 And going in chronological order, I'll start with Stanley Mouse. So Stanley. Hi. Hi. Your father was a Disney animator and you got your start airbrushing T-shirts at hot rod shows. Can you tell us a little bit about how that background fit into your early work as a poster artist? That's a big story. Yeah, it's a big story. But give us just, well, I guess I grew up around the dinner table sketching with my dad. And then in high school, I guess there was a big fad going on with hot rods. Of course, I was in Detroit. It was also happening in Los Angeles, but it was a big fad of airbrushing on sweatshirts with hot rods and monsters. And there was a big monster fad in those days too. And so I tried it and everybody forced all the kids in the neighborhood had their T-shirts saying paint mine. And I was off and running and then I painted, it must have painted like 10,000 T-shirts sweatshirts in the next eight or nine years. And after painting so many, I think I went to art school during the week and then I painted at hot rod shows on the weekends around the country. And art school was, I liked the life drawing class. I was good at that. And the life drawings was from the human body. And so it gave, that's where I learned like the Art Nouveau lines because the human body has Art Nouveau lines. And after about eight, nine years of painting a million shirts, and I would, people would like put a picture of their sister or their kitty cat or their 55 Chevy or whatever they'd put in front of me and I'd have to draw it on a sweatshirt or a T-shirt. And so that was my real art school training. I became, I was able to draw just about anything. And after about eight years, I got bored with it. And then psychedelics pot came along and psychedelics and that opened up a whole, whole giant world. And I think it was especially good for me because I was already, my skills were already totally at the top, how do you say it? My skills were really keen. And then when I started messing with psychedelics, a giant world opened up and I got a chance to go to California. I heard things were happening in San Francisco. And so me and some friends, we all ventured out here and it happened that they were doing posters. And I said, I can do that. Tell us a little bit more about that. How did you first stumble onto the poster scene? How did you get involved in that? Well, I first came out in 65 and me and my girlfriend stayed in a little windmill in Berkeley. It's actually still there. It's on, I can't remember, 50s first street in the street that goes through Berkeley. Anyway, we stayed there for a summer, a really delightful summer. And I would airbrush t-shirts in the front of the place and we got introduced to the San Francisco scene. We would go over to San Francisco and meet. I had a lot of friends who were in San Francisco and I had a lot of friends that came from Detroit and we would, like Jim Gurley, who was the lead guitarist and big brother. And he introduced me to Kelly and then I got drafted, went back to Detroit to face the draft board and I took a lot of LSD and they kicked me out. Good move, yeah. And in Detroit, you could get these cars because they made them there, they had to get them up to different parts of the country and so they called them driveaways and I called and I said, do you have a driveaway? I almost wanted to go back to San Francisco. And they said, all we have is a Cadillac hearse and I said, perfect. And so I put a make love, not war sticker on the back. The Vietnam, of course, was raging at the time. And put my girlfriend and dog and all my supplies back in the hearse and drove to San Francisco. And we got here for the night of the acid trips, but we were too tired to go in. We were drove straight through and then I actually came out originally in a little Porsche. It was like a brand new Porsche because I was making a lot of money painting t-shirts and I bought it, actually it was 1965, I bought a brand new Porsche for $3,500. Wow. And I drove it here and I left it here when I went back to Detroit for the draft board but when I got back, it had a broken axle and I heard Kelly was a good mechanic and so he came over to try to fix the broken axle and so we got to be friends and then he became, he never fixed the Porsche, I had to get it. I had to take it somewhere else. But he became the art director of the family dog posters so he brought Chad Helms over to my studio and introduced me and he gave me a poster. Chad said, what kind of art do you do? And I said, oh, kind of like some cartoons. He says, we don't want no cartoons. And that really stuck in my head. I think for years after that, I'd hear him saying that because everybody else went into cartoons after the posters and I didn't. And that was your start with Chad. How did you come to do work for Bill Graham? I'm not sure, but I think it was because I was doing posters, he asked me and he was kind of friendly to the artists and people I knew knew him and we all talked. And somewhere along in there, you moved to the city, to San Francisco and one of the interesting things you've talked about in other interviews is your proximity to the bindweed press. