This rare and very desirable piece features a beautiful long-haired woman in a green toga holding onto an urn with a red circle behind, combining both Greek classical and Art Nouveau motifs. The central image was borrowed from the prolific Belle Epoch artist Alphonse Mucha’s “La Samaritaine” poster for a Sarah Bernhardt performance at the Theatre de la Renaissance in Paris, in 1897. It is pictured on page 75 of “Toulouse-Lautrec and his Contemporaries” (1985).
The Grateful Dead had just recorded their first album in four days down in Los Angeles – it would be released on March 17, 1967. Note this is the same lettering font the Dead chose for their first album cover! Quicksilver Messenger Service formed at end of 1965 and toured regularly but resisted signing a record contract until November 1967, which actually led to them getting a better deal.
The general pattern for the major San Francisco rock bands in early 1967 was that they looked for paying gigs on Fridays and Saturdays (such as Jan 27-28), including Sunday afternoon at the Fillmore, and then played benefits or fun gigs on Sunday nights.
These shows - which must have been the paying gigs - were sandwiched between two seminal San Francisco Haight Ashbury events, the Human Be-In on January 14th in Golden Gate Park and the Mantra-Rock Dance held the night after these shows on August 29th at the Avalon. The Mantra-Rock Dance concert was later called "the ultimate high" and "the major spiritual event of the San Francisco hippie era. Meanwhile, the gathering of approximately 30,000 at the Human Be-In helped publicize hippie fashions and culture.
Both events featured the leading counterculture bands, The Dead, Quicksilver, Big Brother and the Holding Company and in the case of the January 29 event, a new group called Moby Grape. In addition, hippie ethos and LSD-as-sacrament proponents Allen Ginsburg and Timothy Leary made appearances. Both events got a fair amount of press and in the spring the upcoming “Summer of Love” was openly discussed - interestingly, the local resident hippies, bands, police and pretty much everyone in San Francisco was not so much heralding the Summer of Love as dreading it, thinking that 100,000 young people would be pouring into the neighborhood - which pretty much happened.
“Haight Ashbury was a ghetto of bohemians who wanted to do anything—and we did and I don't think it has happened since. Yes there was LSD. But Haight Ashbury was not about drugs. It was about exploration, finding new ways of expression, being aware of one's existence.” - Bob Weir