RokyMovie

Tag: Fillmore

  • 1960s Psychedelic Concert Poster Art: From the Fillmore to Texas

    1960s Psychedelic Concert Poster Art: From the Fillmore to Texas

    The sound of mid-1960s psychedelic rock had a visual language, and most of it was printed to be stapled to a telephone pole. Concert posters from San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium and Avalon Ballroom — later joined by work from Austin rooms such as the Vulcan Gas Company — turned lettering into a maze, color into an optical trick, and a weekend bill into something you might keep after the show. Museums now collect them. Dealers grade them. The artists’ estates still hold copyrights. This article is a history of that movement, not a gallery of the posters themselves: we do not reproduce copyrighted 1960s concert art here.

    The posters matter to a music site because they were never only decoration. They told you who was playing, they trained the eye to expect a certain kind of night, and they traveled farther than many of the regional singles they advertised. When the 13th Floor Elevators played San Francisco, they entered a room that already had a house style on the wall. Back in Austin, a different group of artists built a Texas variant of the same idea. For the club-level story, see Austin’s 1960s psychedelic scene; for the wider city-to-city contrast, see San Francisco vs Austin.

    The Fillmore Auditorium exterior in San Francisco
    Photo: total13. The Fillmore, San Francisco — CC BY 2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).

    Two rooms, two numbering systems

    By 1966, San Francisco had two flagship psychedelic halls, and each generated a numbered poster series that collectors still use as a catalog. Bill Graham’s bills at the Fillmore Auditorium (and, later, related Graham venues) are commonly cited by their BG numbers. Chet Helms’s Family Dog productions at the Avalon Ballroom are cited by their FD numbers. The systems were practical before they were a hobby: they identified a specific weekend, a specific printer, and a first printing. Liquid light shows and dancing crowds finished the environment; the poster was the invitation you saw in daylight.

    The style that filled those numbered sheets did not come from nowhere. Designers borrowed from Art Nouveau, the Vienna Secession, comic art, advertising illustration, and, in more than one famous case, a nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century book plate that could be redrawn until it felt new. What was new was the density: lettering that seemed to melt, colors chosen to vibrate, and an almost willful refusal of the clean, high-contrast advertising style that had dominated mainstream posters.

    Wes Wilson, Bonnie MacLean, and the Fillmore look

    Wes Wilson is the artist most often credited with defining the early Fillmore poster. From early 1966 until May 1967 he designed bills for Graham in a style built around swollen, compressed lettering that made the names of the bands into a pattern as much as a text. Writers on the period, and later museum notes, have pointed to the influence of Vienna Secession lettering — especially the work of Alfred Roller — on that approach. Wilson left Graham’s operation after a dispute over payment. He died on January 24, 2020, at eighty-two.

    Bonnie MacLean, who had been part of Graham’s office world and was for a time married to him, became the Fillmore’s principal poster artist after Wilson’s departure. She designed many of the later 1960s Graham posters, carrying the house style forward with her own figures and lettering, and continued into the end of the decade. She died in 2020, the same year as Wilson. Any honest history of the Fillmore look has to include both names: the inventor of the early language, and the artist who kept the walls changing after he left.

    Moscoso, Mouse, Kelley, Griffin: the rest of the “Big Five”

    If Wilson made lettering feel organic, Victor Moscoso made color feel like a wiring problem. He had studied at Yale with Josef Albers, whose teaching on color interaction — including the way adjacent saturated hues can appear to vibrate — became the technical backbone of Moscoso’s mid-1960s posters. Working often under his Neon Rose imprint, he pushed complementary colors and almost unreadable lettering until the poster itself seemed to pulse. It was a rare case of an Ivy League color course walking straight into a ballroom.

    Stanley “Mouse” Miller and Alton Kelley, working as Mouse Studios, were the great collagists and recyclers of the group. Their 1966 Family Dog poster for the Grateful Dead and Oxford Circle at the Avalon, usually called “Skeleton and Roses” or “Skull and Roses,” adapted an illustration by Edmund J. Sullivan from a 1913 edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, adding color and lettering until the image became the Dead’s most durable visual emblem — later reused on the band’s 1971 live album. The move was typical of the scene at its smartest: an old plate, a new context, and a design that outlived the weekend it advertised.

    Rick Griffin arrived with a different toolbox. He was already known in Southern California surfing and underground-comic circles before becoming a San Francisco poster artist. His “Flying Eyeball” poster for a February 1968 Bill Graham bill — the Jimi Hendrix Experience, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, and Albert King, at the Fillmore and Winterland — is among the most famous single sheets of the era. Museum collections (including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art) now hold impressions of it. The winged-eyeball motif itself drew on earlier hot-rod and Von Dutch imagery; Griffin’s contribution was to make that vernacular feel ceremonial.

