Introduction:
When John Van Hamersveld left the art school scene of the late Beat Era in the early 60's
artists were becoming media minded like Andy Warhol & The Factory with the Velvet
Underground. Andy was seen in Life Magazine as "the" pop artist. Everyone knew the Beatles' sound
in the 60's was the "British Invasion". They were transforming the British bubblegum hits into
American Culture as fashion. Their uniform hair cut and suits were the new look.
"The Endless Summer" album cover image and soundtrack, distributed by Capitol Records, brought a
different surf sound to radio. The film had done 30 million dollars in sales then at the box
office as an independent film in America. The popular Beach Boys were on the same label and
their sound was a part of the transition of the surf sound in the 60's, during music industry
standards, all turns into the psychedelic sound and fashion of the high culture of the new
media. In the early 60's the Beatles and Beach Boys dominated the radio and concert venues
through America, all was distributed by the Capitol Records Company in the mid 60's, but all
changed into the San Francisco enviable new sound of bands like The Dead, Big Brother, The
Jefferson Airplane and the Blue Cheer. During the change in the culture, John Van Hamersveld
designed album covers, posters and promotions in the art scene of the 60's and 70's, for the
likes of The Jefferson Airplane and The Rolling Stones, where he gains his reputation from as an
American Artist and Designer.
Gut Terk the artist & the "Vincebus Eruptum" album cover:
John Van Hamersveld:
This part is about meeting Gut Terk the manager of the Blue Cheer band, 1967. I was one of the
founders and a part of forming "Pinnacle Rock Concerts", as one of the three partners. I was an
art director at Capitol Records since 1966 and had finished the Beatles "Magical Mystery Tour",
the front of the Album Cover, released that summer in 1967. For me, at the time of the first
shows, we as a production company had organized a series of Dance Concerts. On the eve of the
first concert, I was introduced to Gut during the days of Pinnacle's "Electric Wonders" show at
the Shrine Exposition Hall. The Blue Cheer was the hit of the weekend party. Gut, as the manager
of the band, came around after the show and asked if I would take a photo of the band for his
new album cover for "Vincebus Eruptum". Gut later introduced me to Hell's Angels that would drop
by the studio at the time. Gut was the dominate character who represented the image of the
Blue Cheer band when we all met in the "Pinnacle" deals. Gut was a great influence as a crazy
friend with great stories he told about his life and times in San Francisco, his world he
constructed for all of us to understand.
Blue Cheer - Vincebus Eruptum
Album Cover - 1968
© John Van Hamersveld & Gut
John Van Hamersveld:
My studio was upstairs in a victorian two storey house, at Coronado and Wilshire, near Otis Art
School in Downtown Los Angeles. This is where I had two apartments adjoining one another on the
second floor, where it was set-up for making photographs, an art studio for my drawings and
posters that became the famous "Hendrix Head".
The "Pinnacle Rock Concerts" started in the studio
bedroom. One morning with girlfriend Honeya, I woke up and named my idea, "Pinnacle" from my
dream. At the time I knew Gut as the manager of the Blue Cheer. Later on a trip to San Francisco
to visit Gut he introduced me to his album cover, printed and finished in the psychedelic style
of letterforms and pattern. It was impressive to see my photographs of the band imbedded in the
surface of the 12 x 12 square. Now it is one of the most famous albums in the world. In middle
of 1968 I designed the Jefferson Airplane Album Cover, "Crown of Creation", their biggest album.
They seem to have become the Rolling Stones of America at the time. I later did design
the Rolling Stones "Exile on Main Street" album cover in 1972. All was a small world living in
Southern California. Later in the 1970's I was always surprised, as unexpected Hell's Angels
were standing at the doorway of the studio, with that leather jacket and the skull image on the
back, they wanted to trade pot for money for their gas tank. Gut had put me on the list.
