Radical Trips: Exploring the Political Dimension and Context of the 1960s Psychedelic

Poster
Author(s): Scott B. Montgomery
Source: Journal for the Study of Radicalism , Vol. 13, No. 1 (2019), pp. 121-154
Published by: Michigan State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/jstudradi.13.1.0121

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 Scott B. Montgomery

Radical Trips
Exploring the Political Dimension and Context of the 1960s
Psychedelic Poster

“A
re We Next? Be Aware” intones the jarring poster, offering a
disturbing suggestion of a parallel between the U.S. government
and that of Nazi Germany (see Figure 1). Bold, powerful, and suc-
cinct—it is iconic political poster art. Designed by Wes Wilson in mid-1965,
not long after the first U.S. troops arrived in Vietnam, the poster conjoins
its ominous query, or warning, with an unsettling conflation of the stars
and stripes with the swastika. It was intended to provoke. With this image,
we are introduced to one of the pioneers of the nascent Psychedelic Poster
Movement in San Francisco. Having trained in a print shop and possessing
strong political views and concerns about U.S. policy, Wilson created this
poster to distribute at antiwar events. Though most famous for his concert
posters, Wilson’s career began here, with artwork made for protest. His
art would unite these two realms, heralding both political events and rock
concerts, not unlike the band Country Joe and the Fish, who straddled the
lines between radical politics and art and music, playing protest rallies, the
Avalon Ballroom, and even art openings.1 The fact that Wilson’s first poster
was a self-produced work of great political provocation reveals how closely
tied to political concerns were many of the artists of this new psychedelic
poster revolution.

Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2019, pp. 121–154. issn 1930-1189.
© 2019 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved. 121

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122 Scott B. Montgomery

Figure 1. Wes Wilson. Are We Next? Be Aware. 1965. Offset lithograph.

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Radical Trips 123

Wilson originally designed “Are We Next?” in red and white, without the
blue field for the stars. It was simpler and more understated than the final
version. The tri-color poster is bolder in its conjuring of the flag, upping
the ante in terms of political commentary, as Old Glory is overtly and
provocatively fused with the Nazi swastika. The query “Are We Next?” pushes
it from commentary to call to arms, particularly as it was first displayed
at an antiwar rally in Berkeley in the early autumn of 1965. While equally
cogent in regard to the horrors witnessed in the South’s deeply rooted racism
and all-too-frequently violent responses to 1964’s Freedom Summer, the
most obvious point of reference here is the Vietnam War and U.S. foreign
policy in Southeast Asia. Wilson’s poster asks, “Are We Next?”—a question
that might be read two ways. The first and most obvious is, of course, the
concern that American foreign and domestic policies had become fascistic.
But, for young men, it had another chilling side: that they might be “next”
in the draft selection. As the draft expanded, so too did the relevancy of the
poster. Wilson credits West Coast Litho pressman Ivor Powell with the idea
to add the question, making it more forceful and engaging.2 While Allen
Ginsberg found it to be “too paranoid,” Chet Helms saw the poster’s power
and was inspired to contact Wilson to make concert posters for the Family
Dog in early 1966. Though not a deeply psychedelic design, it is the poster
that launched not only Wilson’s career, but helped initiate the entire flowering
of the poster movement in the San Francisco area. Given the history of the
poster’s function as propaganda, it hardly surprises that such strong political
statements were part of the very birth of the Psychedelic Poster Movement.
As the first major figure in the San Francisco Psychedelic Poster Movement,
Wes Wilson both pioneered the style and was its principal poster child in the
media during its early years.3 Many central characteristics of the psychedelic
poster developed significantly, though not exclusively, through Wilson’s hand.
While “Are We Next? Be Aware” is not fully psychedelic, it might be seen
as one of two key posters of the summer of 1965 that began the Psychedelic
Poster Movement.4 The other is “The Seed,” by George Hunter and Michael
Ferguson, generally regarded as the first artistically inclined rock poster.5
In these two images—one political, one recreative—we see the emerging
artistic and cultural–political forces that nurtured the birth and flowering
of psychedelic poster art.

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124 Scott B. Montgomery

I explore some of the radical dimensions of the psychedelic poster, through

an art-historical lens, considering how both the medium and style were
laden with socio-political potential and implication. Generally, when it is
even considered, this material is examined through the lens of its obvious
socio-political context. My goal is to begin an art-historical investigation of
these images, particularly through consideration of the interface of politics
and psychedelic aesthetics within the Psychedelic Poster Movement in San
Francisco during the late 1960s. From 1965 onward, the psychedelic poster
began to articulate cultural distinctions within the San Francisco area as
designs increasingly challenged the viewer’s perceptions and thus prompted
new explorations of visual and conceptual paradigms. Breaking beyond its
mandate to advertise (commercially or politically), the psychedelic poster
increasingly emphasized a cultural coherence that could be harnessed as a
political force. With an evolving iconography of style–psychedelic flourishes
increasingly expressing countercultural identity—the poster became a beacon
of hip-gnosis. The interface between this style-based indicator of identity and
the exigency of political galvanization led to the development of psychedelic
political poster art in which psychedelic stylistic elements are used to fashion
a sense of countercultural coherence around a central political issue.
The poster’s history as a tool for propaganda and political agitation,
combined with the strong liberal leanings of the artists and the fraught
political climate of the time, gave birth to Wilson’s “Are We Next?” and
other political posters. An inherent countercultural alignment against the
military-industrial complex and mainstream society can be seen in Wilson’s
design. This is not to say that all countercultural elements actively opposed the
war. Many, such as Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, were relatively disengaged
from serious antiwar protest. But the war created a focal point around which
notions of “counter” coagulated. While not all hippies were overtly political,
neither were they apolitical. A “moral imperative toward altruism” and social
engagement can be found in much psychedelic mysticism and communal
praxis.6 Radical politics and cultural recreation coexisted, as dramatically
demonstrated at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park on 14 January 1967.
The stage was shared by poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder,
bands such as the Grateful Dead and the Charlatans, and political figures
such as Jerry Rubin. But, as Jerry Garcia mused, the “angry” political tone
fell on ears more interested in music and poetry than speeches.7 The politics

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Radical Trips 125

of the counterculture was frequently performed in more nebulous ways. In

self-identifying as “counter” (“freaks”), the so-called hippie counterculture
was an inherently socio-political phenomenon, however subtly articulated
it might have been. The psychedelic poster was a visual means of expressing
and performing this radical alterity—a psychedelic identity. It radiated
psychedelic signification and it demanded that the viewer engage in active
searching for meaning.
“Are We Next?” resonated with the burgeoning psychedelic “hippie”
counterculture and expressed in no uncertain terms its distrust of “straight”
society. Wilson and others would soon develop a new psychedelic artistic
language that visually articulated this cultural divide. Wilson’s artistic colleague,
Victor Moscoso, recalls a clear distinction: “So, the straight people didn’t like
us. The cops were beating up the hippies. There was really two cultures in
San Francisco at the time. One was what we called ‘the suits’ and the other
was the psychedelic people.”8 Moscoso, Wilson, and others fashioned a style
that suited this articulation of a divergence of culture. Pushing line and color
to luxurious optic extremes and fashioning lettering that was challenging to
read, the poster artists created artistic visions that demanded slow looking
and psychedelic awareness to fully comprehend. The psychedelic aesthetic
would become a cultural signifier—a visual acid test that demonstrated
that one was “on the bus” and thus not on the normative cultural highway.9
Reading a poster increasingly became an adventure that visually performed
psychedelic awareness and identity. In many ways, the most transformative
element of the posters is that the style and its cultural signification was itself
a “radical trip”—an invitation to identify with the countercultural response
to the madness of the mainstream. This raises the idea of radical aesthetics
as part of an inextricable link between the politics and aesthetics of the
counterculture, as discussed by Julie Stephens.10 With this in mind, let us look
to the interface of psychedelic posters and counterculture political agendas
in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1960s.
Psychedelic posters gave visual focus to new ways of seeing. An inherently
populist medium, the poster brought this to the street, resonating with both
political flyers and commercial advertising. But even when announcing a
concert, a psychedelic poster offered a new vision—both in terms of a new
visual poetics and in a new repertory of imagery—all aligned to new utopian
dreams of a better society. Psychedelic posters provided icons through which

