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...Capitol-City Arts Network...

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CONCERT POSTER ART,
AUSTIN, TEXAS STYLE

by Rush Evans

 

In the 1960s, popular music changed in radical and experimental ways. The rock and roll revolution was old enough to go into different directions that gave it greater depth of character far beyond the danceable, fun sound that had been its original trademark. Along with the new sense of musical experimentation came a psychedelic subculture, heavily influenced by alternative philosophies, mind expanding drugs, and a determination in the youth of the day to be different. Nowhere was this new culture more tangible and exemplary than in San Francisco, where even the accompanying advertising for the musical revolution was to be decidedly different. In fact, the concert posters were to become imaginative works of art, every bit as complex and surreal as the music and musicians they were to represent. Also by the late 1960s, another experimental musical mecca was in the early stages of its rich counterculture. Austin seemed on the surface to be light years away from what was happening in San Francisco. But it was also a college town. A college town that required a wider variety in music than just the folk and country that had been indigenous
to the area.

All musical influences and styles seemed to be welcome here, and by the time Willie Nelson arrived in the early '70s, anything went. The accompanying poster art that developed in Austin carried a true Texas touch, but maintained the same cerebral obscurity that had characterized the designs coming out of San Francisco and spreading throughout the country. The house artists at the legendary Armadillo World Headquarters, used their printed images to help define what the Austin music scene was all about: musically rich, culturally diverse, and stubbornly Texan.To this day, much of the print art that comes out of Austin is associated with its live music, and largely influenced by the Armadillo period. Poster bills still hang on telephone poles, particularly in The University of Texas area and on 6th Street, the live music hub of the city that proudly (and now officially) refers to itself as the "Live Music Capital Of The World," with more live music venues than most cities twice its size. And the influential work of the past can still be found on the walls of many clubs and stores, keeping Austin's bohemian status alive. The colorful and free-spirited Patrick Helton is the owner of Austin's Inner Sanctum Records. He's also a passionate collector and occasional designer of this type of art, and he certainly sees it as something far more meaningful than simple advertising. "You got your heroin junkies, you got your vinyl junkies, and you got your paper poster junkies. I'm definitely a paper junkie. The smell, the feel, the ambience, the ink, the design." Helton has been involved in trading, buying, selling and cherishing music posters since 1969. His record store is packed with thousands of albums which take up more space than the piles of posters, but an hour in the store produces more inquiries about classic posters than about the music.

One of Helton's earliest pieces was an Austin poster that actually promoted a San Antonio Janis Joplin concert that never even happened, but still holds great artistic and financial value. "I remember in '69 picking up a bunch of Janis flyers at one time. I went home and displayed them on my wall, I must have displayed somewhere between a hundred and two hundred all on the wall at one time, and when I moved, it didn't mean anything, I just left the flyers there. I've told people for a few years, I'd pay a hundred bucks just for a photo of all those Janis flyers on the wall at one time. I mean, it was really twenty or thirty grand in today's dollars." Not that it's necessarily the musician that is the draw to a particular design like this one. "It's more the art and colors, it's definitely not Janis herself that's the reason I picked this up. It's a mixture of colors that's kind of perfect."
However, there are certainly plenty of collectors who do indeed seek out the item primarily because it depicts a favorite artist, or more specifically, a personally meaningful concert that they attended, or simply wish that they had attended. Bruce Springsteen collectors all over the country are familiar with the famous "eardrum" poster of a 1974 Armadillo appearance that only cost a buck to attend. There is no depiction of Springsteen himself in the design, but the bizarre images of microphone in an ear and an arm and hammer emerging from a guitar are indicative of the general times of rock and roll and how this future rock superstar fit into them.
Jim Franklin designed that poster, as well as that colorful Janis Joplin one. Franklin played a major role in setting the style associated with '60s and '70s art in Central Texas. So much so that many collectors seek out his particular designs from his very prolific period. Franklin wasn't just a freelance artist who did work for Armadillo shows, he was also one of its staffers, as the club's "Ethereal Essence In Residence."

