Tuesday, June 10, 2008

some very ROCKIN' automotive-themed rock concert posters appeared in May

(above) DIRTBOMBS, by VonDada (Kirk Diedrich)
(above) SOCIAL DISTORTION, by Craig Howell
(above) CLUTCH, by Jeral Tidwell
(above) NEW BRUTALISM, by Ryan Duggan
(above) DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS, by Powerslide Design
(above) FIN FANG FOOM, by Ron Liberti
(above) VIBROLAS, by Chris Hosner
(above) ZEKE, by Billy Bishop
(above) VELCRO LEWIS, by Crosshair Design (Dan McAdam)
(above) THE SLINGERLAND RIDE, by 1090 Studios
(above) "VAMPIRE WEEKEND," by Dog & Pony Showprints
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Honoring our good friend Alton Kelley, the great rock concert poster artist who passed away, here are the posters-of-the-month for May.
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Note that some are brand new, for May and June events, and others surfaced from the archives--and of note, the ZEKE poster, which Billy Bishop in Austin, TX spontaneously created by overprinting on some especially cheesy pre-printed stock. Kudos, Billy! Still one of my all-time favs.
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Also gotta give special props to CAD designer Craig Howell, selecting a car much like that which Mike Ness drives; Jeral Tidwell, for continuing his own tradition of excellence; and VonDada (aka Kirk Diedrich) for his inspired DIRTBOMBS poster, who wrote on www.gigposters.com "these are 4-color screenprints (grey, red, "flo" (fluorescent) green, and black) on 110 lb. bright white stock, supertight printing done by Nick at Tugboat Studios. Edition of 100. These sold out at the show for $30 a pop. Crazy!"
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Enjoy!

Thursday, June 05, 2008

further updates upon Kelley's passing, he was indeed one ROCKIN' dude


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Above, one of Kelley's many beautiful airbrush paintings. He was a hot rodder, he had a particular jones for custom cars, and he was an excellent mechanic. Thank you Frank Vacanti, for unearthing this beauty from the archives.
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from Alton Kelley's family:
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Thank you all wonderful family, friends, colleagues for the tremendous outpouring of love and support. Many of you have been asking how to contribute to the family for Kelley's medical expenses. You can wire or send a check toWashington Mutual Bank, 101 Western Ave., Petaluma CA 94952. Tel 707-763-4148. An account has been set up in the name of Marguerite Trousdale (account #3952762942) for wires (routing #322271627).We will let everyone know details about the memorial, when a time and place is determined. Peace and blessings to all.
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A reminiscence from Kelley's good friend about his Connecticut years, penned by John Alfonso, of Richmond, CA:

"I'm still very shaken after reading his obituary in the SF Chron yesterday. I'd been talking about Kelley with some friends recently, and was thinking about tracking him down. Kelley and a group of us came out to California in 1963 from Bridgeport, CT. We spent some time in Venice hanging out, eating Mexican food, going to the flat track races at Ascot Park, smoking up a storm and drinking a lot of Guinness.

"Most of the guys ended up back in Conn., but I stayed in L.A. and Kelley drifted up north. I last saw him in late 1964. He came down to Venice and stayed with us for a couple of days. He told me about the Family Dog having just been formed, and tried to convince me to come back up to SF, but for a lot of reasons I stayed in Venice and eventually moved to the Bay Area in 1971.

"Mostly I remember my late teens with Kelley in Connecticut. He opend a world to me that I could have never found for myself. We worked on cars, took the train into Manhattan to go to the Guggenheim, listened to Jean Shepard, looked at Kelley's strange paintings (Pollack-like in those days, one was even triangular) and hung out at Parmelees motorcycle shop until they threw us out (Kelley got his Matchless there, finally).

"Kelley was one of the most important people in my life, and I regret very deeply not seeing him again later in life. My very deepest condolences to his family here and in Connecticut. He will be in my heart always."

