I’M SO EXCITED to be working with my new buddy, KC Murphy, on her amazing Bindweed Press poster collection for Heritage’s spring auctions. Of all the stories we’ve heard about how San Francisco concert posters were saved from the old days, this one is pretty extraordinary. As a little girl, KC used to literally lie on the floor of the legendary Bay-Area printery, with her siblings, and color on the blank backs of first-printing San Francisco concert posters! I wonder how many FD-26 Skeleton & Roses posters she “enhanced” this way?
AUCTION PREVIEW: Check the schedule for poster auctions.
But whether it’s that famous poster or Zig-Zag Man, Peace/Winnie the Pooh, Edwardian Ball, Howlin’ Wolf at the Avalon, the Grateful Dead’s “Notice!” tour, a Hells Angels dance with Janis and Big Brother, or the seminal Human Be-In, family friend Frank Westlake’s storied print shop was her playground, and the posters’ versos were her art supplies.
None of KC’s original colored artwork exists anymore. But what we do have are mint-condition first-printing specimens of all those posters and much, much more. Naturally, every single one screamed out for CGC grading, so off they went, back they came, and without surprise, most of the Bindweed Press Collection is dressed to the nines: 9.6, 9.2, 9.8, 9.4, and so forth. Her mother would take home a fresh new copy of each poster printed and, rather than hang them up in the home, carefully stow them away in an antique wooden trunk. Wow! And now we’re all poised to benefit from it 55 years later.
Bindweed printed more than concert posters, of course. So there are also political posters (“Smash Capitalism, Vote Communist”; “Cleaver for President”), hippie-pad peace/love posters, art events, astrology, depictions of Haight-Ashbury… the whole gamut. And it’s all going up for auction this spring, in our April Signature and May Showcase auctions. We’re even printing a separate catalog for this collection, and that doesn’t happen often; the last concert poster separate catalog we printed was for The Beatles’ 1966 Shea Stadium poster, so this collection is in hallowed company.
Who’s KC, you may be wondering? That little girl lying on the floor at the Bindweed Press went on to her own an amazing career in the music biz… starting at Capitol Records in the famous Hollywood tower, assisting in the careers of artists like Poison, Heart and Tina Turner. KC’s next career move was into private artist management; would you believe she was Assistant Manager for Guns N’ Roses during their Appetite for Destruction era? Wow! Plus other seminal 80’s artists such as Berlin, Great White, David & David and Toni Childs.
In recent years, KC teamed up with David Crosby, and his wife Jan, to co-produce a series of benefit concerts in California’s Santa Ynez Valley. The concerts featured guest artists Christopher Cross, Michael McDonald, Melissa Etheridge, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Clint Black and Neil Young. In fact, KC’s career in the music business resulted in a second treasure trove of latter-day posters she collected, many of them autographed, which Heritage is also auctioning this spring.
What terrific street cred and provenance for all these posters!
See you in the spring!
Pete Howard
Director, Concert Posters