Pig & Owl, Big Brother at The Shrine, 1968

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This poster was a collaborative effort between two of San Francisco’s Big Five psychedelic poster artists, Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso. The concert was produced by Pinnacle Productions and partner John Van Hammersveld would have commissioned this - while he was an even more prominent artist and did many of the Pinnacle/Shine posters himself, he was good friends with Griffin and Moscoso. Both artists were involved in the underground Comix movement at this time and explains the style of this hard-to-find poster.

The Monterey Pop Festival in the summer of 1967 was the first great international rock festival and it was the moment when Big Brother and its lead singer Janis Joplin blew open the collective mind of the audience and rose to the top of the Rock music hierarchy.

While their first album, Big Brother & the Holding Company, was widely regarded as a disappointment, their Monterey set (which became a highlight of the documentary Monterey Pop) brought them to the attention of Albert Grossman, a manager whose clients included Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul & Mary. Grossman took over management of Big Brother & the Holding Company, extricated them from their contract with Mainstream, and negotiated a more lucrative deal with Columbia.

Having impressed audiences on the road (they were chosen to be the first headliners when Bill Graham opened the Fillmore East in March 1968), their second album was highly anticipated, and when Cheap Thrills (originally titled Sex, Dope and Cheap Thrills before Columbia got cold feet) arrived in August 1968, it was an immediate hit and would spend eight weeks at the number one spot on the national album charts, while "Piece of My Heart" was a major Top 40 hit.