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126 Scott B. Montgomery

to perceive and perform an idealized cultural identity. To get it was to alter

one’s paradigm. Psychedelic posters were visual manifestations of both the
Leary (Apollonian) and Kesey (Dionysian) schools of psychedelic exploration,
simultaneously demanding attentive focus and unbridled play.11 They were
themselves doors of perception. These doors could be opened to individual
reflection as well as to socio-political calls to arms. Within the psychedelic
poster, artists could fuse the realms of the visual poetics of psychedelia and
the political expediency of propaganda.
While the overt political element was heralded by Wilson’s “Are We Next?”
poster, countercultural identity could be seen coalescing at the same time a
few hours’ drive to the east, as the Charlatans held their two-week residence at
the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada in June of 1965.12 In this sleepy
pioneer town, the Red Dog Saloon became the focus for a new Wild West—a
psychedelic frontier pioneered by the Charlatans. With them came future
poster artist and Family Dog member Alton Kelley, as well as large quantities
of LSD. The unbridled psychedelic Wild West mayhem of the residency is
often heralded as a momentous event in the development of the musical and
visual history of the counterculture—the origin of the psychedelic dance
concert. Bill Ham brought his battery of projectors and oils and created some
of the earliest experimental combinations of lightshow and live rock music in
a multimedia performance environment—the likes of which would become
a staple at the Fillmore Auditorium and Avalon Ballroom within less than a
year. Equally significant was the poster for the Red Dog adventure, designed
by The Charlatans’ George Hunter and Michael Ferguson. Known as “The
Seed,” it is generally considered the first noteworthy attempt at an “artistic”
rock poster. It contains the germ of the Psychedelic Poster Movement in style,
content and context. Initially inspired by an old circus poster, Hunter and
Ferguson’s design introduces varied lettering, a lively linear sensibility, a playful
drawing style, and novel framing of images of the performers—all soon-to-be
standard features of the psychedelic poster. “The Seed” proclaims this fusion
of rock music, neo-pioneer sartorial penchant, lightshow, and psychedelics
as operating at “the limit of the marvelous.” From the beginning, the poster
was part of the proclamation and performance of countercultural identity.
Another critical ingredient was the sense of alternative community and the
distinct questioning of mainstream values and the endeavor to visualize a
new society. The countercultural utopian dream was itself inherently political.

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Radical Trips 127

The germ of this new society—the new, psychedelic, Really Wild West—was
first fully articulated in this hippie takeover of a small frontier town. But,
in June of 1965, this psychedelic encampment in Virginia City was still very
much an anomaly, with even the Acid Tests several months in the future.
Though the seed may have been planted in Virginia City, it was in the San
Francisco area that it fell upon the most fertile soil. By the end of the year,
a number of artistically crude but playful fliers had emerged to announce
various Acid Tests—the chaotic, all-night, multimedia psychedelic circuses
held by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. As more organized (to use the
term loosely) events began to emerge, the psychedelic handbill was adopted
as a means of spreading the word and articulating countercultural identity.
Alton Kelley, a founding member of the Family Dog collective, designed the
flier for “A Tribute to Dr. Strange” which was the Family Dog’s first “rock and
roll dance and concert” held 16 October 1965 at San Francisco’s Longshore-
man’s Hall.13 Kelley would design fliers for subsequent Family Dog events
from 1965 onward. Translating the loose, chaotic style of the Acid Test fliers
into the context of the new, psychedelic dance concert, Kelley’s early fliers
were harbingers of the flowing linear pattern and varied lettering that he and
others would develop into a full-blown artistic movement over the course of
the following year. The psychedelic poster evolved and first flourished into
a visual hallmark of the countercultural (“hippie”) scene over the course of
1966—the year in which the Psychedelic Poster Movement and style emerged,
coalesced, and first hit its apogee. Once established, the Psychedelic Poster
Movement entered its creative peak as late 1966 evolved into 1967, during which
time many of the most visually potent and artistically advanced works of the
movement were fashioned. As such, the psychedelic poster was formulated
and came of age in a nexus of political questioning, cultural exploration,
paradigm expansion, and rock music.
Within the fraught climate of the mid-1960s, rock music was perceived
as a powerful cultural force.14 Images of musicians hung next to pictures of
political revolutionaries such as Che Guevara on the walls of the Print Mint
and many a domicile. While this could be characterized as empty fetishization
and dehistoricized consumerism of the hip, it might also be understood as an
example of a perceived interrelationship between music and politics, as rock
stars (and rock music) were placed in an inherently politicized position.15 As
Chester Anderson waxes poetic in his rambling “Notes for the New Geology”

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128 Scott B. Montgomery

rave contained in issue 6 of the San Francisco Oracle (February 1967), “rock is
a regenerative & revolutionary art, offering us our first real hope for the future
(indeed for the present) since August 6, 1945.”16 Continuing, Anderson articulates
the broader feeling that rock’s “tribal” aspects and “social rituals” offer a model
for utopian social conceptualizations—acquiring a deeper socio-cultural gravitas
than simple entertainment. Like psychedelic posters, rock was perceived as
articulating the vision of the counterculture.17 To be sure, most rock posters
were not made to be directly “political,” though they partook of this dimension
through their inherent socio-aesthetic engagement. Anderson opines that
“rock principles are not limited to music, and that much of the shape of the
future can be seen in its aspirations today (these being mainly total freedom,
total experience, total love, peace & mutual affection. . . . rock is a way of life.”
It is interesting that this voice from the street (as it were) echoes the less-
hyperbolic, but nonetheless sincere, assessment of San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Ralph Gleason, who was one of the mainstream media’s greatest
champions of the new music and cultural scene.18 In the context of the oppres-
sive shadow of the threat of nuclear war and the draft of youthful cannon
fodder for the Vietnam War, rock music took on a greater political, social, and
cultural significance. Just two years after Chester Anderson’s musings, Herbert
Marcuse waxed philosophical about the new cultural “sensibility” in which
notions of a free society were aesthetically performed in a “mixture of the
barricade and the dance floor, the mingling of love, play and heroism.”19 With
its questioning of older social values, mores, and practices, the counterculture
was inherently political—a social revolution that was expressed in dancing as
much as in demonstration.20 The barricade was a dance floor and the dance
floor was a barricade, as the politics of countercultural identity were deeply
linked to music and cultural recreation.
Not all wars were fought overseas. A cultural divide—largely genera-
tional—was emerging between traditional American values and a new set of
cultural paradigms. Antiwar protests, the Free Speech Movement, the Civil
Rights Movement, and a general sentiment against perceived political-cultural
oppression were increasingly on the rise in California (and elsewhere). The
“Berkeley Left” was a hotbed of political demonstration and agitation. This was
the setting for Wilson’s “Are We Next?” poster’s initial distribution. Keeping
with the media traditions of political messaging, the Free Speech Movement
used fliers and posters to announce its events and promulgate its philosophy