From an article for background:
Designing Images During the Counter Culture of the 60's:
Los Angeles, also, boasted a number of influential music venues, mostly in the vicinity of the
Sunset Strip. The most popular was the Whisky-a-Go-Go, which soon became not only an important
venue for the San Francisco bands, but also a springboard for many of L.A.'s own acts like The
Doors, Love and The Byrds.
Other significant venues were The Troubadour, the Shrine Auditorium,
The Kaleidoscope, the Ash Grove, Ciro's (where The Byrds were frequent performers), Pandora's
Box and the Sea Witch. Strangely, Los Angeles was never a great centre for rock posters. The
Pinnacle concert production company was the first significant concert and production company to
put on rock concerts and dances in Los Angeles, mostly at the Shrine Auditorium. The posters
designed by local artist John Van Hamersveld for these events are now legendary works.
A serigraph is a color print made by the silk-screen process and printed by the artist. The
silk-screen process is a stencil method of printing a flat, color design through a piece of silk
or other fine cloth on which all parts of the design not to be printed have been stopped out by
an impermeable film. Silk-screening also makes use of a squeegee to force ink directly on to the
surface to be printed. Visions of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein with their huge silk-screened
canvasses flash through the mind when the term serigraph is mentioned, since it is this
technique that many high priced, upscale art galleries have succeeded in selling their works. It
is this same technique that began flourishing through the "Rock" poster underground in the early
'90s.
Silk-screen printing is most widely known for its use of printing on fabrics and is how the
method originated. The first silk-screens were made of fine silk threads and strands of human
hair by the Japanese as a way to apply stenciled shapes to fabric.
It was not until the 1920s
that the first automatic screen printing machine was invented. This process was capable of
meeting small runs on short notice, while being inexpensive, yet the applications were mostly
for commercial reasons. With time, the silk-screen advantage was the relative ease of
multi-color printing for bold designs since the inks tend to be opaque and ride on the surface
of the paper. Virtually any paper can be used for printing, making silk-screen more accessible
than any other print medium.
Pop art and op art revitalized the screen printing process in the early 1960s as an art form
rather than just a commercial printing technique. Perhaps, this could have lent itself to the
next wave of producing "Rock" show (or "Gig") posters in the mid to late 1960s during the
"Psychedelic Era". Previously, most "Rock" posters were a clutter of type with perhaps a
photograph of the performer that were either taped to store windows or stapled to telephone
poles to advertise the "Gig". The poster soon incorporated illustrations into the design and, as
this "Psychedelic Era" began, unusual lettering or logos morphed into illustrations, which
blended into a display of mind bending colors. These posters produced either by serigraphy
(screen), lithography (flat), or offset (cylinder) saw pop art tones with day-glow expressionism
reflect the cultural clash of society, the Vietnam War and mind expanding drugs becoming a new
direction in American art. This new breed of artists, including Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse,
Alton Kelly, Victor Moscoso, Wes Wilson, John Van Hamersveld, Gary Grimsham, Randy Tuten, and
others would influence generations to come while helping design the face of "Rock".
 |
Rick Griffin & John Van Hamersveld
Photo Victor Moscoso - 1968
© John Van Hamersveld |
The alternative scene at the street level. From the Melrose District
like a fist thrust into a mirror, the face changed with the birth of punk and hardcore (late
1970s to early 1980s), as this new generation rebelled against what was once rebellion. And from
that era, one image still stages strong, the Screamers poster by Gary Panter since it pictured
the rage evident in this new sound of social consciousness. Yet the silk-screened poster did not
seem to exist as it once had. The limited, signed serigraphs still sold out of upscale
galleries, but the punk mentality grew into a do it yourself ethic, and the xerox machine or
offset printer became the way to create. Artists like Raymond Pettibon, Shawn Kerri, "Mad"
Marc Rude, and Pushead reflected the mood. Their work adorned the inner walls of houses across
America and appeared on T-shirts silk-screened in garages on home made units. Glenn Danzig,
singer of the Misfits, silk-screened T-shirts in the basement of his parent's home while
occasionally printing huge one color "gig" posters silk-screened on butcher paper. T-shirts and
"flyers" (small handbills) were in full D.I.Y. swing, but silk-screened "Rock" posters would
have to evolve again.
