FD-14 Big Brother & the Holding Company 1966 "Zig-Zag Man" Second Printing Family Dog Concert Poster....

Description

FD-14 Big Brother & the Holding Company 1966 "Zig-Zag Man" Second Printing Family Dog Concert Poster. A second-printing San Francisco concert poster for Big Brother and the Holding Company, with brand new singer Janis Joplin, and Quicksilver Messenger Service at the Avalon Ballroom on Friday and Saturday, June 24-25, 1966. The second printings are very easily distinguishable because, besides the "14(2)" designation under Bill Ham's name, the bottom two lines are printed in blue ink, instead of gold or silver as on the originals.

The big gold star here for this specimen is that it comes from the personal archives of Bob Cohen, the man who co-owned the Family Dog and ran it with Chet Helms from early 1966 until the firm's demise in late 1968. That is just terrifically fun provenance.

Everyone in the Bay Area wanted this iconic image up on their wall, so they were quickly gobbled up from telephone poles and store windows, and were a mainstay in hippie crash pads throughout the rest of the 60's. "Zig-Zag Man" is truly a cultural icon of the decade, one of the five most important and popular concert-poster images of the entire FD and BG series combined.

Don't forget that Janis Joplin had just joined Big Brother full-time at this point. She may have jumped on stage for a couple of songs as a try-out earlier in June, but this is considered by historians as the first S.F. Janis Joplin concert poster. Another gigantic gold star for this poster!

This poster is popular in so many ways it's hard to count them. It was designed by Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley in the spring of 1966, when everything was still so young and naïve. In a flash of brilliance, they designed a poster using the logo for Zig-Zag rolling papers, which everyone in their target audience was using to roll joints. Being such a small, local entity and not making posters to be sold - or so they thought - they feared not copyright infringement. It turns out they were right; the Zig-Zag people never came after them.

Maybe the suits who owned Zig-Zag saw the irony and humor in what Mouse Studios wrote down in the lower left: "What you don't know about copying and duplicating won't hurt you." What a great, disarming line to include on this particular poster!

The tables got turned, however, when some enterprising bootlegger(s) made unauthorized copies of the poster to sell in head shops in the Haight. Chet Helms & gang ran around rubber-stamping those as counterfeits; we had a pair of those for sale in our last auction in August, if you'd like to go see them.

Measures 14 1/4" x 20" and grades to Very Good condition. One thumbtack hole, top center margin, also leaving a circle impression with a little rust color. Dirt markings in the upper right area, by the "G" in "Zag" and possibly a footprint in the upper right corner. Dinged margin edge to the right of "25." Otherwise just standard handling and slight markings or surface creases here & there, nothing else obtrusive at all. A good, solid VG. COA from Heritage Auctions.

Literature: See Grushkin, Paul, The Art of Rock: Posters from Presley to Punk, Abbeville Press, New York, 1987, p.96 (illustrated).

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