Greeley 1989: Not Quite San Francisco

A City for the 80s

Back in the 1980s, there was a sign as you entered Greeley, Colorado proclaiming it to be “A City for the 80s.” The joke among many people I knew was that it was a city for the 1880s, given that since the time of its founding the politics and views of many of the long-time citizens seemed to have been frozen in time. At the beginning of the first Gulf War in 1991, there was actually a pro-war march. When I went to protest CIA recruiting with my five hippie roommates, we were not just the only ones to show up, we were mocked in the campus newspaper to boot.

Greeley is home to one of the largest slaughterhouses in the beef industry, had (and to a great extent still has) a large farming and ranching community, and has earned a deserved reputation for its foul-smelling air, thanks in part to the arrival of a quarter-million hogs in the late 1980s. The biggest event is the annual Greeley Stampede: three days of rodeo, barbeque and fireworks that occur around the 4^th of July.

The University of Northern Colorado was once exclusively a teachers’ college. But since the 1970s it has also been home to one of the more renowned jazz education schools in the country, which attracted a variety of musicians who perform at an annual jazz festival. Still, it was by and large a very sleepy town where little of note occurred in the arts or music unless you made it happen. In this unlikely setting, there was actually a very small group of artists, writers and musicians honing their crafts. As part of the minimal "counter-culture" that existed in Greeley at the time, several of my closest friends and I longed to be part of another era—the 1960s—and our tastes in music, clothes and the influences behind our aesthetics reflected that longing. We were strangers in a strange land: our long hair, tie-dye shirts and idealistic leftist politics in the era of Reagan and Bush Sr. were far from the norm.

The Posters

I did my first poster in February of 1989 promoting a coffee house gig for one of my roommates and a friend of his who played classic rock songs on acoustic guitars. Making the poster was a sort of epiphany for me and was the first art I had done in many years. Here was a medium that in many ways epitomized everything that my anachronistic ideals loved and longed for. My main inspiration was the look of the San Francisco psychedelic posters.

There are a number of elements in this very first poster that have remained a part of the look I pursue: the flowers, the flowing shapes, the strong presence of eyes, the hidden faces, the patterns to fill shapes and give different values and textures. The stippling and different types of cross-hatching (I would often even hide words and names, usually my own or some woman’s, in the squiggly lines that helped give the piece texture) were a necessity in the medium, as the finished drawing was simply black printed on neon colored paper.

This poster, like all of the posters in this group, was first sketched out in pencil with a light hard lead (usually a 2H) and then traced over in pen, usually a rapidograph-type drafting pen. The rapidographs, with their different size points, allowed for a variety of lines that helped shape the textures and patterns on the paper, creating different outlines to accentuate shapes and making lettering stand out. Later on, I abandoned the rapidographs because of their tendency to clog or leak at inopportune moments—more than one poster was ruined because of this problem—and switched to Micron Pigmas which are almost as good and less problematic.

There were 250 copies made of this first poster on a variety of colored papers: bright yellow, bright orange, neon lime green and super hot pink. Since working in color was not an option, this was the closest I could get to the vintage San Francisco look I was hoping to achieve. We put them up all over campus (the only place where we thought it appropriate to advertise) and within a few days they were all gone. Though I do know of a few that ended up on people's walls, most were probably taken down by "the authorities" at the University. Their existence did give me the exposure I needed to end up doing more work for a popular bar band in Greeley called Free Beer.

With the Free Beer posters I had my first real concern for legibility and the actual function of the poster. Like some of the imagery that has stuck with me and still appears in some of my contemporary poster work, the “font” for the second Free Beer poster is one that I still use. This image is still one of my favorites for its bizarre oneiric and druggy quality. The third and final Free Beer poster was the first which I can say actually attempts to integrate all of the elements in the design and incorporate the art nouveau elements that were so important to some of the finest of the San Francisco artists, particularly Stanley Mouse. This was the closest I ever got to having a “real poster” at the time. The posters themselves reflected the music in only the vaguest sense: the band did play some Grateful Dead and other 1960’s songs, but the look that I was putting forth was the furthest thing from hip one could come up with in 1989.

The Insomniacs

A few months later, in the summer of 1990, I began working for a band called The Insomniacs. I had seen their name on flyers around town and thought their name offered me the greatest amount of possibilities. I could straddle the world of dreams, hallucinations, and nightmares in the imagery simply by having a reference to the name. Though the first poster was not directly informed by any particular 60s artist, I was aspiring to create imagery that could be almost as strange as surrealists like De Chirico or the more out-there of the San Francisco artists like Lee Conklin or Bob Fried. It was not something I kept up for several reasons, not the least of which was the constraints of the 8 1/2 x 11 “canvas.” Also, I was not yet skillful enough to execute the grand surrealistic images I imagined and make them aesthetically viable in that space. Nonetheless, the liminal point of experience that I associated with the state
of insomnia still gave me a great amount of freedom to incorporate whatever images I wanted. Instead, I was inspired by art from different parts of the world: Japanese, Indian and Mayan. Later on, I used the Mayan imagery for another band I worked for, Water.

To the source, and the source of the source

Late in 1989, Late in 1989, I found the source of inspiration that would to some degree or another fuel my inspiration to this day: Paul Grushkin’s book, The Art of Rock. The book collected an enormous amount of the posters from the psychedelic era that I had longed to see and study so I could incorporate their aesthetics. At long last, I had in front of me the work of all the artists I have already mentioned and many others, notably Victor Moscoso, whose use of color practically defined what a psychedelic color scheme is. It would also make me even more aware of the sources they were drawing from, most importantly the Art Nouveau of Alphonse Mucha’s posters. With that realization, I decided to go directly to the original source, the art nouveau, for inspiration. Mucha’s women, borders and beautifully precise lines were captivating and began to permeate my work, much like the San Francisco artists in the 60’s reworked classic images for their own posters. Stanley Mouse in particular used Mucha’s Job Cigarette Papers ad and turned it into a hippie art icon for one of his Fillmore posters in 1967. I did something similar with one of Mucha’s lesser known images for an Insomniacs poster, with an Aubrey Beardsley image.

Mucha, of course, was not the only influence. Klimt and other art nouveau artists based in Vienna also presented looks that had not been utilized during the psychedelic era, but that I was attempting to use in that vein. The recurrent use of “gypsy-like” women and the yawning moon icon created a look that was identifiable in each Insomniacs poster. As I was attempting to move away from this look and establish a new look for the band, they broke up.

After that, I continued to do work for other bands. The aesthetic guidelines were consciously different. The Mayan influence re-emerged in work I did for Water, which was also an attempt to get shades of grey involved directly by using 6B pencil to cover certain areas. Though the results were less than ideal, it did offer some options which I was able to perfect in other posters.

The limitations of the medium (black on colored paper) are no longer a concern, but the same techniques still give the new work a quality that has characterized all my work since i got started in 1989.

Above: Several techniques used to achieve textures and grey tones in these posters.

Javier González has an MA in Jazz History from Rutgers-Newark. He has played in United Dope Front, The Members, The Boogaloo Communicators, and Myndflower. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado–Boulder. His current poster work can be seen at: posterscene.com.