But the popular new "Limited" idea started at a store front in Santa Monica, at the Jeff
Wasserman Silkscreen Shop, who had worked as a GEMINI printer in 1979. It was the edge of the
1980's. This was now signed serigraphs sales, sold out of upscale galleries, like publisher
Mirage Editions, where Van Hamersveld had designed for the Smithsonian and the Cooper Hewitt of
the Oceanliner Print, The Cooper Hewitt, the book store. But it was the new L.A. scene called
"WET" created by Leonard Corren, the "WET Leg" Poster Limited Edition was distributed like the
"Endless Summer" poster as a silkscreen, not for three bucks in the mid 60's, this was the
high-end limited edition for 40 dollars, for poster and frame galleries.
 |
John Van Hamersveld:
The limited editions turned one of his images into an Olympic Mural in 1984, the wrapped half
around way Coliseum. This was a 360 foot 12 foot high figure on 60 foot lone canvas's painted
in Olympic Colors.
With so much ink being squeegeed through frames of synthetic screens, a cultural icon is once
again laying out the foundation for history in the "Rock" world.
Refer to:
The Art of Rock Book, Abeville Publisher . . . John Van Hamersveld
On Mar 14, 2008, at 9:22 AM, john van hamersveld wrote:
I was in Los Vegas and met the guys from High Times, and
one offered I do a the Annual Poster. Week after I sent e-mail into the
dark.
My Mother would say to me in the 70s, that "Rockn' Roll" is everything
going wrong!
I think Dylan as an art student going on the road and creating his
persona, act, concept, proformance was to manage his own career and be
in control while he could think out the whole process was a "Tranwreck",
and Columbia distributed his product. He still paints the picture of a
disturbed man alone in his studio with his power of the words and the
beat.
Here is a piece of the Pinnacle story... © a chapter from "The
California Trip". I have been working on a book for 10 years.
The transition from surf culture into Hippies:
THE CALIFORNIA TRIP by John Van Hamersveld
Chapter Four: Two Brown's Counter Culture
Word Count 8150
But first, Back to the Roots of Art Education…
My parents accepted the idea that I move into a student housing facility
downtown to go back to art school in Los Angeles. My rich grandmother,
once a child from Berlin, paid the art school tuition. So I moved from
the beach towns and decided to go to an art school called Chouinard Art
Institute, located on Grand View near Wilshire. The art school was more
bohemian-like in its tradition than the other schools, but I wanted to
learn about art and technology. I didn’t enroll in the Chouinard
painting program because I wanted to learn about photography and study
in the film program.
I moved into the West Garden apartments near the USC campus in August of
1965. There I would sit on the couch in my apartment during the hot and
smoggy evenings with the image of the war in Vietnam on the TV. The
draft was foremost in everyone’s mind, with teens and young adults
watching the nightly news and seeing the horrible images that were
broadcast daily. In August came the race riots that burned from Watts to
Vermont just four blocks away from my apartment, near the Adams and
Hoover Avenue neighborhood. This image of urban change was in brutally
sharp contrast to my memories of the beach with the sun out and the
surfers hanging out in peace.
Suddenly my passive generation changed its attitude, its politics
suddenly evolving out of suburbia, civic centers, and universities.
Youth dressed as hippies and counterculture men and women with a new
cause burned their draft cards and flags and joined the radicals
elsewhere in the country, streaming across the campuses towards the
corporate administration buildings, calling for new rights and
democracy. This was the common image of impatient youth fighting against
their betrayal by the government, and the TV news opened nightly with
images of the war and the police clubbing students who denounced L.B.J.,
vowing they would never fight in Vietnam.
Counter Culture Begins
Boomers of today watch MTV and see the trends transform rock ‘n’ roll as
we once knew it in the ‘60s and ‘70s into “classic rock.” Edited and
canned documentaries, with their corporate sponsors, show the ‘60s
through newsreel footage, claiming to know what it was all about then.
