DETAIL OF BOB SCHNEPF, ‘FLASH’
Loving the
Summer
of
Love:
Salem museum explores rock concert posters and
counterculture fashion of the 1960s by Bob Keefer
I
t was 50 years ago today — well, more or less —
that my generation found itself.
Rock ’n’ roll turned grand and pretentious that
year, 1967, when Sgt. Pepper taught the band to
play with a real live symphony orchestra. Here in
Eugene, KLCC went on the air for the first time,
and the Oregon Country Fair was two years away
from being born.
Across the ocean, Vietnam was purring along like a
macabre lawnmower.
That was the year of the Summer of Love.
I was 15. My friends and I sat on the beach in Los Angeles
smoking dope and reading Camus and Lenny Bruce and
predicting the imminent legalization of marijuana. (It was
inevitable, we knew, because pretty soon all the judges and
legislators would be potheads, too. It just took a bit longer
than we expected.)
Cut forward half a century. I’ve been married for
decades and have a grown son. I’m on Social Security and
Medicare. And even as an editor at Eugene’s alt-weekly
I’m definitely part of what we always used to deride as the
Establishment.
And so now I’m walking into a building in Salem to see
a chapter of my youth “pinned and wriggling on the wall,”
as T.S. Eliot once put it, in an exhibition that’s just opened
at Willamette University’s Hallie Ford Museum of Art.
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June 8, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com
Behind the Beyond: Psychedelic Posters and Fashion
in San Francisco, 1966−71 was the brainchild of Oregon
artist Gary Westford, a trim gray-haired fellow who greets
me in the museum lobby with a rush of enthusiasm.
Westford is a painter recently retired from teaching studio
art and art history at Linn-Benton Community College. As
a 20-something in 1968, he lived just a few blocks from
Haight-Ashbury.
“I came a little late to the scene in terms of the Summer of
Love,” he says. “But there was still a palpable sense in the air
that all things were possible. Something big was happening.”
Much of that “something” was in the form of rock
’n’ roll concerts being staged by such bands as Jefferson
Airplane, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Grateful Dead
and Big Brother and the Holding Company. The streets
near Westford’s apartment were alive with bright, colorful
posters advertising the concerts.
He started collecting them, sometimes pulling them
down off telephone poles and sometimes buying them for
a dollar or two at concert halls. Then, like so many young
people did in those days, he thumbtacked them to the walls
of his apartment.
At least one poster in the Hallie Ford exhibition,
now properly framed to museum standards, still shows
Westford’s thumbtack holes. Along the way he picked up
posters from a new generation of artists, including Victor
Moscoso, Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Rick
Griffin, David Singer and Bonnie MacLean, all represented
in the exhibit.
Looking back now at the imagery in those posters, which
were commissioned and published by concert promoters
such as Bill Graham, I see traces of the adolescent car-
and surf-culture doodling that all my grade school friends
and I used to do in class to infuriate our teachers: winged
eyeballs, surfboards, snarling monsters, smoking tires on
drag racers.
It’s good to realize, 50 years later, that a few kids who
were drawing those things made a career out of it.
Westford understood, even in his youth, that these
posters were more than mere decoration.
“When I was 22 and these posters were on my wall,
yes, they were emblematic of our era,” he says. “But I also
recognized early on that they were exciting works of art. I
thought, ‘Someday I’ll do something with these posters.’”
Over the years, Westford has collected hundreds of
examples from the psychedelic era of poster art, which
centered on San Francisco and a small handful of music
promoters and graphic artists. The exhibit he’s curated at
the Hallie Ford, with the help of museum director John
Olbrantz, makes a strong case that these works are in fact
art and not mere ephemera. It contains just more than 100
posters, photographs and other items.