a good friend, but we didn’t know him at the time.
John: It was this great sampler of what was going on in the community. Most of the designers were sending me three or four shirts. Some of them had notes, some came with cards. That’s when I realized there was this cottage industry that had developed—maybe it had always been there—of Deadheads who also were designers. And all of the designs seemed to fall into the same language except one set of shirts, and those were from Online Ceramics.
Naomi: How would you define the design language of the other shirts versus what you saw with what the Online Ceramics guys were doing?
John: Taking corporate logos and flipping them to represent titles of Grateful Dead songs is part of the Deadhead tradition. So, a shirt would say “Morning Dew” but in the Mountain Dew logo. And then I remember unfolding these Online Ceramics shirts and going, “What is this?” The front of the T-shirt, from corner to corner, hem to hem, was the canvas. Not these little areas of either a chest hit or putting something in the center. It was covered in positive space. I mean, it was whacked out.
Naomi: Do you remember which shirt gave you this impression?
John: The very first shirt I saw was for the Citi Field shows, and it had the Statue of Liberty on it in black and white. Do you remember that one?
Elijah: I remember that one, but that wasn’t the first shirt you saw. The first one we sent you has a photo of a child with face paint, from this Grateful Dead book. It’s got a “Box of Rain” back, with a face and some bears planting a rose in the guy’s head.
Alix Ross: There’s another early shirt that was really special to me, the “Mayer is Dead to Us” shirt,4 probably from 2016.
John: I remember seeing that shirt, and it was like a hug.
Alix: For me, that shirt was a troll to all the people who were anti-Mayer. There are only a few shirts that I really felt pride in wearing, and that was one of them.
John: And when you made the shirt, it means you’re steering the destiny of something. Now that I think about it, that shirt must have been from 2016, because the picture of me on the front is from when I was wearing that applejack hat.
Alix: Like a beret?
John: I had this hat from Japan that was a take on the applejack hat, those sideways slouchy hats. Stevie Ray Vaughan wore one in the late ’70s.
Elijah: It had a little bill.
Alix: Cute.
Elijah: It was a cute hat, actually.
John: It’s a good hat. The thing about Online Ceramics is that you guys make your own calls on what you like. Online Ceramics said, “No, we like him.” That’s called being an original. I don’t like the phrase “free thinker” because it’s attached to other things now, but the attitude of, I like what I like and I don’t consult with anything before I make my decision— that’s heroic.
Naomi: Like Alix said, “Fuck it. We’re welcoming him.” Do you guys remember what you thought about John, culturally speaking, before he joined Dead & Company?
Elijah: Our background was in experimental music and punk, so my experience with your music was that my high school girlfriend was a fan. I was just radically unfamiliar. But it was literally within the first song at Madison Square Garden, on that first 2015 run you guys did, when I thought, I love this guy. You could just feel the collective blow-away of everyone in the room. It’s an exaggeration, but it felt like people were grabbing each other and yelling, “Are you fucking serious?”
John: When did we first actually meet, at Joe Russo’s Almost Dead? Or was it a Bob show?
Alix: It was a Bob Weir show in Los Angeles. You DM'ed us and asked if we wanted to meet up. We were like, “We’ll be there.”
John: Right. We met in the back hallway so you could pass some shirts off to me.
Elijah: I remember that night so well because this guy in the crowd yelled at me for having my phone out, kind of coming down on me for being a kid at a show and not knowing. And I showed him that you texted us, and then everyone got really excited because they knew that you were about to come out and play.
John: I was sitting in with the band that night, but I was just as much there to make sure you guys had passes to come backstage and hand off a new pile of booty. It’s very rare that I really value things. And new Online Ceramics—especially then, at a time when the rest of the world wasn’t really aware of it—was like new gear to me, like a new guitar. I remember getting stacks of shirts and thinking, “I am going to implement this tomorrow.” I really did wear the long-sleeve tie-dye stuff every day, for a long time.
