Artist and designer Douglas Totten Slade died peacefully at his home in Harvard on Sept. 15, 2024 after a brief struggle with bone cancer. He was 79.
The son of Phillip and Rhoda Slade, Doug was born in Brookline on March 7, 1945. He grew up in Lexington, was the captain of the Lexington High School football team, played lacrosse, and practiced guitar with an after-school group called Fretted Strings.
He danced regularly on WBZ’s Record Shop Hop with Dave Maynard, said his partner, Suzanne Mahoney. He spent summers at his family’s home in Rockport.
After graduating in 1963, Doug attended the Vesper George Art School in Boston before transferring to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where he became friends with Peter Wolf, later of J. Geils Band fame.
While at the Museum School, Doug started working at the Bunnell Frame Shop on Newbury Street in Boston, which led to a career in restoration and framing and the formation of his company Slade Designs. He designed clothes and logos for bars, bands, and businesses; he also designed cloisonné jewelry exclusively for Cartier. Slade Designs had offices in Provincetown, Key West, and San Francisco.
In 1966, Doug joined a band called the Hallucinations with Wolf, Stephen Jo Bladd, who also worked at the frame shop, Peter Blankfield, and Joe Clark. A reviewer of their earliest live shows wrote, “No attempt to describe them is sufficient. They must be heard to be appreciated.”
In 1967, the Hallucinations became the house band for the Boston Tea Party, where they opened for blues legends Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, the Velvet Underground, and Van Morrison. They also were booked for a week at Piggy’s Dance Bar in Provincetown. “I don’t know how we got booked there,” he told Ann Wood of the Provincetown Banner in 2016. “The only guys in the bar were cops.”
The Hallucinations played their last gig in August 1967, after which Doug devoted himself to art as other members morphed into the J. Geils Band. Doug and Peter Wolf remained close, however. Peter wrote in an online remembrance, “We stood side by side and remained friends for life.”
That friendship included a three-and-a-half-week European tour with the Rolling Stones in the 1980s, where, Suzanne said, “Doug looked after Keith Richards’s father, who was also traveling with the band.” When Suzanne asked Doug what the tour was like, he replied, “Lots of cocaine.”
Doug told Ann Wood that he first came to Provincetown when he was 16 when he and a friend hitched to the end of the road. “I was so fascinated that I started coming back forever,” he said.
Doug designed posters and worked in photography, inspired by the anti-art movement known as Dada. In the introduction to his 2024 book, Posters +, he wrote, “I was full of awe and enthusiasm for those fascinating ‘far-out’ artists. They ripped things apart and put them back together in a different way. They all got a little nuts.”
Doug’s friendship with John Yingling and Rick Knudson tied him closely to Provincetown. He worked for a time as a bartender at Yingling’s Café Edwige, and in the 1980s he ran a T-shirt shop across the street from Yingling’s Spiritus Pizza. That shop “was a vehicle for me to get my ideas out,” he told Wood, pointing to a photograph of Keith Richards playing guitar while wearing a T-shirt Doug designed.
In 1990, Doug settled in Harvard with Suzanne Mahoney. He served for years thereafter on the Harvard Historical Society board of directors. Between 2007 and 2023 he produced original posters advertising historical society events.
His many exhibits have appeared in Provincetown, Wellfleet, Gloucester, Harvard, Concord, and Littleton, and while Dada was a regular theme in his work — one show at Spiritus in 2013 was called “Dada Again?! Dadaist Doug Slade” — he did posters for musicians including one called “Pleased to Meet You” for the Rolling Stones and for collaborative shows with Stephen Aiken and Thor Yingling.
Doug also experimented with computer-assisted mixed media, his 2016 exhibition of handbag-inspired art being prints of computer-scanned images of figures with purses printed onto corrugated plastic and brushed aluminum.
“A fashion icon in his own right,” wrote Ann Wood, “when Slade walks down the street, his trench coat sways right and left; he’s got the rock star swagger down better than Mick Jagger.”
Doug is survived by his friend and partner of 65 years, Suzanne Mahoney of Harvard; her son, Jack, and wife, Irene, and their son, Drew, and daughter, Sydney, of South Hampton, N.H.; and his brother, Jeff, and wife Sandee of Statesville, N.C.
Services will be private.