By 1970, when the Armadillo World Headquarters came into being, one of its greatest promises of success was the memorable name itself. And, appropriately enough, Franklin incorporated that strange little armored mammal into most of his work. Once in 1968, Franklin was searching for the right image for a poster design for an outdoor Austin concert. "I did an armadillo smoking a joint, which kind of related it to the Texas underground hippie culture. It was like an instant hit, you might say. The following week, I had another blank page to fill, and that armadillo idea popped up. It turned out that it was a theme. After that first one I thought, 'What if I were to keep drawing these things?'" Thus, a brilliant advertising, cross-promotional symbol had been found that would long be displayed as an image to be associated with Austin and its independent musical spirit for years to come.
Visual puns were common in his work, and have since run throughout the work of Austin's other poster designers. For instance, the opening night poster for the Armadillo pictured two armadillos atop our planet in something like the shape of a head, that had been divided into quarters (Armadillo World Headquarters, get it?) "You can make a visual pun fairly easy," says Franklin. "In fact, you can get away with visual puns that you can't get away with verbally."

One of the other creative artists associated with the Armadillo was Micael Priest, who was every bit as imaginative as Franklin, but perhaps less obscure in that the images were more likely to be more obviously relevant to the musician in question. Priest came to town looking for Franklin, whose cartoon work was already well known, and he quickly got into the postering business. "I started off doing them for 25 bucks apiece, until suddenly I was doing them for all three places in town that booked live music, and I just couldn't do them fast enough." He literally had to go round up more artist friends to take on some of the quickly growing design duties. Priest's poster design for a Springsteen show, also from 1974 like Franklin's, is a highly collectible piece as well, and has held value far outside of Austin's city limits. The design is appealing for its historical value and because it was a variation of Bruce's first album cover, which was itself a variation of that great indigenous American art form, the tacky tourist postcard. What made Priest's design even more interesting is the fact that it provides a hidden story: the pictures within each letter of Bruce Springsteen's name depict a scene from the narrative story songs that defined the singer's style on his first two albums. Each letter follows the same sequence as the songs on the albums (the first song is depicted in the B, the second song in the R, etc.) One cartoon shows a man running into a "lake in just his socks and a shirt," a line straight out of the song, "Spirits In The Night." Priest's and Franklin's works were seen plugging many an Armadillo show, but there were many other equally talented artists who were nearly as prolific during those years, each developing his own distinctive style as part of the healthy competition among this group of artist friends. Artists like Guy Juke, whose sharp, minimalist style was featured on posters for folks like Rickie Lee Jones and can also be found as the cover of Joe Ely's Live Shots album. Bill Narum was equally imaginative, in pieces like the colorful aerial view of Manor Downs, the location of the Allman Brothers/Johnny Winter show he was advertising. His traditional Texana painting style also worked as ZZ Top's cover art on Deguello and Tejas.

Sam Yeates was known for many colorful and creative designs, like the very colorful lion's head with a guitar neck for a tongue. The design was for a Bob Seger show, also interesting for the fact that he spelled Seger's name as S-E-E-G-E-R. Yeates remembers this faux pas with a sense of humor; "It's how Pete Seeger spelled his name!"

Guy Juke keeps a close eye on the sales figures!

Ken Featherston handled many of the designs during the Armadillo's early years. His drawing of a cowboy and horse jumping over a crescent moon for a Marshall Tucker show caught the eye of the band when they hit town. They were so impressed with his design that they decided it was suitable as the cover for their forthcoming Searchin' For A Rainbow album. Featherston was tragically shot and killed in 1975 by a deranged concert-goer at the Armadillo after a performance by the Pointer Sisters.

The posters that have come from Antone's, the famous blues club, are every bit as collectible and sought as the more hippie oriented designs that came from the Armadillo years. The work of artist Danny Garrett has long been associated with Antone's (though he did Armadillo work as well), with an appealing and accessible illustrative style that is imaginative without straying too far off the subject at hand. In other words, he puts pictures of the musicians on the poster, though his work cannot be called simplistic and predictable. Often, his pieces have reflected something of the musical personality or image of the depicted entertainer. For instance, a classic work of his on the late, great Muddy Waters shows the blues legend in a pained and wrinkled expression set against a black background with his name in colorful lettering, bright enough to stand out and do its advertising job, but not so
distractive as to ignore the detail in the blues ridden face.

Yet another artist often associated with the Armadillo was perhaps most widely known for his designs for another Austin live music venue, Soap Creek Saloon. Kerry Awn, now a well-known Austin comic, had a cartoonish drawing style combined with an emphasis on lettering, with a different look to the letters on each day of a month's worth of performance dates on the Soap Creek calendar. The lettering may have been the focus, but again, there was something purely Texan about it, for it bore little resemblance to the more trippy letter styles coming from other parts of the country. Awn's work, like that of his contemporaries, also wound up on album covers, like frequent Soap Creek performer Doug Sahm's Groover's Paradise, which has a full cartoon depiction of a hip little section (including Inner Sanctum Records) of the city to which the title refers, with even a few of Franklin's armadillos appearing in the work.

