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Tune in, turn on, drop out and flash back to San Francisco in the 1960s. The psychedelic poster art of the San Francisco bay area was part of the cultural phenomenon of the 1960s, producing some of the most iconic cultural symbols of the flower generation. San Francisco in the 1960s was the epicenter of free spirited thinking, the propagation of free love, the birthplace of this exciting cultural phenomenon. As the center of American counter culture the City by the Bay became the cultural Mecca for the flower generation. At the heart of all of this was the Haight-Ashbury district, home to many bay area bands, artist and the droves of young people that gravitated there. A core group of artists worked and lived in the Haight, such as Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso, Wes Wilson, and Alton Kelley. Inspired by the new music and the new drug LSD, the art scene in San Francisco was enveloped in a psychedelic frenzy.

Allured by the promise of a community built on the notions of peace and love many young people from all corners of America ran away, road tripped and hitched across the country to reach this supposed utopian paradise. New York poets and artists from the beat generation of the 1950s such as Allen Ginsburg embraced the thriving San Francisco scene. The artists in San Francisco feed off of this alternative vibe unique to the Bay City, producing art that pushed new boundaries and transcended the distinction between art and music.

Drugs were the paramount ingredient that engendered this budding wave of psychedelic music and art in the bay area. The introduction of LSD into the San Francisco scene inspired the psychedelic stylistic directions of bands such as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company. In turn the visual art community in the bay area took on their own psychedelic and free spirited flavor. Art community regulars such as Bonnie MacLean were friends with musicians such as the Grateful Dead. Her husband Bill Graham was the concert promoter of the Fillmore West and Winterland Ballroom, which hosted countless psychedelic rock concerts. These venues launched the Grateful Dead and many other acts to notoriety within the San Francisco music scene. MacLean’s intimate relationship and cultural kinship with the musicians, translated into paralleled innovations in her art.

While the music scene in San Francisco took off the art scene soon followed, producing the advertisements for these new artists and cultural happenings. LSD was the vital ingredient that inspired the fabulous colors, patterns, and images that appeared on the concert promotional posters produced for bay area bands. These posters were covered in bright colors, swirling, twisting, morphing designs, melting biomorphicesque texts, and frenzied motion all meant to enhance the LSD experience. When at these concerts in the bay area it was not just the bands and that were experimenting with LSD and other psychedelic drugs but most of the audience was as well. The artists created a unique genre of advertisements meant only for this specific drug counter culture. To any one else these concert promotions felt overwhelming and were not the most efficient method to convey the information. To others though it was a way to bring amazement and wonder to every day objects like a concert promotion. These posters were meant to appeal to almost exclusively the hippy generation.

Illustrators such as Rick Griffin and Wess Wilson and photographer Paul Kagan were at the vanguard of this newstyle. They produced works for area bands in the popular psychedelic style. In turn they began forming personal relationships as well as public association with the bands because of their poster work. However, many of the most well known of these iconic posters from 1960s San Francisco were produced by unknown artists, paying homage to the wandering and free spirited nature of many in the flower generation. To understand the source of inspiration and why this art was so strongly associated with the music and personalities on the scene one must consider the prolific mind altering effects of LSD. Many people who have taken LSD describe one of the effects of the drug as “literally seeing music”. Portraying music in a physical form in this fashion was groundbreaking. The radiating shapes, swirls and patterns in posters such as one by Lee Conklin and Herb Greene for the Grateful Dead, Pentangle, and Sir Douglas Quintet, shows an attempt to visualize this psychedelic experience.



Happenings such as the Human Bee Inn and Monterrey International Pop Festival were huge gatherings of people, not just from the San Francisco scene but people that also embodied the kind of freethinking and experimental nature of the Haight scene. San Francisco in the 1960s produced a type of art unique to this experimental city. Cultural icons and homeless teenagers came together through the free expression of peace, love, music, drugs and art. The combination of these forces and the free spirits that lived in the bay area in the 1960s cultivated a psychedelic counter culture that by the end of the decade had circled the western art world and could be found in New York and all of the major art centers of Europe including London, Paris and Berlin.The southern tier of New York got a taste of the San Francisco scene with the Grateful Dead playing what is known among “deadheads” as one of the beast acoustic shows ever played by the band at Harper College, immortalized on the Dead’s Dick’s Picks album. Deadheads and fans of other psychedelic rock bands feed off the energy produced at these concerts. “The Grateful Dead are not just a band, but an environment” is a quote by an MC on the Grateful Dead’s live album, Ladies and Gentlemen…the Grateful Dead. San Francisco artists fed off of the energy of the city and LSD, opening up an infinite number of new possibility’s and ways of thinking and visualizing art. The artists in the bay area strove to make their art match the wonders of drug educed euphoria and visual hallucinations through the use of colors and patterns.

This collection of works shines as testament to a time of great change and development in America. They represented the feelings of free spiritedness, Peace, Love and LSD. The posters done by bay area artists convey the druggy haze that the 1960s looms as to many native San Franciscan’s and baby boomers. The wondrous colors and patters that survive today on posters were matched feverishly by the unique flower children that lived in by the San Francisco Bay. It was an art that at times was hard to separate from the new mind expansive and experimental music that it advertised. These works exploded out of an underground counter culture into iconic flashback of visual aesthetics. This art made for those in alternate states of mind was blatant with its encouragement of drug use and association with the new ways of thinking. The sexual and social boundaries pushed by the non-musical posters were as bold as the colors and designs used to express them. The artists sought to portray, as quoted in the Grateful dead song, the Music Never Stopped, by John Perry Barlow “They’re a rainbow full of sound.” The posters produced for the bands of the bay are sought to do just that, produce a rainbow of sound that transcends both music and art and connects with the viewer, on not just a higher level but any and every level.

Below are Related posts, prime examples of this legendary art form.

Learn more and explore these following case studies in-depth:

Grateful Dead/Pentangle/Sir Douglas, Lee Conklin (Herb Greene photography) 1969 Lithograph

Read About: Peace Sign, Unknown (Paul Kagan Photography) 1968 lithograph

Read About: Monterrey International Pop Festival, Tom Wilkes 1967 poster

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