John Alfonso
Richmond, CA
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and, from yesterday's Los Angeles Times:
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Alton Kelley, 67; artist created psychedelic posters for rock groups
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By Mary Rourke_Los Angeles Times Staff Writer_June 4, 2008
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Alton Kelley, a San Francisco graphic artist whose psychedelic posters and album covers captured the mood and music of the Grateful Dead, the Steve Miller Band, Journey and other top rock 'n' roll groups of the '60s and '70s, has died. He was 67.
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Kelley died Sunday at his home in Petaluma, Calif., according to publicist Jennifer Gross. The cause was complications from osteoporosis.
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With his creative partner Stanley Mouse, Kelley helped launch a poster art revolution in the mid-1960s, turning out vividly colored works for concerts at the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium, where Jimi Hendrix, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service were among the headliners.
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"Kelley was one of the first to see it coming, the rise of the psychedelic era in San Francisco," Paul Grushkin, who wrote "The Art of Rock, Posters From Presley to Punk" (1987), said this week. "He was a pioneer."
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Using images inspired by vintage prints and lettering that flows like smoke, Kelley and Mouse designed graphics now considered emblems of the psychedelic age.The best known of them all is a skull and roses design they created for the Grateful Dead.
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"Kelley had the unique ability to translate the music being played into amazing images that capture the spirit of who we were and what the music was all about," Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead said in a statement this week.
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The album covers that came out of the Kelley-Mouse collaboration with the Grateful Dead included "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty" in 1970. The idea for a skull and roses came from an illustration in "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam," a collection of poems by the Persian poet who died in 1123.
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Kelley once explained that he found the illustration in a library book, enlarged the image, and added color and other details that dramatically changed it. "I knew right away it was a classic, " he said in a 1995 interview with the Palm Beach Post.He and Mouse created several other graphic images that became signatures for certain bands. Among them is a Pegasus that looms from the album cover of the Steve Miller Band's "Book of Dreams" in 1977 and a scarab on the album cover of "Departure," by Journey in 1980.
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"Images Kelley and Mouse put on playbills, posters and album covers became a major part of the music experience of the time," Dell Furano of Signatures Network, which merchandises rock artworks, said in an interview this week
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.Kelley was born June 17, 1940, in Houlton, Maine. After high school he worked as a mechanic and took art classes but never graduated from art school. He moved to San Francisco in about 1965 and helped found the Family Dog Collective, a group that produced some of the first psychedelic dance concerts in San Francisco, with light shows, dancing and poster art as part of the program.
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He met Mouse about a year after he arrived in San Francisco. At the time, the Haight-Ashbury district was starting to bubble over. "It was really fun. Everybody was really enjoying themselves," Kelley told the San Francisco Chronicle last year. "We all came out of the rock 'n' roll world." When they began working together, "Stanley and I had no idea what we were doing," Kelley told the Chronicle. "We had free rein to just go graphically crazy."
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Their posters combined images borrowed from Native American and Chinese art, Art Nouveau and Art Deco, reworked in acid colors and swirling letters that were a dramatic break with tradition. "Before that, all advertising was pretty much just typeset with a photograph of something," Kelley told the Chronicle.
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"It was a glory period for record album covers," Grushkin said of the artists' inventions. "Kelley and Mouse created art that captured what the music sounded like.
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"Kelley continued working as a graphic artist throughout his career, sometimes teaming up with Mouse. Their most recent project was for the March induction ceremony of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland.
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Kelley is survived by his wife, Marguerite; three children; two grandchildren; his mother, Annie; and his sister, Kathy.
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And from me, having meditiated on all the wonderful things that have been said in the last several days, my conclusion is . . . bless you Kelley, you've brought all of us together again.
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Sunday, June 01, 2008

another man done gone, RIP Alton Kelley, a great ROCKIN' poster artist and greater friend

(above) the iconic Family Dog #26
Grateful Dead at the Avalon Ballroom, September,1966
poster by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse
(above) GRATEFUL DEAD BOOK OF THE DEAD HEADS (1983),
cover art by Alton Kelley
authored by Paul Grushkin, Jonas Grushkin, and Cynthia Bassett
illustrating The Dead's "Golden Road to Unlimited Devotion" song


