It's time to start your collection.
By Nate Todd Oct 25, 2022 • 2:02 pm PDT
The JamBase Concert Poster Primer
Welcome back to The JamBase Concert Poster Primer, our ongoing series about the amazing evolution of concert posters over the past 70 years.
Imagine it’s 1979. You’re a college student on tour with the Grateful Dead. Bumper stickers are your stock and trade. You cruise the bazaar in the parking lot outside the show, barking your wares. Through the hazy crowd, something catches your eye. The colors make your heart thump in your chest. You get closer. The images beckon to you. Closer still. The paper smells old. You barter for three beauties. But a rowdy college dorm room is no place for a treasured poster. So you take it home and hang it on your bedroom wall for safekeeping. Until one day you come home to find … your posters are gone!
The scene above is based on real life events experienced by Adam Roberts, a “man of many enthusiasms,” one of those being concert poster collecting, which is the subject of the fourth and final installment in the JamBase Concert Poster Primer series in partnership with Psychedelic Art Exchange — the premier source to buy, sell, and learn about vintage concert posters.
In Part 4, we’ll examine Concert Posters As Collectibles & Investments. But speaking of poster collections, what happened to Adam’s?
“In 1981 I came home to find my bedroom converted to a den and my mother threw out the posters!” Roberts revealed to JamBase. “This was actually a huge turning point for me,” he continued. “In rebellion against my parents, I promptly started repurchasing those posters and then a few others…and then a few more.”
As Adam’s story highlights, the ways in which people come to collect concert posters are myriad. What collectors look for in a concert poster is also diverse. The artwork, the band and show attendance are just a few factors that might float a collector’s boat. For some, it moves into the realm of compulsion to complete a set — by band, artist or venue — which says a lot about how deeply ingrained collecting is in the human psyche.
It’s pretty tough to be a person and not collect something. Renowned Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung theorized that collecting’s wide and varied appeal to humans comes from hundreds of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers. Examples of what we recognize as collecting stretch back 5,000 years to Mesopotamia as a hobby among the elites. Ptolemaic Egypt’s Library of Alexandria is another famed collection. In Renaissance Italy, the Medici Family began the first art collection by private patronage.
The Industrial Revolution brought about a proliferation of goods in general. In the 20th century, mass-produced items like stamps, coins, baseball cards and comics became popular collectibles. As these collectibles and their collectors evolved, a grading system became necessary to determine value.
In 1987, the Numismatic Guaranty Company (NGC) became one of the first independent third-party rare coin grading companies. In 2000, the NGC’s sister organization, the Certified Guaranty Company (CGC), played the same role in grading rare comic books. The CGC stepped into the concert poster art world in the past decade, revolutionizing the way vintage concert posters are traded and valued. The CGC Standard Grading Scale operates on a 10-point hierarchy further delineated by decimal points with each designation receiving a characterization like Mint or Near Mint. For example, a piece with a 9.8 grade is considered Near Mint/Mint.
“Certainly the most significant development in rock poster collecting of the last 10 years has been the introduction of CGC grading,” Ted Bahr, owner of Bahr Gallery, told JamBase. “This has taken a lot of the guesswork out of the market in terms of quality and for some pieces, one can consider the CGC folks as creating a stable market for pricing.”
But like any market, the vintage concert poster trade sees fluctuations. Bahr explained using perhaps the most famous vintage concert poster of them all from the famed Family Dog numbered series, FD-26 or “Skeleton & Roses”:
“Not all posters will go up tremendously in value and that’s why you buy what you love. But at the top end there is always a desire for the best of the best and that poster in this field is known as FD-26, or, the original Skeleton & Roses poster from 1966 by Mouse & Kelley.
A Near Mint version of this poster that was unsigned sold at auction for $50,600 in August 2018. In mid-2019 one sold for $56,000, and the high-water mark was reached with a copy in top condition going for $118,750 at the end of 2019. In August 2020, a yellowed FD-26 graded as Very Good, sold for $38,750 at auction. The next month, a top CGC-graded piece sold for $116,150 in an online auction and another sold in July 2021 for $93,750. In November 2021 a CGC 9.6 sold for $109,375. Another 9.6 sold in early Spring for $84,375 and the current record set in April 2022 is a staggering $137,500.
Interestingly, while this poster is rare and valuable, the high prices people can get for selling them keeps shaking them out of trees – there have to be at least a dozen for sale across the auctions each year.”
Unscrupulous dealers aren’t necessarily looking for transparency, so the CGC grading is helpful for poster retailers like Bahr Gallery and Psychedelic Art Exchange to allow prospective buyers to make educated and sophisticated decisions about buying concert poster art. To get a feel for a poster’s provenance and history, Psychedelic Art Exchange’s Past Auctions page is a great resource.
Another resource for collectors looking for a piece of the action is Rally Road, as Psychedelic Art Exchange owner Glen Trosch detailed:
“The latest innovation to capture the collecting community is fractionalized ownership of collectibles. Essentially it is like buying stock in collectibles. Shares are offered at an introductory offer and once sold out trade at market value. Rally Road is the leader of this emerging powerhouse in the collectibles world, every asset that they offer is SEC approved. Rally Road has taken an interest in concert posters and PAE has taken the lead by offering a CGC graded 9.6 FD-26 Skull and Roses to Rally. The interest by collectors is super encouraging.
