Rick Griffin believed that lettering was as much a part of the image as the image itself, as seen in Heart and Torch, 1968. ©Bill Graham Archives, LLC
:Huey Lewis and the News told us back in the 1980s that the "heart of rock 'n' roll is in Cleveland." He forgot to mention that the soul of rock 'n' roll is in San Francisco, where it all started back in the 1960s, when it was good to be groovy but better to be psychedelic.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the complex imagery and hand lettering of the psychedelic rock posters that called the faithful to the Fillmore Auditorium and Avalon Ballroom for concerts and happenings. Commissioned by rock promoters Chet Helms and Bill Graham, the posters were created by a small group of mostly untrained graphic designers.
The early posters were small, 14 by 20 inches at the most, with many being handbills and postcards. They were printed on bond paper or vellum on offset litho presses. They were the ephemera of the day, not meant to last beyond the concert date. But many did. Some originals and many more reprints were sold in record stores and head shops to fans and collectors.
Recently, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) acquired more than 800 rock posters from the collection of Sheryl and David Tippit. More than 200 will be featured in "The Psychedelic Experience: Rock Posters from the San Francisco Bay Area," running March 31 through July 19.
In his reevaluation of this short-lived genre of popular American art, Darrin Alfred, AIGA associate curator of graphic design at DAM, casts them as a postmodern reaction to International Style. He also sees the genre coming full circle toward the end of the psychedelic era, when images embodied cleaner lines and sparer images infiltrated the designs.
Victor Moscoso used liquid letters to fill the lenses of a California girl's shades and a coarse screen across the right side of her face to give depth to a 1967 Chambers Brothers poster. ©Neon Rose
Add to this overview the illustrators' own intent to commit to paper the vibrant colors and morphing images induced by hallucinogens and you have the basis of the psychedelic experience. The word "psychedelic" was coined from the Greek word for soul. Today, it refers to any brightly colored or patterned object.
In the 1960s, everything from the music and light shows to rubber floors and neon-colored clothing imitated the psychedelic experience. Even ever-vigilant members of the establishment were baptized into the cult of the psychedelic by association.
It is little wonder that the posters that brought the counterculture to hear the Yardbirds, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, even Andy Warhol and His Inevitable Plastic Velvet Underground, were the front lines of communication about the psychedelic experience.
To a young audience, much of which was as unschooled in art as the artists themselves, those intricate posters were as unique as a newborn. In truth, they were informed by designs from the Art Nouveau period, Art Deco, Surrealism, Japanese woodblock prints of the Floating World and images of Native Americans. In the posters can be seen elements of Op and Pop, even oblique references to the color theories of Josef Albers.
The first rock poster is attributed to Mike Ferguson and George Hunter of the Charlatans. It was used to advertise their mid-1965 gig at the Red Dog Saloon. But the tone for a generation of poster makers was set by Wes Wilson, as Darrin Alfred explained.
Since so much of the art is "trippy" and its artists better known to niche collectors than the community at large, a short course in the founding artists is in order.