(above and below) in the last ten years of Kelley's life he took huge joy
in painting hot rods and customs, as fine art and for t-shirts and other merch.
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Our great, good friend, poster artist and illustrator Alton Kelley passed away last night from complications due to a lingering illness. I will miss him. All his friends will miss him.
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I've spoken about Kelley's legacy several times in previous blogs. He and his colleagues in the original Family Dog collective changed the course of San Francisco, the Bay Area, and rock & roll forever, having put on the world's first psychedelic-mode dance concerts--before Chet Helms, before Bill Graham. Then Kelley went on to do posters with Stanley Mouse, then album covers, then hot rod art.
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I'm reminded, on Kelley's passing, of Robert Hunter's words and Jerry Garcia's music, as performed by the Grateful Dead in "Black Peter," on the album WORKINGMANS DEAD:
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"All of my friends
Came to see me last night
I was laying in my bed and dying

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"Annie Bonneau from St. Angel
says the weather down there, so fine
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"Just then the wind
Came squalling through the dark.
But who can the weather command?
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"Just want to have
A little peace to die
And a friend or two I love at hand.
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"Fever roll up to a hundred and five,
Roll on up, gonna roll back down.
One more day I find myself alive,
Tomorrow maybe go beneath the ground.
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"See here how everything
Lead up to this day.
And it's just like any other day
That's ever been.
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"Sun, going up and then,
The sun it go back down.
Shine through the window,
And my friends they come around."
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And here is Kelley's official obit. Those of you know me, may recognize my contribution.
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"Legendary artist Alton Kelley created a graphic stype that rocked the world beginning in the psychedelic Sixties. His concert posters, logo designs, LP album covers, and fine art have forevermore defined that time.
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"Kelley, born June 17, 1940, passed away peacefully at home June 1st of complications from a long illness. He is survived by the true love of his life, Marguerite Trousdale Kelley. He also leaves his mother Annie, sister Kathy, and beloved children Patty, Yossarian, and China, and beautiful grandchildren Life and Lacoda.
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"Through his mind-expanding creativity and over several decades, Kelley gave rock music new colors, shapes, and themes expressing the optimism and enthusiasm of young people around the globe. His graphics defined youth culture as much as the music itself--in effect, his art was a break-thru collaboration with musicians and bands such as the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix. As Joel Selvin, rock critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, put it, "Kelley and Mouse drew the first face on rock music."
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"Kelley and his life-long collaborator, Stanley Mouse, are best known for their posters for "San Francisco style" dance-concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium, Winterland Arena, Avalon Ballroom, and a host of other Bay Area theaters and amphitheaters. They also created world-renowned posters and album covers for the Grateful Dead, Journey, Steve Miller, Hendrix, The Beatles, and others.
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"The two artists historically worked as a team, in their words "riffing off each other's giggle." They joyfully appropriated from historic sources, in one instance re-working an obscure nineteenth-century etching to create their iconic Grateful Dead "skeleton and roses" design. They combined vibrant sixties color with French poster-making joi de vivre technique to generate compelling pieces often issued on a weekly basis, ultimately dazzling millions worldwide. Thus, they even changed advertising art forever, as their posters belonged to one of the most important art movements of the latter part of the twentieth century.
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"When Kelley (a native of Maine) met Mouse (a native of Detroit, MI), in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district in late 1965 (the "Haight" was the epicenter of the hippie movement, culminating in the "Summer of Love" in 1967), they instantly recognized they were kindred spirits in what Mouse described as "one of the juciest scenes of all time."
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"Their concert posters, commissioned by Fillmore promoter Bill Graham and Graham's rival, the Avalon's Family Dog collective, were eagerly snapped up by bands and fans alike. In the decades since, Mouse and Kelley's classics have established even greater popularity, rivaling the interest long shown by collectors of French turn-of-the-century Belle Epoque art made famous by Toulouse-Lautrec and others.
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"Kelley's (and Mouse's) art is licensed worldwide by Signatures Network, Inc. "There is one word for Alton Kelley's lifelong contribution, and that is "iconic,"" said Dell Furano, President of Signatures Network.
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"In lieu of flowers, donations can be made at the Washington Mutual Western Street branch in Petaluma, CA for a memorial bench in a Sonoma County park. A memorial event will be announced shortly."
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And so, In the refrain of a great, and painful, and ultimately uplifting country-blues song:
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"Another man done gone, another man done gone, down on the county farm, another man done gone."
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RIP Alton Kelley. Bless you, man. Wherever you fly to, wherever you land, be sure to kick some hot rod tires for all of us.
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