![]() ![]() And as art director, Arlene Owseichik was responsible for making nearly every single one of those posters happen from 1985 to 2019. They weren’t going to be advertisements anymore, they were going to be mementos given out at the end of concerts, stand-alone works of art. In the mid-’80s, Graham decided to take the posters in a different direction. The psychedelic posters designed to promote these shows were originally created just as advertisements - but they quickly became sought-after collectibles, written about in national magazines and reprinted for sale. In the ’60s, Bill Graham Presents made a name for themselves by booking the biggest musical acts of the counterculture. The walls are decorated with psychedelic concert posters and photographs, and a stack of record albums is on top of a bookshelf. German-born American businessman Bill Graham (1931–1991), rock concert producer and promoter, talks on the phone in his office at the Fillmore West music club, San Francisco, California, August 1969. Take it.” Working for Bill GrahamĪrlene Owseichik’s boss at Bill Graham Presents was Bill Graham itself, the larger-than-life concert promoter. Owseichik had come to San Francisco for the music, and now she was plugged into one of the most influential music scenes of the 20th century. They sat on the proposal for months,” she says. Seven years later, Owseichik proposed that Bill Graham Presents hire her to do the paste-ups in-house as their first-ever art director. They asked her if anyone there would want to work for them doing paste-ups. Owseichik picked it up, and the concert promotion company Bill Graham Presents was on the other end. One day, the phone rang while she was at work. Those were the hazards of the olden days of graphics,” she recalls. “I got pretty good with that X-Acto knife and actually stabbed myself a few times. She primarily made announcements for shows that went inside the SF Chronicle’s entertainment section. In a time before Photoshop, paste-ups were how you manually put images and photos together for printing, literally cutting with an X-acto knife and pasting layers onto a board like a collage. She got a job doing “paste-ups” for a hip design studio, Ampersand. Owseichik studied art in college and wanted to work in photography and graphic design. Owseichik designed posters for Bill Graham Presents for 30 years and produced nearly 2000 of the iconic concert posters. Arlene Owseichik, long-time art director at Bill Graham Presents, holds a self-portrait of herself from her early years in San Francisco at her home in Berkeley on Sept. One of the first things she did when she got here was ride past the Airplane House on Fulton Street. We just, kind of on a whim and a prayer, loaded up the car and came west,” she says. Going to CaliforniaĪrlene Owseichik came to San Francisco in 1976 for one reason: “I was very aware that the Jefferson Airplane were from San Francisco. Which got him wondering: the posters of the Fillmore are so legendary, who is the person behind them?įrom 1985 to 2019, the answer was Arlene Owseichik. “They’re as much of the concert as the concert.” ![]() ![]() “The posters are artifacts, pieces of time,” he says. (Photo By Lea Suzuki/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images) The Grateful Dead played at the Fillmore more than 50 times. Posters from the Fillmore hang on a wall next to a large portrait of Jerry Garcia. Bay Curious listener Ben Kaiser has his poster of the Psychedelic Furs at the Fillmore framed. They’re a highly anticipated parting gift given out at the biggest shows. These days, when you see a show at the Fillmore, you might be lucky enough to get your very own poster for free. It’s the closest you can get to stepping into a musical time machine. What do you wonder about the Bay Area, its culture or people that you want KQED to investigate?Īll of this soul and history is on display inside the Fillmore’s infamous Poster Room, a cavernous room whose walls are filled floor to ceiling with posters from decades of the venue’s shows. “I always think of Jimi Hendrix being in that building and making his way down the narrow staircase behind the dressing room onto the stage.” “I think every person that’s entered into that building that’s seen a show leaves a part of themselves there,” she says. According to Arlene Owseichik, San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium has a “palpable soul.” It was the center of the countercultural music universe for a time, and bands like Santana, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company launched their careers on its stage. ![]()
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