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, deconstructionist atrocities which
demonstrate
no technical mastery of any medium, occasionally interesting Asian
vases
and a few lesser European Old masters which were not gobbled up long
ago
by European or East Coast museums because they were just that, "lesser"
European Old Masters. This same city from the mayors and supervisors on
down to the graphics acquisition staffs over two dozen years has
systematically
refused to appropriate what was once only a few thousand dollars to
insure
that a set of original printings of the greatest original art ever to
arise
in San Francisco stayed in San Francisco. Why? Because "psychedelic"
does not and never will mean "pussycat." These posters were by,
for and about drugs.
This is not an essay advocating drug usage. Even if we were naive
enough
back then to listen to Bobby singing, "Everybody must get stoned,"
we are not that naive now. We have seen the hollow-eyed wraiths, the
casualties
of the psychedelic revolution, some of whom still populate our streets,
and know the downside to drug abuse. More than one of the great
psychedelic
poster artists experienced drug related problems and one almost trashed
his entire life, but for better or worse out of the cauldron of naivete
and confusion came brilliant art of often crystal clarity.
If anyone would doubt the power of psychoactive drugs to influence
artistic
creativity, he or she need only study the works of Hieronymous Bosch
before
and after he was initiated into the cult which had managed to find some
means of neutralizing the toxins in the rye fungus known as ergot from
which LSD was eventually derived. Because we live in a country which
has
thrown a quarter of a trillion dollars down a rat hole known as the
"War
on Drugs" which has harmed us more than the drugs ever did, and they
did us no little damage, we are no longer willing to discuss how the
goal
of psychedelic rock concert poster art was to "stone" the beholder
briefly, to create on paper the visual effects of hallucinogenic drugs.
Furthermore the concerts themselves, music, light shows etc. were all
intended
to enhance the psychedelic experience. It should be noted just as
clearly
that although the environment which made these posters and concerts
possible
could not have existed without the widespread, indiscriminate use of
mind
altering substances,the destruction of this environment inevitably
resulted
from the same widespread, indiscriminate use of these substances.
With only one exception all the significant artists of both the Bill
Graham
and Family Dog series sought to experience this state of drug-induced
altered
consciousness and then to capture on paper what that experience was for
them. A very important part of the brilliance of their art lies in
their
success in bringing back images from that other world and capturing
them
so that they could be shared, communicated to others, many of whom now
all these years later, have never participated in this drug experience,
because that is what art is all about, communication of experience. The
main differences between the art of these two series arise from the
simple
fact that different artists predominated at each ballroom, and the
psychedelic
experience, inherently individualized, was different for each of them.
Although Wes Wilson did the earliest posters for the Family Dog, he
did not really hit his creative stride until later, and his best work
was
done for Bill Graham. The main artists for the Family Dog were Mouse
and
Kelley of Mouse Studios, Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin. What
characterized
the work of Mouse and Kelley was the use of one powerful, central image
taken from the mass culture. Typically this image was drastically
altered
to show how a person under the influence of drugs, any mind altering
drugs,
would see something, anything, he or she had seen all his or her life,
in an entirely new way. The most extreme and perhaps the best example
of
this is FD-110, the use of what may well be one of the two or three
most
important mass culture images in American history, the Statue of
Liberty.
Garishly done in black silhouette against a red backdrop with the
brilliant
touch of the addition of a tiny white tear on Miss Liberty's cheek as a
comment on the Vietnam War, this remains one of the greatest true
combinations
of the psychedelic and the political.
For Victor Moscoso the psychedelic experience was bound up in vibration
of color. None of the artists used color with such electric results as
Victor, and since this distortion and "fighting" of color was
one of the most powerful aspects of psychedelic experience, it may well
be that for this alone Victor captured the physical, visual experience
of being "stoned" better than anyone else. One can gaze at images
such as FD-53 after having done no psychoactive substances in twenty
years
and still fall into at least the visual aspects of the drug experience.
Rick Griffin was a religious mystic, and for him the psychedelic
experience
was a religious one. His art for the Family Dog was filled with images
which arose in his own internal mystical experience. Unlike his Bill
Graham
images, these were rooted in the beauty of creation, Michaelangelo's
Sistine
Adam in FD-52 and his own wonderfully biophilic "The Source"
FD-101.
Two more Family Dog artists who captured, and were significantly part
of,
The Family Dog spirit were Bob Schnepf and San Andreas Fault both of
whom
created their own styles in an area not too far distant from that of
Mouse
and Kelley and Moscoso. Todd Hunter (San Andreas Fault) made excellent
use of the Chaplin image in FD-111, and Bob Schnepf created what is
often
judged one of Psychedelia's ten best, FD-122, which also was one of the
best of those involving visual puns on group names, an idea which was
popular
for a while. One of the main reasons the establishment has so much
difficulty
recognizing the greatness of psychedelic art is that many of its best
examples
are, like FD-122, just too bizarre for them to accept.
