Signs o’ the Times : Once-Disposable Rock Posters Have Become Valuable Collectibles

Remember those old rock concert posters you hung on your bedroom wall after yanking them off a telephone pole?

If you can still find one--maybe under a dusty pile in the garage--you may have unearthed a gem that could help pay for your child’s college education.

Vintage concert and record company promotional posters are now fetching big bucks from collectors, who reportedly are paying upward of $10,000 for the rarest items. Among the most prized pieces: original British Invasion concert posters, cardboard R&B; revue posters from the ‘60s and just about anything from the ‘60s depicting the Beatles.

“Poster collecting is exploding,” says Pete Howard, editor and publisher of the influential ICE CD newsletter and a major collector himself. “Everybody is realizing that [music formats] are going to continue to become obsolete--we’ve all seen the value of our vinyl collections drop substantially--so the music collecting community is sort of turning its eye toward paper collectibles.”

Not surprisingly, older rock fans are credited by dealers for driving up the price of vintage posters.

“As the baby boomers reach a certain point, we’re not all rushing out to fight with 16-year-olds for concert tickets,” says Jacaeber Kastor, owner of the Psychedelic Solution poster shop in New York. “We think more of decorating our homes and having things that remind us of good times.”

Adds Jeff Leve, a Los Angeles collector and owner of Sound Investments, which specializes in rock memorabilia: “These posters are monuments to pop culture. That’s your music, that’s your life. You saw those shows, you went to those concerts--or you wanted to go to those concerts.”

Debi Jacobson, owner of L’Imagerie poster shop in Studio City, traces the beginning of the current boom in poster collecting to the publication in 1987 of Paul Grushkin’s definitive tome on the subject, “The Art of Rock.”

“That really changed things,” she says, “because now there was a reference guide for collectors all over the country.”

Especially prized are posters advertising early concerts by the Beatles. One promoting an appearance at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, the band’s proving ground, would probably sell for $10,000, collectors say.

Also among the most coveted items are Motown revue-tour posters from the ‘60s, which are extremely scarce, and a poster from Germany that touted Jimi Hendrix’s last official concert. The latter was sold at auction by Sotheby’s for about $7,000.

“Unlike coins, these things were meant to be thrown away, so there are only one, two or three known copies of a huge array of really nice posters,” says Howard, who has 10 posters on loan to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. “What you have on top of that [to drive up the price] is desirability, which is where acts like the Beatles come in.”

But even posters that didn’t advertise superstar acts are in great demand. Interest has skyrocketed recently, collectors say, in the so-called “boxing style” posters of the 1950s and ‘60s, which had little artistic value other than listing the vital information about a performance.

“They’re in demand because they hearken back to a time when rock music was just starting and was in its innocent stages,” says Howard, who wrote a 23,000-word story on poster collecting in this month’s issue of Goldmine magazine, which targets rock memorabilia collectors.

Of the psychedelic posters, the most coveted is a piece by artist Rick Griffin that advertised a 1969 Honolulu concert by the Grateful Dead that was canceled after the posters were printed and shipped to Hawaii.

“There are posters that are harder to find,” Jacobson says, “but this one combines a lot of really good elements: It’s really rare, it’s by Rick Griffin and it’s the Grateful Dead.”

Kastor’s dream find is much more scarce: a handbill from a 1965 benefit in San Francisco (featuring the Jefferson Airplane) that was the first musical ever promoted by legendary rock impresario Bill Graham. Only one is known to exist, and it’s in the late promoter’s archives in the San Francisco offices of Bill Graham Presents.

But don’t expect rock fans to stop searching for another copy. Collectors say their hobby will only continue to expand.

“It’s grown by leaps and bounds in the last couple of years, but it’s still in its infancy,” Leve says. “You’ll see more interest, more knowledge and higher demand.

“One thing you might want to keep in mind: A poster for [the movie] ‘Frankenstein’ from 1931--about 25 years older than rock ‘n’ roll--sold for close to $200,000. It’s not inconceivable that, in the next 20 years, a Beatles poster could go for that much too.”

HISTORY OF ROCK: A 10-hour documentary begins on PBS. Review on F12