Probably For most folks a music concert poster means a Fillmore/Family Dog (‘psychedelic’) rock concert poster of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s or the later aesthetic offspring thereof.
However, long before Wes Wilson and company, music concert posters were printed by letterpress on thick, cheap cardboard intended to be stapled to a telephone pole or a wooden fence.
They weren’t as artful as the rock posters of later generations but nevertheless packed a considerable graphic punch.
Some printers such the Hatch Show Print are legendary among collectors. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Tilghman Press of Oakland was one of the most renown printers (and source of most of the poster shown here).
I forget where and how I came about acquiring most of these posters. The ‘current’ posters seen here (that is to say, from the 1990’s), I picked up by attending blues festivals, so clearly this form of printing was still in existence until the end of the last century. I have no idea if anyone today is continuing this particular tradition. Or is it yet another lost graphic art?
Many of these posters employ the ‘split fountain’ technique which allowed the use of more than one color with only a single pass through the press.
The printer would load the ink tray of the press with two or three different colored inks, side by side.
When the colors were transferred from the rollers to the paper the inks would bleed a bit creating a color gradation and a cheap and effective way to make the poster more colorful and punchy.
Mark Naftalin, former keyboardist with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, produced and hosted the much-missed Marin County Blues Festival for about 20 years.
Now there’s a line-up.
Bobby Mitchell and Big Daddy Tom Donahue were ‘Top 30’ DJ’s at KYA at the time (and had side gigs not only as concert promoters but ran Autumn records issuing singles by Bobby “Do the Swim” Freeman, to the folk-rock era Vejtables, Mojo Men and the Beau Brummels. Sly Stone was their producer. Later, Big Daddy Tom Donahue was the founding father of legendary ‘underground’ FM radio stations KMPX and KSAN.
