Quicksilver Messenger Service - 1967

This colorful poster was one of the most popular of the Fillmore series designed by Bonnie MacLean. MacLean was married to Bill Graham and stepped in to design many Fillmore posters after Wes Wilson was fired.

MacLean had taken art classes at Pratt before moving West in the mid 1960s and she shows a slightly more restrained or studied psychedelic style. If nothing else one might describe her interpretation of the design gestalt as smooth and measured. Here, she playfully invokes the bill, depicting the Quicksilver Messenger Service delivering the dates while flying over the Grass Roots and a Mad River. Great colors and design in this piece which was supposedly first printed in a quantity of 5,000.

Quicksilver Messenger Service was one of the mainstays of the San Francisco dance concert movement and helped define the San Francisco Sound with the searing guitar playing of John Cipollina and Gary Duncan.

The Grass Roots had a series of major hits - most notably "Let's Live for Today," and "Midnight Confessions," - that help define the essence of the era's best AM radio. Although the group's members weren't even close to being recognizable, and their in-house songwriting was next to irrelevant, the Grass Roots managed to chart 14 Top 40 hits. Their version of "Let's Live for Today," released two months before this concert in the Summer of Love beautifully captured the zeitgeist of that time.