(JDK/Higher Ground)

www.jdkdesign.com / www.highergroundmusic.com 

121 posters, 49 designers, 102 bands, 135 nights - let's do this! By now everyone knows that all those Fillmore-period concert posters, featuring the eye-popping, brain-melting artwork of such psychedelicists as Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelly and Rick Griffin, are not only viewed as significant cultural artifacts but constitute high-ticket items on the memorabilia market, too. In fact, pretty much any poster that pre-dates 1972 is greatly coveted by collectors. The modern era probably hasn't produced artists who can claim Great Masters status alongside Mouse et al, at least not yet, although it's hard to say if that's a shortcoming on the part of the arts community or simply a reflection of the fact that in rock ‘n' roll, we tend to assign a value to an artifact according to which band it represents (a Nirvana poster will fetch big bucks; one depicting, say, popular-in-their-time-but-largely-forgotten-now Archers of Loaf, not so much) as opposed to any intrinsic visual worth.

That's a shame, however, for the artists of the near-past and the contemporary milieu continue to produce provocative, eye-popping designs every bit as memorable as their elders. Some of these artists are in fact already considered iconic in certain underground quarters - Art Chantry, Derek Hess, Frank Kozik, Coop, etc. - and it's no surprise that the outsized cultural imagery of the punk and garage scenes gave rise to many of these twisted brush-wielders. (2004's Sal Canzonieri-curated Electric Frankenstein poster book is a particularly outstanding recent collection of images.)

1 of 1500 serves up additional testimony via some 121 poster reproductions snatched off the walls (figuratively speaking) of Burlington, VT, concert venue Higher Ground. The club opened in 1998 and this 6"x9", 112-page volume serves as a ten-year celebration of the club's ongoing relationship with the with the Iskra Print Collective and Jager Di Paola Kemp Design (JDK). Included are posters created for Higher Ground shows by a who's-who of the hipster world, among them Gov't Mule, My Morning Jacket, Feist, Beth Orton, Ween, The Dresden Dolls, Interpol, Neko Case, Sonic Youth, Bright Eyes, Cat Power, Yo La Tengo, Kings of Leon, Damien Rice, Rilo Kiley, Of Montreal, The Decemberists, Ryan Adams, Grace Potter, Herbie Hancock, Dr. John, J.J. Cale, The Neville Brothers, Femi Kuti, Mos Def, Jurassic 5, Ray La Montagne and more. It's published in an edition of - you guessed it - 1500, with each individual book numbered and boasting a hand-silkscreened cover. (The one pictured on the Higher Ground site is red, but my copy, numbered 892, had a blue swirl/marble design.) In a perfect world the book would be printed in a size closer to the posters' actual physical dimensions, but one supposes a product clocking in at, say, 20"x20" might be a hard sell to retailers mindful of their available shelf space.

The foregoing laundry list of band names doesn't convey the visual impact here, however. Certainly, the posters themselves are arresting enough in their own right. A 2000 Ozomatli concert poster by artist Randy Ronquillo is designed like a Los Angeles street map grid and rendered as a blueprint (it was originally printed on thin, unstable blueprint paper, in fact, giving it an inherent collectible quality - if the collector is savvy enough to store or display it properly); a 2006 Deerhoof/Fiery Furnaces gig is commemorated by Erik Petersen with simple block lettering for the band names, no other images, but the overlapping blues, greens, reds, yellows and oranges make the letters pop out as if in 3D; and a stone(r) classic Ween poster from '99, at the hands of Todd Wender, depicts a person, presumably a child, standing in a bright yellow puddle of pee, which considering Ween's frequent forays into juvenile toilet humor, is rock ‘n' roll self-referentiality at its finest!

Giving the book additional clout is the inclusion of live photos of some of the bands upon which the poster images are overlaid as insets. A second Ween poster (by Mark Michaylira), this one displaying a childlike ghost with, er, a big boner, joins a sweaty action shot of Ween; an ornate, almost chaste Feist graphic (by Malcolm Buick of the Conscious Alliance), is juxtaposed against a riotous photo of Feist crowded onstage by scores of excited fans; a poster depicting an orange/red locomotive bearing the legend Taj Mahal (by Steve Cousins) is accompanied by a shot of Taj, smiling, eyes closed and playing his acoustic guitar, steady as a train.

Some of the pages contain short commentaries from the designers as well as the bands themselves in order to provide more literal context. The former give insights as to what inspired their particular designs, while the latter offer their thoughts on the posters or memories of the actual concerts. Feist, for example, reflects on her 2007 Higher Ground show, writing, "I recall for some reason being seized with the desire to have the audience on the stage with us, and so I asked them all up. Like being swallowed up by the sea, it was a great feeling, but almost gave my tour manager a heart attack. Sometimes seated theaters need to be messed with."

Ultimately, what comes through the loudest - and I think this applies to any particular musical period - is the psychic and psychological relationships forged on canvas (or silkscreen or whatever the medium) by the artists with their subjects. Journalist Pamela Polston, in her introduction to the book, suggests exactly that when she discusses how the downsizing of LP art in the CD era (and even further in the thumbnail/iPod era) may have prompted a pushback from artists in the form of an uptick in concert poster creation. "It's no coincidence that most of the club's posters are 15 inches square," she writes. "Even for post-analog music fans, the shape is iconic... Each of the posters in this book packs an idiosyncratic wallop - created before the concerts they document, the images arose from the designers' personal connection with their chosen bands."

And that same sense of personal connection, of course, is what makes all of us fans of the music we celebrate. Here's a vote for celebrating the artists such as those included in 1 of 1500 with equal gusto. FRED MILLS

[Images taken from HigherGroundMusic.com; ordering details for the book are at the site]