Grateful Dead 1965 Can You Pass the Acid Test? Palo Alto, CA Poster w/Venue Info (AOR 2.4)....

Description

IN MANY WAYS, THE ULTIMATE GRATEFUL DEAD POSTER

Grateful Dead 1965 Can You Pass the Acid Test? Palo Alto, CA Poster w/Venue Info (AOR 2.4).

Well, we've finally gotten one. After all this time.

Heritage has finally landed our first Grateful Dead concert poster printed in 1965, at the dawn of their career, that was filled out with specifics and posted around town to draw people into the event.

We all love our high-graded, unused specimens of this poster in goldenrod color, the best one of which we've sold for $35,000 - twice (in 2023 and again this year). Condition is an important part of this hobby, and any grade with "mint" in the verbiage is to be coveted. It's fine & great that those copies were safely kept in storage for the last 60 years.

But from this angle, to find one that's full of living, breathing life, that was fully used to market the event, with details filled into the venue box, that drew people into the event that night, is just a grand-slam, walk-off World Series home run. It took Heritage years to get here, but we've finally done it. These scant few things are so rare and so hung onto by their elite owners.

As you can see in our pictures, the filled-in venue box reads, in blue ballpoint pen, "at the 'BIG BEAT' ... San Antonio Road near Bayshore ... TONIGHT! SAT!" Which means, of course, that this poster was put up the morning or afternoon of the show... Saturday, December 18, 1965.

And if that wasn't enough, it's believed among scholars that this December 18 event was the very first use, ever, of this famous, crazy Acid Test poster. And it's from the Grateful Dead's home town of Palo Alto, California. And we know exactly where this poster came from - the two sisters who attended the event, Kathy and Betsy, who then took home the poster and saved it, and both witnesses have spoken to Heritage about their experience that night. And provided an electrifying Letter of Provenance.

How could this get any better?

Heritage auction-watchers know that back in April, we sold these two sisters' souvenir crayon-drawn poster for the first public Acid Test, which took place in San Jose, California on December 4. And then in July, we auctioned off the crayon-drawn handbill they found in the street of the same historic event. The teenage girls were too shy to walk into the San Jose party, but at least they brought home those two priceless artifacts.

But then, just two weeks later, on December 18, sisters Kathy and Betsy did walk into an Acid Test, perhaps because they were prepared this time, and it was held in the safer confines of a business establishment. And, of course, one of the sisters had seen the Warlocks perform several times earlier that year.

So for every Heritage concert-poster auction this year, you've seen Kathy and Betsy standing in front of their kitchen table with all three of these artifacts spread out before them. The crayon-drawn poster. The crayon-drawn handbill. And yes, this filled-in Big Beat, Palo Alto poster from the event they attended - the poster in this auction.

For the record, that event would be the third public Acid Test, led by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, held at the Big Beat Club in Palo Alto, California on Saturday night, December 18, 1965.

Designed by Merry Prankster Paul Foster, a lot of collectors don't know that in addition to goldenrod, this poster was also printed on white paper and blue paper, three colors in all. This auction's specimen is a white-paper one, of course, with the embellishment of random rust-colored paint on the front and red spray-paint on the verso. How the rust paint got there is anybody's guess; but it's assumed that the "$1.00" on the back side was a rudimentary sign put up at the Big Beat to inform patrons of the admission price. A pretty simple and safe conclusion to draw.

We couldn't wait to ask the sisters their memories of the Big Beat Acid Test, realizing that any memory at all would be a bonus. "It was pretty crazy," sister Kathy tells Heritage. "We were so innocent; we didn't know that Owsley [Stanley] was there, passing out LSD. It wasn't always in the Kool-Aid, it was in different forms. But again, we just went there for the music, to dance. Lots of Day-Glo colors, strobe lights, neon lights. People were dressed in a lot of paisley and neon colors. It was a bit overwhelming for us, because we were still in high school, so to go to something like that, we were pretty naïve about the drugs that went on there."

If you saw our previous auctions in April and July, you'll remember that older sister Kathy had gotten to know Jerry Garcia & company performing in Palo Alto throughout 1965 as the Warlocks. "It was just a neighborhood pizza parlor, and we went there for the music," Kathy reminisces. "We would go there every weekend to listen to them play. There was no dancing at the pizza parlor, we just sat and listened to them.

"We were very disappointed when they changed their name. We knew them as the Warlocks and didn't want them to change."

In a revealing interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 1970, Jerry Garcia and his girlfriend Mountain Girl still had good memories of this event, which had taken place only five years earlier. "The Big Beat was a plushy little nightclub in Palo Alto," Garcia told Rolling Stone editor and publisher Jann Wenner. "That was a real nice one. There was the stage with the Grateful Dead setup on it over here... and on the other side there's sort of a long runway. It's sort of an L-shaped room, and on the point of the L is the Grateful Dead, and down here is where the Pranksters have their setup, which is like... it kinda looked like a cockpit.

"It had this Day-Glo organ and all these weird tape recorders and stuff and microphones and [Ken] Babbs, who had on one of his quasi-uniforms." Garcia and Mountain Girl explained that the Big Beat gig was the debut of the Merry Pranksters' new "uniforms," basically loudly colored outfits in bright green and orange with white stripes.

As for the Big Beat itself, this Acid Test was obviously way out of the norm for the 'plush little nightclub.' "There were the two straight ladies who owned the place or something," Mountain Girl told Wenner, "worrying what was going on. We had rented this place from them for $50 or $100 or something like that. They were just freaking out." Which jogged Garcia's memory: "Oh, right, right... middle-aged ladies. They were hanging around behind the bar the whole time."

