Ted and Victor Moscoso
Stanley Mouse and Ted Bahr at The Rock Poster Society Festival, San Francisco 2017
“I know, I must be out of my mind”
– Ted Bahr, to his wife, Rebecca
I was nine years old during the Summer of Love, and like many who missed the Sixties, I came to revere them. Raised in New York, I was transferred to San Francisco in 1983 where I was able to see Big Brother, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish and many of the other seminal San Francisco bands in small, intimate settings as it was past their time maybe, but not past mine. Of course there were also the 20+ Dead shows per year to attend up and down the Coast and in between all of this and selling advertising in the computer magazine business (speaking of nostalgia…), I began collecting posters and handbills from the legendary Ben Friedman at The Postermat.
More than a few evenings found my friends and me at Ben’s buying postcard/handbills and then trundling down Broadway in North Beach to Spec’s where we would drink pitchers of Budweiser, eat Saltines and Swedish Fontina cheese, try to avoid Ann Nonymous the handwriting analyst and The Socialist selling The People’s Times, and write to our East Coast friends about the mad circus we were enjoying in the roaring, fresh Pacific Night.
ah yes. Reality eventually strode into the room in the form of career and wife and three kids and the budding collection was put on hold. We moved back to New York and I started my own business which eventually was located in an office with lots of large white walls and hallways glaring at me. One day I realized…they wanted posters. (Can you blame them?)
So I began collecting the artwork I still loved rather in earnest, and in 2017 had the opening of the first Bahr Gallery in the BZ Media offices. Response from the 45 or so friends who visited was so positive that I began considering the need for these wonderful posters to be distributed to and displayed by a new-old audience of people who were There, or wished they were, as well as collectors looking for beautiful, historically significant art that is also rapidly increasing in value.
BZ Media was sold in 2017 providing the funding for the long-term vision of The Bahr Gallery and I invite you to come by and enjoy the collection and swap stories about the funny things we did and saw, “back in the day.”