I had been making merch for shows for 15 years by that point. You guys came in, and it was like a band with a new sound. I’ve told you before, “You guys are Nirvana. And this is Bleach for you”—which was their demo—“and you’re about to release Nevermind.” When it came time for me to ask if you would do merch for my solo tours, it would’ve been all too easy for you to say, “Ah, we’re really busy,” and then talk amongst yourselves and say, “I think we just like him when he’s with Dead & Company.”
Naomi: Is there a difference language between Dead & Company stuff and the merch you do with solo John?
Elijah: There aren’t as many skeletons.
Naomi: I’m curious, Alix and Elijah, when it comes to choosing which collaborations to say yes to, what do you base those decisions on? Who do you want to align with? What does a person or artist or another brand have to have in to order for you to collaborate with them?
Alix: It’s pretty physical, in a gut sense.
Naomi: If you run to the bathroom to throw up?
Alix: I like to not think about it. If I don’t have to think about it, it means we should do it. If we have to start talking about it, we probably shouldn’t.
Naomi: Do you guys have a sense of when the dynamic between you three cemented into place? John’s really famous, and at that point you guys were at the beginning. But you clicked pretty early on, right?
John: I’ll tell this story. Elijah will come back to the dressing room before shows and hand me a tote bag full of cash, full of their earnings from the lot. I can remember the first time he ever came up to me and said, “Hey, can you hold onto this for me? I don’t feel comfortable going out into the crowd with this fanny pack.” And I was like, “Yes, man. I’ll hold your money.” I put it in my road case and—
Naomi: —and gambled it away.
John: And I gambled it away. I gambled on setlists, and I was wrong.
But really, I remember thinking that I’d be telling this story someday: I used to hold onto their money and put it in my road case while I played and they were in the crowd. It’s like when you hear people say, “Oh, the Grateful Dead. They used to rehearse in my garage.” Or, “I had a pizza place and The Warlocks played at my pizza parlor.” These are the hallmarks of knowing that you’re dealing with people who are going to be massive.
Elijah: But how cool was it for us to be like, yeah, the Dead is running our money.
John: I will forever run your banking.
Alix: The Covid tour was actually a big issue for us, because we couldn’t go backstage.
Naomi: What did you do?
Alix: We just had to keep the money on us.
Elijah: We would incrementally bring the money back to Los Angeles, but you can’t fly with more than $10,000 in your bag. TSA can seize it. So when we travel we split the cash between our group and basically go, “You get $10,000 and you get $10,000.” But there was that one year we were making a lot of money.
Alix: Was that when we were in Denver and had to give it to everybody that we were with?
Elijah: Yes. We were all in line, and I was watching a woman, who I think was coming from the show as well. She was crying while TSA was searching her bag and seizing all her money. And then TSA asked me to step aside. I was like, that’s it, we’re busted. I had money. You had money. Justin had money. My ex-girlfriend had money. Everyone had money in their bag, and when they started searching mine, the guy pulled out my backstage pass. I was like, “We work with the Dead. We work with them.” And the guy goes, “Oh my God, dude, they were so sick Friday night. You get out of here.” As we walked away, I heard him telling his TSA buddy, “Dude, I’m serious. You should go see them—John Mayer rips.” It was such a lucky moment.
John: That’s the gift of Dead & Company. Young people today have stories and memories that rival the stories, memories, and experiences of their parents in the ’70s.
Naomi: Do you feel that sense of time travel? I remember when I interviewed you guys years ago and we talked about festivals of the past like Monterey.7 The world has changed a lot, but traveling from city to city on a tour feels like an age-old American tradition in some way. It doesn’t happen that much anymore.
John: When we play two shows at the Hollywood Bowl and everyone goes back to work after the first night, you feel a cosmic connection with the entire city, knowing we’re all meeting back up for night two. That connection is deep. People who have these experiences from 1982 talk about it the same way.
Elijah: I can’t think of anything that’s on par with the experience of going on the road. You show up in a different city and have 150 of your friends beside you every single time.