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Radical Trips 129

and political tenets. As with most political ephemera, the fliers followed the
mandate of graphic advertising which demands immediately discernible
text and message. While much of this material had a quick, ad-hoc quality,
the consistency of the protest organizers enabled the development of more
regular outlets of information cogent to the new youth movement, such as
the San Francisco Oracle and the Berkeley Barb.
The first issue of the Berkeley Barb was published on 13 August 1965, just
two months after both Wilson’s “Are We Next?” and Hunter and Ferguson’s
“The Seed.” A radical, “underground” newspaper, the Barb was particularly
vociferous in its support of civil rights and the antiwar movement, both of
which were increasingly relevant to the youth of America who were increas-
ingly finding their voice for change. While much of this voice resonated
in the sound emanating from the bullhorns of free-speech advocates and
the spontaneous choirs of protest marchers, another mode of voicing the
cultural divide was increasingly emerging—one that would have a dramatic
effect upon the development of the poster. This voice was rock music, which
increasingly became the galvanizing soundtrack to the social revolution. It
would be this dynamic interplay of socio-political consciousness and rock
art as cultural voice that would spark the evolution of the psychedelic poster
as a socio-aesthetic artistic force. On the same date that the first issue of the
Berkeley Barb hit the street, a small club was opened in San Francisco by
Marty Balin, singer of a new group called the Jefferson Airplane. The club
was called the Matrix. Soon, hand-drawn fliers announcing performances
at the Matrix began appearing. A year and a half later, it would be the forum
for the creation of a number of the poster movement’s most radical designs,
particularly those produced by the hand of Victor Moscoso.
True to their origins, posters and handbills were used as weapons in the
social revolution brewing on the streets during this period of tremendous
social upheaval. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the assassination
of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, the ongoing struggles and successes
of the Civil Rights Movement, the Watts Riots of 1965, and the escalating
conflict in Vietnam contributed to a psychic, political, and cultural powder
keg of doubt, fear, reflection, action, and reaction. This tension would only
increase over the next few years. Amidst this era of conflict and change, the
poster was repeatedly conscripted into service for agitation, transformation,
and countercultural identification. The poster has always been a political tool,

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130 Scott B. Montgomery

applying its advertising role to the selling of ideas. Its reproducibility and
relatively low production cost made the poster ideally suited for mass delivery
of political ideologies and agendas. Equally, its ability to muster people for a
political event made the poster an invaluable tool in both direct opposition
to the war and the more nebulous politics of countercultural identity vis-à-vis
mainstream America. While the psychedelic poster was an ideal forum for
the development of artistic ideas and experiments, its ability to do so while
simultaneously engaging in socio-political discourse made it the perfect vehicle
for the formulation and delivery of countercultural ideas, ideals, and agendas.
Much of the psychedelic poster’s political and cultural currency initially
came from the street, evolving largely within the realm of countercultural
reaction to mainstream society and self-identification as its own social force.
Inexpensively reproduced and easily distributed, posters and fliers were key
elements in galvanizing both civil rights and antiwar sentiment and action,
with Wilson’s “Are We Next?” being a perfect example. Given their pointed
immediacy in spawning action, the overtly political posters tend to be more
direct and considerably less psychedelic or artistic in intent. Nonetheless, the
larger social connection was there and a degree of visual interface between
the political flier and the psychedelic poster is discernible as part of the
broader expression of countercultural questioning of restrictive socio-political
practices and military wargasm that seemed to be enthusiastically embraced
by the American mainstream.
In this context, even the psychedelic concert poster was not without an
inherent (or perceptible) suggestion of a new, peaceful world order. While not
exclusively the case, many posters were connected to rock concert advertising,
negotiating the music’s role as a unifying force in the countercultural scene.
Both rock and psychedelia were central agents in the questioning and break-
ing down of established (and arbitrary) distinctions that brought about the
destructive notions of alterity which drove both inequalities in civil rights and
the military-industrial complex’s violent Cold War games in Southeast Asia.
Warning calls to action like “Are We Next? Be Aware” rang forth from posters,
music, and street theater alike, all part of the countercultural questioning of
the perceived myopia and madness of the mainstream. Together, they helped
articulate a distinction between Haight Street, SF and Main Street, USA.
Adamantly political in both its performance content and modus
operandi, the San Francisco Mime Troupe was at the forefront of the early

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Radical Trips 131

manifestations of counterculture politics in the San Francisco Bay Area.21

Updating Commedia dell’Arte traditions to address contemporary concerns
such as the escalating Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, the San
Francisco Mime Troupe were theatrical radicals. Performances such as “A
Minstrel Show or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel” were termed “indecent,
obscene, and offensive to children and adults alike” by the San Francisco
Parks Commission and banned from performance, leading to an uproar
over censorship and arrests. Ultimately, benefits would be organized to raise
money for the Mime Troupe’s legal bills, beginning with “The Appeal,” held
in a loft on San Francisco’s Howard Street on 6 November 1965.22 Essentially
a grassroots political event within the community, the Appeal involved the
Jefferson Airplane, The Fugs, Allen Ginsberg, Sandy Bull, and the experimental
theater troupe known as The Committee.
The germ of the Fillmore idea, the Appeal was organized by an aspiring
actor recently transplanted from New York who stepped in to help the Mime
Troupe sort through its financial difficulties. His name was Bill Graham.
Seeing the success of the event, Graham would quickly recognize the potential
of organizing cultural events with music and effectively using handbills and
posters to advertise them. Four months later, Graham would tap an artist
who had facilitated printing posters and fliers for the San Francisco Mime
Troupe to design posters for his new concert series. That man would become
a principal architect of the Psychedelic Poster Movement. His name was Wes
Wilson. The artist, who would soon dominate the early poster renaissance,
had only begun distributing his provocative “Are We Next?” poster a few
months prior to The Appeal. Radical politics, rock music, countercultural
identity, and psychedelic posters grew together in this nexus of social change.
As Stephens observes, “In the anti-disciplinary politics of the counterculture,
the aesthetic was given a double significance; at once pure and uncontaminated
and a domain where the mingling of politics and art could occur.”23 The
psychedelic poster occupies both of these spaces, involving both a “pure”
artistic endeavor as well as a mandate to advertise events, culture and ideology.
Groups such as the Diggers used a relatively nonartistic, DIY approach
to create fliers that propagated their message of community engagement. In
these fliers we see the most purposefully populist application of the print
medium within the San Francisco scene. Literally working on the street to feed
the hungry and envision a new socio-political reality, the Diggers took full

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132 Scott B. Montgomery

advantage of the flier to expound and spread their ideology for a new society.
Evolving from the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Artists Liberation
Front and led by Emmett Grogan, Peter Cohon (Coyote), and others, the
Diggers were a radical group who wished to shift beyond capitalism and
the stranglehold of social constraints that were perceived as suppressing
freedom and authenticity of being. Aggressive, uncompromising, utopian
idealist activists, the Diggers embraced an ethos of “free”—a society free
of money and an overall freedom from oppressive socio-political norms.
The “hippies” may have been developing their own counterculture, but the
Diggers wanted to change the entirety of mainstream American culture‘s
values and practices. True to their roots with the Mime Troupe, the Diggers
were actors of the street, engaging in cultural activism. They were, as the
wily Peter Coyote characterized it, “an art project” intended to inspire new
modes of thinking and social/community unity. Their fliers were, however,
not terribly artistically inclined. Instead, they favored a bold and direct
emphasis on text, as is appropriate for political handbills.
The Diggers used visual aids and props to further their points about social
reorientation. The most dramatic example was the Free Frame of Reference
set up in Golden Gate Park.24 Passing through its wooden frame was meant
to symbolize the changing of one’s paradigms. Psychedelic posters provided
similar frames of reference—portals into new modes of seeing. Like the
more performative Free Frame of Reference, psychedelic posters invited an
immersive and transformative experience. Both emphasized the performance
of freeing one’s mind of previous constraints, including capitalist notions
and the military-industrial complex. Like the Diggers’ free store (“it’s free
because it’s yours”) the posters invited one to free one’s mind.
The whole Digger-promulgated notion of “free” was radical—a direct
challenge to, and negation of, the capitalist economy and values upon which
America had evolved (or devolved). It would be the Diggers who prompted
the Grateful Dead’s famous 3 March 1968 free concert on a flatbed truck on
Haight Street.25 To a degree, this was a response from the community to
the increasingly monetized rock industry. That evening, rock supergroup
Cream played the Fillmore Auditorium, as advertised by Lee Conklin’s
appropriately fluid psychedelic poster design.26 The three-dollar admission
charge at the Fillmore, while perfectly reasonable to most, was anathema to
the Diggers, who applauded the Dead for playing “for the people.” In this

