General Fillmore Information

These posters were very cheaply made; especially the earlier ones.  Bill Graham never envisioned that they would someday become collector items.  They were intended to be posted on walls, telephone poles, etc. to advertise that week’s performing artists only to be torn down, discarded and replaced next week with a new poster for the next show.  No one gave thought to such subjects as handling creases, tack holes, etc.  There was little attention made to quality of ink and paper.  Many times the printer would run out of paper and would simply use whatever they had in stock. 

Here are Wes Wilson’s details of the story as told to Collector’s Weekly:

Normally I had to design and deliver printed posters in a matter of a week, or even days. Within three or four days of getting the billing, I had to have the poster at the shop getting printed. For producers like Chet Helms and Bill Graham, that was usually as quick as they could get these bands scheduled. It was just tough to schedule two or three bands way in advance for some reason. I don’t know why, but that was just the way it was. Once in a while, I remember Bill would be real happy if he had over a week in advance and would perhaps have photos for a poster. That was a big deal. It was a pretty fast-moving business in those early days.

As such, maintaining them in ‘pristine’ condition is an on-going challenge. 

I have gone through great lengths to insure that these posters have been maintained using only archival materials.  I have preserved them on acid free paper mounted by protective corners stored flat in binders.  On most of the photos of posters that I will be offering you may notice these corner protectors. 

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Randy Tuten Bio

 In 1966,Tuten made a habit of hitchhiking back and forth between Los Angeles and San Francisco, soaking up everything that was happening musically at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium. Dropping acid became a highway ritual. "I literally road tested the stuff after I picked it up in San Francisco. Hitchhiking back to LA in the middle of the night, I'd encounter all kinds of animals - bears, owls, wolverines, cows. At the time I wasn't sure if they were real or imagined. All I know is they were definitely amongst me." During these visits to San Francisco, Randy remembers catching a glimpse of Mouse and Kelley's posters. "That's what brought me to San Francisco for keeps." He reveals that it was the posters of Mouse, Kelley and Griffin that fueled his imagination and influenced his approach. "I liked Mouse and Kelley's posters because they were so friendly to the eye. But Griffin influenced me the most. Griffin still influences me."

 Randy made the move to San Francisco in January 1967, making ends meet by freelancing as a graphic designer, until he got his break with Bill Graham in 1969. After months of rejections from the Avalon's Chet Helms, in early 1969 he brought his portfolio the Fillmore's Bill Graham, who hired him immediately, eventually even installing Tuten as his promotional company's first in-house artist, a job he held for a decade.

 When he moved back to San Francisco, Randy made the acquaintance of graphic illustrator Daddy Bread (Bill Bostedt). Tuten and Bread became close friends, and they collaborated on many projects, including some of the most famous rock posters, until Daddy Bread's death in 1998.

 Tuten remained in San Francisco until 1980 when, suffering from burnout, he moved up to Lake County. He continued to produce for Bill Graham and others until he was struck by a debilitating stroke in early 1984.  He produced no work in 1984 and 1985 while he struggled to recover.  While he was in the hospital, Rick Griffin visited him and invited him to come down to work with him in Santa Ana once he had sufficiently recovered. Randy took him up on his offer and, starting in 1986, he made multiple trips to Santa Ana to work with Griffin. In 1989, Tuten returned to the Bay area where he currently resides.

 Randy related that unlike many of the poster artists before and after him, he made no conscious effort to translate emotional depth or personal or political conviction. His posters owe more to his skill as a draftsman and to his regard for the commercial art formats of American advertising. "There really isn't any heavy meaning in my posters. What I did graphically was a combination of what I liked and what fit." Tuten was interested in trains, ships, classic automobiles and planes, and ultimately what fit was an eclectic mix of graphic imagery, photographs and lettering. Although Tuten's posters show considerable variety, his formats and lettering style generally reflect the influence of early 20th century product labels. Randy’s own taste, sense of proportion, and craftsmanship, along with the added influences of Mouse, Kelley, and Griffin, imparted new vigor to these conventional classical forms and produced a distinctive personal style.

 Randy Tuten is the only poster artist to span 5 decades designing for The Fillmore. He remains a prolific poster designer today, and still a regular producer for Bill Graham Presents and other promoters. Randy’s work has long been recognized for its seminal influence in the art of modern rock and roll, and has been featured in major museum exhibits as well as in several important book-length retrospective studies of rock art. Though his work shows the influences of the 60's era, it has also evolved in recent years into an orderly and highly varied style of ornamental commercial art, often reminiscent of the advertising used in the deco era. The general consensus in the rock art community is that he has continued to grow as an artist and may be doing his best, most creative and exciting work at the present time. His posters are now a part of rock history, and for both curator and collector, will always be among the most desirable and telling artifacts of West Coast rock aesthetics.

 Andrew Olson

Reader Weekly

In the mid-1960s making concert posters in San Francisco was similar to Paris a century before when Toulouse Lautrec did posters for The Moulin Rouge.  It was a spiritual marriage of music, artists, rebellion, and revolution that made advertising images more important than just rock show ads.

“I’m 64 years old,” Randy Tuten said.  “So I guess I started when I was 25 or something like that. But the other artists were young when they started too… Alton Kelley, Stanley Mouse and Rick Griffin; none of us ever thought we would be doing this more than a year or two.  So it wasn’t a big thing, it was like little episodes because it didn’t pay much.”

Randy Tuten has become one of the top concert poster artists in the business.  He also has created them longer than most of his contemporaries, despite starting a bit late. 