Alix: The first couple years of Dead & Company, where we were going to every show, we met so many people that had never heard of us, but they came to meet us and hang out with us on the lot. We’d be tripping on acid, everyone giving hugs, and there would just be a deep, deep spiritual connection. The brand has changed and evolved over the years, and maybe the people that met us aren’t even buying Online Ceramics today, but those people love us. They actually love us.
Naomi: There are parallels between the experience of being a band going on tour and the adjacent merch and design crew that’s also touring. I’m wondering if you guys have thought about other parallels between your arcs. John, I think I heard you say once, “I was playing in a club for 10 people, and within two years I had a Grammy.” And Alix and Elijah, even from the time four years ago when I met you, it seems as though you’ve gone above and beyond what you initially imagined that this could be.
John: It’s easy over time to slow down and get a little bit more cautious about what you put out there. What has always appealed to me about Online Ceramics is that you don’t care. The rest of the fashion industry can’t help but continually care too much. It’s very serious. There were, and there still are, brackets at the end of the year for the most stylish man. Everything is about how cool, how ice-cold, you can be. If you were to anthropomorphize every fashion brand and put them in a lineup, the camera pans and everyone has this Blue Steel look. Until you get to Elijah and Alix, and they’re just smiling. Everyone else is like, “We are here to be seen as cool.” And they’re like, “We think frogs and bears are cool.”
Elijah: Part of the reason we’re so loose and feel like we can take liberties is because in order to run a T-shirt brand, you have to make so much content. You constantly have to be making shirts, so it’s easier to have a spill. It’s not an album, where you’re releasing eight songs in a year. We’re essentially writing 200 songs a year. Of course there are going to be duds, and that’s okay. You have to dust yourself off pretty quick. So, eh, okay, that one didn’t do so hot. And then it’s in the warehouse, and you forget about it.
John: You send it off to an earthquake-stricken place, and meanwhile everybody’s walking around the rubble wearing “My Religion Is Kindness” shirts.
Alix: As we’re designing for a core drop, once we get past that wall where we know we’ve got some really good designs, one of us will have a really out-of-left-field idea. It’ll be something that we know maybe no one’s going to buy, but it needs to be in the drop for it to cohesively all make sense.
John: Also, to remind yourself that this has always been wild, and it needs to stay wild.
Elijah: Those are the shirts that make us laugh the hardest. The ones where we know that whoever’s buying this is completely crazy.
John: And this is what makes Online Ceramics great: Still to this day, I don’t know how much is a sincere, direct message about what they like, and how much is a play on it. I don’t know where the wink is. Are you going for that perfect thing that finally makes people go, is this too much? Are you sort of teasing this idea that you could eventually turn everyone off by going too far out?
Elijah: I do think we’ve gotten progressively crazier.
Alix: The wink, it’s there all the time.
Elijah: I think people do take us literally. That’s where the fun comes in for us, when people don’t know when we’re being characters or when we’re being real. I’ve seen tweets that are basically like, “Waiting for the Online Ceramics anti-vax shirt,” and I’m like, oh, people think we’re that far gone. They don’t know if we’re actually Deadheads, or if we’re tripping all the time, or if we’re into eco-terrorism. If we were sharing personal stuff and getting out there and talking and doing selfies and shit all the time, I don’t think people would wonder. But we’re pretty hidden. On a day-to-day basis nobody knows, until someone hops in the comments and goes, “No, they’re cool. I met them.”
Alix: Over the last couple years, there have been more people that rip us off, and whole brands that even base their aesthetic off of us. So personally, conceptually, I’m doubling down on a lot of our original ideas. For the line sheet that’s coming up, the ideas I have are the most “Online Ceramics” shirts of all time.
John: Could you see a world where Online Ceramics is the collateral damage of the great success between the two of you, and you move on to something else? Or does Online Ceramics have to travel with you through your whole life?
Alix: If we were to ever sell or leave the company, I personally would want to have some ownership forever.
Elijah: Yeah, for sure.
John: I believe I own a share of Online Ceramics.
