I Revolutionise Rock Poster Art!

In 1966, this hung in my dormitory room!

I wasn’t gigantic on the San Francisco rock boom. Indeed, I detested most of it. I thought most of the bands were ugly, and nearly all of the music self-indulgent. I don’t think there’s ever been another time when so many mediocre instrumentalists felt called upon to display their lack of talent for what seemed hours on end. I found Janis shrill and imitative. I found the Dead numbingly boring. Jefferson Airplane had a couple of nice tracks, but their fervent smugness put me off. 

But I loved Wes Wilson’s art nouveau-inspired posters for the Fillmore Auditorium as much as I hated most of the San Francisco bands whose names you might have been able to make out on them if you figured out Wes’s ultra-psychedelic lettering, inspired by that of the Austrian poster artist Alfred Roller. And boy, did I figure it out, to the point of being able to do a very credible imitation of it. 

Armed with my ability to imitate Wes Wilson’s lettering style and a great deal of bravado born out of stupidity, I ascertained the address at which Bill Graham, the city’s pre-eminent concert promoter, had his office, and, with a stack of the posters I’d drawn in my little dormitory room at UCLA while I should have been studying, and with a carload of bravado, headed for it. 

I hadn’t bothered phoning ahead to request an appointment. I was sort of a hippie — sometimes I attended class barefoot, and in a little necklace I’d made myself — and surely Bill had had much experience dealing with such free spirits as I. It hadn’t even occurred to me that Bill wouldn’t both see me and invite me to replace my idol as his in-house poster artist. 

I presented myself at his office. His young male assistant asked if I had an appointment. I rolled my eyes. How deeply uncool. The assistant did some eye-rolling of his own and asked me to wait a minute. He disappeared into an inner office, from which a window-rattling rumble of umbrage soon emanated. 

Himself stormed out to where I was waiting, breathing fire, glowering to melt the walls. He saw that I was innocence itself! — that is, a little twerp — and, instead of taking a large bite out of me, sighed, “You can have three minutes now, or longer than that later in the week if you make a fucking appointment and come back.” I gulped, and said I’d take the three minutes, as I was hitch-hiking back to Los Angeles later in the day.

He looked at my stuff, which I realise now wasn’t very good, except for the lettering. He was much kinder than I deserved. He studied my work with care, and complimented me on it.

In the end, though, I didn’t design a single Fillmore poster. Instead, my buddy Bill hired a woman I understood to be his girlfriend. Maybe he'd misplaced my phone number. Wes Wilson was heard from again 15 years into the 21st century, when a typeface named in his honour suddenly appeared. It misses the point that Wilson’s lettering was designed for curves, and doesn’t look gorgeous when all the characters are the same size. I went on to glorious careers as a polemicist, novelist, musician, actor, graphic designer, and humourist, knowing barely an hour’s frustration. 

Shot Down, and Hard!

After my little girl was born, and we moved up to the northern California wine country so she wouldn’t have to grow up breathing Los Angeles air pollution, cruel circumstances reduced me to looking for a soul-bruising, non-writing, non-singing, non-dancing day job. I got one, processing words at San Francisco’s biggest (and in many ways ghastliest) law firm, which was primarily in the business of defending a big oil company from environmental suits. 

I wasn’t good at the job, hated the idea of becoming good at the job, and got banished from posting after posting. (The firm had offices on multiple floors in three different Financial Center skyscrapers.) At one posting, I worked with two remarkable women, Kathleen McN— and Karen Nameforgotten. Both of them worked around 90 hours a week, 50 of them overtime, for which they were paid time and a half up to the point at which they started being paid double time. 

Consequently, they were earning around $70K a year (in mid-‘80s dollars), which they delighted in pointing out was more than the young associate attorneys — semiliterate and smug, every one of ‘em! — got. They spent a lot of money on stylish attire which they didn’t have time to wear anywhere but the office. I thought there must be something terribly wrong with them. Were they not American materialism made flesh? They thought there was something terribly wrong with me because I wasn’t good at word processing and had promised myself not to get better.

My first marriage was falling apart around the time I worked with them, and I’d begun looking around for new gals to woo. Karen Nameforgotten wasn’t attractive, and Kathleen and I seemed to be allergic to each other, as in I couldn’t stand her.

Or maybe I’d been mistaken. After I got banished from the group they served, and sent elsewhere, she was always the soul of cordiality when filling in for someone with whom I’d been partnered. I dared imagine she had come to find me a bit of all right, and phoned her on a particularly lonely Friday evening to ask if she might like to come over after work (assuming she wasn’t going to work straight through to Monday morning, and earn herself some megabucks) and help me drink a bottle of pinot grigio I hadn’t actually bought yet, but she didn’t need to know that. 

Her response — disdainful incredulity — reminded me of that of a pair of cutie-pies my friend Chief and I had approached on Santa Monica Beach one sunny summer afternoon around a quarter-century earlier. Said the cutie-pies, on getting a good look at us, scrawny and snide, shy and cynical, twerps. “Why don’t you two go find someone your own age?” It was entirely  possible that we didn’t look our combined 32 years. 

Kathleen McN— knew full well I wasn’t too young for her — I was forever telling her and Karen that I had no intention of turning 40 as an employee of Perfidy, Malfeasance & Sutro, as I remember the firm being called — but that made her no thirstier. It might have been she was planning to see the bit-of-rough taxi driver she was forever rhapsodizing about when not rhapsodizing about the small fortune she’d earned the previous week. 

It dawned on me that Kathleen’s cordiality had been born of the very slight danger that I might speak ill of her at my new postings, and thus make it impossible for her to earn, earn, earn! in every office of the firm’s many floors.

I wound up turning not just 40 at PM&S, but also 41, and wooing and winning the koala keeper from the San Francisco Zoo, who neither made $70K/year nor dressed terribly stylishly, but who looked like Michelle Pfeiffer, and found me sufficiently amusing to share my life for the next 11 years.