If there was anything which terrified the doyens of the dominant
paradigm
more than widespread recreational drug use in the sixties, it was
widespread
recreational sex. Writing about psychedelic rock concert poster art
without
discussing the predominant roles of sex and drugs is like writing
seriously
about Michaelangelo without mentioning the Roman Catholic church. It
might
be possible, but it certainly would be hypocritical. If there was any
artist
who was more blatantly erotic than Victor Moscoso it was Wes Wilson.
All
of these artists embraced sensuality, but none with the unceasing
immersion
of Wes Wilson. This probably made the father of psychedelic rock
concert
poster art the most subversive of them all, but he was not merely
subversive,
he was revolutionary. All it takes is a quick look at the delicate,
fragile
"femme" ideal of pin-up art from the forties and fifties by such
American painters as Moran and Elvgren to see the radical change Wilson
represented. Here were big, powerful, muscular looking women dancing in
wild abandon, not cutesy, defenseless, little women who stood on the
sidelines
watching men. In this sense Wilson was way ahead of the feminist
movement.
If there is a more empowered woman than the one in BG-29, "The Sound",
I have not had the good fortune to meet her. We would all be lucky if
now
as she approaches fifty we elected her to the Senate, grown to maturity
and with a realistic understanding of the ideals she represented, she
would
make a lot better president than several we have had.
As the years have passed I have come to be more and more convinced that
the only reason the big five (Wilson, Mouse, Kelley, Moscoso and
Griffin)
was not the big six was that Bonnie MacLean was a woman. Even the hip
of
1967 were not ready to take the "No girls allowed" sign off the
door of the psychedelic poster artist's club treehouse. Bonnie was not
just graphically as gifted as the others. Like the others her
imagination
drew from the mass culture and recreated its famous images, for
example,
BG-64 the art school advertisement tour de force, and she created
sexually
attractive psychedelic men and women (BG-89 and 90) which were as
beautiful
and dynamic as the others. Her sense of color also was excellent.
The work Rick Griffin did for Bill Graham is very different from that
which
he did for the Family Dog. BG-105, perhaps the most famous image of the
era, is apocalyptic in nature, anything but gentle and nutritive the
way
his Family Dog images are. This is his vision of the Old Testament
"jealous
and angry god," and any trivialization of the image, failure to
recognize
its real nature, is an insult to his memory. BG-136, "The Heart Torch,"
represents part of Griffin's psychedelic adaptation of arcane Masonic
symbology
which fascinated him for years the way pop culture images enchanted
Mouse
and Kelley.
Lee Conklin was the first of the second wave of psychedelic artists.
Unfortunately
he did no work at all for the Family Dog. His eerie, surrealistic
impressions
of the psychedelic experience rendered in a phenomenal detail
recognizable
only in the original drawings led to a clear understanding that when
you
were stoned nothing was what it appeared to be. It may make sense at
the
time but later it will rarely be coherent. Nothing typifies this
duality
more than the striking bizarreness of BG-101, the embracing torsos
whose
heads are replaced by clasped hands. Are we being told a true union
folds
us together like intertwined fingers? Are we being told not to ask too
many questions about the meaning of art? Or are we merely being told to
ignore the interpretations of psychedelia done years later by an auto
mechanic?
The last major Bill Graham artist was David Singer. Where Griffin was a
mystic with roots in organized fundamentalist religion, Singer was a
mystic
who absorbed a multitude of religious and mystical traditions and
synthesized
a dream vision built on the juxtaposition of multiple images in collage
(Kelley's brilliant personal collages notwithstanding, the other major
artists tended to use one image per poster). Just as in the LSD
experience
different images floated before the beholder/participant so did David
seek
to capture his own usually gentle version of the acid state. One needs
only to imagine movement in the elements of such images as those in the
lower BG-180's to see that David took some wonderful trips. He also was
the first, in BG-205, certainly one of the best anti-drug pieces of
serious
art, to caution us that drugs could become the tail that wagged the
dog,
could swallow a person whole and spit them out one of the walking dead
which still fill our streets today.
Two less famous but nevertheless noteworthy artists round out the
Fillmore
pantheon. First is the late Greg Irons who was a cartoonist with a
delightful
sense of humor. No one captured the essence of Chuck Berry (Rolling
Stone's
true king of the rock and rollers) better than Greg did in BG-193. His
depiction of Berry flying through the air over a city grinning his
enigmatic
grin as his characteristic wingtips point due North and South recalls
for
me better than anything else the electricity Berry brought on stage at
his peak in New York in the late 1950's. Norman Orr's
Christmas/birthday
card to Jesus, BG-262, showed a love of god equalled only by his love
of
the flesh shown in "The Nymphet", BG-273 & 4. If there was
anything that typified the psychedelic era more than this duality, the
lust for the spiritual and the lust for the fleshly, no one has
suggested
to me what it was. All the sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll of the era
grew
out of the explosion generated by this duality.
Copyright Eric King 1996
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