San Francisco is home to some of the greatest graphic artists the world has ever known - from Emory Douglas, whose bold imagery told the story of the Black Panthers and their fight for freedom and equality, to Stanley Mouse, Wes Wilson, and Victor Moscoso, whose concert posters are now preserved as historical artifacts from the Summer of Love.

At Church California, we consistently draw inspiration from this legacy in own graphic arts projects. Since our opening in 2017, we've created six hand-drawn price boards, each one completely unique. One holds a special place in our hearts: the poster we call the "rainbow roll," inspired by the rock posters of the 1960s.

In an effort to tell a more complete story about the poster art scene of the 60's, I tapped three local historians who are passionate about this lineage of graphic arts: Ben Marks, a curator at the Haight Street Art Center (where we print our posters today); Grant McKinnon, a collector who has owned and operated the legendary poster store, SF Rock Posters, for nearly 40 years; and Daniel Castro, Church California's co-founder and a graphic artist himself.

Grant traces the art form back to 1965, when Chandler Laughlin and a group of friends opened the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada. Looking for a band, they came down to San Francisco and spotted George Hunter of the Charlatans walking down the street, already dressed in Victorian clothes (certified hippie swag), and they hired him on the spot.

"That was one of the big starting points—the seed to all of this," Grant told us. It's true too - Hunter and guitarist Mike Ferguson made a poster to advertise the residency at the Red Dog Saloon; today collectors call it "The Seed", and it's considered the first psychedelic rock poster. "The band took LSD at least three nights a week", Grant said, "Artists drove up from LA to see what all the fuss was about. And one of the people hanging around the Red Dog that summer was a young artist named Alton Kelley".

"When the scene imploded, "Grant says, "they brought the idea back to San Francisco. Kelley and a few others formed a collective called the Family Dog, named for the dogs living in their communal house, and they started producing shows. The next big thing that happened," Grant goes on, "was the Trips Festival in January '66, and then the Human Be-In in January '67 with 20,000 people in the park. By May, the Summer of Love had started." 

In that summer of 1967, it’s reported than more than 100,000 young people (hippies) moved to San Francisco, from all around the world.

From that explosion came more shows at the Avalon Ballroom, the Fillmore, and all the artwork that advertised them. Kelley teamed up with Stanley Mouse, and together they created some of the most iconic images in rock history.

 "The stuff would be all over town," Grant said, "in every cool shop window, every record store, everywhere. And then inside, on the counter would be a whole stack of the handbills (small hand-sized versions of the posters)."

Ben still has original handbills from the Fillmore that were mailed to him as a teenager, with his name and address printed right on them. "They're not in perfect condition," he told us, "but they're perfect to me."

He sees a deeper reason why this all took root here. "Unlike New York and LA and Chicago, San Francisco wasn't about one thing," he explained. "LA became a company town for Hollywood. New York was finance. Chicago was commodities trading. San Francisco was different. One artist told me, 'I wasn't in New York, so it didn't matter what I did. I had a lot of freedom because I wasn't going to sell anything anyway.' His studio became a place of freedom."

Among the artists who emerged from this scene, Victor Moscoso stands out for his distinctive approach to color. He created work for Bill Graham, Family Dog, and other promoters, advertising shows by the Grateful Dead, the Doors, and dozens more.

"Humans have three color spectrums in our eyes—red, green, and blue," Daniel explained. "If you take opposite colors on the spectrum and put them together, they create color disharmony. There was an instructor at the Bauhaus named Josef Albers who theorized about color harmony. Victor Moscoso studied with Albers at Yale - he took those learnings, and then completely flipped them on its head."

While Albers taught artists which color combinations created visual comfort, Moscoso deliberately chose combinations that made your eyes work. Greens and reds. Oranges and blues. Fuchsia and orange. The result was posters that seemed to pulse and shimmer. "Victor was living in the Haight-Ashbury, doing tons of drugs, pumping out posters for Family Dog and Bill Graham—sometimes two a night," Daniel said. "Through that quantity, he gained a wealth of knowledge around which particular color combinations created that vibrating effect."

"They were hard to read... but that was also by design." Ben added, "You had to be cool enough to understand what was going on... otherwise they didn't want you at the show."

Back in the day, when early print shops were making massive amounts of content for boxing matches, concerts, and community events, they were working with physical constraints we can barely imagine today. Every font was made of metal or carved from wood. Every letter had to be set by hand.

