Psychedelic wonderland
Promoter of Vancouver’s fi rst hippie club releases a memoir and art book.
The saying goes that if you can remember the ’ 60s, you weren’t really there.
Jerry Kruz knows this all too well. At 66, his memory of the parties, concerts and happenings he took part in during the hippie era are a bit hazy.
But a marvellous thing happens when he looks back at his collection of old psychedelic concert posters. The memories of the shows come floating back, like a contact high.
And what memories those are. From 1965 to 1967, Kruz was the promoter behind The Afterthought, Vancouver’s first psychedelic club.
Kruz promoted gigs by ’ 60s legends such as the Grateful Dead, Steve Miller, and Country Joe and The Fish, as well as local acts like the United Empire Loyalists, the Painted Ship and the Tom Northcott Trio.
To promote the shows, he commissioned artists like Bob Masse, Frank Lewis, Bruce Dowad and Doug Cuthbert to create posters. They responded with mind- bending visions filled with wild colours, beautiful women and hairy men. The band names were rendered in psychedelic art nouveau lettering that was so stylized that at times it was hard to decipher.
The Afterthought posters are now cherished collector items, and internationally renowned. Bob Masse’s ‘ exploding face’ poster of a hairy fellow was even used to illustrate psychedelia in the coffeetable book The Art of Rock and Roll.
The image promoted a gig by the Steve Miller Blues Band, March 17 to 19, 1967, at the Kits Theatre at 4th and Arbutus, which is where many of the Afterthought gigs were held.
If you were able to track down an original of the poster, you might have to fork over hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Alternatively, you can pick it up in Kruz’s new memoir and art book, The Afterthought: West Coast Rock Posters & Recollections from the ’ 60s ( Rocky Mountain Books, $ 40).
All the Afterthought posters are there, in glorious colour — from a crude 1965 poster for a coffee house where Kruz cut his promoter’s teeth, to the drug- friendly posters from ’ 66 and ’ 67 that got Kruz into trouble with the cops.
One of these posters features a green- haired hippie goddess puffing away on a hash pipe. Masse designed it for a March 3- 4, 1967 gig with Carnival, the Seeds of Time, and William Tell and the Marksmen. Forty- seven years later, it became the cover of Kruz’s book.
“Tommy Chong picked that, by the way,” Kruz said over the phone from his home in Victoria. “We sent him a couple of images and asked him, ‘ Which one do you like?’ And he immediately went to that one. He said, ‘ That’s the one that represents the time.’ ”
It does. But posters like this didn’t sit too well with RCMP sergeant Abe Snidanko, a ‘ narc’ who Kruz said was constantly harassing him and the hippies who came to his shows.
“( At one show) I walked out onto the street, onto Fourth Avenue, and there were traffic barriers,” Kruz recalled.
“I go ‘ Oh s---! The whole damn street is shut down! What’s next?’ And I turn around and all of a sudden Snidanko is beside me. They come in with a SWAT team and lined everybody up against the wall, including me and my brother.”