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that friendship, that collaboration and how that fed into your art. Yeah, when we moved to San Francisco, when I came back, I lived on 17th Street going up the hill and the next door was an apartment building and I kept seeing this pretty blunt lady walk in and out all the time and this crazy guy with all this hair and stuff. And then my landlord said he wanted to move in the house and he was a real estate agent and I said, you have to get me somewhere to live. Before I move out, he said, what do you want? And I said, I want a firehouse. So within two days, he came up with a firehouse on Henry Street, Henry and Noe, which is near the Haydashbury. And so I moved in there, started doing posters with Kelly there and I think the Grateful Dead one came out and Ida was Rick Griffin's wife. Ida was the blonde lady going inside the apartment. I guess they were separated or something at the time. She sent one of those to Rick and Rick made a beeline to San Francisco and joined the free. And the guy with the crazy hair was Bob Siderman, the photographer that took all our pictures. Such a small community. But being close to Bindweed, did that give you, how did that shape your art? How did that, you've mentioned in other interviews that it meant a lot to you to be able to just walk over and communicate with the printer. Yeah, the firehouse was on Henry Street and around the corner on Noe Street was the printer. I think both our buildings backed up to each other and back. But I could take over the artwork to him and he would print it and I could watch him printing it. He also collected pump organs. And one night it was actually a warm San Francisco night and he had the door open and I had just eaten some mescaline, I think. And I went over there and I think it was the girl with green hair poster who was being printed and the printing press has this beautiful rhythm to it. Clickity, clickity, clickity. And so I started playing the pump organ and to the rhythm of the printing press and watching the colors come out of the printing press is amazing, amazing evening. It's a great image, it really is. It's a movie right there. And right along at that time, you and we're sitting in the basement of the San Francisco Public Library where you and Alton Kelly would often spend afternoons looking for images and looking for the perfect illustration for posters. Tell us a little bit about that and one of the more famous images that came from that exploration. We were hungry to find out about old posters and classic old posters and so we weren't far from the library so we'd go and they upstairs is what I think they call it, the stacks where you can't take books out but you can look at them there. So we would be going through books, book after book. Getting a great education on poster art. It's things we never saw like Gustav Klimt and Alphonse Mucca. And we had a job to do a Grateful Dead poster. Of course, the Grateful Dead wasn't just one of the bands playing and they weren't gods like they are now but we're looking for something that kind of said Grateful Dead and came across this picture in the ruby out of Omar Cayam and it was the Skeleton of Roses and we looked at it and said, that says Grateful Dead all over it and so I don't know if I should say this but I used to say that we Xeroxed it but that didn't, it was Xeroxes back then. But I realized that Kelly had cut it out of the book. I think the statute of limitations has now passed upon that. Plus Kelly's not around anymore. Exactly. Exactly. I did do it. There was, I have this picture of this pope that they took out of the grave and put him in its chair and they did a court case against him. Oh, sure. That'd be funny. Sounds like we've got the next idea brewing already. We could make a poster for it. You've said that technology has had both positive and negative effects on the art of posters that for every step forward, we've also lost something and I was just wondering if you care to elaborate on that. Say that again. You said before that every sort of advance in technology surrounding the production of posters has been both a step forward but that we've also lost something in that process. And this is my last question for you before we move on. So I'd sort of wanted to give you the open ended chance to tell us a little bit about how you see that. Yeah, I keep looking for a printing company that has a one color printing press. So I could print like we printed back then because it seemed to be more of an art when it's like the silk screen thing that they're doing out there because sometimes they're a little off register and I don't know, they just looked artsy or not. And now the printing presses print four colors at a time and it comes out looking like a magazine cover. And I tried to fake it, you know, like maybe make some things out of registrations but it still doesn't have the art to it that it used to. Absolutely. Well, I think that's a perfect point of segue to our next speaker, Winston Smith. And Winston developed his art at a time when that was still very much a challenge. And so Winston, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your background and how you became interested in rock art. Well, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Stanley's work and the work of his associates because as a teenager in the 1960s, I would see psychedelic posters and at head shops and other places. I lived in of all places, Oklahoma, which is about as far away as you can get from anything that was happening. And so to see these works was like an atomic bomb to the brain to know that these assemblages could be possible, especially the lettering in psychedelic posters that was so wild and contorted. And sometimes you actually had to be kind of stoned to actually read it because you could look at it and I was saying before, I'm a bit dyslexic. So already it's hard for me to read normal words, but those words I could read because they flowed the way that I would already think. And I was thinking as a kid, finally, someone who thinks like me, this is not the oddball anymore. And so that was a big inspiration. And I was fortunate that my mom was an artist and when she was a teenager before the war, she was a sculptor, a son of painter. And so our house was filled with art books and we had Abrechtur and Rafaello and Leonardo and all these works of classical art that I'd pour over. And I thought everybody knew about these pictures. And so I've done my part to, what's the word, to deconstruct, deconstruct, some of them over the years, only out of reverence for the originals, but I'm sure probably a noisest people who, like purity and originalism and no change, but things do change over