Lost Posters

Drawn By Jerry Garcia

 



An integral part of any music scene is the promotional posters that are created to advertise the shows. All the cool posters you see around Northampton are some of the strongest evidence of what a vibrant music scene there is in this area.

Many people collect music posters, and the ultimate collectibles are the old posters from the 1960's psychedelic scene in San Franciso. The rarest of the rare are the Acid Test posters, those that were used to promote the "happenings" where author Ken Kesey and his house band the Grateful Dead performed at dance halls where LSD was served to the sometimes unsuspecting audience, as part of Kesey's belief that if a significant percentage of the population had the LSD experience, then revolutionary changes would begin to occur in society as a whole.

It had long been believed that Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist for the Grateful Dead, who also painted and drew throughout his life, had drawn some of the earliest Acid Test flyers, but none were known to have survived. However, last year a mysterious old vinyl Grateful Dead album surfaced at a record swap that had stuffed inside it nine never before seen posters from the earliest years of the Kesey/Dead scene. After extensive research, the posters were identified as the long lost Jerry Garcia Acid Test posters. The collector who discovered the first poster on eBay tells the tale: 

 



Around the time period of April 2008, a very strange, very amateurish-looking Acid Test handbill for the Fillmore on Jan 8, 1966, appeared on E-Bay and was sitting up for several days before I noticed it. I looked at it carefully. Nobody had ever seen one like this before. Every day I scan E-Bay for Acid Test related items and on this day, there was some "energy" about the piece because I was scanning down through the page and it literally jumped out at me as being something interesting.

I contacted the seller and asked if he was interested in selling me the item for $400, and he agreed, removed it and mailed me the item. The next week, I took it in to Dennis King and had it authenticated, and Dennis concluded he believed it was real, and not faked. Dennis said he believed it was printed on Day-Glo green paper which had faded. This gave me a boost of confidence in the item, and likewise, confidence in the seller.

At the same time I contacted the seller to acquire it, I also asked where the item came from, and how he happened upon it. The seller was very nice, and responded that he got it from a record swapmeet where it was inside an old Grateful Dead mono version of the first album.

 



The past has a tendency to slip away, but here is an example of the long lost past unexpectedly resurfacing. It would be interesting to know more about the original collector. Was he an Acid Test attendee?

The Poe Down

In case you didn't notice, this is the 200th anniversary year of the birth of Edgar Allen Poe in Boston, Massachusetts. UMass is holding a Halloween weekend symposium in honor of the event. 

It's mostly for Poe scholars from around the country, but I strolled past to check out the scene. There were Poe t-shirts for sale.

Also posters were on display from the many mostly cheesey Hollywood movies made from Poe's work.

 



The father of the modern detective story and a pioneer of fantasy and science-fiction, Edgar Allen Poe is indeed worthy of having his birthday celebrated.

By the way, there's a big party at Sam's in Northampton tonight.

Evil pumpkins haunt a porch in Hamp.

Today's Video

Jerry Garcia's Book

Harrington Street.

Whew, let's take a break from politics and write about the Grateful Dead!

The other day somebody gave me a present - a copy of the now out of print Jerry Garcia biography Harrington Street. It's only 76 pages long, with most of it illustrations, so it didn't take long to read. 

The title of the book refers to the street in San Francisco which Jerry Garcia lived on as a boy. Garcia lived at number 87, in a house which is still standing. The current owners complain that hippies are always sitting on their steps. Here is Jerry's house as it looked in 2003.

I like this book. It is colorful, whimsical and fun to read. The problem is the book was incomplete at the time of Garcia's death. Various editors and friends tried to piece together what they could from the material Garcia left behind, but are only partially successful.

Garcia's intention was to make an illustrated biography mixing written narrative with his own paintings. Unfortunately at the time of Garcia's death he had only got as far as telling his life story to the age of ten. That leaves out a whole lot of things that were worth writing about in Garcia's life.

However, for a guy that always seemed to have starch in his grin Jerry Garcia had a pretty traumatic childhood. Born sickly, he was confined to his bed a lot as a child. At the age of two, he was nearly drowned when a drunken guest at a family party threw him into a swimming pool, from which he was barely rescued in time by his father. His Dad, a well known San Francisco musician, would himself drown to death in front of his entire family at a swimming resort. Watching his father die was a major trauma for Garcia, who for over a year later would burst into tears whenever his father's name was mentioned.

His mother never recovered from the tragedy, and Garcia ended up being raised by his eccentric grandparents, whose sterile marriage forced Garcia to retreat into art and music. He recounts two other disturbing childhood events, one of which involved a time when he tried to pursue what he thought was a kitten into the bushes but instead discovered was a rat. It reminded me of an event from my own childhood. When I was around four or five I was really fond of squirrels. One day a mean boy called me over to look at something in the gutter. When I did so I saw that it was a squirrel that had been hit by a car and its guts were all over the place. I remember I ran into the house and got sick, but when my mother asked me what was wrong, I said nothing.

Another traumatic event for Garcia was when some sadistic older girls stripped him and made fun of him while he was nude. Gosh, with all these childhood traumas, you'd think it would be enough to make somebody grow up and take drugs!

Garcia is a good writer. When telling about a seafaring ancestor, Captain Olson of San Francisco, he writes:

In truth, I only know of his existence because of a few meager pieces of evidence in the form of two anecdotes and one ancient photograph. The photograph, faded, out of focus, shows a blurred foreheady gaussian blur, as if the endless, restless motion of the sea itself had robbed from Capt. O. the ability to stand still for a photo, thereby denying the future a good look at him. Allowing him to sneak, so to speak, into the past, unseen, like the phantom he was....

Disappointingly, the book never goes past Garcia's early childhood, since he died while undergoing treatment in a California detox before he could write anymore. What saves the book from just being a dead rock star rip-off are the paintings Garica did to accompany the text. Garcia was a masterful psychedelic poster artist whose trippy mindscapes are simply beautiful to behold. If the text is maddeningly short, then the paintings provide endless fascination.

Alas, only used copies are available of this book on Amazon.com. However if you can get your hands on a copy there or somewhere else then I recommend you do so. Not just because this is a visually delightful book, but also because it is bound to become a valuable collectors piece. 

The other day I was wandering around downtown Northampton just before sunset and looking at all the posters, like this sort of Victorian one.

 



This wall has a whole lot of posters, mostly for musical events. 

There is an old sign painted on the side of this building, but so much has peeled off I can't make out what it used to advertise. Can you?

This sign reminds me that maple sugar season is just around the corner. Once the sap starts to rise, Spring will be right behind! 

So hurry the hell up and get here!