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Radical Trips 133

environment, even a free concert could be construed as a political act. To

many, the eschewing of the capitalist system was another way of questioning
the deeply ingrained military-industrial complex that seemed to govern both
the domestic market and foreign policy of America, frequently characterized
as “Amerika,” as evidenced by Wilson’s “Are We Next?” poster.
Psychedelia opened the doors of perception to new paradigms and
even the transcendence of paradigmatic thinking. Politics is constituted of
paradigm-based interactions among citizens (polites) and thus a reassess-
ment of paradigms, including the nature, meaning, and performance of
citizenship, was itself a political act, or at least an endeavor laden with radical
implications. A form of countercultural psychedelic patriotism emerged.27
There was ultimately a politics of mind expansion.28 Timothy Leary and
others sought “chemical experimentation to radically shatter ontological
certainties and from then on revamp the social and political structures of
American society.”29 David Farber notes the use of LSD as a cultural marker,
“as an agent in the production of cultural reorientation.”30 The freeing of the
individual mind was a part of the politics of social reinvention: “Both the
movement’s campaigns against the State and the counterculture’s searches
for transcendental escapes from it . . . implied a rejection of the notion that
capitalism’s control of the individual and the collective was all embracing.”31
Musicians, actors, activists, poster artists, and kids on the street were all
striving for ways to manifest and inspire a new way of looking, feeling, and
acting—a revolution and evolution of consciousness.
The psychedelic poster was a tool in this revolution. Like the music, it was
a window to mind-expansion. As such, it invited this process of reconsidering
traditional values and norms. Reading and “getting” a psychedelic poster was
an invitation to a radical trip. As battle standards in the fight for the “fifth
freedom” of consciousness expansion, the uniquely American psychedelic
posters became flags of psychedelic patriotism.32 Raised like freak flags, posters
helped articulate one’s alignment with new cultural paradigms. Posters were
part of this weaponized aesthetic sensibility in the formulation of a culture
war. They also reveal the tensions between the two putative poles of protest
and mind-expansion, as the need for expediency and clarity frequently
superseded the more lavish and illegible flourishes. Psychedelic posters
helped articulate a cultural and perceptual divide, but political psychedelia
needed to galvanize this sense of alterity into more unified action. What

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134 Scott B. Montgomery

happened when this aesthetic approach interfaced with the more pointed
focus of political propaganda and provocation? By psychedelicizing the
political poster, artists furthered the medium and style’s capacity to coalesce
countercultural identity around a cause.
Liberal and radical thinking were, naturally, staples on college campuses,
particularly the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State.
But this went beyond higher education. Skirmishes were fought in living
rooms and on the streets. A strong “us and them” thinking was increasingly
apparent—dividing “freaks” and “straights,” hippies and squares, counterculture
and mainstream.33 Middle-class kids were experimenting with hallucinogenic
substances and getting arrested. The first issue of Gilbert Shelton’s 1968
underground comic, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, was appropriately
titled Feds ‘N Heads. The Freak Brothers emphasize the strong factor of
drugs in this perceived divide. There was thus a sort of political aspect even
to smoking pot. It was illegal, and therefore was a challenge to authority. A
narrative of frequently heavy-handed law enforcement in regard to drugs
ensued (spearheaded by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover), existing alongside the
more celebratory aspects of mind expansion embraced by the counterculture.
All of this was part of the context of the conceptualization of a counterculture
in direct contrast/opposition to the perceived normative moral hegemony,
laws, and power structure.
Poster artists played with this idea, inserting drug references into many
posters, sometimes suggesting “new” takes on traditional American icons.
Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley’s “Keep America Green” design repurposes
good old Smokey the Bear for the cause of marijuana legalization and use.34
Heralding a dance concert at the Avalon Ballroom just a few days after the
Fourth of July 1966, the poster turns that great American environmental icon
into a pothead. He sports a belt buckle encouraging one to “SMOKE!” and
appears to have been following his buckle’s advice, given his half-mast eyes.
No longer admonishing us to put out fires, he now calls out to light up. He
seems to ask of joint-toting hippies, “are you next?” His fire-axe has been
transformed into a twelve-string electric guitar (musicians affectionately
refer to their instruments as “axes”). Smokey is poised and ready to help
keep America green, not by preventing forest fires, but by lighting joints
and playing rock music. The first printing of the poster was intentionally
set slightly off-register so as to create a blurry effect that might be seen as

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Radical Trips 135

evoking the altered state of mind of the bear who now seems to want to alter
the state of California and subsequently the nation.
Running for governor of California in 1966, Ronald Reagan directed much
of the rhetoric of his campaign against the left. He wished to “fix” the state of
California by ridding it of the countercultural presence. Targeting perceived
morality issues such as “beatniks, radicals, and filthy-speech advocates,”
candidate Reagan promised to “clean up the mess at Berkeley.” In cahoots
with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Reagan had a track record of persecuting
free-thinkers since his days as president of the Screen Actors Guild when
he turned over the names of “leftists” to the House Un-American Activities
Committee. In a 12 May 1966 campaign address at San Francisco’s Cow
Palace, he called Berkeley “a rallying point for Communists and a center
of sexual misconduct.” In deliciously serendipitous irony, the following
evening’s lineup at the Fillmore Auditorium seemed to respond with the
Charlatans, the Jaywalkers, and the New Generation, and a poster by the
politically inclined Wes Wilson.35 With its embrace of communal ideals,
sexual freedom, psychedelic drugs, and a deep questioning of both capitalist
obsessions and the military-industrial complex, the new generation of the
counterculture was clearly placed in the crosshairs of candidate Reagan’s call
for a culture war. To be a “hippie” was indelibly cast as an inherently political
stance—whether intentional or not. A divide had been articulated—a line
drawn in the sand between the ideals of the older generation and the new
questioning of the wisdom of such traditional values.
Despite Reagan and others lumping them together in their sweeping
rhetorical condemnations, there was often a perceived divide between the
hippies and the real political activists such as the Diggers and the Berkeley
antiwar activists. Many of the young hippies were not overtly political in the
traditional sense of protest and public demonstration. There was a strongly
incubating sentiment that rather than trying to change “straight America”
they would develop their own culture, their own America, based on their own
interpretations of the freedoms ensured by the Constitution.36 This new mode
of activism was indirect and often passive or self-indulgent. Many hippies,
musicians, and artists believed that true cultural transformation would be
better achieved through open hearts and minds than clenched fists—a view
shared by neither the political extremists on the left nor those on the right.
However, Reagan’s divisive message apparently resonated with many voters

