Jim Blashfield was born September 4, 1944 in Seattle, Washington. He was active in the late 1960s countercultural music scene and became known for his colorful, psychedelic posters he created for rock shows at the Fillmore in San Francisco and in the Northwest. He soon began experimenting with filmmaking, making short non-narrative works and music videos. Today he is best known for his short films such as Suspicious Circumstances and The Mid-Torso of Inez, and his music videos for musicians like the Talking Heads, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, Michael Jackson, and Tears for Fears. He has collaborated with Bill Frisell and the Oregon Symphony. Blashfield is the recipient of a Cannes Golden Lion, a Grammy Award, and 17 MTV Video Music Award nominations, including 3 MTV Video Awards.
He tells his story of his short time in San Francisco here, in a 2011 interview by Heather Oriana Petrocelli.
In January of 1967, Peggy Lindquist, later Peggy Blashfield, and I moved to San Francisco for our, “twenty-one-year-olds on a life adventure” experience. We moved to San Francisco right before the Summer of Love. We moved to within two blocks of Haight Street, right on the Panhandle and it was a wild summer. I had no idea what the scene was that was going on down there. I’d never heard the word “hippie” before in my life. It wasn’t a common term until later.
So by the spring of 1967 the rock posters had become a big part of the Fillmore. And these posters, I’d never seen anything like them! I decided, I want to make them. We moved down there to go to college…allegedly. So I started drawing posters with a felt pen, being very inspired by Wes Wilson, who was to me the coolest guy, he was the one that did the very organic ones in the most expert way. But, what made me think anyone wanted me to make these posters? I’d never drawn a poster before. I mean, I’d always drawn cartoons, but I could see that I wasn’t supposed to make them funny - at least not in an obvious way. So I drew some, and worked… as only a twenty-one-year old can, basically copying someone else’s style as best you could without realizing that you were copying, because you’re not very old and you’re just doing something cool.
Jack Casady, the bass player for the Jefferson Airplane, lived behind our flat and he was managed by Bill Graham. So he would see me doing these drawings, and one day he said, “If you want to do posters for the Fillmore, I could mention your name to Bill Graham.” And I went, “You could what?!” I was so excited, I was vibrating to death, and I kept waiting to get a call or something, but no call came, because as it turned out later Jack hadn’t really gotten around to it. But it did cause me to just pick up the phone and call, more or less the week that Wes Wilson and Bill Graham had parted company. And I went down there and I showed him my little drawings, and he said, “Here’s what I’d like you to do,” and had me draw something up, and I came back and showed it to him and suddenly I was making Fillmore posters! Whoa! There’s my poster on the wall! Look, and it’s on the telephone poles! It was really exciting. So I made maybe, really only seven or eight or something like that. And then when I came back to Portland, people found out that I’d been making Fillmore posters, so I made some more posters here, and did that for awhile while trying to go to school studying film.