Jann Wenner also asked them about the patrons who showed up. "A lot of drifter Palo Alto types," Mountain Girl said. "And speed freaks, lots of speed freaks." To which Garcia added, "And weirdos. There were always weirdoes at the Acid Tests. There were always a lot of people that didn't know from LSD; they were like bums and hobos and strange truck-driver types and shit like that, who would always somehow turn up there, and find themselves in this weird other world."

"Oh, and Neal Cassady and Ann Murphy were there," Mountain Girl continued to tell Rolling Stone. Notice that Cassady's name is on this poster, above the Grateful Dead. "Neal was really good," Garcia added. "There was one small strobe light in between our two set-ups, but it was real bright, enough to flash the whole place because it was a fairly small room. We'd play stuff and the Pranksters would be doin' stuff and there was this incredible cross-interference and weirdness. Stewart Brand was there with his Indian stuff, too."

The famous book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe documented the whole scene in terrific, fun detail. "The Acid Tests were the epoch of the psychedelic style and practically everything that has gone into it," Wolfe writes. "I don't mean merely that the Pranksters did it first, but rather, that it all came straight out of the Acid Tests in a direct line leading to the Trips Festival of January 1966. That brought the whole thing full out into the open.

"Mixed media entertainment - this came straight out of the Acid Tests' combination of light and movie projections, strobes, tapes, rock 'n' roll, black light. Acid rock... the mothers of it all was the Grateful Dead at the Acid Tests. The Dead were the audio counterpart of Roy Seburn's light projections." Wolfe was referring to "Roy's Audioptics" on the poster, right next to the Dead's name.

"Owsley [Stanley] was responsible for some of this, indirectly," Wolfe's book concludes. "Maybe he figured the Tests were the wave of the future, or maybe he thought 'acid rock' was the sound of the future and he would become a kind of Brian Epstein for the Grateful Dead.

"Even psychedelic poster art came out of the Acid Tests."

Speaking of which, Paul Foster's artwork is an insane collage of esoteric, clever and funny words and images everywhere you look, much of it nonsense. For the longest time the design was credited to Norman Hartweg, as The Art of Rock book states; the research then shifted to perhaps a collaborative effort by many Pranksters; and now it's been concluded that cartoonist and Merry Prankster Paul Foster was the sole artist.

The key, primary phrase winding throughout the poster is this: On the left side you have, "Can you pass the Acid Test? The happeners are likely to include..." And on the right side, top to bottom: "...The Fugs, Allen Ginsberg, The Merry Pranksters, Neal Cassady, The Grateful Dead, Roy's Audio Optics, Movies. This Saturday night. Bring your own comfort. Here's where it's at," and then the blank box.

This mind-blowing poster - more so than any other psychedelic poster of the era - fairly screamed fun, crazy, edgy, LSD-fueled hipster-ness not for the faint of heart. LSD was still legal at this point, and would sweep the Bay Area underground scene largely at the hands of Owsley. (It would be made illegal in October 1966.)

This was the very first printed poster advertising the Dead, just weeks after they changed their name from the Warlocks. The fall and winter 1965 Acid Tests in the San Francisco Bay Area helped to kick-start the whole psychedelic underground music-and-poster movement, bringing about a tectonic shift in pop culture.

As we've alluded, this was actually a "tour blank" advertising poster, because that small blank box was fashioned down in the lower right corner, in which a town and venue could be filled in. They even spell it out for you: "Here's Where It's At," right above the box. Now, usually with tour blanks a date would need to be filled in too, right? But not necessarily in the Pranksters' world. Sometimes they wanted people to read the poster and figure it out, not just gloss it over. In fact, notice the very first thing the poster says in the extreme upper left corner: "Read every word of this." OK, sure!

Then down in the artwork not far above the blank box, it says with convoluted lettering, "This Saturday Night." So this poster could never be used for more than six days. With that wording, it could be functionally used only from a Sunday morning up through the following Saturday evening. And like this Big Beat / Palo Alto specimen, on the very few examples where this poster has been found with the venue box filled in, none of them give the date, only the location, so everybody played along. The poster seems to say with a wink: It's this upcoming Saturday night... what part don't you get?

We've never done crazier in all the years of offering pop culture here at Heritage auctions, and I'm not even sure we've ever done rarer. This museum-piece Heritage offering measures 17" x 22" and grades to Very Good condition. From the David Swartz Concert Poster Collection. COA from Heritage Auctions.

Pete Howard
Director, Concert Posters

Literature: See Grushkin, Paul, The Art of Rock: Posters from Presley to Punk, Abbeville Press, New York, 1987, p.91 (full-page illus.).

More Information: It's hard to grade craziness! Is what we kept thinking. The pinholes are easy: There's a pinhole tear-away in the upper left corner, and two pinholes in each of the other three corners. Otherwise, after that, it's a cornucopia of paint fingerprints and splatters, blemishes, art doodles, an impromptu "$1.00" admission sign... you name it. One picture's worth a thousand words, so why write the thousand words out here... just peruse our photograph and feast your eyes. Condition means almost nothing on a historic piece like this... the very fact that it survived is the whole story.


Heritage Auctions provides as much information as possible but strongly encourages in-person inspection. Condition statements are offered as general guidance only, not as complete representations of fact, and do not constitute a warranty or assumption of liability by Heritage. Some condition issues may not be noted but may be visible in the photos, which are considered part of the condition report. Lots estimated at $1,000 or less are not de-framed for inspection, and we may be unable to provide additional details for lots valued under $500. Heritage does not guarantee the condition of frames and is not liable for damage to frames, glass/acrylic coverings, original boxes, display accessories, or artwork that has shifted in the frame. All lots are sold "AS IS" under our Terms & Conditions of Auction.