I love it when the band gets the poster! When you have a discussion with the band over a piece and they say stuff like, “by far the best poster we’ve ever gotten,” “gritty and classy at the same time,” “I never hang up my band posters in my house, but this one goes up.” It’s Total Print Victory.

Then we had a cool discussion about the graffiti and how it somehow looks like Japanese characters. Pointed out that I gave shout outs to all my friends – Dave Hunter’s TRPS logo, Zoltron, Political Gridlock, and Ribbity (one of my favorite SF Graf artists).

Hangar 18 represents on an SF bus while the central figure “tunes out” with ipod in an introspective mood. Somehow all this technology still leaves us listening to our inner voice – even when blasting music.

Just a reminder – the Firehouse-Goldenvoice Poster Series is getting veeeery close to number 100.

Passion Pit, Mayer Hawthorne and The Country, Bear Hands

Firehouse Goldenvoice Series Number 97

Thursday, April 15, 2010

The Warfield

Poster will be released April 16, 2010 at 12 noon PST.

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Passion Pit Red (numbers 26-125)

Firehouse Goldenvoice Series Number 97

Edition of 100

2 colors on canvas textured red paper

(heavy gold metallic and deep purple)

23″ x 35″

Signed and Numbered

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SOLD OUT

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Passion Pit Black (limited to numbers 1-25)

Firehouse Goldenvoice Series Number 97

Edition of 25

2 colors on canvas textured black paper

(heavy metallic blue and deep purple)

23″ x 35″

Signed and Numbered

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SOLD OUT

Well, extremely sad to say, Urlo, Poia and Lu have headed for the airport. The Dark Nouveau Tour was a massive success. I miss my good friends already!!!!

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Vita, the drummer for Ufomammut, was still in town today. George and I drove over to the Mission to get him, and took him over to Alameda for a visit to Jon-Paul Bail’s house and a tour of his Political Gridlock studio. Seemed a good quiet day to chill down from the busy weekend. Went to Ole’s Waffle House for a mid afternoon breakfast and then caught a drink at the Lucky 13 in Alameda. Showed Vita all the cool posters at Lucky 13 Alameda, collected by Dan, the owner of Lucky 13, who made a special trip over to the bar just to say hello to him. Played pinball and drank a couple of good Belgian brews.

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As for Saturday night, Ufomammut and Acid King surpassed my expectations and played just amazingly cool sets, just blew my mind how good the show was. Awesome poster visuals provided by Malleus, Alan Forbes, Dave Hunter, and Firehouse. Justin and Heather played really cool music, perfect for the mood, DJ’ing into Acid King’s masterful and heavy groove. I’m still stunned at the power and grace that drives Acid King – I got swept onto their heavy freight train of metal – and dug the shit out of their entire set. Loved where they were taking me, and was all sweaty at the end.

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I was overjoyed to finally get to witness a live Ufomammut show. Urlo, Poia and Vita played heavy, groovin, doom with modulated soft sections and booming heavy over-drive. Made me so very happy to finally get to meet this side of my friends after knowing only the visual art side of them for over seven years. I’m astonished at how powerful they are with music – and enjoyed every second of their set – and will savor the memory for the rest of my life.

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Varnish was packed full of great people. I want to thank everyone for coming down and supporting the scene! I had the time of my life! Thank you to Varnish Fine Art for hosting my event!

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This morning I called Joey from Acid King to tell him thank you – to him and Lori, and Mark – for such a great show at Varnish Fine Art last Saturday night. He hipped me to Brian Lew’s glowing review of the show on Umlaut. Brian hit the nail on the head when he said, “This will go down as one of my favorite nights of the year!” I want to thank everyone who helped me organize this show and who participated and who came to have a good time.

