PSYCHEDELIC IMAGE HAILS FROM PROVINCE
Early postcard ended up gracing San Francisco’s music scene
One of the best-known images of the psychedelic ’60s is a native Indian in a top hat smoking a joint.
It was the logo for Family Dog, a hippie music promoter in San Francisco that produced gigs by ‘60s legends such as Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead.
The Family Dog employed a who’s who of psychedelic artists to create its promotional posters, including Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Rick Griffin, and Victor Moscoso. They all used the First Nations guy in their art, often as the central image.
So imagine my surprise to find the man in a new exhibition of early B.C. photos collected by antique dealer Uno Langmann. And on a postcard, to boot.
The show is called Nanitch, and features hundreds of B.C. photos taken between the 1860s and the 1920s.
The postcard with the First Nations man in a top hat was produced by Barber Brothers in Victoria, and is hand-tinted.
It was probably created around 1910, but the actual photo dates to about 1897. It was taken by Jones & Co., a photographic firm run by brothers John and Thomas Jones between 1891 and 1900.
The Jones brothers were located in Victoria and Esquimalt, and some of their glass-plate negatives are owned by the Royal B.C. Museum, including the image of the First Nations man.
Historic photo expert Dan Savard picked him as the cover photo for his award-winning 2010 book, Images From The Likeness House.
“That photo has had a lot of lives,” said Savard, who retired from the Royal B.C. Museum in 2010. “I think it was first used in a British Columbia yearbook in 1897. I cannot tell you exactly where he is from, but it’s had a lot of uses and iterations.”
The image is identified in the 1897 B.C. yearbook as “the chief of the Kootenais (Ktunaxa) in modern costume.” But the man also may be in an 1867-68 photo by Frederick Dally, where he was identified as Tyee Jim.
Savard said the 1897 photo was first turned into a postcard around 1903. It was also reproduced on a larger “cabinet card” that was used for Christmas greetings.
It looks sharp in any version, because the giant glass negatives that photographers used in the 1890s produced incredible detail.
“The quality of that eight-by-10 glass plate just jumps right off,” Savard said. “If you look at early photographs that were based on wet or dry glass plates, you can jump them up (in size), and you can see everything.”
In the original image, the man is smoking a pipe, which Savard says is German. The stem looks to be locally made, partly with a piece of carved antler that Savard said is “incised with a First Nations circleand-dot motif.”
How it got into the hands of San Francisco hippies is a matter for speculation.
“The story I’m familiar with is that (Family Dog promoter) Chet Helms found it somewhere,” said Victor Moscoso over the phone from his home in Marin County, Cal. “He gave it to Wes Wilson, who was one of the Family Dog artists at the time, and said ‘Do something with this. I want a logo.’ And Wes did that, and that’s the logo that you see.”
In Wilson’s version, the pipe turned into the kind of big fat doobie favoured by San Francisco’s underground comic heroes The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
Moscoso doesn’t know if Wilson turned the pipe into a joint by accident or on purpose. But it fit the times.
“You don’t usually smoke grass in a pipe, you roll up a joint,” he said. “And it was more appropriate.”
The Family Dog logo first appears on a Feb. 19, 1966, poster for the Tribal Stomp, a gig featuring Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company, preJanis Joplin.
Moscoso used the logo as the main art for his poster of a Big Brother and the Holding Company show at the Avalon Ballroom on Dec. 9 and 1966. In Moscoso’s version, the native guy is blue, with swirling pink kaleidoscope eyes. It became one of the landmark images of the psychedelic era.
“I liked the logo,” he said. “And at that point the logo was still pretty new. So I figured, great, I’ll make a poster using the logo as the basis. Only I added my twist to it, of course. I consider that my first truly psychedelic poster. It got me in with the other guys, so I was competing.”
Vancouver’s top psychedelic artist Bob Masse was amazed to find out that the Family Dog native was Canadian.
“How in the hell did that ever come from British Columbia?” he laughed. “It’s amazing, because I’ve seen that since the ’60s. I always thought it was a cigar he had on his face. You can see now that it was this strange pipe that he had.
“It’s a very well known image. That was the face of the Family Dog, for Chrissakes.”
Masse said there were two main promoters in San Francisco’s flower-power era, Chet Helms and the Family Dog at the Avalon Ballroom, and Bill Graham at the Fillmore.
“One was the hippie, the other was the businessman,” Masse said. “(The Family Dog) didn’t last. The businessman won out.”
Over time, the Family Dog posters became valuable. Moscoso said Helms “burned” the poster artists over royalties, and the artists eventually went to court against Helms (who is now dead) over the poster rights. Moscoso now receives royalties for the Family Dog posters he did.
There were about 180 Family Dog posters produced for the Avalon Ballroom, and Vancouver collector Rob Frith has all of them.
“They sold them at the shows,” said Frith. “At first, they gave them away — if you went to the show and stayed to the end, they handed you a poster on the way out. But then they realized how popular they were, people were taking them off telephone poles and stuff, and said ‘Hey, we should reprint these and sell them.’”
The prices of Family Dog posters varies.
“Basically you can buy a reprint done in the ’70s for $50,” Frith said. “But an original, certain first printings, can go for hundreds or thousands. It depends on the image and how early they are.”
Tyee Jim would be proud.