Vintage Paper

Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Grateful Dead posters, discarded after their use as dorm decorations in the 1960s, are now high art.

By: Daniel Shearer

"Skeleton and Roses", Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse, Family Dog Productions, 1966. The lithograph is part of Rock On! The Art of the Music Poster from the ’60s and ’70s, on view at the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pa.

        Fads come and go, but everything
gets recycled eventually.
   This seems doubly true in the music industry, where image is
as important as the music. Long before music videos, larger-than-life posters
of rock stars adorned countless street corners, record stores and dorm rooms.
   In the mid-’60s, San Francisco graphic designers Alton Kelley
and Stanley Mouse studied the work of a late-19th-century English illustrator,
Edmund Sullivan, and used it to create an image that would help lend an identity
to a then little-known garage band, The Grateful Dead. The poster, "Skeleton and
Roses," copied one of Sullivan’s illustrations for a translation of The Rubáiyát
of Omar Khayyam, which hinted at the growing interest in Eastern spirituality
present not only in the band members, but many of the era’s youths.
   "The original illustration was in black and white," says Graziella
Marchicelli, curator of Rock On! The Art of the Music Poster from the
’60s and ’70s, on view at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown,
Pa., Feb. 7 through May 23. "What Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse did with ‘Skeleton
and Roses’ was they colored in the roses and made scrolling lettering at the bottom,
which had a sort of Victorian look.
   "What made it interesting, exciting and fresh, not only with
that poster, which advertised a show at the Avalon Ballroom, but with other work
they did for Family Dog Productions, is that they freely borrowed styles, images,
from all different periods of graphic arts. But they really looked into the art
of the 19th century, as well as what was known as the Art Nouveau period. That
image stayed with The Grateful Dead for years."
   Working with Bill Graham, owner of the famed Fillmore Auditorium,
and other concert promoters, Family Dog designed posters for many bands that became
part of the burgeoning San Francisco scene, among them The Mamas and the Papas,
The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and The Charlatans.
   The show currently on view at the Michener is a traveling exhibit,
with more than 100 vintage offset lithographs from the permanent collection of
the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in Loretto, Western Pennsylvania. While
Ms. Marchicelli considers two sets of Family Dog posters from 1965 to 1968 to
be the show’s "pride and joy," the exhibit traces the evolution of rock music
posters through the punk movement, which flourished in the early ’80s.

Tadanori Tokoo’s poster and cover art for Carlos Santana’s Amigos, released in 1973.

   "An artist works with what are known as grease crayons," Ms.
Marchicelli says, "and a lot of the works were done via collage and color-painted,
and then transferred onto a metal press, with paper, and just run through by hand.
That’s why, in the case of the Family Dog, these are very precious."
   Hundreds of such posters were eventually produced, but the Rock
On! exhibit has several prime examples from initial printings, such as "Skeleton
and Roses," number three in a run of 26 lithographs.
   The posters were collected over a span of more than 20 years
by Burlington resident Mark del Costello, a television producer and faculty member
at the Art Institute of Philadelphia who donated the material, part of a collection
of more than 400 assorted film, music and advertising lithographs, to the Southern
Allegheny Museum of Art in 1984. Headquartered on the campus of his undergraduate
alma mater, Saint Francis University, the museum held the collection’s first showing
in 1984, following it with another exhibit in 2002 that incidentally coincided
with Mr. del Costello’s 30-year reunion.
   The timing was ironic, particularly because Mr. del Costello
remembers viewing the exhibit with classmates, some of whom had once decorated
their dorm rooms those very same posters.
   One of them, a Jimi Hendrix poster that glows under black light,
which Mr. del Costello views as "the superstar of the collection," had been ripped
off the wall by his friend, Mike, and thrown in a pile of trash as he moved out
of his dorm.

"Girl with Green Hair" (left), a lithograph by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse, advertising a show at Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco with Big Brother and the Holding Company, 1966.

   "I asked him if I could have it," Mr. del Costello says, "and
he said, ‘Sure.’ Then I went down and looked in everybody’s room. Anybody who
had stuff on their walls and didn’t want it, I grabbed it."
   That was in 1969. Oddly enough, the Hendrix poster had almost
wound up in Mr. del Costello’s hands two years earlier, when he and Mike walked
into a mall in Moorestown.
   "We were just hanging out," he says, "and we walked into a shop
and there are three posters on the wall. Black light, real psychedelic stuff.
So there were three of them, Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger and Jimi Hendrix. Mike
bought Jimi, I bought Jagger, and neither one of us had another $4 to buy Jim
Morrison, so god knows where he is."
   The "Skeleton and Roses" poster entered Mr. del Costello’s collection
in 1970.
   "I bought that in Danny’s Record Store in my hometown of Burlington,"
he says. "They had about 50 posters from San Francisco, all from the Avalon and
Fillmore West, and I’ve always been a music junky. I bought my first record in
that store when I was 5. Anyway, I walked in and was chatting with the owner,
and bought the 50 posters for a quarter each."
   Today, similar posters can be purchased on the Internet for
anywhere between several hundred and several thousand dollars, depending on the
size of the print run and the condition of the poster, or paper, as collectors
refer to them.
   "The Internet has made poster collection truly international,"
Mr. del Costello says. "I’ve bought paper from probably 30 or 40 different countries.
I don’t call it collecting, I call it accumulating."
   Mr. del Costello’s varied career contributed greatly to his
personal collection of film and music posters, which now numbers in the hundreds.
Graduating from college with a history degree, he started taking photographs of
bands in 1973 when Electric Factory Concerts hired him to shoot The Grateful Dead
in Philadelphia. In ensuing years, he photographed more than 100 shows for Electric
Factory and other promoters.
   In 1976, he shifted his career path to film, enrolling in graduate
studies at New York University. During his first week in Manhattan, he landed
a job at the Museum of Modern Art as assistant curator of film, charged with cataloging
film and posters.
   "They had a huge collection over 30,000 posters and ephemera
that was just piled in a room," he says. "I had to not only catalog it but create
the cataloguing system.
   "I started work on a book on the history of film posters, and
I was virtually the only person in the world doing it at the time. So, the next
thing I knew, MoMA offered me a job as their resident expert."
   Prior to 1975, film posters were cheap — $10 to $15 —
so that even a kid with little or no money could afford them.
   "I first went to Italy in 1972, and I found a film poster, ‘El
Dorado,’ in Rome," he says, "and over the next 15 years I cleaned the poster distributors
out. I bought thousands of posters, imported them here, and sold and traded them.