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136 Scott B. Montgomery

in the state (and eventually the nation), and the former actor was sworn in
as governor of California on 2 January 1967. Four days later, 1967 was sworn
in Haight style at the Fillmore Auditorium with a concert by the Young
Rascals, Sopwith Camel, and a new group from Los Angeles with an Aldous
Huxley-derived name: The Doors. The “invitation” to this countercultural
inauguration was provided by the exquisite psychedelic poster designed
by Wes Wilson.37 The event was promoted by another former actor—Bill
Graham—who would become a powerful, visionary force in rock promotion
well before Reagan rode his reactionary political agenda to the White House.
During Reagan’s campaign, a major gauntlet was thrown down in
the counterculture wars with the criminalization of LSD in California on
Thursday, 6 October 1966. The Haight commemorated the day by holding
the “Love Pageant Rally”—a quasi-spontaneous event that reacted to the
government’s dictum by celebrating its own ideals, fueled by the suddenly
contraband substance.38 The Love Pageant Rally was a direct (and politi-
cal) response to the illegalization of the counterculture’s favorite mode of
spiritual development. The brainchild of Allen Cohen (editor of the Oracle)
and Michael Bowen, the Love Pageant Rally consisted of a colorful parade
that ambled up Haight Street to the panhandle of Golden Gate Park, where
speakers voiced their opposition to the new law in between performances
by Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead.39 The
flier for the rally intones the sense of political action that powered the Love
Pageant Rally: “When in the flow of human events, it becomes necessary
for the people to cease to recognize the obsolete social patterns which have
isolated man from his consciousness” and so on. The antique, floral border
gives the flier a traditional, historic sensibility, playing upon its associations
with colonial calls to freedom. Appropriately, large amounts of LSD were
also freely distributed in what might be considered a multicolored flip of
the proverbial bird to the establishment.
Once illegal, LSD, and by extension the psychedelic experience, acquired
a decidedly political dimension in addition to its already strong recreational
and spiritual centrality within countercultural identity and practice. Through
the rally and distribution of free acid, psychedelia was culturally weaponized
as an active agent in countering the mainstream, its perceptions AND its laws.
Curiously, this is about the time that the Psychedelic Poster Movement first
hit its full peak. In the immediate aftermath of the Love Pageant Rally, Wes

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Radical Trips 137

Wilson’s poster for the 7–8 October concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium offers
a swirling op-art disc that seems lifted from an Acid Test flier—perhaps an
insider nod-and-wink suggestion that the concert environment doubtless
involved a hefty amount of the (now-illegal) substance.40
An ”acid test” card appropriating the iconic, pointing Uncle Sam from
James Montgomery Flagg’s World War I draft poster (“I Want YOU for the
U.S Army”), now utters a query posed on both Paul Foster’s 1965 Muir Beach
Acid Test poster and Wes Wilson’s 1966 flier: “Can YOU pass the Acid Test?”41
The draft is playfully turned against itself, as the card becomes a psychedelic
induction notice. With new meaning, it implies the question are you next?
Suggesting that it is now one’s patriotic duty to experiment with hallucinogenic
drugs, this card posits a political element to even recreational acid use.42 The
name “acid test” is historically loaded, originating as a term for a prospector’s
means of determining if a metal was actually gold. Referencing the area’s pioneer
past, the term now suggests a new gold standard—the currency of expanded
consciousness. The Old West was alchemically transformed into the New Really
Wild West, as the Merry Pranksters and others saw themselves as mining the
psychic frontier. Allen “Gut” Turk’s (née Terk) intensely neon orange poster
for the 31 October 1966 Acid Test Graduation puckishly celebrates this as a
form of “higher learning,” with the cap and gown signaling the attainment of
elevated education at Kesey’s psychedelic university/universe.43 Throughout
this, the psychedelic poster grew as a principal voice in visually articulating
this countercultural identity, particularly as reading the posters became an
increasingly psychedelic challenge. To “get it” was passing the visual acid
test and boarding the bus of expanded consciousness. It was the ticket to a
radical visual trip.
Psychedelic vision and psychedelic visuality increasingly became marks
of cultural identity that sought to radically counter paradigmatic percep-
tions. The Diggers, Berkeley radicals, and political posters looked and acted
outward in endeavors to change the world. The psychedelic radicals and
posters looked inward in an endeavor to change the self and through this,
society. The belief was that the domino effect of personal change would effect
large-scale social change (like a hippie consciousness equivalent of the Cold
War fear of a communist domino effect that led to the U.S. involvement in
Vietnam). Opposition to the war aligned with opposition to the dominant
cultural (and cognitive) paradigms and thus, in a strange and awkward

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138 Scott B. Montgomery

dance, the psychedelic revolution boogied with the political revolution,

adding a little more vibrancy and color to a movement (and moment) of
socio-political change.
Once formulated, the psychedelic style itself eventually took on its own
implied political discourse of “hip-gnosis” and helped establish countercul-
tural visual identity. The iconography of the style itself became laden with
the notion of signifying the ineffable psychedelic experience and thus the
countercultural search for expanded consciousness.44 The psychedelic poster
was one of the counterculture’s primary visual tools of this self-definition.
This was achieved through imagery as well as stylistic elements. The posters
offer a new vision, a new way of seeing, a new trip. This was itself an “inward”
political journey, but its larger social manifestation was decidedly outward
as well. The collective inward gaze questioned the validity of what one saw
outside in mainstream culture. To tune in was also to turn on (or to turn
off the mainstream buzz). While the Diggers and Berkeley protesters were
among the more outward and radical manifestations of this countering of
mainstream politics, commerce, and culture, there was also an inherent
political dimension to the hippie ideology that should not be lost sight of. The
psychedelic poster helped visually articulate this—providing a visual acid test,
asking “are you experienced?” and thus, implicitly, “are you one of us?” To
understand the poster was a mark of belonging. Within this climate, born of
a political–cultural paradigm, the psychedelic poster came to signify a certain
hippie je ne sais quoi, a marker in the performance of one’s countercultural
identity. The psychedelic poster was rich in meanings—its layers of messaging
covering both event advertising and cultural articulation. While ostensibly
made for the former, many psychedelic posters came to signify even more
potently in terms of the latter as visualizers of a radical new social identity.
As the younger counterculture psychedelicized, so too did the poster, develop-
ing a visual language that itself became laden with cultural identity and thus
political meaning. But, due to the need to galvanize community forces, many
of the political designs are somewhat more legible, still serving their primary
function as purveyors of discrete information. Gut Turk’s poster for a conference
on the draft on 27 May 1967 in the fellowship hall of the Glide Methodist Church
underscores the strong political element within poster production (see Figure 2).
A member of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, which had a complex and often
contentious relationship with the antiwar protestors, Gut’s involvement reveals

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Radical Trips 139

the sometimes-surprising background of artists creating political and psychedelic

posters. Advising “your responsibilities and legal alternatives” vis-à-vis the draft,
Gut’s poster illustrates the application of more traditional design elements to the
countercultural cause. Appropriately, the design plays upon military branding
imagery with the “Draft” ensconced within an escutcheon, an association
familiar to Gut’s motorcycle group who frequently sported military insignia.
The subdued red, white, and blue color scheme furthers the reference to, and
commentary upon, the stars and stripes and all that it was held to signify.45 In
this, it hearkens back to Wilson’s “Are We Next?” poster. But, Gut’s design also
has more than a little in common with advertising and product labeling. It is
still a relatively traditional image, compared with the visual bacchanal of some
of the rock posters produced at the time. But, it has a dynamism and sense of
breath that stems from psychedelic designs. Nodding to established psychedelic
style, it nonetheless maintains much of the clarity of political advertising.
Benefit concerts (and their posters) reveal the close connection between
music and political events, as the counterculture frequently rallied around
causes through musical engagement. Here, the poster might need to be clear
enough to advertise the event, but psychedelic enough to deliver a deeper
message of cultural signification. Stanley Mouse’s poster for the 19 February
1967 Port Chicago Vigil Benefit concert at San Francisco’s California Hall
with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Country Joe and the Fish, the Steve
Miller Blues Band, and others takes the tri-color to a more optically chal-
lenging place.46 The color scheme is the same red, white, and blue as Gut’s
(slightly later) Conference on the Draft poster, but Mouse’s design is more
sophisticated in its use of these colors for optical effect. Unlike Gut’s poster,
the color scheme does not evoke the flag and patriotism as much as it does
an op-art sensibility. A polarized photo of a dancing nude woman is saturated
with bold color to the point of becoming abstracted. Around her swirl frilly
banderols bearing news of the event. A great face is even suggested by the
“lips” below and peace symbol eyes above. Whether this emergent visage is
intentional or not, the point is that the poster allows for, and even invites,
such exploration. It is a genuinely psychedelic poster in its shape-shifting
potential and its challenge to both the eye and the mind. Space and planar
dimensions are somewhat fluid and the forms are visually unstable. The
poster engages, drawing one into exploring its own qualities, and attention
drifts away from the ostensible purpose of the poster. Viewing it is as much a

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 140 Scott B. Montgomery

Figure 2. Gut Turk (Terk). Conference on the Draft. 1967. Offset lithograph.