time and we all contribute to them. And so that was a big advantage, I think, as an artist to have my own reference library, essentially, although I couldn't cut any pictures out, I think I would have been skinned alive, you know, my mom. Although I do recall one time going to McDonald's Bookshop, which is down in the Tenderloin, it's gone now, but it was a vast, old place with rickety staircases and found the exact right picture that I needed in an old Life magazine, went to ask the guy how much it was, it was more than I had on me. I said, oh, okay, I'll put it back and I go back upstairs and always carry a little razor blade on me and just slipped it out and that became the centerpiece for a Dead Kennedy's record. It was just the right picture. And oh, I'll be back next week, I'll get it. You know, thank you, sir. I unfortunately never was good for my word at that point. So that's kind of how my inspiration was probably being the fact that I was saturated with artwork and never had any other marketable skills to sell, you know, so I had to be an artist by default. You were destined for it. No choice. How did you get from Oklahoma to San Francisco and get involved in the burgeoning punk scene? Really long, I went the wrong way around the planet to when I was about 17, I was gonna, it occurred to me you didn't have to graduate from high school to go to college. I thought, then what am I doing here? Because I hated school, I was a bad student all my life. And I think I was in 10th grade, whatever, 16, 17. I was going to go to the Art Institute in Chicago. My folks were Yankees, they came from the north from Chicago, and I found out that that was pretty expensive and that didn't happen. I didn't have good enough grades to get in, so I couldn't afford to go. By sheer dumb luck, some friend of the family knew some people, I had saved up some money to go to Ireland, my family was Irish. At that time, the very late sixties, you could get round-trip tickets from New York to either London or Rome or Paris for like $199. That was like a thing for about three or four years until they wised it up and raised the price. But that's when backpackers were all over Europe because you couldn't afford not to go for 200 bucks. And it was an open-ended year-long ticket, and now it would never happen. So I took advantage of that, but then it dawned on me I'd get to Ireland, wouldn't have enough money to get off the bus, turn around and go back. So these friends were saying, hey, if your kid can go to Rome instead, we have friends he can crash with in Florence or in Rome, and that'd be better than nothing. At that point, I really didn't know where Italy was on the map, I geographically dyslexic. So I figured, well, that's better than nothing, I'll do that. And found out that it was cheaper to go to the Art Institute, the School of Fine Arts and the University there than it was to go to school, even in Oklahoma, because Italy at that time was the cheapest country in Europe, a bus ride was a nickel. A bottle of wine was 50 cents. My rent was about $40 in the middle of the center of the city. So it would be like going back in time to like 1922 when your grandfather said, I could get a whole meal for a quarter. And that's kind of how it was, it was a whole meal for a dollar, but now unfortunately, because of inflation, it's completely the opposite in its most expensive country in Europe. But oh, that's a piece, the guy in the middle that he was torn out of a magazine I couldn't afford. He's screaming, it was a perfect face. But I wound up staying there for like six or seven years and came back to America. I left in the 1960s and came back in the mid-1970s and when I got back, everything in society had changed. The rioting in the streets was over with, people were kind of like dumbied down watching television and nobody was sent to any ecological or environmental or political change. All that had been kind of subdued or bought off. And I remember just feeling outraged that this change had happened behind my back because I hadn't been back for years. And wound up living in Boston for a little bit, but then hitchhiked across the country to get to San Francisco exactly 40 years ago last week on St. Patrick's Day of all days. It's kind of like your arrival in San Francisco on the night of the acid trips and perfect timing. So that led, one thing led to another. I had been a roadie for some jazz bands back in Italy, so the only thing I knew how to do was carrying sound equipment. And I got a job working at SIR, which was a studio rental joint. They'd rent equipment and things for bands. And we had, every day in the studios, we had Journey in Santana and Cross the Sills and Nash and a bunch of local bands, but then like some international bands would come through the tubes, and which had really peculiar equipment to have to carry, usually paper mache, rocket ships and baby dolls and strange, but great band. White punk's on dope and big head. So then a year or two, two years later, the punk rock scene was rearing its ugly head in San Francisco and all over in LA and New York, but here it was because San Francisco is such a small city, physically small, it's only seven miles across. And it's like an island really, it's surrounded by water. So it's a walking town, people walk around and they see posters. It's not like they describe LA and everywhere else. It's automobiles. So posters were everywhere. Coffee shops on walls, you couldn't walk anywhere without seeing some really crazy screwball posters for bands and gigs, and sometimes posters weren't for anything. They weren't for any event. They were just weird data. There was kind of a revival of the data trip at that point and some of them were great and magnificent and some were pretty lame. And I remember thinking, well, I could probably do that. You know, the same thing you were saying, Stanley was saying, no, that's probably something I could pull off. I wound up doing a