Busacca Gallery

The Blues Project,Great Society,Tony Martin's Light Show at the Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco April 22-23 1966. Publisher: Family Dog Productions. Artist: Wes Wilson. A tokin' Native American sits in for Uncle Sam on this litho that commemorates the first event put on by the Family Dog at the Avalon Ballroom. It also marks the first appearance of the Family Dog motto "May the baby Jesus shut your mouth and open yer mind." The 3rd printing is 14 1/8" x 20 1/2" on uncoated index. It drops the union logo and the "Gillette" credit of the 2nd printing, but "No.5-3" is in the lower right corner, and the Washington Street address appears in the lower left. It was printed after the concert, sometime between October 1966 and January 1967. Avalon Ballroom concert held August 22-23rd 1966 in San Francisco. Pre concert 3st printing. Family Dog Productions.The Blues Project was a band from the Greenwich Village neighborhood of NYC that was formed in 1965 and originally split up in 1967. While their songs drew from a wide array of musical styles, they are most remembered as one of the earliest practitioners of psychedelic rock, as well as one of the world’s first jam bands. In February 1966, Family Dog Productions was formally founded to begin promoting concerts. The Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco became the Family Dog’s main venue. The Family Dog put on a series of great concerts between April 1966 and November 1968. Their shows were a mix of artists, from rock to blues, soul, Indian, to rock and roll. Measures 14” x 20” ht. The Avalon BallroomThe Avalon Ballroom is a music venue in the Polk Gulch neighborhood of San Francisco, California at 1268 Sutter Street, on the north side, one building east of the corner of Van Ness Avenue. The space operated from 1966 to 1968, and reopened in 2003. The building that housed the Avalon Ballroom was built in 1911 and was originally called the Colin Traver Academy of Dance. The Avalon was founded by Robert E. Cohen, impresario Chet Helms and his music production company, Family Dog Productions, which had offices on Van Ness.In the 1960s at the Avalon, two bands typically performed two sets during the evening beginning at about nine o'clock. Many local bands, such as Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Steve Miller Band, served as backup bands, as did the early Moby Grape and headliners such as the 13th Floor Elevators, the Butterfield Blues Band, and Big Brother and the Holding Company, which Helms organized around singer and performer Janis Joplin in spring 1966. Joplin and Big Brother performed in June 1967 on several occasions.Bands were frequently booked to perform at the Avalon on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Extraordinary posters advertising each event were produced by psychedelic artists such as Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelly and Victor Moscoso.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_art

Psychedelic art is any kind of visual artwork inspired by psychedelic experiences induced by drugs such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin. The word "psychedelic" (coined by British psychologist Humphry Osmond) means "mind manifesting". By that definition all artistic efforts to depict the inner world of the psyche may be considered "psychedelic". In common parlance "Psychedelic Art" refers above all to the art movement of the late 1960s counterculture. Psychedelic visual arts were a counterpart to psychedelic rock music. Concert posters, album covers, lightshows, murals, comic books, underground newspapers and more reflected not only the kaleidoscopically swirling patterns of LSD hallucinations, but also revolutionary political, social and spiritual sentiments inspired by insights derived from these psychedelic states of consciousness.



Leading proponents of the 1960s Psychedelic Art movement were San Francisco poster artists such as: Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Bonnie MacLean, Stanley Mouse & Alton Kelley, and Wes Wilson. Their Psychedelic Rock concert posters were inspired by Art Nouveau, Victoriana, Dada, and Pop Art. The "Fillmore Posters" were among the most notable of the time. Richly saturated colors in glaring contrast, elaborately ornate lettering, strongly symmetrical composition, collage elements, rubber-like distortions, and bizarre iconography are all hallmarks of the San Francisco psychedelic poster art style. The style flourished from about 1966 - 1972. Their work was immediately influential to album cover art, and indeed all of the aforementioned artists also created album covers.

Although San Francisco remained the hub of psychedelic art into the early 1970s, the style also developed internationally: British artist Bridget Riley became famous for her op-art paintings of psychedlic patterns creating optical illusions. Mati Klarwein created psychedelic masterpieces for Miles Davis' Jazz-Rock fusion albums, and also for Carlos Santana Latin Rock. Pink Floyd worked extensively with London based designers, Hipgnosis to create graphics to support the concepts in their albums. Los Angeles area artists such as John Van Hamersveld, Warren Dayton and Art Bevacqua and New York artists Peter Max and Milton Glaser all produced posters for concerts or social commentary (such as the anti-war movement) that were highly collected during this time. Life Magazine's cover and lead article for the September 1, 1967 issue at the height of the Summer of Love focused on the explosion of psychedelic art on posters and the artists as leaders in the hippie counterculture community.

Psychedelic light-shows were a new art-form developed for rock concerts. Using oil and dye in an emulsion that was set between large convex lenses upon overhead projectors the lightshow artists created bubbling liquid visuals that pulsed in rhythm to the music. This was mixed with slideshows and film loops to create an improvisational motion picture art form to give visual representation to the improvisational jams of the rock bands and create a completely "trippy" atmosphere for the audience. The Brotherhood of Light were responsible for many of the light-shows in San Francisco psychedelic rock concerts.

Out of the psychedelic counterculture also arose a new genre of comic books: underground comix. "Zap Comix" was among the original underground comics, and featured the work of Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, and Robert Williams among others. Underground Comix were ribald, intensely satirical, and seemed to pursue weirdness for the sake of weirdness. Gilbert Shelton created perhaps the most enduring of underground cartoon characters, "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers", whose drugged out exploits held a hilarious mirror up to the hippy lifestyle of the 1960s.

Psychedelic art was also applied to the LSD itself. LSD began to be put on blotter paper in the early 1970s and this gave rise to a specialized art form of decorating the blotter paper. Often the blotter paper was decorated with tiny insignia on each perforated square tab, but by the 1990s this had progressed to complete four color designs often involving an entire page of 900 or more tabs. Mark McCloud is a recognized authority on the history of LSD blotter art.