Incredible artist worked for Chet Helms (Avalon) & Bill Graham (Fillmore)

Zinfandel

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Thu Mar-11-04 07:18 PM
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Incredible artist worked for Chet Helms (Avalon) & Bill Graham (Fillmore)

Edited on Thu Mar-11-04 07:42 PM by Zinfandel

Poster Artist's like Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse, Anton Kelly, Bonnie McClean, Victor Moscoso, Lee Conklin & David Singer...some of the best break through artist were in SF at that time...art work we see all around and we are so used to and the lettering, etc...was created by those artist.

It's a shame the city of San Francisco won't even acknowledge or recognize that very important time in San Francisco's history and these now, world renown artist.

I have many poster first printings framed and hung all around my house, they are a treasure so bright & colorful and still a trip to look at stoned...or not.
Growing up in San Francisco, I started going to these shows when I was just fifteen, change my life and changed me into a liberal forever! (Read below.)

Drugs And Psychedelic Poster Art
By Eric King

In August, 1965 I arrived in Berkeley to pursue a Ph. D. in Medieval English. I had read about the Free Speech Movement and been drawn to Berkeley by the prospect of freedom of academic inquiry. As I was finishing my M. A., the local disciples of a rather amusingly demented guru whispered his alluring siren call in my ear, "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out." I attended one of the early concerts at the Avalon Ballroom in a appropriately stoned state and met a very attractive young woman who took me back to her apartment and made love with me in an uninhibited fashion beyond anything I could have imagined. I awoke the next morning with the realization that this was a lot more fun than translating obscure passages in Beowulf. I spent the next several years at the greatest party since the fall of the Roman Empire.

If the party had any focus, it was at the Fillmore and Avalon Ballrooms. Today, thirty years after the beginning of the two main series of San Francisco psychedelic rock concert posters, the Bill Graham Presents series and the Family Dog Presents series, people are in a bizarre state of denial concerning the role drugs played in the creation of this art. Collectors, dealers and even one or two or the artists themselves seem to be pretending that if they looked up the word "psychedelic" in Webster's, they would find the definition to be, "a breed of pussycat." The reason for this is simple. From the outset the art establishment has contemptuously sought to dismiss this major art form as the drug-crazed ravings of sex-obsessed dirty hippies, and according to this group the farther away from people's minds this drug connection can be dragged, the more likely it is that this art will finally be accepted by the art establishment. Reality check time, fellows and gals. The art establishment loathed us in 1966, and their loathing continues unabated today. Until they have passed from the scene, their attitude will prevail. Even if we did convince them that "psychedelic" meant "pussycat," there would still be the problem in their eyes of sex-obsessed dirty hippies.

Nowhere has this been more true than in San Francisco itself, the very home of psychedelic rock concert poster art. Here is a supposedly cash strapped city which has found the enormous sums of money necessary to fill its museums with New York art,
(much more)

http://home.earthlink.net/~therose7/drugs.htm