bunch of posters for bands that didn't exist. I just made them up. I made up crazy names that then buy and buy. I found out there were bands that took that name, not because of my poster, but it was an obvious punk rock name. And I put an address for a club that didn't exist. And I found out later on some people were really not happy because they had taken a bus to go out to some address that didn't exist and there was a vacant lot. And I said, oh man, that really bummed our whole trip. We had to go out there in the middle of the night and we couldn't get back. And it was only done as a kind of a data experiment. But that way, other bands would see them and go, oh, hey, can you do a thing for our band? And it was kind of like a fake resume. You know, if I said I went to Juilliard, you know, and say, oh, well, then could you write this song we need for our new movie? But so it was kind of like a prank that turned into a career such as it is. And that's why I'm here now. If the function of art is to provoke, you did a great job of provocation. Tell us how you came to work specifically with the dead Kennedys. Well, one thing that I have learned, one of the few things I've learned over the many years is an advice that young people, especially will ask me about, you know, who's an artist, how do you get into this or that? Because I didn't know anybody in the scene. I just was there, you know, and it's to volunteer. And it's good for everyone. I mean, no matter what age group or demographic you're in, volunteering is good because it takes you out of what you normally would be doing, and you're connected with other people, you know, like-minded or even not like-minded. Maybe that's better, more challenging. And I recall being in Recycle Records one time on Grant Avenue and seeing a poster in the back that said we need artists and writers and stagehands for punk shows that we're gonna do, rock against racism. It was an organization, I think it started in Great Britain, but there was like a branches of it here. And we put on several shows at the Old Temple Beautiful. It was a beautiful old synagogue, 19th century synagogue on, right near the film war, I guess, right next to Film War and Geary. Very elaborate and beautiful, and everyone had great respect for us. I didn't tear it up. It was really nice. The punks are really polite, you know, and great shows. And by and by, I did more posters for different bands and a friend of mine in RIR said, oh, you gotta meet this friend of mine who thinks just like you. You guys would really hit it off. And I thought, well, he must be crazy if he thinks like me. And I kind of delayed in doing that and put it off. I'm a very good procrastinator. And finally, she was instrumental in introducing me to Biafra backstage at the end of a show at the Mabuhi Gardens one time, I think around either Christmas in 1979 or just, you know, after New Years of 1980. And we went out looking for places to eat at three or four o'clock in the morning, which there weren't too many. I think we wound up at Clown Alley, which used to be, you know, open till 4 a.m. or all night. And Biafra's going through a portfolio of some things of mine and I had this cross of dollars image that I'd made a few years before and he said, that, that's what I want on my next record. And he hadn't even done the first record yet because we were so, we wound up working together on the first one called Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. It was kind of groundbreaking. But we made a poster for that. I mean, we made a giant poster that was double-sided. We crammed in everything we could. You know, it was, we crammed in everything we could because we never thought we'd have another chance. So we just put all this weird stuff. Some of it wasn't very artistically inspired. It was just, you know, artistically verbose. And it turns out people liked it a lot and there was another record and by and by, we kept on working together on different projects and posters and have been partners in crime ever since. That's great, absolutely, yeah. One thing I want, my last question for you before we move on to Chris is, you're actually longtime friends with Chris and you and Chris and Chex Berry took, made a tour of Europe in the early 2000s. And I wanted to ask you how you saw your work. You've made wonderful reference to European and American art traditions. And I just wanted to ask you how that tour shaped your sense of how your art fit into the, did it shape the way you imagine your art fitting into those traditions? What, what impact did the tour have and what's your larger sense of allegiance and tradition? It was a special, it was an interesting tour. It started off in Switzerland. We were in, what was the town, Geneva, Geneva. And beautiful old 19th century villa that had been abandoned and got squatted by some punks and we each had our own rooms and a couple of them were haunted actually, according to Chuck. And lovely people who hosted us there and we, we had a spectacular location where that show was down by the river and I don't know if Geneva very well but it was only there that one time. It's mainly all banks, you know, it's Switzerland, banks and chocolate factories I guess and cuckoo clocks. But then we went on to Italy and we were in several towns in Torino, Milano and Rome. In Rome, we went, I don't think, oh we, some of us went to Florence but I think by that time we had broken up to regroup in Rome at the Forte Prendesino. And Biafra was long for the ride through the Italian arm of the trip which was a bit of an ordeal. He's a lovely guy, a little hard to travel with you. They say you never get to know someone until you've traveled with them. And the tour manager was long suffering but he did put it mildly. But it was a relic and good time and Chuck and Ron and Kristen and I was like the four Stooges. We all had to crash in the same rooms and we had different tenors of snoring so it was