    In July 1967, Wilson, Moscoso, Mouse, Kelley, and Griffin — the group later nicknamed the “Big Five” — showed together at the Joint Show at San Francisco’s Moore Gallery, a moment when ballroom advertising briefly entered the art-gallery circuit during the Summer of Love. MacLean is not usually counted in that five, which is one reason later exhibitions have had to work to put her back into the main narrative.

    Texas walls: Jim Franklin and the Vulcan

    Austin’s version of this culture was smaller and later. The Vulcan Gas Company opened at 316 Congress Avenue on October 27, 1967, and poster artist Jim Franklin joined that same month, even living in the building, as the Handbook of Texas records. The Vulcan’s light booth and Franklin’s posters gave Central Texas a visual identity that was related to San Francisco without being a copy of it — armadillos and a more local sense of humor would follow Franklin into the Armadillo World Headquarters years after the Vulcan closed around July 1970. The Elevators, already veterans of the Fillmore and Avalon, now had a hometown room with its own printed language. We go into the club’s history, and Houston’s International Artists label, in the Austin scene article; the point here is simpler: psychedelic poster art was not a California monopoly.

    Collecting posters without collecting trouble

    If you decide to collect, treat posters with the same discipline you would bring to scarce vinyl. First printings, later authorized reprints, and unauthorized copies can look similar in a thumbnail. Series numbers (BG, FD, and their Texas and other-city cousins), printer marks, paper stock, and documented measurements help, and so do dealers who photograph full margins rather than cropped images. Condition is its own vocabulary: original posters were hung outdoors, so pinholes, staple marks, and fading are common and should be described, not disguised.

    Copyright is not a technicality. Most 1960s concert posters remain under copyright, held by artists, estates, or publishers. Buying a legally offered original or authorized reprint is the ethical path; scanning a poster to decorate a website or a T-shirt without permission is not. Museum sites and library collections are the right places to study high-resolution images for research. We follow the same rule on RokyMovie: no copyrighted posters or film stills, only clearly free-licensed photographs, such as the Fillmore’s exterior above, or original art made for this site.

    The posters, like the records, are documents of a few short years when a concert advertisement could also be a new kind of American graphic art. Start with the rooms — Fillmore, Avalon, Vulcan — then the artists, then, if you collect, the paperwork. The music is still the reason the paper was printed. For the Texas band that walked into those San Francisco rooms, begin with Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators and You’re Gonna Miss Me.

    Related: Austin’s 1960s Psychedelic Scene · San Francisco vs Austin · You’re Gonna Miss Me · Old Links & Press

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  • San Francisco vs Austin: Two Psychedelic Rock Scenes of the 1960s

    San Francisco vs Austin: Two Psychedelic Rock Scenes of the 1960s

    Ask a casual listener where American psychedelic rock happened, and the answer is usually San Francisco: Haight-Ashbury, the Fillmore, the Avalon, liquid light, and a summer that magazines would not stop covering. That picture is not wrong. It is incomplete. In 1965, while the Bay Area’s ballroom culture was still taking shape, an Austin band led by a University of Texas philosophy student and a teenage singer from the Spades was already calling its sound psychedelic. The 13th Floor Elevators would soon travel west and play the same rooms that made the San Francisco scene famous. The traffic, in other words, went both ways — but the two cities were never the same kind of experiment.

    This is a comparison, not a contest. San Francisco had the infrastructure and the spotlight. Austin had a harder legal climate, a smaller circuit, and a Houston label that could get a single onto the national charts without ever resembling Warner Bros. or RCA. Understanding both is the best way to hear why the Elevators sounded like themselves, and why Keven McAlester’s You’re Gonna Miss Me is a Texas story rather than a Haight-Ashbury footnote.

    The corner of Haight and Ashbury streets in San Francisco
    Photo: Daniel Schwen. Corner of Haight and Ashbury, San Francisco — CC BY-SA 2.5 (via Wikimedia Commons).

    Who got there first — and who got the cameras

    Chronology is less tidy than city pride likes to admit. San Francisco’s mid-1960s scene had deep folk, blues, and bohemian roots; by 1966 Bill Graham was presenting shows at the Fillmore Auditorium, and Chet Helms’s Family Dog was filling the Avalon Ballroom with dancing crowds, light shows, and a poster culture that became an art movement of its own. Jefferson Airplane had signed to RCA Victor in late 1965; the Grateful Dead were on Warner Bros. in time for a 1967 debut album. On January 14, 1967, the Human Be-In drew a crowd in the tens of thousands — contemporary and later estimates often range from 20,000 to 30,000 — to the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park, a preview of the media storm that would be called the Summer of Love.

    Austin’s clock started just as early and ran on a different voltage. The Elevators formed in 1965. In November of that year, according to the Handbook of Texas, Tommy Hall began describing the band’s sound as psychedelic after encountering the word in Timothy Leary’s writings. “You’re Gonna Miss Me” became a national single on International Artists in mid-1966 and reached the mid-50s on the Billboard charts — proof that Texas could export the music before it had a ballroom built specifically for the culture around it. The Vulcan Gas Company, Austin’s essential psychedelic room, did not open at 316 Congress Avenue until October 27, 1967, after San Francisco’s summer in the headlines. For the club and the Houston label behind the Elevators, see our longer piece on Austin’s 1960s psychedelic scene.