 “I was born in San Francisco, but I went to high school in Los Angeles, in Hollywood,” Tuten said.  “I used to travel up to San Francisco in 1966 and 67’ just to hang out with some friends and go see some music.  I started seeing the ‘Big 5’ (of poster artists at the time) Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso, and Wes Wilson’s posters around town. I said to myself that these are great, but I didn’t have a desire to do them at that time as long as they were good.  Then, as soon as some other people started doing ones that were sub-quality, I went, ‘Well, if they can do these then I can certainly do posters.’  So that is how I started.  I started that part of my life in 1967, and then I went to see Chet Helms at the Avalon Ballroom. I chose them because Mouse, Rick, Kelley, and everybody I knew were doing posters more there than for Bill Graham at the Fillmore.  Wes Wilson was doing posters for Bill, however, and (eventually) I got sick of being rejected for a year from the art department at Chet’s Family Dog.”

 After initially wanting to work for Helm’s Family Dog and being rejected for a year Tuten decided to bring his portfolio to Graham.  In the beginning only Wes Wilson made the Fillmore’s concert posters, but that changed after a fallout over contracts and money.  The moment that Graham saw Tuten’s work he commissioned 4 concert posters.  He liked that Tuten’s art was not as much psychedelic, but that it was more like fancy advertisement posters.

 “The Family Dog were knocking them off, but they were a bunch of hippies,” Tuten said.  “I was really never a hippie, but I liked the hippies; I had nothing against them.  I liked them because they didn’t want to fight all the time.  When you were growing up in high school in the early 60s, like 1959 to 1964, you had to defend yourself a lot in school.”

 Was it like “Rebel Without a Cause?” 

 “Kind of, yeah,” Tuten said.  “And so I liked the hippies because they didn’t want to fight.  And that was fine with me.”

 The first concert poster that Tuten did for Graham’s Fillmore was of a ship bursting through a red door.  It featured The Grateful Dead, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Spirit for a show on January 2-4 of 1969.  His next poster was for Led Zeppelin, which began a career of many Zep posters to follow. 

 “The first concert poster I did for Led Zeppelin had a car on it,” Tuten said.  “It also featured County Joe & The Fish.  The next poster was an update of an avocado art piece I did in college, so I didn’t start to do the blimps until after it was all said and done.  Funny thing is that Rick Griffin always got Jimi Hendrix posters and I always got Led Zeppelin posters.  It wasn’t planned that way, it just worked out.  I don’t know about Victor Moscoso and The Doors, but it was just a random selection of who did the posters for what band.  We had no fiendish plot behind it all.”

Fillmore posters begin with a notation of “BG”, standing for Bill Graham, and then the number following stands for the show in the series. The numerical system begins with Graham’s first concert in 1966 at the Fillmore as BG1 and ends with BG289 when the Fillmore closed in 1972.  There are also more modern BGP posters, but those are less valuable and more numerous.

It wasn’t until later that Tuten decided to use a blimp in his posters. BG199 (11/6-9/1969), featuring a blimp to advertise an upcoming Led Zeppelin show, is one of the more famous Fillmore posters.  It’s also one of the top posters sought after by collectors.

“Led Zeppelin always used a blimp,” Tuten said.  “I was tired of using a blimp all the time, so I put the blimp in the hanger on BG199 rather than just having a blimp in the sky.  It was like when a zeppelin is on the ground or Led Zeppelin was on the ground and it was repair time.”

That same poster has a small blurb about an upcoming Rolling Stones show that Graham was promoting at the bottom.  Graham saw an opportunity to band the groups together to advertise both upcoming shows. 

“Bill just said let’s put a little notice at the bottom because Led Zeppelin was a big English act and the Rolling Stones are a big English act, so we thought it would do some advertising for that at that point.”

The things that really stand out about the BG199 poster are the color choices and Tuten’s trademark lettering style.  The blue and red offset give a great visual effect to the poster.  I asked him if that was done on purpose.

“It was supposed to be that blue and red kind of go together like a little visual sync,” Tuten said.  “From blue to red… But I didn’t use enough red. I was more interested in the bold lettering with bolts like an airplane.  There were only 3000 of those printed, so that’s not very many really.  That why BG222 and The Doors one for BG219, and even ‘the Avocado’ Led Zeppelin (BG170) are hard to find nowadays.  I only have two or three left of the Led Zeppelin one.”             

Another very famous Tuten poster that was done a bit later has Janis Joplin in a jukebox and very drippy lettering.  No one was pleased with that poster initially, Tuten said.

“Jim Marshall (famous rock photographer) did the picture, but both Bill Graham and Jim Marshall called me up early in the morning and were yelling about how they didn’t like the way the poster had turned out.  Bill didn’t like the lettering because he said you couldn’t read it, and then Jim didn’t like it because I didn’t use his picture big enough.  After it was all said and done they were both fine with it.  It was just an in-the-moment thing.”

With The Doors being from Los Angeles I asked Tuten if he had some stories about attending their shows.

“When I was in L.A. in the early-mid 60s I used to go see The Doors all the time when there were like 20 people in the audience,” Tuten said.  “I would take something and I‘d go see The Doors and I’d lay down on the floor... 20 feet away from the stage…  and they were terrific.  Now I wasn’t a trendsetter and didn’t know about that.  I just thought that this was really neat and I actually love The Doors very much.  I still listen to them to this day.  They were very unique, not even a band really, it was poetry set to music. The three instruments with the piano, drums and guitar were not your normal set ups.”