Until the arrival of psychedelia in the mid Sixties, rock posters were purely informative. Visually, they were very dull; the headline artist appeared at the top in the largest lettering, the opening act at the bottom in the smallest. The type was uniform, usually black on white, with maybe a dash of red for good measure. Such posters have no artistic value, and any interest in them is either in the names of the artists or the venues at which they played.

By 1964 there was some attempt to make the rock poster look less like an estate agent's auction list, but it was usually restricted to the use of dark coloured paper and white ink. In the UK, one or two clubs started to experiment with lettering notably the Crawdaddy, which adopted similar lettering to the famous Yardbirds logo.

Acid art
The rock poster as an art form dates from the beginning of the 'acid days' and comes, not surprisingly, from San Francisco. The first poster in the new style advertised a now famous gig - the Charlatans at the Red Dog Saloon in Nevada in the summer of 1965. The Charlatans drew their style of dress from a combination of Wild West cowboys and Mississippi gamblers, and they felt that an appropriate poster was required to reflect their image. Band members George Hunter and Michael Ferguson therefore came up with a marvelously dense design, full of different lettering, caricature drawings or the band members and all manner of little eye catching devices. Like the band's image, it combined the consciously archaic with the boldly original and fresh. Aspects or this poster influenced the San Francisco artists who became famous in the following year.

By early 1966, when the Family Dog and Bill Graham's organisation were running weekly dances at the Fillmore, the idea of having an exotic poster to advertise the gigs and reflect the nature of the music had taken hold. The first regular artist they employed was Wes Wilson, who became well known for his original style. His work rapidly became stylised, however - he generally used only two heavily contrasting colours and a central design, surrounded by the group's name in standard lettering.

When the Family Dog moved to the Avalon, Chet Helms started to employ a variety of artists, notably Stanley 'Mouse' Miller and Alton Kelley of Mouse Studios. Their work combined Mouse's undeniable draughtsmanship with Kelley's predilection for collage, and both artists would, as Mouse puts it, 'raid the image bank', getting their inspiration for a central image from books on art and photography.

Towards the end of 1966, the Avalon added another name to the list - Victor Moscoso, a highly accomplished SF artist. He specialised in the hypnotic effects created by weird colour combinations which made his posters difficult to read but stunning to look at. Moscoso's series for the Matrix Club in early 1967 are among the highspots of the era. Another artist who was commissioned by Avalon was Rick Griffin, who is perhaps best known for the cover of the Grateful Dead's Aoxomoxoa originally an Avalon poster. Less prolific than the others, he was arguably the most talented and witty.

In July 1967 an exhibition by Mouse, Kelley, Griffin and Moscoso was held at a gallery in San Francisco; the posters were no longer merely a by-product of rock, they had become works of art in their own right. In the next three years, these four artists and others almost equally talented, including Randy Tuten and Bob Fried, produced many hundreds of posters for the Avalon Ballroom, the Fillmore and dozens of other smaller venues and one-off benefits; a high proportion of these subsequently became collectors' items. Although they became increasingly sophisticated, they never lost the earthy yet mind-bending quality of the early designs.

San Francisco posters disappeared with the passing of the hippie era. They were intrinsically connected with it and in. separable from groups whose names conjured up psychedelic images, such as Country Joe and the Fish or Kaleidoscope. Mouse and Kelley continued to work closely with the Grateful Dead, the group most evocative of the era, but like the music itself, the style of these posters is a thing of the past.

Other artists in different parts of the United States took their inspiration from the posters produced in San Francisco. In Detroit, Gary Grimshaw produced an excellent set of posters for the Grande and Aragon Ballrooms to rival the best work of Mouse or Griffin. Los Angeles, too, produced some good examples, notably a set of nearly 30 round posters by various artists for the Kaleidoscope Club. In Texas Jim Franklin and Fabulous Furry Freak Bros. artist Gilbert Shelton designed fine posters for the Vulcan Gas Company venue.

Some of the best of the era came from Britain, from Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, the collective name of artists Michael English and Nigel Weymouth. They produced a series of beautiful silk-screen posters for UFO and the Savile Theatre, as well as promotion material for various bands. Their style was generally more lyrical than that of their American counterparts, but at times maybe just a little too fey and sentimental. Martin Sharp was another truly original British designer, whose swirling Dayglo images also enlivened many early covers of Oz magazine, as well as Cream's Disraeli Gears and Wheels Of Fire album sleeves.

Psychedelic posters vanished even faster in England than in America, largely because the media-inspired 'flower power' image had become a national joke by the autumn of 1967. Michael English moved on to advertising, and his development parallels the road that rock art took in the early Seventies; posters became slick, sophisticated and very glossy.

Like so much that was good about the mid Sixties, poster art was a naive blend of imagination and talent. The talent may still be there, but the naivety and imagination seem, on the whole, long gone.