Grateful Dead 1965 Can You Pass the Acid Test? Rare Portland, OR Event Poster w/Venue Info (AOR 2.4)....

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ANOTHER MIRACLE POSTER: THE ONE ACID TEST HELD OUTSIDE OF CALIFORNIA

Grateful Dead 1965 Can You Pass the Acid Test? Rare Portland, OR Event Poster w/Venue Info (AOR 2.4).

Well, lightning has struck twice here at Heritage. After all this time.

Last auction, Heritage 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 at the Big Beat club in Palo Alto, California.

And now, lo and behold, a man in his late 70's has come forward and offered up his own venue-used Acid Test poster to Heritage for auction this spring. We can't believe it ourselves. This time, the event took place at Beaver Hall in Portland, Oregon on Wednesday night, December 29, 1965. It was the Grateful Dead's sixth public live performance ever. And obviously their first gig in the state of Oregon, which would become a favorite and special destination for the band the rest of their career.

We're simply thrilled to death that this specimen is the tall, thin, completed version created by cutting the original poster down the middle and following the poster's instructions to create the tall version which then reads perfectly from top to bottom. (The poster we're auctioning is tall, thin and attached at the middle. For marketing purposes and visual convenience, Heritage's photo department created the more-square image that you see in places.)

And awesomely, this is the first time we've ever seen this poster's unique flag presented intact and used as poster artist Paul Foster instructed people to. That's what you see sticking out halfway down the poster, and missing at the very bottom left. The wording on that flag literally says, "This grand thing can be made very long & thin by cutting up the middle and pasting line "a," below, to line "b," above. Or it can be left as it is." Crazy, right?

And notice how an ampersand is used between the words "long" and "thin," but then on the next line between the words "middle" and "pasting," instead of another ampersand artist Foster put ditto marks to just repeat the ampersand from directly above it. Nutso and fun! And this poster is stuffed to the gills with crazy little fun stuff like that.

The very aged writing in this rare specimen's venue box says, "Dec. 29 till 1 A.M. Beaver Hall." And then twice in the margins around the box, it gives the location via the cross streets: "S.E. 9th & Hawthorne." What about the day of the week? Well, it was a Wednesday. So notice how the Merry Pranksters crossed off much of the words "Saturday night" on the poster and dropped in the letters "Wednes" vertically, leading down to the "day" printed on the poster. It's a remarkably inventive improvisation to make the poster accurate and yet keep all of its crazy ethos.

And then the hand-coloring on this poster... it's just a sheer delight. Should we say a lot of work, or a lot of fun? Went into coloring this poster, which was posted right outside the front doors of the venue. It would be impractical for us to walk through every cool little colored thing, so we'll leave that to your eyes to feast upon. That's why Heritage posts enlargeable and high-res photos on our Web site.

Another super element of this poster is that our consignor, Michael Vann, actually attended the event, and afterwards asked if he could take home the poster. Same owner, 60 years, and a signed letter of recollection provided with the poster. No garage sales, poster dealers or eBay involved! Do read his Letter of Provenance, it's such a majorly cool part of this piece.

All in all, it's a truly remarkable discovery, given the fact that even confirmation that a Portland Acid Test really took place was up in the air until last year, when the date of December 29 was finally uncovered. So the web sites might have it now, but none of the books do. That'll have to come with books printed going forward.

Jason Blumklotz is a local music historian and poster collector who is working on a detailed history of Oregon concert posters. "The Portland Acid Test took place at a rented hall known as the Beaver Building at 1510 SE 9th Avenue," Blumklotz tells Heritage. "It was originally constructed in the 1920s to house the Improved Order of Red Men, a fraternal organization. Sometime later the group disbanded and the name was changed to the Beaver Building, sometimes called Beaver Hall. The upstairs venue was rented for the night by the Merry Pranksters. Today the venue is home to a comedy club.

"To avoid any confusion, it should be noted that there were two Beaver Halls in Portland. A few years later, in 1968, a hippy collective opened an emporium and dance hall in northwest Portland that featured many up-and-coming local psychedelic bands.

"Not a lot is known about this Acid Test," Blumklotz concludes, "which seems to have been sparsely attended by local hipsters and young folk. The harrowing journey over the California-Oregon border mountain pass, through a blizzard, is detailed in Phil Lesh's autobiography."

So we indeed turned to Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh's book, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (Back Bay Books, 2006). "What mattered about the Portland Acid Test," Lesh writes, "was the journey toward it. It began as our first trip together on Further, Kesey's fabled bus. Bobby and I had day-tripped on the bus to see the Beatles at the Cow Palace earlier that year, but for the majority of the band [including Jerry Garcia] it was a first.

"Leaving Palo Alto as early as possible, by midafternoon we were halfway up the Central Valley headed for Shasta and points north, and then: catastrophe! The bus breaks down! Never let it be said that the show did not go on! What to do?

"We rent a U-Haul truck; we strip the bus and cram all of us - the band, the Pranksters - and everything else into the truck. I jump into the shotgun seat up front, and we cruise off into the darkening storm of the worst blizzard in years. Over the Siskiyou Mountains in the dead of night, Neal [Cassady] pressing ever onward, the rhythm of the falling snow sweeping through the headlights.

"If ever the magic of the open road was distilled into a single experience," Lesh concludes, "it was, for me, that night sitting next to Neal, hurtling into the whirling snow, with his voice turning every sentence into a poem."

Wow. Back to the poster itself, the key, primary phrase running from top to bottom is, "Can you pass the Acid Test? The happeners are likely to include... The Fugs, Allen Ginsberg, The Merry Pranksters, Neal Cassady, The Grateful Dead, Roy's Audio Optics, Movies. This Saturday [changed to "Wednesday" here] night. Bring your own comfort. Here's where it's at," and then the venue 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 1965-66 Acid Tests helped to kick-start the whole psychedelic underground music-and-poster movement, bringing about a tectonic shift in pop culture.

As we've explained, 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!

As for its condition, Heritage could have had Chameleon Restoration work it over from top to bottom, fixing all the little edge tears, missing bits of paper and so forth. But nope, not a chance! We wanted to auction off this historic piece exactly as it was used to bring patrons in, intrepidly taken from the hall by our consignor, saved for 60 years and then now finding a new home. No way we're going to touch this thing... it is 100% 1965 molecules!

For two auctions in a row now, 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 than an Acid Test poster with the venue box filled in. This museum-piece Heritage offering measures 8 1/2" x a very tall 42 3/4" and grades to what we have to call only Fair condition, but... does anybody really care? 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: The famous book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe documented the whole zany 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.

Condition details: There is simply no sense in us detailing every little crease, tear, blemish, fade, fold, missing paper piece, etc.... your eyes tell you all you need to know, and your heart will tell you that it simply doesn't matter.


Heritage Auctions provides detailed information when available but strongly encourages in-person inspection. Condition statements and photographs are offered as general guidance only, not as complete representations of facts, and do not constitute a warranty or assumption of liability by Heritage. Framed artworks are not examined outside their frames, and additional details from Heritage may be unavailable; therefore, the condition of unexamined works is not guaranteed. Heritage is not responsible for damage to frames, glazing, original boxes, display materials, or for works that have shifted within the frame. All lots are sold "AS IS" in accordance with our Terms & Conditions of Auction.