almost like working a pipe organ. You know, you know, the three Stooges routine like the Marx Brothers but we, people were clamoring for Chris's work and the work of the firehouse guys fondly known as the knuckleheads, Ron and Chuck. And my work was a little different because it was, you know, I had used my collages to reproduce them, I used color Xeroxes and color copiers. So I was kind of going into the next generation of silk screen is too technologically challenging for me to high tech to figure out. But we did have one evening I think in Torino and Biafra was doing his rap, a spoken word rap. It was all in English and probably only about 10% of the people really understood high school English but they were there because it was a fun show. And I think they had a band, a couple of different shows we did but in Torino I think it's where there was a woman who was yacking and she was yacking in some language we didn't know and they were saying what is she saying because I speak Italian. I said I don't know but it's not Italian. It was but he was yacking all through Biafra's rap and he was like lady would you be quiet so I can finish my performance. And finally one of the people traveling with us was a journalist for one of the Italian mainstream papers and asked the lady what are you saying what language is that? And she said I'm speaking the word of God or the language of God and she was channeling the Lord and speaking in tongues and so our friend was saying oh that's interesting what does God say about Biafra's show? And oh he didn't care about Biafra's show it's all this artwork that's being projected behind him which is my pictures in a what do they call it? Carousel. Carousel projected. Old school. When Biafra got told this story afterwards he was annoyed that God wasn't you know he'd overlooked him for criticize my pictures. They shouldn't be here they were all wrong they're bad pictures and so we figured we should hire her and actually take her to all the shows she could have been like a crowd please. Attention getter. Exactly like a barker you know at the carnival. But we had a wonderful time and it was great to see the people's interests in American posters and rock posters in general and we knew we were appreciated because in Rome we got some of them stolen. Cause you know you must be doing something right if people are gonna risk stealing it. Theft is the highest form of flattery. Which is exactly what we do we kind of you know rip off other people's artwork and then reassemble it. It is emerging as a theme on the panel too. So this is good. This is good. Only cause we admire it. I'll do it you know. Well thank you that's wonderful and that's a great note of transition to our last speaker who is Chris Shaw and Chris would like to start you off the same way we started these other two fine gentlemen off with which is tell us a little bit about your background and how you became a poster artist. Yeah well my mother's an artist and I always grew up around art. She's a ceramic artist so I was you know always playing with clay and stuff when my mom would throw me in the corner of the studio and tell me to do something and keep occupied but I was maybe more naturally a drawer. I've always been a drawer. I just draw stuff and I've been always kind of interested in iconography and really strong images since I was a real little kid and would actually make logos and full graphics packages for my little neighborhood forts and we had stationery and the whole thing. So I had this kind of thing running in me a long time but it's funny Winston was tipping the hat tipping the hat to Stanley and I have to tip the hat to Winston because I was one of these guys that bought the Dead Kennedys fresh fruit for right now vegetables albums and pulled it out and I was like oh my God there's so much stuff in this album and there's artwork, there's posters and collage and music of course obviously and something clicked with me is that I wanted to do that and I could see myself making collages and making posters and I was super into the music and I was super into the band as well and so I became the guy that was making a lot of flyers with Xerox which was affordable in the early 80s suddenly for all my friends' bands, you know so they were the kids in the back of the class that were practicing their drumming and I was the guy in the back of the class that was sketching and we kind of found a happy synthesis and anyway that's kind of it some of those guys ended up going on to fame and fortune and a lot of them didn't and but in the middle of it I kept making posters and it's progressed over the years, we'll say that. That's an understatement. Tell us how you became involved in doing posters for Bill Graham and the Fillmore that was a long and illustrious tradition and how did you land in that? Yeah, it may have been by accident but I was making posters already for a lot of years I was making political posters mostly with Ron Donovan from the firehouse who we've mentioned and we were really influenced in a lot of the punk movement, the art that was coming out the how political it was, the Reagan, I mean all that stuff was, it was that time so that's what we did. We learned how to screen print and at California College of Arts and Crafts and we had a teacher, Malakias Montoya who was a kind of famous political artist that taught us the craft kind of nicely and the power of images and the fact that you can do stuff with them and even better, print them yourself and so this is what we were doing and Stanley was talking about going to art school, painting shirts on the weekend, we were making political posters during class and printing them on t-shirts and then going out and selling those on the weekend and that's how we would make our money for our projects and so it got my hands into the world of making posters. Previously I'd done a lot of Xerox but now I was doing silk screen and I was starting to work with some