But I can remember being there in the ‘60s. In that second-story
apartment house I blasted Bob Dylan out of the large hi-fi speakers as
if I lived in a bar. Dylan, his face in magazines and on TV shows,
appeared as a leader of the youth, talking about the government. His
abstracted style and poetic words of wisdom were the narrative we had of
the new culture. Sometimes they came through his folk guitar and
sometimes through his electrified revolution of country rock music, the
Fender guitar hung around his neck and amplified equipment blowing away
the audience at Newport Folk Festival as some of them booed him and his
band. As a student and consumer of his propaganda, I was buying his
drama. I read somewhere that Dylan had turned John Lennon onto smoking
pot, and I remember seeing a photograph of Lennon on his knees at the
feet of Dylan, his god. In 1965 Dylan wanted to be English and look like
a rocker like the Stones. The new style everyone was embracing was
really from the bohemian art schools of the urban city, New York’s East
Village, and London’s Soho.
London Reflection in America
There were the pictures and sounds of the bad boys of rock, too, led by
Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.
Mick’s voice would spin on the turntable as we rolled joints in the
studio living rooms of student housing. These were the idols of most of
the youth culture at the time. We saw it on TV, creating rumors,
magazine stories, newspaper interviews, and pictures of the fashion of
London. We saw groups of young men in their twenties with long hair,
sitting around at what could be the beginning of an LSD session. The
longhaired image of youth drove Republicans wild with its worn patchwork
jeans, hippies looking like clowns with loose silk shirts, embroidered
waistcoats over painted T-shirts, and strings of groovy, crude beads
around their necks.
The newscaster Jerry Duffy was known for delivering the latest news from
the “Mountains to the Sea in Southern California.” Through him and other
newscasters on TV I would hear about the surf breaking at the beaches,
surfers would bring the rumors from beachside communities, and I would
learn about their new styles growing out of their take on the new pop
art fashion image. Surfers collided with hippie culture style, letting
go of the ideals of crew cuts and Hang-Ten striped T-shirts. The new fad
of tie-dye made its way in, along with public love-ins, psychedelic
music, and drug dealers extraordinaire. The zany surfers of the ‘50s and
early ‘60s, all but forgotten at the beach by 1965, reorganized their
values and created a new subculture—Surfer Hippies.
As the surfers came downtown for a visit to the studio, they spoke of
their traveling south to Laguna Beach, the idealist surf town of
Southern California. There they found surfers wearing long hair,
expounding exotic beliefs, laughing and smiling through clouds of pot
smoke. Theirs was a world filled with small waterfalls tumbling into
indoor rock gardens like tiki Gardens of Eden, fantasy waves painted on
living room walls, soft and rhythmic music with the occasional
zapping-in feedback of a Fender guitar, and water bongs from one of the
typical head shops springing up in every neighborhood around Southern
California. Here were new businesses with scattered cushions here and
there for customers who, after removing their flip-flops, sandals, or
shoes before entering, could loll at their ease. This was the Laguna
Beach surf scene. In it one heard people saying things like, "So these
guys were smoking doobies,” and "There was this orgy on the floor with
guys and girls like in an underground porno movie by Warhol!” Ravi
Shankar’s sitar on the HELP! soundtrack is in the air, a Beatles
album-turned-movie with a touch of psychedelic style, directed by
Richard Lester. This was hippie culture mutating into pop culture.
The Ocean In A Cloud
Eventually, a group of Laguna surfers formed what they called the
"Brotherhood of Eternal Love." The Brotherhood's figurehead became the
high priest of psychedelic drugs himself, Timothy Leary. The
world-famous former Harvard psychology professor-turned proselytizer of
hallucinogenic substances such as LSD had been lifted to god-like status
in the area. Leary and The Brotherhood preached spiritual awakening
through Buddhist meditation and drug experimentation through their
beloved sacraments in the Laguna Canyons. Down on PCH the surf broke at
Brook Street just as I remembered it when I was 15 years old. But this
was the ‘60s, and as tourists walked along the sidewalk and visited the
cafes and art galleries, the once-quiet town could fulfill all of the
travelers’ needs, whether they be a good restaurant or a little bit of
Orange Sunshine.