One particular artist busy in the '90s, usually designing for touring shows by larger acts, is Nels Jacobsen, who signs his work as Jagmo. Jagmo keeps his drawings simple and recognizable, but incorporates colors that give the work true distinction, while continuing to keep the rich Austin tradition alive. Jagmo has covered diverse musical territory, from designs promoting shows by The B-52s to Nanci Griffith, from k.d. lang to Austin guitar wizard Eric Johnson.

"The age and condition are determining factors in posters," says Nancy Coplin, who sets up shop to sell these posters at the Annual Armadillo Christmas Bazaar, the one lingering business venture still bearing the Armadillo name. "I get calls from all over the country from people who've seen the Armadillo posters in the Art Of Rock book [a 1987 coffee table book by Paul Grushkin with a huge selection of concert posters from all over the country]. Poster collecting is becoming a big thing. The art and the collectibility of these posters is growing every year. It's amazing." And just like album collecting, the real value is in the eye of the beholder. For the most part, Austin collectible posters fetch something in the 25 to 50 dollar range, with special concerts or artists or designs sometimes getting hundreds of dollars.Autographs on the designs by either the artist or the musicians involved can certainly add to the value and collectibility of a piece. On the general subject of pricing, however, Patrick Helton will also be quick to tell you that "prices are more flexible now than they ever have been." Aside from the Christmas bazaar and Inner Sanctum, other stores in Austin carry rock art; Under The Sun Emporium and Book Source have quite a few, and even Waterloo Records has a selection available. Austin pieces have occasionally been sold through San Francisco's Art Rock Gallery, which specializes in mail order sales of such work from all over the country (call 415-255-7390 to order a catalog.) Collecting these pieces has become a fun project for music collectors, by providing the memento that can be cherished as a reminder of those invaluable moments shared between musicians and audiences. Or as Bruce Willenzik of the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar (and onetime Armadillo kitchen manager) puts it, "If you go to the concert and you listen to the music and then the encore happens and everyone applauds and then it's over. You have a memory that's like software. The poster is a document that will always remind you of every bit of fun, all the excitement, all the enjoyment you got out of that concert. You have this thing that you can hold in your hands and you can put on your walls that's still alive after the concert's over."

Perhaps no other musical artist was as fully symbolic of the originality and raw energy in Austin's music over the years as Stevie Ray Vaughan. With his faithfulness to traditional blues and his creation of a new sound, Stevie Ray became a guitar hero in Austin years before the rest of the world caught on, and he always remained loyal to the audiences in his musical home. To this day, six years since his death, the reverence for his musical role in Austin is recognized by the entire community; the city has even erected a statue of him near downtown. Concert posters for his shows are among the most collectible of the Austin pieces and they span most of the years that such art has been prevalent in the city, running from the early days of the Armadillo all the way to his superstar days. In the mid-'70s, Vaughan was a member of Paul Ray and the Cobras, who along with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, carved out an Austin blues niche when the redneck rock of the day was dominating the scene. Both bands occasionally played the Armadillo, and posters for such shows are among the most valuable in Austin.

The appearance of a teenaged Vaughan as a member of an opening act band makes for a highly collectible image. After The Cobras, Stevie Ray made his name in Austin as a key member of the Triple Threat Revue and later fronting his own Double Trouble; and was depicted in these configurations in many a Kerry Awn Soap Creek calendar and certainly a number of Garrett's works for Antone's, where Vaughan played many a bluesy night. One of Garrett's finest pieces designed for an October, 1980 show depicted Vaughan playing his guitar while holding it behind his neck, a position which had become a Vaughan trademark early on.

When he became a major label, world traveling guitar hero, Vaughan still returned to Austin for frequent shows, playing one of his last shows at Auditorium Shores in 1990. The colorful Jagmo design for this show depicts the mature Vaughan in a somewhat mysterious pose, covered almost fully with his trademark hat and poncho. This poster is not only a commemorative of an important event and an impression of Austin's favorite son, it's also simply a beautiful piece of art.And certainly the same can be said for most of the work of this type. There is something truer and more sincere about art that is designed to be simply posted on phone poles to be seen by anybody, without any particular profit motivation on the part of the artist or goals of gallery exhibition. It's just bursts of inspiration that come from the same thing that inspires so many of us: great music. And in Austin, where there is plenty of that great music, there is bound to be an outpouring of this imaginative art.