a continuation of the local posters from the mid-1960s and earlier.40 In January 1966, Bill Graham began organizing rock music dance concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, and he hired artists to create posters advertising the events. The posters spread throughout the Bay Area and attracted international attention. The posters, by a variety of artists, suggested both the psychedelic subculture centered in San Francisco and the rock music that was their direct subject. Walter Medeiros, a historian of the posters, describes them as handmade and hand-lettered, with rich decorative patterns, “abstract, undulating, stretched or warped,” with bright colors in unusual combinations, and with images that are “sensual, bizarre or beautiful, philosophical or metaphysical.”41 The handmade posters were then commercially printed in large numbers and distributed throughout the Bay Area, a congenial place for the circulation and viewing of posters. Graham later recalled,
I was possessed. I’d go out there all speeded up on my scooter with my Army pack. . . . I would stick a big pile of posters in there with my industrial stapler. And in my coat, my fiberglass 3M tape, so I could put posters up on steel or concrete, not just wood. I would leave the city at four in the morning and go up to Berkeley . . . [and] when people woke up in the morning, full. Every wall. I knew then that the posters were hitting home, because as I went back down the block, I would see people taking them off the wall for their own.42
The dance concert posters and the Berkeley peace posters also shared a common space that was, it turned out, suited to the display of posters and directed to a public familiar with street poster art. In a 1974 article, Marc Treib described how the mild weather in Berkeley drew people onto the streets, especially in the Telegraph Avenue area just south of campus at Sproul Plaza. After earlier demonstrators had broken storefront windows along Telegraph, owners replaced glass with plywood or with windowless walls, and these surfaces became prime locations for posters, especially “cheap photocopy and offset lithography . . . in near standard format. The machines limit the message size to 8” by 11” or 8½” by 14”, usually one color.” The posters were stapled or taped to telephone poles, walls, and kiosks, becoming a “town crier, the information source.”43 Alton Kelley, one of the dance concert poster artists, observed later that Berkeley and San Francisco were ideal physical settings for the concert posters, a setting that was much the same in May 1970 when the Berkeley peace posters were in circulation. Kelley recalls, “The posters wouldn’t have worked in any other city. New York’s too big, and nobody walks in L.A. So what you had in San Francisco was the right combination of people walking around the streets and timing. Everything that was happening in the culture came together—at least for a while.”44
The dance concert posters were not “political” in the same way that the peace posters were. In his dissertation on the psychedelic rock concert posters, Kevin Moist nevertheless identifies what he calls a “form of subcultural visionary rhetoric.” Moist writes that in Haight-Ashbury, the core of the psychedelic culture, “during the mid-to-late 1960s we find nary a protest nor political demonstration of any kind.”45 Moist argues that the Haight subculture did have a politics, but that hippie politics refused what it and Moist characterized as the old-fashioned, polarized, either-or of the New Left taking on the Establishment. Moist elaborates on the cultural meanings and the politics of “dropping out” as a rejection of the futility and violence of the old order. To be sure, the New Left had its share of ambitious posturing and sectarian struggle, although Moist’s portrayal of these traits is too sweeping. In any case, Moist’s observation about the dropout culture as an alternative prompts the question of whether the Berkeley peace posters themselves share the doctrinaire rigidity Moist seems to attribute to the New Left. The psychedelic posters were available to the artists and viewers of the Berkeley peace posters as examples of the power of poster art. It may even be that, besides enriching the storehouse of poster styles, the dropout culture’s suspicion of sectarian leftism tempered and provided a more complex context for the peace demonstrations of May 1970.
Matthieu Poirer argues that the Paris uprisings of May 1968 were directly linked to the international and the specifically French psychedelic avant-garde of the 1960s. Poirer draws attention to the immersive, participatory sensory disruptions of French psychedelic art that stood in contrast to the countercultural utopian dropout strain noted by Moist. May 1968, argues Poirer, drew inspiration from the ambition of psychedelic art to change “consciousness, disturbing sensorial stability.” It also drew inspiration from the development of the “happening,” an immersive artistic and theatrical experience that directly engaged the audience. Poirer observes that “it is no coincidence that the [French] minister of education at the time, Edgar Faure, likened May 1968 to a large ‘happening.’” In French psychedelic visual art, Poirer continues, “these intransitive works appeal directly to the senses and are subsequently stripped of any cross-reference to external style other than their own phenomenological reality.”46 In the case of the Atelier Populaire, it seems evident in retrospect that the ambition of the poster artists to induce something like the direct, pure, social, and perceptual disruption of the happening and of psychedelic art was paired simultaneously with traditional poster-art appeals to militant political dissent. Such a pairing may have contributed to their peculiar power and to the unlikelihood that they would stimulate lasting social and political change. Writing of the British psychedelic scene in the 1960s, Andrew Wilson argues that “1968 marked the moment in which a belief that social and political change might happen naturally was exchanged for an understanding that such change had to be organized for, willed and made to happen. . . . However necessary thought, feeling, and imagination might be for such a revolution to succeed, the events of May 1968 exposed the split between those voyagers of inner space who believed that imagination was enough, and activists who understood that social and political struggle entailed a return to more orthodox—even Marxian—forms of analysis, conflict and action.”47
Walter Medeiros, in contrast to Moist on the San Francisco scene and Wilson on the British 1960s, describes not so much a sharp break between the political and the psychedelic but a highly complex mix of shifting activities and people, many of whom crossed the lines of art, music, and politics. It seems likely that attendees at dance concerts and political rallies, though sometimes entirely separate populations, were often the same people. Rather than viewing the political and the cultural as two separate strains, and without simply collapsing the whole Bay Area experience of the 1960s into an amorphous mix, Medeiros sees common strains of impatience with politics and culture stimulating a variety of sometimes divergent, sometimes interactive political and cultural events.48 Underground newspapers in the Bay Area liberally mixed sex, drugs, rock and roll, radical cultural movements, massage parlors, Black Panthers, and antiwar activism. A cover drawing in the Berkeley Barb for June 12–18, 1970, is typical: a pistol-packing seminude woman; a naked cop with Black Panther tattoo carrying a “Now” placard with raised black and white fists; a Capitol dome toppling in an explosion of smoke and psychedelic stars; a street fighter raising his fist; and the slogan “Only a United People’s Liberation Front Can Win—The Pigs Are Everywhere.”
It seems clear that there were at least some direct connections among the Berkeley peace posters of May 1970 and the poster art of the Atelier Populaire, the politics of Paris in May 1968, and the worldwide uprisings in 1968. But it seems unlikely that May 1968 was a dominating force in the rhetorical consciousness of the United States in the late 1960s or in May 1970. The war in Vietnam and turmoil over civil rights and racial justice, together with assassinations, riots, and political instability, consumed the country’s attention. The assassination of John Kennedy in 1963 created grief and uncertainty. Historian James T. Patterson identifies 1965, “the year of military escalation, of Watts, of the splintering of the civil rights movement, and of mounting cultural and political change and polarization, . . . as the time when America’s social cohesion began to unravel and when the turbulent phenomenon that would be called ‘the Sixties’ broke into view” and “lasted into the early 1970s.”49 Every year seemed to bring new disturbances, with even the great progressive changes in civil rights—voting rights, public accommodations—bringing their own backlashes. In 1967, riots spread through the inner city of Detroit. That fall saw large demonstrations in Washington