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Radical Trips 141

psychedelic experience as it is an informative one. Mouse’s poster demonstrates

how the psychedelic style could override the clarity that is the goal of most
political posters. As such, this comes off as more of an advertisement for a
dance than a political event.
Like a psychedelic train ride, the anonymously created Soot Productions
poster for “A Tribute to J. Edgar Hoover” vibrates in kaleidoscopic patterns
and hot rails to Hoover Hell (see Figure 3).47 Hardly the darling of the
counterculture and antiwar movement, the director of the FBI was particularly
loathed for his heavy-handed investigations and prosecutions of any number
of “youth offenses,” most notably draft resistance and drugs. The perceived
“oppressor of the youth” is mocked in faux homage with an event the likes of
which he would no doubt wish to suppress. Whatever sort of tribute is being
offered, it is given with tongue in cheek. Aside from its puckish moniker, it
is essentially a dance concert at the California Hall on 10 February 1967, a
non-political, multi-media event, as evidenced by Head Lights being given
equal billing to the bands: the Mojo Men, Blue Cheer, the Jook Savages, and
the Congress of Wonders. Printed in various colorings—orange on pink
and green on pink—the poster uses bold color juxtapositions to make the
image pop and further confound the relationship between line and space.
A vibrant surface plane is adamantly asserted by the linear pattern, only to
clash with the railroad-tie suggestion of linear perspective that crashes into
the dapperly dour J. Edgar. Flippant, yes, but also political in its doctrine of
fair use of public figures as psychedelic playthings. No one and nothing was
exempt from appropriation, mutation, and commentary—not the U.S. flag,
not Uncle Sam, not Smokey the Bear, not even J. Edgar Hoover.
Stylistically it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between concert
promotion and political posters, particularly once the larger umbrella signifier
of countercultural identity was firmly inscribed onto the psychedelic style.
This is compounded by the fact that many political posters were made by
the same artists who were producing posters for concerts promoted by the
Family Dog, Bill Graham, and others. This underscores how the posters
were the product of a discernible artistic movement with its own (loosely)
coherent set of stylistic parameters and a close sense of artistic community.
While occasionally only the context differentiates the products of this artistic
vision, many posters reveal some discrepancy between more politically

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142 Scott B. Montgomery

immediate events and concerts. In the three abovementioned posters—by

Gut, Mouse, and Soot—we can see some of this tension between the discrete
information advertised on the poster and the more nebulous signification
delivered through artistic flourishes.
A certain mandate for clarity regulates political posters. While this largely
holds true for music advertising as well, for a while (late-1966 through mid-
1969) the aesthetic-cultural link worked sufficiently to advertise concerts

Figure 3. Soot Productions. A Tribute to J. Edgar Hoover. 1967. Offset lithograph.

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Radical Trips 143

even if the posters were nearly illegible. The concept of slow looking worked
to advertise the events, a change in the paradigm of visual advertising. But,
political agendas are never intended to be vague. Their messages are best
delivered in slogans with clear, direct texts and identifiable, iconic (and
sometimes ironic) imagery. Political messages, as expressed in protests and
posters, are more often shouted than whispered and rarely delivered in a poetic
mélange of free association. An exception would be the theatrical political
sensibility of Hugh Romney, Abbie Hoffman, and others who performed a
politics of the absurd—an “aim for incomprehensibility” and “refusal to be
subjected to a singular reading,” as Stephens characterizes it.48 This aesthetic
politics of incomprehensibility might equally be applied to the psychedelic
poster. The more oblique strategy of unintelligible ineffability was better
suited for the concert hall than the protest march’s more pointed political
intent. Thus, political posters tended to work along more direct lines than
concert and head shop posters which both allowed greater creative license
and demanded slow looking. Therefore, few of the more political posters
of the movement are psychedelic in extremis. They consistently eschew the
embrace of ineffability, concentrating instead on palpability. Consequently,
radical political posters rarely utilized the psychedelic style and its cultural
associations to the fullest, preferring to stay with the tried and true clarity
and directness of propaganda traditions. But, nods to the psychedelic style
helped connect the political action with a broader countercultural aesthetic
and identity.
In addition to numerous posters for the Fillmore Auditorium and Avalon
Ballroom, Wes Wilson produced one for the “New Mobilization West”
march from Pier 29 to the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park on Saturday, 15
November 1969 (see Figure 4). His design is based on two characters who
succinctly express the perceived cultural dichotomy between counterculture
and mainstream, hippie and straight, hate and Haight, and war and peace.
A rather whimsically fluid-looking hipster flashes the peace sign, his two
elevated fingers countering the thumb-down gesture of the adjacent soldier
who turns his back on the notion. Peace and war, positivity and negativity,
hip and straight, are caricatured in this oppositional pairing of counterculture
and military representatives. A clear, Manichaean divide between good and
evil is posited as the poster speaks in the visual disambiguity of political
rhetoric. Lightly hued, open-garbed, hand lifted upward to offer the peace

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144 Scott B. Montgomery

symbol, with wide-open eyes elevated in a heavenly direction, the “hippie”

contrasts with the heavily inked military garb, thumbs-down gesture, and
lowered blank stare of the decidedly negative soldier. To drive the point
home, the soldier’s Nazi-implicating helmet is branded with the numerical
“mark of the Beast”: 666. This biblical reference to the evil nature of the
military-industrial complex is reinforced by the overarching textual reference
to scripture. Isaiah 2:4’s famous celebration of turning machines of war into
tools of creation and bounty intones: “and he shall judge among the nations
and shall rebuke many people and they shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.” The poster suggests that the peace
sign–brandishing young man is on the side of the righteous. By contrast,
the 666 ominously emblazoned on the soldier’s helmet is a double-whammy
of nefarious association, as the military-industrial complex is excoriated as
both fascistic and satanic.
The colors are bold and striking, in accord with psychedelic tradition, but
also effective for attention grabbing as is mandated by the political poster.
Space is somewhat ambiguous, as the figures overlap the text bands both
above and below. They appear to stand behind a lower parapet containing text

Figure 4. Wes Wilson. New Mobilization West. 1969. Offset lithograph.

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Radical Trips 145

that informs us of the march’s details. Their hands extend over the lettering,
creating a spatial dimension. Similarly, their heads extend in front of the
biblical text above, creating a contrasting sense of receding space. The flat
sense of the poster and the similar treatment of the text areas is challenged,
as spatial recession is fashioned yet negated by the juxtaposition of the planar
emphasis of the text and the overlap of the figures. While adding a flourish of
psychedelic spatial uncertainty, this effect does not undermine the immediacy
and clarity of the image.
The lively psychedelic line and the varied lettering align with those found
on Wilson’s psychedelic concert posters, mostly from 1966–67. But the design
offers a clear balance of text and image: all parts are discernible, even if the space
is ambiguous and the colors are bold. It works within the psychedelic style’s
general parameters yet does not push its artistic limits, remaining grounded
in clarity as is necessitated for direct political engagement. It does, however,
offer enough textual and visual information to slow one down to process
it, thereby engaging in the slow-looking practice demanded by psychedelic
posters. Wilson’s posters for concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium exhibit
a similar approach to varied lettering but often with a greater Jugendstil-
inspired dynamic plasticity. The rock posters’ epigraphy is generally more
fluid in its celebration of line and they are somewhat more challenging to
read. Similarly, the relationship between figures and text is more complex in
the rock posters, as the lettering seems to be connected to textile material in
which the figures appear wrapped, creating a fluid, intertwined play of word
and image. While still legible, the rock posters take longer to decipher. The
“meaning” of the imagery on the rock posters is not immediately clear, nor
does extended looking always help. Rather, the longer one looks, the less one
can make clear sense of the image. The opposite is true with Wilson’s “New
Mobilization West” poster, wherein the figures’ antithetical relationship
is both instantly apparent and grows clearer with additional observation
through slow looking.
As the psychedelic style’s association with the youthful counterculture
became a marker of cultural identity, it could be used to market to this same
demographic.49 An extraordinary example of the use of psychedelic poster
art to sell political ideas to the counterculture is Wilson’s design for Jack
Morrison’s (unsuccessful) campaign for mayor of San Francisco in 1967 (see
Figure 5). It is the style that signifies the candidate’s liberal leanings through

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146 Scott B. Montgomery

Figure 5. Wes Wilson. Morrison for Mayor. 1967. Offset lithograph.