Richard Avedon’s lithograph of the Beatles, produced for Look magazine, NEMS enterprises, 1967.

   "Film replaced archaeology as my profession, but it was so schizophrenic.
Here I am, going to grad school at night, my day gig was at MoMA, and on the weekends
I photographed everybody from Pink Floyd to Frank Sinatra."
   Demand for rare movie posters started to skyrocket in the mid-’70s,
and Mr. del Costello found himself "sitting with one serious collection of paper."
   "Movie posters were business," he says. "I collected music posters
for fun. Nobody took those seriously. They’re just starting to. The price of a
rare music poster is a fraction of what the price of a rare movie poster would
be. I mean, there are six-figure movie posters available on the Internet, and
I don’t know of a single music poster that would approach that number."
   Mr. del Costello left MoMA in 1979, working as a personal assistant
for Martin Scorsese Productions, and producing films and television programs in
New York. The former job required him to travel to London for the premiere
of Raging Bull.
   While there, he purchased a controversial punk rock poster of
the Sex Pistols, "God Save the Queen," which depicted Queen Elizabeth II as a
kidnap victim on a torn British flag. That poster, designed by Jamie Reid, is
now part of the show at the Michener, reflecting a style Ms. Marchicelli calls
"anti-graphic arts."
   "If you look at most advertising, it’s clean, pretty, and most
of it isn’t offensive," she says. "This is dirty. It’s raw, cheap-looking. It
looks like it’s made out of newspaper, because the artists commissioned to do
these posters had to reflect what the punk movement was all about."
   The Michener show also includes a lithograph set of the Beatles
produced by photographer Richard Avedon for Look magazine, Tadanori Yokoo’s
poster and cover art for Carlos Santana’s Amigos, released in 1976, Brian
Duffy’s memorable 1973 image of David Bowie for the cover of his album, Aladdin
Sane, and Milton Glaser’s highly styled rendering of Bob Dylan — in which
he appears as a dark silhouette with hair in psychedelic swirls — one of
the most prominent images from the ’60s.
   "The show at the Michener reflects my youth," Mr. del Costello
says. "I donated it to the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art because I was hopeful
that the students at Saint Francis could experience what the culture was like
for a previous generation.
   "And it’s still a gas, once a year, to go into a distributor
or store and find some interesting graphics, some interesting paper. I guess it
goes back to my original intent to be an archaeologist. This isn’t really that
different. Whether it’s finding rare posters or seeking out a musician that has
fallen into obscurity, it’s still exciting to play Indiana Jones once in a while."
   Several years ago, Mr. del Costello heard about a barn in Northern
Italy with a million posters.
   "That’s a lot of paper, dude," he says. "I’ve gotta get over
there one day because out of a thousand posters, you might find one great one,
if you’re lucky."
Rock On! The Art of the Music Poster from the ’60s and ’70s is on view at the
James A. Michener Art Museum, 138 S. Pine St., Doylestown, Pa., through May 23.
Museum admission costs $6.50, seniors $6, students $4. Entrance to the Rock On!
exhibit requires an additional $4 fee. Other events: rock ‘n’ roll dance party,
April 17, 8 p.m.; discussion with concert photographer Jared Polin, April
21, 7 p.m. (free with museum and exhibit admission); lecture and book signing
by Larry Kane, author of Ticket to Ride, May 2, 3 p.m. ($15 lecture fee includes
museum and exhibit admission).
Film historian archivist Bruce Lawton will present a three-part film series,
followed by a question-and-answer session, beginning with The Beatles: Rock
Films as Art and Advertisement, part II — Yellow Submarine, Feb.
29, 3-5 p.m.; and part III, Let It Be, March 21, 3-5 p.m. Film screenings
free with museum and exhibition admission. Gallery hours: Tues.-Fri. 10 a.m.-4:30
p.m., Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sun. noon 5 p.m. (open Wednesdays until 9 p.m., beginning
April 14). For information, call (215) 340-9800. On the Web: www.michenerartmuseum.org