Elijah: Somewhere you have a piece of paper that has one share. We were just laughing about this because when we started we had all these paper shares,8 and we thought it was funny. And now they’re real; we were just going through them to give someone we work with a portion of the company.
John: How many shares are there in total?
Alix: It was a totally arbitrary number, but I think 50,000?
John: Not bad.
Elijah: You can keep your share.
John: I get a slight kick out of seeing some celebrity wearing an Online Ceramics shirt and feeling infinitesimally connected to it. This is maybe a little bit of me hammering out the dents of my career, feeling like I’m not cool enough. But then, well, welcome to the Online Ceramics world, where I’ve sort of lived for a while. There’s a selfish aspect to it, and the connection is about as small a fraction as the shares I own. It’s one 50,000th of a real feeling. But it’s enough for me to go, hey, I’m a little bit like Kenny G with Starbucks.
Naomi: Can you elaborate on that?
John: Kenny G was one of the original investors in Starbucks. It makes Kenny G a Forrest Gump of sorts: “There was this guy, said he had a way of making coffee real fast.” You know what I mean? “He said he was going to put a mermaid on the cup.” It’s that sense of accidental entrepreneurialism. This is my own Forrest Gump-y vibe, but for me it’s, “You know he played with the Dead?” “You know he also ran with those Online Ceramics guys?”
I think we all respect smashing or twisting norms to get a laugh or to be interested. And to just keep it exciting. My favorite text is getting a design file from Elijah. Even if it’s the slightest edit, it’s like Christmas morning every single time. It’s like scratching a lottery ticket. My favorite thing in the world is to have Elijah show me something that I have to process. If I look at a design and reply “yes,” it means it’s pretty much what I was imagining. But if I look at it and I say “processing,” it means “wow.”
Naomi: The way you all met, and the way Online Ceramics started, is tied up from the beginning with this iteration of the Dead. And now, at the time of this interview, this iteration of the Dead is coming to a close this summer with the final tour. Are you guys ready to let it go?
John: This entire experience with Dead & Company, from the first note we played, has been this one long beautiful song. The way the song ends affects your memory of the song. And it’s very important to me that the song ends with a beautiful final note and a beautiful chord and the splash of a cymbal, so that everyone can be on the same page at the same moment and say, “What a gorgeous song that was.” And in the history of the Grateful Dead, sadly, there hasn’t really been that. If we all had another 100 years in us, we’d probably say, “Hey, let’s take a few summers off. Let’s make them miss us a little bit.” And we just don’t have that kind of time.
Alix: Since the beginning of Dead & Co., every summer we were all asking if you were going to tour. No one knew that this was going to keep happening. In my head, every single tour was the last tour. So the fact that we got so many is incredible. Knowing that this one really is the last tour—honestly, it’s a bummer. At the same time, it’s a relief. We started this thing in the parking lot, and then we made people aware of the fact that we’re actually artists. I’m always still excited to make Dead merch and go on tour, but knowing that the following year we’re going to have to think of something new for the summer is exciting to me.
Elijah: I’ve had a couple people ask me, “It’s the last tour, what are you going to do?” And I’m not concerned. But this summer, do I want to make the greatest Online Ceramics tour shirt that’s ever happened? Yes, I want to whoop this thing’s ass.
Selfishly, I’m going to really miss seeing this band, and I’m really going to miss doing it with our friends and traveling. I’ll miss having the full-on excuse to know that people are going to go to New York City for three days because the Dead’s playing.
John: It’s been a great excuse.
Elijah: And if we answer an email with, “Sorry, we’re at the Gorge in Washington camping for three nights to see the Dead,” everyone goes, “Yeah, that’s what you guys do.”
I’ve seen Dead & Company close to 100 times. There are probably five or six times I remember a song. That’s not really what it’s about; it’s the collective energy, the friends, the dinners, and the partying and seeing new places. A lot of people don’t make new friends as they get older. We’ve made hundreds of new friends.
Reprinted with the permission of A24.