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Radical Trips 147

bold colors, dynamic line and an overall psychedelic aesthetic. Its coloristic
pop and vibrant, linear sensibility echo the riot of color and mellifluous line
that had become emblematic of the psychedelic poster. As the visual voice
of the youth, psychedelia is employed to ground Morrison in left-leaning
political concerns that were particularly embraced by younger audiences.
Crashing through a dollar sign, Morrison promises to break the stranglehold
of big business over politics, bringing democracy back to the people with his
colorful, vibrant visage. Through this use of a culturally associated style to
reach out to that young voting demographic, Wilson’s poster presents Mor-
rison as “hip.” The candidate may not himself be “on the bus,” but the poster
insists that he speaks both to and for those who are. This is a full-fledged
psychedelic “mainstream” political poster.
Wilson’s poster exemplifies political psychedelia—the use of the psychedelic
style’s cultural associations to further traditional political machinations,
such as a mayoral campaign. But Wilson’s poster is created by an artist on
the “inside” of the counterculture. It is counterculture art speaking its visual
and associative language. What is particularly intriguing about this poster
is that it essentially advertises a normative political context and format in
an artistic idiom that comes from, speaks through, and ultimately speaks
to the counterculture. Wilson’s 1965 “Are We Next?” is visually grounded in
clear political and advertising traditions, though the colors and pattern are
most certainly loaded with political implications. Two years later, “Morrison
for Mayor,” explodes in a riot of color as the style itself delivers much of the
message. In the intervening years, psychedelic visual hallmarks had come
to signify certain liberal cultural leanings and could be employed to target
a “youth market” in both politics and commerce.50
The visual trip of the psychedelic poster might carry a discrete political
agenda only so far before its directness was diluted by broader cultural mes-
saging. But the political poster was generally not after the long, meandering
visual trip. Its radical trip followed a more direct path, though sometimes
using the psychedelic style or motifs to nod to the larger cultural identity that
was articulated by the psychedelic poster. The psychedelic style developed
from the counterculture and became political by association. But, it was
initially an insider’s political language that was not as well suited to externally
directed messages and calls for radical change. For that, we look to protest
posters which maintain a mandate of clarity and directness. Here, one can

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148 Scott B. Montgomery

see how psychedelic visual nods remain signifiers of cultural identity, but
don’t dominate the poster’s message. A beautiful, anonymously produced,
circa-1970 poster from Berkeley uses rough but dynamic lettering and a vibrant
art nouveau–inspired psychedelic sense of line and design (see Figure 6).51
“Peace Now” frames a dove bearing an olive branch. The rough, but dynamic
line and simple, bold coloring (blue on white) are pale echoes of the lush,
linear vibrancy and artistic sophistication of Wes Wilson’s exquisite March/
April 1967 poster for the Byrds at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco.52
It is not only three years that divide these posters, but also divergent intents
and functions. To be sure, the avian associations work differently on the two
designs. The peace dove serves as a visual icon of an idea, signifying peace and
associatively, an antiwar political intent. Wilson’s sumptuous Byrds peacocks are
artistic endeavors, serving as icons of logos—words made flesh (and feather).
The band’s name is turned into a sumptuous image of peacocks, themselves
metaphorically associated with lavish hippie garb. While ostensibly (and
ostentatiously) serving as advertising, Wilson’s poster reveals a rich balance
of word and image, line and color, order and dynamism in a sophisticated
design that is based more upon artistic considerations than on advertising
concerns. It has a classical/Renaissance spirit of dynamic balance with a lavish
sense of art nouveau adornment. It invites, even demands, slow looking and
aesthetic delectation, rewarding prolonged examination as it increasingly
unfurls its artistic brilliance. Certainly, it advertises both a concert and a
culture, but it also asserts an artistic identity as a prime manifestation of an
art movement—the Psychedelic Poster Movement. In contrast, “Peace Now”
neither invites slow looking nor aspires to artistic heights. Rather, it references
the psychedelic style in a nod to the counterculture with which it had become
associated. It is a means of connecting a message with an audience and an
example of the iconography of style being put to political use.
In terms of its more direct intent, “Peace Now” is not far from Wilson’s
“Are We Next?” from five years earlier. The 1970 poster is charming and
mildly psychedelic, but it lacks the depth and sophistication of Wilson’s
design. One almost responds to the other over time, as five years of counter-
cultural evolution, war, peace movements, and poster art occupy the space
in between. The counterculture political poster took a radical trip through
psychedelia, but always maintained two lines of communication. The more
overtly political messages were bold, simple, and direct, while more subtle

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Radical Trips 149

Figure 6. Anonymous. Peace Now. 1970. Screen Print.

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150 Scott B. Montgomery

countercultural references were inextricably imbedded into the style and

imagery of the psychedelic poster. “Peace Now” tepidly tries to bridge the
gap. The psychedelic poster offered a nod to nonconformity through its
visual articulation of ineffability. While reading a psychedelic poster was a
(counter)culturally defining act, and thus politicizing in the most nebulous
of senses, the political aims of the far-flung left were more ably concentrated
in clear posters that delivered their messages with textual brevity and iconic
directness, though often with a slight psychedelic flourish, as seen on “Peace
Now” poster.
The Psychedelic Poster Movement was born of the socio-political crucible
of the intensely divided (and divisive) responses to both domestic and foreign
policy, particularly the Vietnam War. But, perhaps most adamantly, it was the
product of a countercultural experiment—a new social identity grounded in a
reassessment of what were perceived as antiquated and repressive traditional
values.53 All culture is political, but the counterculture’s very self-definition as
oppositional to the mainstream was a profoundly conscious political–cultural
agenda—one that played out not only in Southeast Asia, but in People’s Park
in Berkeley where antiwar demonstrators clashed with police amidst a cloud
of tear gas. Less belligerently, it also was a cultural war fought in the middle-
class American home, as kids inevitably questioned their parents’ values and
sought to find new paradigms for living. This paradigm was performed at the
Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium. The psychedelic poster was part
of the visual fabric of this turbulent struggle for identity and representation.
Seen in this light, the development of a counterculturally informed artistic
style was itself a subtly political act that visually articulated a new world view,
a new aesthetic, and a new mode of seeing. As such, all psychedelic posters
are at least inflected with issues of politics and social identity. Thus, it hardly
surprises that we can trace much of this back to the sentiment expressed in
Wilson’s seminal “Are We Next?” poster. This radical call to action helped
birth the visual articulation of a call to a new way of seeing. Sometimes overtly
political, other times not, the psychedelic poster offered a path for a radical
trip to a visionary new world.