bands doing color posters and the first one in the Bay Area was Psycho Funkopus it was a local kind of funk band and I did a cover for them that was all day glow and fluorescent it was kind of late 80s, 90s and we screen printed the art and so that was kind of the start of doing professional rock posters and working with a couple friends and one day I got a call from Bill Graham Presence to come on in, we're interested in having you do a poster and I went in and I had my portfolio and everything great I had ever made with me and got into the waiting room and my best friend who I work with all the time actually my partner in art neither one of us told us, talked about this meeting but we both got called to come in for the same job by two different people, got our art mixed up and so we ended up two best friends and then fighting for the job and Bill Graham presents waiting room and how is this gonna work out and it's a long kind of ugly story but it worked out nicely for me I didn't get the job that I wanted that day but I ended up doing two posters for Bill Graham Presence for New Years and so my debut with them was two posters and which was like about the coolest thing in the world for me and yeah and then over the course of about 15 years I made many dozens of other posters for them and before leaving I think in around 2000 I'm not sure it's 2006, 2005, 2007 maybe I stopped working with them. That's an interesting time period as well because one of the things about your art is that you've really embraced digital technology and I was gonna ask you following up on what both of these other two folks have mentioned about the impact of technology on art how do you see the impact of digitization on poster printing and poster art? Well, it's kind of the computer, you know the digitization I don't really mind so much but the computer is an odd thing because it's really democratized printing and it's democratized imagery and it's allowed anybody to actually grab an image, throw some type on it and output it without ever touching it and so that's really cool because it opens the door for a lot of people to go out there and express themselves, make some art they don't have to be professional artists necessarily to make a poster and but at the same time it's kind of problematic because it takes a lot of the craft and the craftsmanship out of making posters and posters are really two things one of them is the image which could maybe exist in any medium and the other thing is the physical object which is one of these things that's starting to become more obscure in the modern world where you don't have to touch music you don't even need a CD anymore we used to complain when there wasn't albums but now there's nothing and so I think maybe the good thing and the bad thing is is that the computer's the most important tool in my arsenal to manipulate images and to make stuff but it doesn't actually make anything for me and it's not a magic button and so there's always gonna be a need to get in there and have craftsmanship and handmade artwork whether it's a collage or whether it's something that's hand-illustrated and ultimately when you have mediums like silk screen around people are saying hey this is not something that's spit out of a four color machine or that anyone can just push the button for so it's bringing back the craft and the popularity of the object which is something I actually stand behind and I think is a good thing so. That's great, that's a perfect segue into my last question for you which is how do you see what's happening today with rock-poster art fitting into those older traditions, those older art forms? Well I think it needs to the new and the old need to come together and that's something that I've struggled with my whole career as an artist. I learned analog art and I learned how to do it by hand and cut film by hand and to do all the separations by hand and as soon as I learned that the computer took over and everything changed and suddenly everything I learned you can push a button, you know and so balancing that is I think gonna be the struggle of the future and but maybe more over than that is we're gonna come into new mediums to be stuck with the printed poster is as the only way to make a poster is kind of limiting yourself in the modern world and I'm really interested with online posters right now I'm not making a lot of them but I really, really look at all the images out there especially in the election with Donald Trump I've been really loving how this social media and the computer and the internet has really just allowed for almost instant dissemination of images and ideas and that is what posters are so balancing the technique and the craft with that beautiful gift is what the future is gonna be about I think and maybe what people are learning posters today are gonna have to struggle with too is that if they're physically making stuff it's maybe stuck in this space where if you're not physically making stuff it becomes omnipresent almost in the world it can be anywhere that's great, that's great well thank all three of you I'd like to finish up with one huge overarching question for all three of you and then we'll open it up to questions from all of you which is we've had gallery and museum exhibitions of rock poster art for many, many decades actually beginning as early as 1966, 67 yet there seems to be a reluctance on the part of the fine art and the art gallery and the museum world to treat rock poster art seriously and that's true for I think it's post problems for scholars and students as well as artists and I was wondering it seems as if we're still kind of struggling to gain that kind of acceptance and appreciation and I was wondering if y'all see that and do you see it changing and just what your thoughts are about that? I absolutely see that it's this month is Makers month here at the library and it's about people making, makers making stuff for yourself and