Junkyard

At the end of 1968, Chet Helms and the Family Dog had run out of money and could not renew the lease at the Avalon Ballroom. For a few months in early 1969 a company called Soundproof Productions produced concerts there and this is a Rick Griffin poster paid for by them. The first one Griffin did for Soundproof was the famous – and large – Aoxomoxoa. This one was a bit more modest.

If you can read the main headline, you get a prize because most of us think that those are not actually letters at all. Griffin and Alton Kelley made up their own typeface and language for several posters. This lettering presages the Graffiti movement in style, swagger and (lack of) legibility.

Van Morrison was well known after his late 1967 smash, “Brown-eyed Girl” and these shows were just two months after he released the meditative, celtic-layered song cycle that critics adored (still do). Salloom, Sinclair and Mother Bear were a blues-rock psychedelic band and they had released their first album the year before and Black Pearl was another short-lived San Francisco band about which little is known.