Mt. Tamalpais Hippie Parade

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Less than a year after recruiting a young singer named Janis Joplin to join them, Big Brother and the Holding Company headlined this small concert at the outdoor Mt. Tamalpais (Tamalpias on the poster) amphitheater to benefit the Marin Youth for Action anti-war group.

This artwork borrowed an image from the final scene of Ingmar Bergman's film The Seventh Seal. While the literal image is of the “Danse Macbre,” from the end of the movie, the poster artists of the late 1960s were liberal in their interpretations. Here we see what appears to be the quintessential hippie back-to-the-land ethos with the parade of friends on their way to the show.

The artist was Alan Terk, also known as “Gut.” An interesting character; he was the manager of Blue Cheer and also a Hells Angel (and one-time President of the San Bernardino Chapter) as well as a poster artist. He produced several posters for the San Francisco dance halls as well as some for Hells Angel events. Gut was sort of a renaissance man, certainly by Hell's Angels standards. While quite skinny, Gut could put away prodigious amounts of food and that was how he got his nickname.

“Mt. Tam” rises 2,572 feet nearly right out of the sea in Marin County, just across the Golden Gate Bridge and north of San Francisco. To get there one must drive through a rounded tunnel painted as a rainbow symbolizing the entrance to beautiful fog-free Marin County.