Downtown Surfers
By 1961 Rick’s character “Murphy” had also undergone a metamorphoses.
With his eye patch, long, Christ-like hair, and a Rapidograph pen
carving his lines into the thick white paper, Rick grew Murphy into a
pirate sort of character. There sat Rick with his beard draped on the
desktop, surrounded by pot smoke, an ashtray of roaches close at hand,
the India ink drying in the hot, sun-baked loft space. He had imagined a
new Murphy and drawn him there in the ghetto studio underneath the
Harbor freeway overpass. To me, Murphy would come to represent the
changes taking place in the surfing world.
Meanwhile, I found myself wandering around the art school studio in a
semiconscious state, producing drawings, doing animation, taking
photographs, making little movies, and studying advertising and design
communication. Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni’s underground
film Blow Up had blown my mind, with London fashion photographer David
Bailey and artist Andy Warhol having been combined into the David
Hemmings character, a model of the hip, fashionable London Pop Art Scene
we were embracing in the States.
The popularization of LSD outside the medical world was hastened when
individuals such as Ken Kesey participated in drug trials and liked what
they saw. I recall a day at Chouinard when one of my graphic design
teachers told us about a new book we should read by Tom Wolfe about his
accounts in California during the early days of LSD's entrance into the
non-academic world. The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test followed Ken Kesey
and his psychedelic bus around the countryside, desert, and sea with his
troop, the Merry Pranksters.
Everyone knew Tim Leary’s mantra—“Tune in, turn on, drop out.” The lingo
was everywhere as a verbal icon. Everyone around me, the disaffected
middle-class kids talking about quitting their jobs or classes, was
heading into the mirage of the song "California Dreaming" by the Mamas
and Papas. In Laguna the Brotherhood was being called by some “The
Hippie Mafia.” Leary had published the LSD bible, Psychedelic Prayers,
which was, in essence, his own idiosyncratic translation of the Tibetan
Book of the Dead. The surfers in Laguna who owned Mystic Arts on Pacific
Coast Highway sold Leary’s book, along with incense, candles, and
imported countercultural paraphernalia. Behind a bamboo-covered wall,
church members gathered in a secret meditation room decorated with a
massive Taxonomic Mandala, a Technicolor spiral depicting the evolution
of life from primal ooze to Homo sapiens. There on a T-shirt was pinned
a popular button that read, "Leary is God." In October 1966 the state of
California banned LSD.
The psychic team of Tim Leary and Richard Alpert, or Ram Dass, made
famous through his life-changing trek through India on the heels of the
well-known spiritual seeker Bhagavan Das, hit entered everyone’s
awareness early in the ‘60s. Later, they, with the Brotherhood, would
develop a business of selling awareness to hippies out of Laguna.
West Adams Gardens Studio
One night my friend Tom Frobisher, a surfer from Hermosa Beach and a
part-time employee at Surf Guide Magazine appeared at the downstairs
landing of the tudor-style apartment near USC where I had built my art
studio. Tom had been one of my assistants at Surf Guide along with
another assistant named Jim Ganzer and now he lived near me. He came in
and sat on the couch to listen to music and smoke pot, and there I was
sitting on the couch with him when suddenly he produced a sugar cube—
Orange Sunshine. LSD! Tom offered me the cube, but I was not sure that I
wanted to part take in this drug. I remembered seeing Leary and Alpert
on TV years earlier on The Suskind Show, sitting on a couch with a
beatnik surfer named Tinker from Dana Point, debating LSD’s effect on
humans. Jay Stevens wrote in his book Storming Heaven, “Tim had become a
storefront messiah, a Socrates intent on corrupting the young, the P. T.
Barnum of the Other World.” This image of Leary was not appealing to me,
so I just smoked pot and Tom took the dirty looking cube called LSD.
