My Generation’s Collection: Collecting Concert Posters

The summer concert season is in high gear just now, but that highly polished, prepackaged, choreographed lip syncing doesn’t generally appeal to me.  Somehow, I just don’t think that in two or three decades, people will be meeting up and asking if anyone saw Clay Aiken in Cleveland in 2006!  I love to look through the concert posters from the 1960s and 70s in the database, wondering what it would have been like to be at Woodstock or to be at the Fillmore in 1968 for Big Brother and the Holding Company – with Santana AND Chicago!  Just do a keyword search for concert poster to see what I mean….

These concerts defined a generation and created a style of fonts and artwork that has become inextricably linked with the time period.  Commemorating an event is a great reason to collect concert posters, but these posters also have amazing and colorful art that stretched the capabilities of color printing!  Flying eyeballs, roaring lions, giant mushrooms – images based in fantasy and myth and pure imagination.  But, of course, my personal favorite is the Led Zeppelin avocado poster.  That would have matched our old fridge perfectly!