Vintage Music and Concert Posters
When the King of Comedy Posters Set His Surreal Sights on the World of Rock 'n' Roll
By Ben Marks — The multiverse of movie posters is so vast, so inexhaustible, that one collector can choose to focus exclusively on monster movies from the 1930s, another can specialize in Westerns from the 1950s, and a third can decide to go deep on French New Wave cinema from the 1960s, and all would be said to collect movie posters. Equally enormous are the galaxies of vintage circus posters, railway posters, and travel posters, each offering collectors scores of worlds-within-worlds into which they may...
Almost Famous: The Untold Story of an Artist's Rock-Poster Roots
By Ben Marks — In 1967, LIFE magazine sent Jon Borgzinner, a trusted contributing editor at Time magazine, to San Francisco to write about the “psychedelic phantasmagoria” that characterized the “far-out” posters being designed for rock concerts at “hippie hangouts” like the Fillmore Auditorium and Avalon Ballroom. “Such posters,” Borgzinner wrote, “are tacked up in public places as were the lithos of Toulouse-Lautrec touting the Moulin Rouge in the Gay ’90s. But as fast as they go up, collectors—mostly...
Guac 'n' Roll: How a Recycled College Menu Design Became a Classic Led Zeppelin Poster
By Ben Marks — When the origin stories of San Francisco’s “Big Five” rock-poster artists of the 1960s are told, they usually include Wes Wilson’s epiphany upon seeing an exhibition of Viennese Secessionist posters, whose lettering style he would embrace as his own; Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley's appropriation of a 1913 illustration of a rose-crowned skeleton, which the duo repurposed for a Grateful Dead poster; the influence of Southern California surf and car culture on Rick Griffin; and the...
From Death Cab to the Grateful Dead, an Artist Reimagines the Classic Rock Poster
By Ben Marks — Between June 15 and 25, 2019, several thousand rock posters flew off a dozen or so merch tables on two continents. The occasions were concerts headlined by Dave Matthews Band, Foo Fighters, The National, Eddie Vedder, Phish, and Death Cab for Cutie. Despite the distinct musical tastes of these band's audiences, one artist had been selected to produce limited-edition screenprints for all of them, a 22-year-old Baltimorean named Luke Martin. For Martin, it was a helluva couple of weeks, but...
How a Small-Town Navy Vet Created Rock's Most Iconic Surrealist Posters
By Ben Marks — One May morning in 1969, David Singer walked into the Fillmore West in San Francisco in the hopes of meeting Bill Graham. The day before, Singer had shown some of his photo collages to the acclaimed rock-poster artist and "Zap Comix" contributor Victor Moscoso, who'd been recommended to Singer by a printer they both knew. Should he turn his collages into greeting cards, Singer had asked? Perhaps they’d sell better as head-shop posters? Moscoso said he didn’t know much about greeting cards,...
All-Night French Fries with T-Rex: Seattle's Trippiest Rock-Poster Artist Tells All
By Ben Marks — The first time I met John Moehring was in a bar in Seattle, even though Moehring doesn’t drink. Sitting next to this mild-mannered gentleman—his gray hair cut short, Elvis Costello eyeglasses perched on his nose, a brush of a mustache crowning his perpetual smile—I wondered if this could really be the same guy who routinely created fantastically trippy posters for some of the biggest music acts of the 1960s, such as The Doors, Donovan, Frank Zappa, Country Joe McDonald, Jefferson Airplane,...
Was Levon Mosgofian of Tea Lautrec Litho the Most Psychedelic Printer in Rock?
By Ben Marks — When the phrase “San Francisco rock posters” is uttered in certain circles, most people picture bold blocks of psychedelicized Art Nouveau lettering, a skeleton crowned by a garland of roses, shimmering collisions of equiluminant colors, and a flying eyeball peering through a burning ring of fire. That describes the most iconic work of the so-called Big Five poster artists—Wes Wilson, Alton Kelley, Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso, and Rick Griffin. But as good as those artists were (in the...
A Quiet Voice in the Noisy World of Rock
By Ben Marks — Over the past decade, a self-effacing artist named John Mavroudis has quietly become a player in the noisy world of rock posters. Mavroudis was officially made a member of the scene in 2004, when he was given his first assignment to create a Yeah Yeah Yeahs poster for San Francisco's fabled Fillmore Auditorium. That important rite of passage was followed in 2011 by his first commission from a Bay Area band called Moonalice, which has produced an original poster for each of its 500-plus shows...
Psychedelic Poster Pioneer Wes Wilson on The Beatles, Doors, and Bill Graham
By Ben Marks — Between 1966 and 1967, San Francisco rock poster artist Wes Wilson designed posters and handbills for the first Trips Festival, the last show by The Beatles, and dozens of concerts at the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium featuring everyone from The Association to Frank Zappa. Along the way, he defined the psychedelic poster, in which blocks of letters were used to create shapes, which seemed to bend and vibrate in place. In this freewheeling and candid interview, Wilson describes how...
Devils, Doves, and World War I: The Rock-n-Roll Posters of Gary Houston
By Ben Marks — My dad liked Charlie Russell, the Western artist, so we had a few of his prints around the house. I always drew, even as a little kid, and I remember enjoying the way Charlie Russell signed his name next to that little buffalo skull. I don't know if that made a heavy-duty impression on my work, but I know I liked it. He was also a member of a barbershop quartet, which I always thought was as hokey as can be. I was pretty young then, and I found that early rock ’n’ roll stuff, like the...
The Storybook-Psychedelic Rock Posters of Marq Spusta
By Ben Marks — In most collecting categories, antique and vintage pieces are the only things sought by seasoned or aspiring collectors. But in some categories, rock posters foremost among them, it’s contemporary work that’s driving the market and fueling people’s passions. The enthusiasm for Marq Spusta’s rock posters is particularly high right now, and September of 2010 could prove to be a watershed month for the 32-year-old artist. What makes Spusta’s success noteworthy is that he’s achieved it by...
David Lance Goines Discusses Perfect Poster Design
By Maribeth Keane — I don’t collect posters. I don’t collect anything. I started making posters one at a time by hand in high school just for specific events, basically got going when I was a freshman. I still make them today, but they’re printed on a printing press now. I’ve made 221 posters, not including the ones I did in high school. Fundamentally, I believe that in order to be effective as opposed to artsy and not really effective at all, a poster has to be extremely simple. The Shepard Fairey posters...