Here I was, about to witness Frobisher tripping. Tom was a kind and
simple guy, but he was very interested in always being considered hip. I
watched him go into an emotional state, holding his stomach, then to a
calm, euphoric state. Later he would move into the studio, and on one
evening the famous Malibu surfer Kemp Aalberg, from the cover of the
Surf Guide Magazine “Malibu Issue” cover came over, and the two of them
collided in front of my still camera frame for a photograph.
Most of the surfers who came by were coming back from the Army Draft
Office, having escaped their duty to their country. They would tell
their stories of faking insanity, drinking soy sauce to get their blood
pressure up for the checkup, pretending to be homosexual, producing
phony doctors’ reports, whatever it took to get them out of going to
Vietnam. They were the Surfer Outlaws. It was like a movie. The living
room became the Malibu Pit at times but without the sand, the surf, or
Miki Dora.
By 1965 musicians like The Beatles and Bob Dylan began to show the
obvious influence of their experiences with LSD. Although John Lennon
dismissed the connection between his song "Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds" and LSD, both Lennon and George Harrison had been
experimenting with the drug since early 1966.
San Francisco Hippie Scene.
In 1967 I walked into The Capitol Records Building on Vine Street in
Hollywood to take a look at the media machine that was making the myths
of popular culture. I showed them my New York version of the Endless
Summer poster and got a job that afforded me a budget to fly from Los
Angeles to San Francisco, expanding my domain to Rick Griffin, who by
now was living in the San Francisco hippie scene.
Rick left Chouinard and the downtown art school scene to create his
first San Francisco rock poster with the Jook Savages Art Show there.
According to Tim Stephenson’s Rick Griffin website, “He then produced
the posters for the Human Be-In in 1967 in Golden Gate Park, advertised
as the ‘Gathering Of Tribes,’ showing a guitar-toting Indian on
horseback. It was this event that kicked off the Summer of Love. As the
Haight-Ashbury scene developed, Rick's work was in high demand. Drawing
on influences as diverse as Native American culture, the Californian
surf scene and of course, the burgeoning hippie movement, he
incorporated beetles, skulls, surfing eyeballs, vivid colors and wild
lettering into his art. Rick produced a series of seminal posters for
Chet Helms, a producer of The Family Dog collective, and Bill Graham;
they staged events at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium,
respectively. He made posters for legends such as Hendrix, Albert King
and the Grateful Dead, the logo for Rolling Stone magazine, and many
album sleeves; perhaps the most well known being the Dead's Aoxomoxoa.”
Rick became known as one of the "Big Five" psychedelic artists during
this time. He and photographer Bob Seidemann founded the
Berkley-Bonaparte distribution agency to produce and sell psychedelic
poster art. I would visit with Rick there in San Francisco once a week.
He was still putting out artwork for Zap Comics, Snatch, and Tales From
The Tube.
I felt split into two by my successes in the world of the two
Browns—Bruce Brown, whose Endless Summer image was being sold on college
campuses nationwide as a major surf icon, and Brown Meggs, the former
chief executive of Capitol Records who signed the Beatles to their first
American recording contract and who also sent me to my Coronado studio
to take Michael Cooper’s photo of the Beatles and turn it into the cover
for the album The Magical Mystery Tour. I had created images for two of
the most important aspects of the ‘60s, and I wasn’t sure which one
represented me more.
The Happenings
In 1967 I created the Pinnacle Rock Concerts production company in my
Coronado Studio room, along with some of my artist roommates, Barry La
Va and conceptual artist who was going to Otis Art Institute. There was
Caleb Deschanel (later the cameraman for Coppla’s Black Stallion). Also
my friend at UCLA, Burt Gershfield (Now That The Buffalo Are Gone, a
classic student film), would drop by the studio, among others. I was an
artistic director trying to make a living doing album covers for Brown
Meggs. The idea was to develop ideas and events centered on the artists
we knew and their art school projects of drawing, painting, photography,
and filmmaking. In the summer of ‘67 I had envisioned creating a
“happening” and campaigning to spread awareness over LA and the downtown
art scene. Soon we began to promote concerts, and in our first year we
got a good one—Jimi Hendrix in November, 1967.