that's a lesson I learned through art is that galleries and museums aren't gonna do it for us and we have to do it ourselves as poster artists so I really understand the question I think the issue sometimes maybe just very broadly is that posters have a purpose they at their root their propaganda so it's art for a reason and that kind of goes away with from the maybe mainstream conceptual idea of art being for art's sake and not having a purpose and where it's the idea of something that's more important than the image as image makers I think we all lean heavily towards image and having type with that image creates another problem sometimes with the art world and so the art world tends to be unsure of whether posters which are graphic design which they're obviously not graphic designers really almost can't stand a lot of poster artists cause we're too free wheeling and we don't follow rules with typography and things so right Winston? Yeah Rules are meant to be broken Rules are meant to be broken that's how we think about it and so anyway posters are a unique kind of mix of all these things and they sometimes don't quite fit this the accepted definition of what art is supposed to be and We have a lot of competition too because I mean the competition being that instead of posters that have traditionally in our last hundred years of society 20th century instead of being for socially relevant subjects or civil societal progress or other kind of noble things people look at this as now they only want entertainment and a commercial viability so something that has to be commercial so it has to be saleable and marketable and it has to be entertaining which is why you have Trump and people like that rather than some of the substance arguing about difficult questions to solve and posters that can the old statement of pictures worth 10,000 words or pictures worth a thousand words it really is true because you can say so much in just one image that they would take volumes to explain and I look at the posters from the the Russian revolution that as badly as maybe that turned out for communism in general it was a whole lot better than life under the czar for several centuries that was even worse out of the frying pan into the fire but posters also transcend legibility is like a Charlie Chaplin film that's a silent picture he was famous all over the world because it didn't matter whether it was translated into French or you know Turkish or Portuguese everyone could see it and understand it immediately and I think that harnessing the power of imagery like Sally and Chris have done throughout their careers has more of an influence over the heart because emotionally we make our decisions not intellectually and images have emotional appeal and a directness that maybe harder to get across through journalism or other forms of communication but definitely we're always in competition with the world that only wants commercial imagery and entertainment value when you can need a horse of water but you can't make him drink or sometimes posters actually I mean we have to admit they get co-opted by the music business and and I mean there's a type of poster that Winston was talking about something you just do because you want to and no one's paying you no one's asking you to make it you're you're making you're making art maybe you're putting a band's name on it but I mean this is something that you're doing for your own purposes and on and off that's become more or less hip over the years and you know the it gets commercialized it gets taken over and that can be a problem with art becoming or posters being art and you know oddly political posters are almost universally accepted as art so it's just the rock posters that there seem to be an issue with yeah sort of yeah it's it's it's definitely an odd kind of wrinkle to to watch in the politicization of of the art world and Stanley I think that is something that you have definitely had to embrace as you've sort of navigated and gone back and forth between rock-poster-art and fine art in your own career when we first started doing posters when the Kelly and Griffin and Moscow so the graph graphic images were all like really ugly to put it in one word and we had a we were fighting to make it beautiful and uh when we we knew we were doing something because it wasn't anything really special but we we knew that we were doing something special because they the posters got sent to art museums immediately around the world I was I was walking up in 69 I was walking up the stairs in this apartment with my portfolio of posters and Mick Jagger was walking downstairs and I said hey Mick I want to see my portfolio and I showed him to me and he looked at him and he said these are works of love and I went yeah that's a great note to end on let's thank our panel and then let's have a couple of questions from you questions please thank you it was great guys I really appreciate you being here my question is for Chris I wanted to know what those two posters were that you got for Bill Graham what bands you said you got those two posters without getting in the story I did the Neville brothers and I did Tesla were my first two posters for Bill Graham present and the poster I didn't get to do was the red hot chili peppers and um it maybe would have been a great debut poster for the Bill Graham series except the the concert got canceled and it never happened so it was good luck I would like to ask a question in regards to post-do art and political cartoonists and that kind of thing did this country or did this country not kind of like lead the way or set the pace or are we going to be able to ever do that again I mean I haven't you know really traveled a lot and I didn't see a lot of this stuff from other places I mean was is this something that we were uniquely like kind of like you know kind of like really really like you know like really pushing and like in the forefront we we inherited that