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After packing all the gear and wrapping at Varnish at 2 am, George and I caught four hours of sleep, met up again at my house at 6 am, and drove over to Golden Gate Park, and started to set up for everyone at Speedway Meadow for the West Fest. We pulled into Speedway Meadow minutes before dawn, and found that our space had been commandeered by our good friends in the Hell’s Angels. Didn’t have a problem with that, and found good lodgings for our booth next door to good friend Chris Shaw and his wife Alex Fischer. Started to set up the table to sell our West Fest Poster Series with Malleus, Dave Hunter, me and Ron Donovan’s posters. Dave was there bright and early. The Malleus boys slept in at my bidding (since they played such a ripping rock show the night before) and Ron, who had just recently arrived home from Hawaii, made every effort to get the posters to the show, so people could get complete sets of posters.

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Going to take the day easy tomorrow. The ever dependable George will meet for coffee in the morning. We’ll return the PA to McCune in South City SF, help search for Acid King’s visual backdrop DVD (we were having a such a good time and forgot this detail), settle the poster details from the show at Varnish, return the gridwall sections, write thank you emails, etc. Take a day to recharge for designing my Dinosaur Jr poster. Think onward to two Widespread Panic posters coming in the Fall. Get cracking on The Young Gods poster. Start to play with designs for The Prodigy who have asked for another design. Schedule printing for Skinny Puppy at the Regency by Zoltron.

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Mail order that backed up while Malleus was here – Tuesday night and in the mail Wednesday

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Ah, I guess it’s back to the drawing board ; )

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Most of all I’ll shed some tears for my Malleus friends. Miss you guys. Hope you arrive safe and sound in Tortona, Italy!

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West Fest 2009

Editon of 200

4 colors on archival cream paper

20″ x 26″

Signed and Numbered

$30 + $7 Shipping

It’s been a hectic, hard-working year establishing the Firehouse-Goldenvoice Poster Series, art directing and printing all these great posters, with my friend and partner Ron Donovan. Yes, it has been a year, and we are nearing poster number 70.

If you do the math that’s more than one poster a week. Add that to the other posters we produce (read Eric Clapton and Van Morrison to name but two) while at work on the Firehouse-Goldenvoice Series, it’s been a busy year!

Little did we know what a cool year we would have at the Firehouse in 2009. When Chris Shaw introduced us to his landlord Victor Hanson – who was daring enough to rent to us – Chris set us up and we got the new Firehouse studio. We began to call it Hangar 18, the secret military installation in Dayton, Ohio (my hometown) where alien technology is reverse engineered.

After our awesome trip to the United Kingdom in 2008 – organized by the genius of Marc Malakie, founder of Station 4 Gallery, his impeccable site for art prints produced by the Firehouse crew – including the great Emory Douglas – we set to work on the idea of this Series.

The Firehouse-Goldenvoice Series has also brought out the best in Firehouse; the best in me as well, my artwork, and I hope, brought many new faces here to check out my new designs.

The Firehouse-Goldenvoice Series has also brought out the best in all of the fine poster artists who have been invited to take this crazy ride with me and Ron Don. Thanks to everyone included in the series thus far:

Chuck Sperry • Ron Donovan • Malleus (IT) • Dave Hunter • Alexandra Fischer • Chris Shaw • Dennis Loren • Martin Bedford (UK) • Aaron Farmer • Reuben Rude • Gregg Gordon • Jeff Ross • John Howard • Alan Hynes • Frank Zio • Zoltron • Mike King • Scott Johnson

Thanks to David Lefkowitz of Goldenvoice Presents for inviting Firehouse Kustom Rockart Company to produce this poster series, and for having the vision to know it was the right thing at the right time. Mass props and forever indebted and thankful to Doug Dashiell, the Production Manager of the Warfield, who showed David what was possible to do in silkscreen and brought the idea to his attention. In short, Doug put it all together by changing hearts and minds at Goldenvoice.

Doug, armed with his mighty poster collection, enthusiasm and knowledge of silkscreened posters, pushed the idea. All that was left for David and Firehouse was to just do it.