Psychedelic Art Exchange has since its creation sought innovative tools to promote the category and increase the value of psychedelic concert posters. They were a pioneer in bringing CGC certified posters to market and their $1 starting bid, no reserve auctions routinely break sales records in the poster world. Psychedelic Art Exchange is intent on getting the word out to a greater audience and have once again broken the sound barrier by offering one of their top assets to Rally Road, the FD 26 9.6 that was introduced last Friday at Rally Road at $125,000 for $10 a share: the offer sold out in less than 30 minutes.”
Listen to the Psychedelic Art Exchange/Rally Road podcast.
While CGC grading has changed the concert poster art collection world for the better, it has also received its fair share of criticism.
“Unfortunately CGC will only grade a fraction of the concert posters that are available,” Trosch said. “The company will only certify posters that are cataloged in Eric Kings Guide, The Art of Rock, The Art of Modern Rock and a handful of numbered modern posters.”
Bahr had some critiques for the certification system as well:
“On the positive side,” Bahr added, “I will say that if you are going to build a substantial collection and keep your posters in a portfolio or set of flat file drawers, CGC-encased posters are very easy to store and handle.”
CGC grading also increased the number of collectors, as third party certification allows inexperienced collectors to participate in the trade with confidence. But CGC grading pertains mostly to vintage concert posters collected in the wild. As we learned in the collecting section in Part 3 of the series, collectors have varying modi operandi. While some collect vintage posters that were actually used for advertising shows, when it comes to the modern merch poster (as we also learned about in Part 3) there are two main varieties of participants. Brian Chambers of The Chambers Project explained:
Owen Murphy - Courtesy of Psychedelic Art Exchange
Courtesy of Psychedelic Art Exchange
Being a diehard collector following your passion first and investment second seems to be the general consensus among the top traders as the way to go about assembling your collection, as Chambers noted:
But naturally, finances come into play as you are spending money on these posters and maybe one day hope for a positive return on your investment. Jeff Meyer, collector and founder of GoCollect, gave some insight on what he looks for as a buyer.
“[It] depends on whether I’m buying a concert poster to collect or invest. As a personal collection purchase, I tend to place the following order of importance – history, rarity, art, band, condition. As an investor, it’s almost always about the band and where that concert chronologically fits into their history. If there’s amazing art, that’s the cherry on top.”
Adam Roberts also weighed in on what he looks for as a prospective buyer:
Courtesy of Psychedelic Art Exchange
Steve Catron "Berry Dropper" - Courtesy of Psychdedelic Art Exchange
One collector who seems to have maximized his enjoyment obtained from the work is Roger McNamee. A successful businessman as well as a renowned musician having founded the bands Flying Other Brothers and Moonalice, McNamee and his wife have provided patronage for concert poster art and artists for many years and also helped to establish the Haight Street Art Center in San Francisco.
“I am not really a collector in the traditional sense,” McNamee told JamBase. “My wife and I are supporters of poster artists and poster art. We have a huge collection of posters, original art for posters, and ephemera. But our real value has been to commission more than 2,000 posters and to create a museum to promote rock poster art.”
Most of the poster commissions McNamee speaks of were for his band Moonalice. The Moonalice poster series has its own CGC designation alongside renowned numbered series like Bill Graham, Family Dog, Neon Rose and Art Of Rock — all of which we took a look at in Part 1 of the series. There’s a good reason Moonalice has received this distinction with over 1,300 pieces in the series created by many of the artists we’ve profiled in the JamBase Concert Poster Primer.
“Moonalice has commissioned more than 1,300 posters over the past fifteen years. We have worked with roughly 40 artist including Stanley Mouse, Wes Wilson, David Singer, Lee Conklin, Alexandra Fischer, Chris Shaw, Carolyn Ferris, Chuck Sperry, Jermaine Rogers, Emek, Gregg Gordon, Gary Houston, John Mavroudis, Lauren Yurkovich and many others. They have created amazing screen prints and offset prints in a wide range of styles.”
Additionally, McNamee and others have given high-profile visibility to poster collecting by appearing on national television in a business capacity, as Adam Roberts pointed out.
“During Covid you saw TV personalities broadcasting from home and there were a number of familiar faces showing off their 60’s psychedelic poster collection on their walls. That alone spiked curiosity and more acceptance of the collectability of concert posters (and thank you Bob Pisani and Roger McNamee showcasing some of their collection while broadcasting for CNBC from home).”
So now that you’ve learned about grading and the concert poster market, you’re ready to start collecting. Ted Bahr had some great advice for new collectors:
Caveat emptor, or in English, buyer beware. Luckily, there are resources like Psychedelic Art Exchange, ExpressoBeans, Rally Road and GoCollect to increase your concert poster collecting IQ.
Well, it’s been quite the journey. But we’ve come to the conclusion of the JamBase Concert Poster Primer series in partnership with Psychedelic Art Exchange. In Part 1, we took a trip through the psychedelic era and met the legendary concert poster artists of the swinging ‘60s. In Part 2, we found ourselves in the world of ‘70s big business rock, which saw a decline in poster art and artistry. In Part 3, we met the all-stars of the modern screenprint merch poster scene who set the concert poster world on fire again. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the first three articles in the JamBase Concert Poster Primer below:
“If you pour some music on whatever’s wrong, it’ll sure help out.” — Levon Helm
“Just give me one thing that I can hold on to.” — John Prine
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