In the SF Fillmore there’s a room with a 16 foot ceiling where they’ve kept and mounted the original bill posters from the venue’s 35 year existence. They served the bands and crew lunch in this room the day we were there. As we ate we scanned the posters on the walls. The posters from The Fillmore’s heyday, from when it opened in 1965 to when it first closed in 1971, are particularly remarkable. There’s, say, a poster for Fleetwood Mac playing with Creedence in ‘69. Or The Doors opening for The Grateful Dead in ‘67….man. Or what about this one – Love and The Dead from ‘66! Wes and Danny, in particular, hopped up and down from the dinner table to get a better look at this, that or the other poster.
The Vines and Youth Group have a poster up from their appearance in 2003, although it’s in a different room – upstairs on the balcony. This means, at least, that The Vines must have sold out their Fillmore show because (so I heard) that they only keep posters from sold-out events. Unfortunately it’s a shitty image of a mosquito:
So not every band gets their poster mounted on the Fillmore wall for all time. The Get Up Kids already had a couple from their own heyday around 99/00/01 but tonight’s event (some tickets unsold) was marked only by a one-off magic marker drawing of a mother waking up her two kids. The Get Up Kids – get it? After load-out Wes and I were talking to the doorman, who looked like he’d been on the door since 1971, and he said we could meet the poster’s artist if we wanted. I just wanted to know if it really was the show’s poster – it just didn’t seem very good.
“That’s the poster.”
“I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.”
“I never kid,” he replied, and with that, perfectly illustrated the death of the hippie spirit.
The doorman was part of The Fillmore’s local crew. This consisted of about half a dozen slow-moving, sandalled, grey-ponytailed relics from the Fillmore heyday. After the gig, as we loaded out in the alley next to The Fillmore, we found what amounted to the burn-out’s clubhouse. There was a collection of junk: a hash pipe, a ripped tarpaulin, a Halloween costume, some newspaper clippings about Hitler, amongst other “stuff”. Cameron recreated the cacophany in a drawing which he then turned into a poster for the Get Up Kids show in the bubbly-lettered Fillmore style:
I was joking with Joe from GUK crew about these acid casualties on staff and he told me how he’d been having a cigarette in the alley and one of the old guys came up to him and asked, “What are you doing?”
“It’s cool, I’m with the Get Up Kids,” Joe said.
“I guess you can smoke in my alley then” he replied. Like a sixty year old first grader taking umbrage but unprepared to duke it out for his turf.
The San Francisco show ended up being one of our all time best shows I thought.