We focused on the Star Kiss Tuna Family as potential sponsors of the
shows, trying to get the money together to get bands like Buffalo
Springfield, The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The
Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, and Cream to play the events.
The Pinnacle designs were born out of a time when I wanted to create my
own style of drawing. Rick Griffin and I were both of the Chouinard
attitude of expression through pens on paper. I worked after hours and
through the Christmas vacation, trying to work out a new kind of artwork
that would summarize my experiences at the time. My subconscious, the
pot I smoked, whatever the moment was, out came the drawing onto the
paper. It was so new for me. I threw away all the other drawings I had
attempted and went with the black-pen drawing of Hendrix that has since
risen from the underground to be published in books and collected by
admirers of Pinnacle posters.
Selling What Hippies Needed
In 1967, as Pinnacle Dance Concerts became more important in the in the
Los Angeles area, we would get calls from shops that wanted to sell our
tickets in their town. Sound Spectrum, a store in Laguna that
specialized in imported rock ‘n’ roll asked if they could sell Pinnacle
tickets at their shop. Incense and pot, the signature smell of hippies,
hit you as you entered into the drug-friendly environment of Sound
Spectrum, a possible ticket buyer might be listening to music and
chatting with the clientele, and Jimmy the Clerk would be there, just
one of several surf-friendly acidhead investor types, all a few years
older than me. Jimmy had a cheery grin and receding hairline with long
hair in back, and he wanted to get backstage and bring the Brotherhood,
their girlfriends, his fold of partners, and several others from his
small but expanding communal set located in a hidden canyon in Laguna.
He always had a big smile on his face and he always had chicks; he was a
very charming guy. He passed out joints rolled in banana papers, and I
loved smoking with him. It was his way with everyone he met. He would
trade his tickets to see Cream to the Brothers and their chicks for
drugs so they could go backstage, get close to Eric Clapton, and get
high with the band. The Brotherhood would throw more money around,
pushing their way into Pinnacle shows. Drugs were really becoming a
powerful commodity. We had the stuff they wanted, a touch with fame. The
subterranean action swirling around Jimmy the Clerk's set in Laguna was,
unfortunately for them, becoming rather notorious.
At The Kingsley Studio
After some time all became difficult for me to have drugs and druggies
around, so I asked my partners to keep all of that at their place. That,
I think, created the separation of our philosophies. They were at their
place, the Pinnacle House I had set them up in, with the party going on,
while I was settled with my girlfriend from art school in my studio. I
did not want to know what they were doing over there, becasue I believed
the Brotherhood had brought their party to Pinnacle and started funding
the operations. As the summer unfolded I saw less and less of my
partners and their associates regarding the original happening idea.
They had their business now, but I had committed to helping put on the
American Music Show, for which someone had put up 90,000 dollars in
advances to managers to get the bands. The American Music Show was
scheduled to happen at the Rose Bowl on September 15, 1967, with Joan
Baez, the Everly Brothers, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the
Byrds, Country Joe and the Fish, Jr. Wells with Buddy Guy, The Mothers
Of Invention, Buffy St. Maries and Wilson Pickett. The huge lineup
seemed to guarantee a huge crowd.
The big day came but the big crowd didn’t, and the whole year’s worth of
work folded into a bankruptcy. We all disbanded, and I saw my dream of
Pinnacle ending. Soon the county bureaucrats were at the door of the
Kingsley Studio, saying they would be buying the building to knock it
down for a new apartment complex in the new Wilshire Center being
created for corporate office spaces and residences. The Brotherhood
broke up into pieces and was chased by the FBI and CIA. Tim Leary was
busted by the feds. The end was coming.