    Congress Avenue in Austin, Texas
    Photo: LoneStarMike. Congress Avenue, Austin — CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).

    Rooms, labels, and the sound of a scene

    San Francisco had a pair of flagship halls with national reputations, a dense cluster of bands (the Dead, the Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish), and major-label contracts that could put a San Francisco album in every city with a record shop. The musical stereotype is not entirely a cartoon: folk roots, modal jamming, raga inflections, and long improvisations suited rooms where the light show and the dancing were part of the event. There were tighter, song-based Bay Area groups too, but the national image favored the jam.

    Austin’s scene was smaller, more closely watched, and braided with Texas garage, folk, and blues traditions that never fully left the room. The Elevators attacked like a garage band and thought like a philosophy seminar; Hall’s electric jug made them instantly recognizable and impossible to mistake for a Fillmore dance band. International Artists, based in Houston rather than Austin, issued a modest run of albums and singles — the Elevators, the Red Crayola/Red Krayola, Golden Dawn, Bubble Puppy, a Lightnin’ Hopkins LP — without the corporate depth of RCA or Warner. The music traveled. The business often did not. That difference in scale is easy to hear even now: one scene documented by a small army of photographers, poster artists, and label publicists; the other reconstructed later from battered IA pressings, club memories, and a documentary camera that arrived decades after the fact.

    The crossing: Elevators west, Joplin west, and a few shared bills

    The two worlds did meet. As the Elevators’ single rose, the band toured the West Coast. Benny Thurman stayed in Texas; Ronnie Leatherman took over on bass. The Handbook of Texas records that they were especially well received in the Bay Area, playing the Avalon and the Fillmore as well as smaller rooms, and appearing with acts such as the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. A Family Dog poster now in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco collection advertises the Elevators with Moby Grape at the Avalon on November 11 and 12, 1966 — physical evidence of a Texas band on a San Francisco wall. They also reached national television (American Bandstand, Where the Action Is).

    Janis Joplin moved in the other direction. Raised in Port Arthur, Texas, and active in the Austin folk scene, she settled in San Francisco and became the voice of Big Brother. Amy Berg’s later documentary Janis: Little Girl Blue traces that path in detail. The Handbook of Texas notes, carefully, that the Elevators had reportedly asked Joplin to join them, and that she declined while acknowledging the band’s influence. Whether or not every retelling of that offer is complete, the larger fact is solid: talented Texans were looking at the same horizon, and only some of them could make a living inside Texas.

    Police, press, and what happened after the peak

    San Francisco was never unpoliced, and the media rush of 1967 brought its own damage — overcrowding, exploitation, and a short shelf life for the neighborhood’s myth. The Avalon lost its lease in 1968. The decade’s Bay Area aftertaste includes Altamont in December 1969, a widely cited symbol of the era’s souring, even if no single concert can end a culture by itself. Still, for a few years the city offered something Austin could not: a concentration of venues, audiences, and press that made psychedelic rock look like the center of American youth culture.

    Austin offered the opposite pressure. The Elevators’ open drug advocacy drew Texas Rangers and radio bans; a 1966 marijuana case saw some charges dropped on a technicality while other members received suspended sentences. In 1969 Erickson, facing a substantial prison term after another marijuana arrest, chose commitment at Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The band effectively ended there. The Vulcan, which had imported a San Francisco-style understanding of lights, posters, and an altered audience, was itself a police target and closed around July 1970. The energy mutated into the Armadillo World Headquarters era, later Austin punk, and, much later, a neo-psych circuit that still treats Erickson as a local saint. Our Elevators reference page and the documentary You’re Gonna Miss Me pick up that human cost in closer detail.

    What to hold onto from the comparison

    If you want the mass-cultural image of psychedelia — the neighborhood, the festival, the major-label album, the poster in the museum — you start in San Francisco. If you want to understand how early, and how unforgiving, the same impulse could be in America, you start in Austin. The Elevators did not need California’s permission to use the word “psychedelic,” but they did need California’s stages to show that a Texas band belonged in the same conversation as the Dead or Moby Grape. Joplin’s career shows the reverse gravitational pull: a Texas voice that became, for the rest of the world, a San Francisco story.

    Neither city owns the era. The useful habit is to keep both maps open: Haight and Ashbury in one window, Congress Avenue in the other, and the records in between. For the visual language of the ballrooms, see our companion piece on 1960s psychedelic concert poster art.

    Related: Austin’s 1960s Psychedelic Scene · Roky Erickson & the 13th Floor Elevators · You’re Gonna Miss Me · Old Links & Press

    Sources