We have been fortunate to show this series in quite a few exhibits in the last year including:

TRPS Festival of Posters • San Francisco 2008

Art of Musical Maintanance • Portland 2008

Lucky 13 • Alameda 2008

Varnish Fine Art • San Francisco 2009

Ogilvy West • San Francisco 2009

TRPS Rock Art By The Bay • San Francisco 2009

The Best of The East Bay • Oakland Museum 2009

Lucky 13 • Alameda 2009

Rock Art Revulsion • Sacramento 2009

And soon TRPS Festival of Posters • San Francisco 2009

There have been quite a few Poster of the Week awards on Expressobeans – that makes me proud – thanks for everyones’ support! There have been many emergency runs to the paper and ink suppliers, thanks to George Gamboa (KAW!) and Stephen Abramson.

Thanks to the Firehouse buddy-studio Political Gridlock run by Jon-Paul Bail has been a constant source of creativity, ideas (and emergency ink!) at the Firehouse – without JP no cool graffiti, no political compass and no fun!

And many kind thanks to Lulu Ehrhard, one of the very best printers in the Bay Area.

What would a workday at Firehouse be like without a visit from JC Hall of Ideal Posters with his daughter Anjelica along for the ride, who has supported us through many years and made “Bowlio” an international silkscreen superstar; Or without a neighborly visit from Flipper Ted (the band not a poster dealer). And thanks to Chela from PsPrint for the offsets and friendly break from work.

Many thanks and a great big shout out to Nick Cernak who created Firehouse Kustom Rockart Company’s first fully functional website, Hangar 18, and gave me the foundation and design for this site you are reading right here.

Sometimes the Firehouse seems like a cast of characters from a movie – thanks to Merle Becker for committing some of this to film in her brilliant documentary, “American Artifact: The Rise of American Rock Poster Art,” which came out last year while all this was going down.

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On this occasion, Firehouse-Goldenvoice’s first anniversary, I thought it would be cool to revisit my Mogwai poster, and move it here to my new site – begin to move all the posters I’ve done for the Series here – little by little.

Also supplies are getting mighty low on most of my Firehouse-Goldenvoice Series posters from the last year and thought it best to move them here while I still have some to show.

Here’s some posters included in my updated posts:

• English Beat

• Phoenix

• Neko Case

• Mogwai

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This photo sums it up nicely: “Wiley, the kid on the poster; Zoltron, the man behind the kid on the poster; Sperry, the man behind the man behind the kid on the poster.”

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Printed Zoltron’s Psychedelic Furs / Happy Mondays poster on Wednesday. What a blast!

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Zoltron went off on the typography. He told me it took a few days just to place all the characters, highlights and blends on the fonts.

This thing is a symphony of yellow, really an eye grabber.

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We had really the best day of printing, and had a lot of cool visitors. George Gamboa, Dave Hunter and Dennis Loren made the scene – here’s the TMZ photo of the crew – George is behind the camera. Oh, yeah, while printing the doorbell rang and a mysterious crate from Italy arrived – the Malleus art got locked into the vault.

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Well, the funny part is we got finished at 8:30 pm Wednesday – so Zoltron and George dropped me off at my crib – and I started working on Phoenix. That drawing session went on to dawn. Caught about an hour of fitful sleep (too much coffee), woke up at 7:00 am and put the poster together for films. The whole idea just kind of dropped whole-piece out of the brain and onto the paper, definitely energized by the fun day before. Mr. Z picked me up at about 10:30 and off to get films on the way to the studio. I’m telling myself, things just happen in the way they should.

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Number 62 in the Firehouse Goldenvoice poster series is designed by Zoltron for The Psychedelic Furs and Happy Mondays concert with special guests Amusement Parks on Fire on September 17, 2009 at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco, CA. This silkscreen gig poster measures 20″ x 27″ comes signed and numbered by the artist from an edition of 200. Love my way? There is a special red and white colorway, with an edition of 10. Both for sale now at Zoltron.com