So in late 1968 I folded up my tent and moved out of the Kingsley Studio
as detectives were in the backyard with one of my roommates, questioning
him about drugs on the premises. I sold my car and Hasselblad Camera and
left for London with Brown Meggs’s blessing to meet Derek Taylor at the
Apple Corporation, the Beatles’ business venture. The old Los Angeles
art scene was over, and Chouinard would close in 1969, a symbol of this
end.
The music scenes around the world in the ‘60s and ‘70s grew into an
industry that desired to be the cultural arbiters of everything. "Sex,
Drugs, and Rock ‘n' Roll” became a corporate PR slogan. The Rock ‘n’
Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland hosts lines of visitors daily who are
trying to find signs of their youth and connections to the songs and
images of rock. Mick Jagger became the image of rock, and “I Can’t Get
No Satisfaction” became our slogan. Keith Richards became the image for
all lead guitarists who soon felt the need to look emaciated and strung
out. I was shocked as I looked into the mirror in 1969 and saw that I
had changed into a rocker too.
That was my ironic relationship with two Brown's—one product for surf
and the other for rock. I traveled as an artist from the ocean dream to
the international world of rock ‘n’ roll.
(one of the silk-screen posters of 1964 that started all the poster sales interest then)
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(the World of Surf Art, Surf History and Surf Culture)
The great connection to
By 1968 the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band were poised to release their fourth album - but
their last for Reprise. Thus far, in terms of record sales at least, they had conspicuously
failed to set the world alight - or even the small corner they call Los Angeles. Yet in many ways
'Volume III - A Child's Guide To Good And Evil' (RS 6298) was the group's most extraordinary
achievement.
A newspaper piece of the time - the only contemporary record of Markley's words beyond his lyrics
and sleeve pronouncements - provides us with a tantalizing insight into the creative processes at
work within the group. After describing a rare live appearance by the band at a Teenage Fair in
Portland, Oregon - at which six girls apparently fainted - Bob was quoted as saying this about
'A Child's Guide':
"The lyrical content is so meaningful and gets in so deep that we are treading
the fine line of perfect taste. Donovan did it on his 'Sunshine Superman' album, Dylan did it on
'John Wesley Harding' and I hope that we did it here. What I try and do is take as much material
about a subject as I can, condense it to an exact point and hope to capture all the meaning that
maybe forty pages of material would have."
The article pointed to the album's closing track, 'Anniversary Of World War III', as the perfect
example of Bob's economy with words - three minutes of total silence. Whether one views the
comparisons with Dylan and Donovan as justified - or merely as evidence of Markley's delusions of
grandeur - the album was certainly the band's most complex offering to date. As its title
suggested, the work was a fusion of innocence and malice, the subject matter perfectly reflected
in John Van Hamersveld's striking cover art work.
If the 'butterfly mind' represented both the
transience of innocence and the psychedelic possibilities of a mind in free flight, its stark
black and white setting rendered the image distinctly sinister. Hamersveld, who began working as
an Art Director for Capitol Records in 1966, produced some of the most enduring images of the
age, including the poster for cult surf movie 'Endless Summer' and album covers like Jefferson
Airplane's 'Crown Of Creation' and the Stones' 'Exile On Main Street'. In 1967 he formed the
Pinnacle partnership and promoted gigs at the Shrine Auditorium by the likes of Jimi Hendrix,
Cream and the Velvet Underground.
John recalls his work on 'A Child's Guide': "Bob Markley wanted a photograph of the band on the
back so I took them up onto a hillside near Burbank and photographed them in colour with a
Hasselblad camera and a wide angle lens. For the front cover I used the face from a photograph of
Stevie, an artist friend who would pose nude for me. I combined my drawings and letterforms in
black and white to create a stark contrast in the record racks. Black and white was also an issue
in terms of dark and light karma. The butterfly's wings are a psychological symbol for reading in
to the mind, like an ink blot test by a psychologist, but as art. In this image, the head is
thinking of the butterfly image - freedom from the karma in the well of darkness." It was surely
one of the most powerful and iconic cover illustrations of its era.
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Drawing With Phil Becker
Surf Vehicles - 1952
© John Van Hamersveld
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