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Radical Trips 151

Notes

1 Country Joe and the Fish would play the opening of the Joint Show at the Moore Gallery
in San Francisco on 17 July 1967. On the Joint Show exhibit of Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso,
Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, and Rick Griffin, see Herb Caen, “The Hippie Academy,”
San Francisco Chronicle, 19 July 1967; Thomas Albright, “A Psychedelic Flowering,” San
Francisco Sunday  Examiner and Chronicle, 16 July 1967, 26–27 (reprinted in  Thomas
Albright, On Art and Artists: Essays [San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1989], 109–11). My
large study on the Joint Show, “The Joint Show: High Art in the Summer of Love,” will
soon be published in the journal The Sixties.
2 Personal communication with author, summer 2016. This is an excellent example of the
important influence of the all-too-often overlooked printers on the output of the poster
movement.
3 Wilson was featured on the cover of the November 1966 California Living section of the
San Francisco Chronicle. Wilson and Stanley Mouse are highlighted as two principal
conceptualizers of the style in the 6 March 1967 Newsweek featurette on “The Coolest
Things” on page 87. Time magazine’s 7 April 1967 feature on “Nouveau Frisco” on page
88 proclaims Wilson as “its foremost practitioner.”
4 On the San Francisco Psychedelic Poster Movement, see Paul D. Grushkin, The Art of
Rock: Posters from Presley to Punk (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1987); Gayle
Lemke, The Art of the Fillmore 1966–1971 (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999); Sally
Tomlinson and Walter Medeiros, High Societies. Psychedelic Rock Posters of Haight-Asbury
(San Diego: San Diego Museum of Art, 2001); Amélie Gastaut and Jean-Pierre Criqui,
Off the Wall: Psychedelic Rock Posters from San Francisco (London: Thames and Hudson,
2005); Sally Tomlinson, “Sign Language: Formulating a Psychedelic Vernacular in Sixties’
Poster Art,” in Summer of Love. Art of the Psychedelic Era, ed. Christoph Grunenberg
(London: Tate Publishing, 2005), 121–43; Kevin M. Moist, “Visualizing Postmodernity:
1960s Rock Concert Posters and Contemporary American Culture, Journal of Popular
Culture 43, no. 6 (Dec. 2010): 1242–65; Scott B. Montgomery, “Signifying the Ineffable:
Rock Poster Art and Psychedelic Counterculture in San Francisco,” in West of Center:
Art and the Counterculture Experiment in American Art, 1965–1977, ed. Elissa Auther and
Adam Lerner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 574–610; Colleen Terry,
“Selling San Francisco’s Sound. Artistry in 1960s Rock Posters” and Victoria Binder,
“San Francisco Psychedelic Rock Posters. The Art of Photo-offset Lithography,” in
Summer of Love. Art, Fashion and Rock and Roll, ed. Jill d’Alessandro, Colleen Terry,
et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 31–51 and 297–313, respectively.

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152 Scott B. Montgomery

5 Grushkin, The Art of Rock , 89–90.

6 See Morgan Shipley, “‘This Season’s People’ Stephen Gasken, Psychedelic Religion, and
a Community of Social Justice,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 9, no. 2 (Fall 2015):
40–92; Morgan Shipley, Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious
Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America (Lanham: Lexington Books,
2015), 3–21.
7 Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (New York:
Broadway Books, 2002), 254.
8 Victor Moscoso, interview by the author, 12 July 2017. We now see this in much more
nuanced ways, but the perceptions in the 1960s tended to be more cut and dried. The
counterculture was itself disparate and heterogenous within its relatively homogenous
demographic of predominantly white, middle-class youth.
9 Montgomery, “Signifying the Ineffable,” 2012.
10 Julie Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially the chapter on “Aesthetic Radicalism”
(96–119).
11 On the differences between the Leary and Kesey approaches to LSD, see David Farber,
“The Intoxicated State/Illegal Nation, Drugs and the Sixties Counterculture,” in Imagine
Nation. The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and
Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002, 23–26.
12 Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History (New York: Wenner Books, 2005), 7–11. As
noted on the original poster, the Charlatans’ residence was slotted from 1–15 June 1965,
though it actually opened 21 June.
13 Grushkin, The Art of Rock, 93.
14 Michael J. Kramer, The Republic or Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Nick Bromwell, Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock
and Psychedelics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
15 On the coopting of hipness, see Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture,
Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1997); David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994). I disagree
with Stephens’ otherwise excellent analysis of the aestheticization of protest. Rather
than being empty wall dressing, as Stephens implies, I see the posters as active agents in
delivering social messages through style and imagery. Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest,
111–12.
16 Chester Anderson, “Notes for the New Geology,” San Francisco Oracle, no. 6 (February
1967): 2.

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Radical Trips 153

17 Bromwell, Tomorrow Never Knows, 2000.

18 While Gleason’s support first appeared in numerous articles and reviews, it was perhaps
most dramatically displayed in his penning a book that expressed an early appreciation
of the new music. Ralph J. Gleason, The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound
(New York: Ballantine, 1969).
19 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 25.
20 For a thoughtful and nuanced, if rather colloquial, discussion of the complex relationship
between hippie ideologies and those of radical left, see Danny Goldbert, In Search of the
Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea (Brooklyn: Askashic Books, 2017).
21 Ronnie G. Davis, The San Francisco Mime Troupe: The First Ten Years (Palo Alto: Ramparts
Press, 1975).
22 Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 2002, 29–30.
23 Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest, 98.
24 On the Free Frame of Reference, see Emmett Grogan, Ringolevio (Boston: Little Brown,
1972), 250; Farber, “The Intoxicated State/Illegal Nation,” 30.
25 McNally, A Long Strange Trip, 2002, 163–4, 252.
26 The poster (BG-109) is number 109 in the Bill Graham series.
27 On psychedelia and Americanism, see Chrise Elcock, “The Fifth Freedom: The Politics
of Psychedelic Patriotism,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 9, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 17–40.
28 Farber, “The Intoxicated State/Illegal Nation,” 18.
29 Elcock, “The Fifth Freedom,” 18.
30 Farber, “The Intoxicated State/Illegal Nation,” 19.
31 Christopher Gair, The American Counterculture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2007), 136.
32 On the “fifth freedom,” see Elcock, “The Fifth Freedom”; Timothy Leary and Richard
Alpert, “The Fifth Freedom—The Right to Get High,” Harvard Review 1, no. 4 (1963),
rev. and repr., Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (Berkeley: Ronin Publishing, 1968),
64–69.
33 The divides may have been articulated in seeming absolutes, but they were far more
nuanced. Regarding a countercultural questioning of such divides, see Shipley, “This
Season’s People.” On the great diversity within the so-called counterculture, consult Nadya
Zimmerman, Counterculture Kaleidoscope: Musical and Cultural Perspectives on Late
Sixties San Francisco (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Peter Braunstein
and Michael William Doyle, “Introduction: Historicizing the American Counterculture
in the 1960s and ’70s” in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and
’70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002), 5–14;

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154 Scott B. Montgomery

Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture

(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009).
34 The poster (FD-16) is number sixteen in the Family Dog poster series. It is the only poster
in the series to use day-glo ink.
35 BG-6.
36 Elcock, “The Fifth Freedom.”
37 BG-44.
38 Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 92–4.
39 McNally, A Long Strange Trip, 166–7.
40 BG-30.
41 Grushkin, The Art of Rock, 91–2.
42 Elcock, “The Fifth Freedom.”
43 Grushkin, The Art of Rock, 194.
44 Montgomery, “Signifying the Ineffable,” 2012.
45 On psychedelic patriotism and the use of the flag, see Elcock, “The Fifth Freedom,” 28–30.
46 Grushkin, The Art of Rock, 173.
47 Grushkin, The Art of Rock, 176.
48 Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest, 117.
49 On the marketing of “hipness” to the youth market, see Frank, The Conquest of Cool.
50 Frank, The Conquest of Cool.
51 Thomas W. Benson, Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric & Civic Action (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), plate 36.
52 BG-57.
53 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society
and Its Youthful Opposition (New York: Anchor Books, 1969).

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