from I mean there's a long tradition especially you know early 18th century British political broad sides had an awful lot of of what became prefigured modern poster iconography and those guys you know the Jacobean printers were always getting busted always getting in trouble so I think I think to some extent there's there's just something inherent in the nature of that kind of that kind of imagery you know there's something inherently subversive or democratic about it but it it it it tends to sometimes get political I mean I don't I don't think I know a single poster artist that doesn't make political art at some point there's probably a couple out there but um the the the the thing with politics it's really interesting right now is that there's is is the kind of upsurge of street art that's going on that actually goes beyond posters themselves but posters are part of it there's a lot of people doing screenprint and political posters that Occupy Oakland had some actually quite famous posters generated at John Paul is a John Paul Bale is a local screen printer over in the East Bay that you see printing live printing posters at political events and anyway that that whole thing is exists around the world in different forms in different places and my travels I've seen it you know I've seen various types of setups where where people do these political stuff and it always tends to mix in with music art and post rock posters and and other mediums too actually in Italy there were like some pretty hairy posters that were yeah if they weren't you know elegantly done for the artistic appeal they were done for the intensity of the cause yeah whatever you know the 14 political parties there are in Italy and one of the things I first noticed when I moved there in the 1960s when you walk down the street there'd be one two three four five six seven eight nine ten a 12 or 15 of the same poster either a movie poster or you know some leftist rally or whatever and I remember wondering like why do they put like 20 of them in a row if you've seen one you know you get the point that's it but it dawned on me afterward that when people are riding on the bus or automobiles but mainly public transport if it was only one or two you'd not be able to see it so they put it like movie film where you have like real after real of and so they have a whole block of the same poster even like in San Lorenzo in Rome and it was so that it would stay in your head because it's like looking at a field of corn if you just saw one stalk of corn if you're on the train just go right by and it was I guess I don't even know how who came up with this but it was everywhere especially in towns like Florence or Rome and it had to do with the persistence of memory how motion pictures work when we see you've seen just one picture at every couple of seconds or several per second and there's no difference between the picture but slowly is moving and that was kind of revelation because they were utilizing this part of our visual cortex and the brain that interprets it to the advantage of the people making the message on the poster whereas here in America the poster is only a single thing to be appreciated as a separate unit and there there was a kind of a mechanical I'm not verbally adroit enough to pick out the words but there's an operation that was intended to work on passers-by who are going by at 25 or 30 miles an hour and you'd see oh yeah there's gonna be a rally in the Piazza Sancozzo on Saturday maybe we should go you know because it would sink in that was an interesting variation on the theme. Visual politics yeah that's great that's great. Any other questions? Last question. I know because I got the inside here I know that the other museums have treated you guys over the years and at least your poster work would you even consider putting your artwork into like the MoMA right now if they would approach you considering how what they think about your work. I'm talking about posters not like your paintings. Next year is Summer of Love at the De Young Museum which there'll be a lot of posters and I'm sure yeah it's you know let's I don't want to knock knock the museum thing too bad I mean they had there's a lot of great collections of posters and a lot of great museums I think maybe in my experience is what I actually a bunch of us poster artists call it the hometown disadvantage which is a uniquely San Francisco thing the farther away you get from San Francisco the more serious they take posters and so if you get as far as to Europe you'll find that the Tate I think you went to the Tate right you had a show there or something they had featured Stanley's art there I know that much anyway a lot of the big museums will show poster art and show poster artists San Francisco for some reason and you know we've all discussed it and we think the hometown disadvantage is like why would the museum put it up on the wall when you can go outside and get one off the off the pole and so maybe that's what the issue is it locally but at the same time we're not celebrating something that's really uniquely San Francisco and very very much a unique Bay Area tradition and it goes back to the gold rush we've been making posters in San Francisco in the Bay Area and have been kind of a hotbed of it for you know a long time at this point and it happens here in a way it doesn't happen anywhere else and so this you know we should celebrate that somehow and if not the museum maybe we can do it at the library right for you for years of museums wouldn't touch psychedelic posters because of the drug references yeah that too in San Diego they did a show of three other historical artists Taluza Trek and in San Francisco artists and they pulled it off that way and then then there was other shows and Denver and stuff well that's a hopeful note to end on thank our panel very much and thank you all for coming thanks to the library and to the H. Street Art Center so you did me