The Denver Art Museum is taking on an important piece of music history with “The Psychedelic Experience,” the rock poster exhibit opening Saturday. Music was the foundation of the San Francisco scene of the late ’60s. It got everything started, and it kept everything going.
The music gave the community of artists a way to express themselves, to celebrate, to come together.
Or was that the drugs?
Both, actually. The LSD that fueled Timothy Leary’s acid tests — and inspired the book Leary co-wrote that gave this exhibit its name — was the mortar of the Bay Area scene of the ’60s, but the songs and bands were the bricks that created the towering, influential edifice.
What’s especially beautiful is how all of the art intertwined. The psychedelic rock- and jam-centered music inspired out-there light shows that helped concerts evolve into what they are today, and light artists were so popular they were billed on the posters underneath the bands.
A seminal moment in the movement was when Wes Wilson was commissioned to create a poster advertising the Moby Grape show at the Fillmore Auditorium in early 1967. In the years that followed, many of the visual artists would bypass the promoter entirely and work directly with the musicians, creating some of the most lasting album covers in the history of the art form.
Fittingly, the music will be a bigger draw for many than the art itself at “The Psychedelic Experience.” Though the art is compelling: Bonnie MacLean, for example, created some gorgeously twisted images throughout the years, especially the peacock-situated Yardbirds/Doors poster that acts as the exhibit’s icon. And nobody can deny the power of Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse’s work with the Grateful Dead — including the emblematic skeleton-and-roses art they appropriated from a 19th-century illustration.
But as powerful as those images are, much of their greatness comes from their attachment to the music. The peacock in MacLean’s image is thought to be a Yardbirds reference, and how can you not love a band that gave the world Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page?
Even though the exhibit focuses on transporting viewers to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the pre- Gap years, the curators also recognize the small role Denver played in the Bay Area scene. In the September following 1967’s Summer of Love, San Francisco’s Chet Helms and Denver’s Barry Fey opened the Family Dog on West Evans Avenue.
The Denver club was Helms’ second venue, the original being San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom, and it hosted the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Captain Beefheart, Janis Joplin, Buffalo Springfield, Blue Cheer, Quicksilver Messenger Service and others in the short three months it was open as the Family Dog.
Helms and partner Bob Cohen commissioned San Francisco artists to create posters for the Denver shows, and many of them can be found in “The Psychedelic Experience.” One of the best-known posters from the Family Dog’s time in Denver was part of a set, made specifically for a Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band mini-tour that brought them to Colorado from San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom.
The left poster was for the California show, the right poster for the Colorado show. And when put together, they created a whole picture of a rainbow sprouting from fiery fields — not the first image that comes to mind via Kweskin’s loose jug-band sound, but it was fetching nevertheless.
And there it is again — the mingling of music and art. Sometimes you can draw a direct line from one to the other, and sometimes you can’t. But no matter the poster — even Victor Moscoso’s masterful pieces that come alive (via psychedelic animation) in the glow of colored pinwheels — it’s hard to see any of these illustrations/collages outside of the context of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1960s.
Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com
Sounds of the psychedelic era
In the psychedelic scene of the mid- to late ’60s, it was the music that inspired the light shows that later inspired the poster art.
The Denver Art Museum has been careful to acknowledge the music in each step of “The Psychedelic Experience,” and while viewers take in the poster exhibit — or walk through the “Psychedelic Side Trip,” the accompanying interactive gallery — they’ll hear the music that defined the era.
Here are 10 songs you might hear during your visit — and they’re also available on a 59-song iMix (called “Psychedelic Side Trip”) on denverart and iTunes.
1. The Doors, “Strange Days”
2. Grateful Dead, “Uncle John’s Band”
3. Quicksilver Messenger Service, “Pride of Man”
4. Santana, “Oye Como Va”
5. Neil Young, “Southern Man”
6. Jefferson Airplane, “Volunteers”
7. Crosby, Stills & Nash, “Marrakesh Express”
8. Blue Cheer, “Summertime Blues”
9. Big Brother & the Holding Company, “Ball and Chain”
10. Janis Joplin, “Me and Bobby McGee”
Ricardo Baca