"They would use what's called a Gothic style, sans serif fonts," Daniel told me. "The letters were carved from wood, and they came in many widths and thicknesses. Depending on the billing and how long the text was, printers would mix different variations on the same poster."

That scrappy, improvisational spirit carried into the 60s. "Everything was off the seat of their pants," Grant said. "Different papers, different sizes. The artists would have designs in their heads—'I want this one tall and skinny, I want this one horizontal'—and they'd ask the printer what paper they had available."

"Wes Wilson was doing two, three posters a week sometimes. He cut corners. He was pragmatic.", Ben told us. But Wilson also transformed the tradition into something new. "I liked what Wes Wilson did with lettering," Ben says, "He was borrowing a lot from the Viennese Secessionists (Art Nouveau)", which he copped to pretty openly. But I just like the way he turned blocks of type into shapes and used those shapes for his compositions."

"We have all these guys to thank for challenging the norms," Daniel said. "Earlier printers used Gothic lettering for legibility, and because it was economical. Wes Wilson took that idea and turned it upside down - he bent and flowed the letters until they became part of the image itself, these liquid shapes your eye had to work to decode."

Perhaps the most distinctive visual element of 60s poster art is the rainbow roll—also called a "split fountain"—a printing technique that dates back to at least the 1870s. A pressman pours two or more different colored inks into opposite ends of an ink well; as the rollers revolve, the colors spread and blend in the middle, creating gradients from a single pass.

"By the time you get to the 60s," Daniel told me, "it became a popular technique for posters. Bo Diddley posters in Nashville, in New Jersey, in LA—they all had the same sort of aesthetic."

But it was in San Francisco, particularly in publications like The San Francisco Oracle, where the rainbow roll reached its highest form. Allen Cohen, the Oracle's editor, described dividing the ink fountain into compartments with metal dividers and wooden blocks, putting a different color in each, and running "a rainbow over eight pages." Artists took this economical technique and transformed it into something psychedelic. 

While Wilson transformed lettering and Moscoso revolutionized color, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, and Rick Griffin became known for their iconic imagery - much of it borrowed and reimagined from older sources.

In 1966 and 1967, Mouse and Kelley lived and worked at 715 Ashbury, directly across the street from 710 Ashbury, where the Grateful Dead lived (still known today as "the Grateful Dead house"). The proximity was no accident. - the whole scene was intertwined. "Kelley was left-handed, Mouse was right-handed," Grant told us. "They'd work on the same easel together, one on each side."

Their most famous image, the Grateful Dead's Skull and Roses, came from a trip to the San Francisco Public Library. They found a 1913 edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam illustrated by British artist Edmund Sullivan, and one drawing stopped them cold: a skeleton surrounded by roses. "We saw that skeleton and said, 'This says Grateful Dead all over it,'" Mouse later recalled. Kelley cut the page out with a pen knife, they added color and psychedelic lettering, and it became the poster for a Dead show at the Avalon Ballroom—and one of the most recognizable images in rock history.

"The 60s artists borrowed freely, and they were pretty good about admitting what their sources were," Ben told us, sharing an example, "Mouse and Kelly used the Zig-Zag logo and put a note at the bottom that said 'what you don't know about copyright won't hurt you.' The Zig-Zag company thought it was great.. free advertising."

Rick Griffin took a similar approach with his famous Flying Eyeball, the bloodshot winged eye that became the defining image of his 1968 Jimi Hendrix poster. Griffin borrowed the motif from Von Dutch, who had been painting flying eyeballs on custom cars and motorcycles since the 1950s. A 1963 car accident that nearly cost Griffin his own eye may have deepened his obsession with the image. Where Von Dutch's eyeballs were playful, Griffin's became something more intense—a symbol that captured the era's mix of ecstasy and unease.

Grant has a personal connection to Griffin. "I met him in the 70s, when I was just 19 or something," he told us. "I asked him if he had something I could buy from him, and he pulled something out of his portfolio, signed it, and handed me the poster. It was a Flying Eyeball." Years later, Grant opened SF Rock Posters with Griffin on a handshake deal—no paper, just trust. The store's logo still features a flying eyeball today. "Rick loved paying homage to stuff," Grant said. "His sense of humor was really clever."

Daniel sees this borrowing as part of an ancient tradition. "Humans have always borrowed from others in order to continue on the learnings. We're all the byproducts of our context and surroundings. You can point to colonial powers bringing Japanese printmaking to Europe in the late 1800s - that had a heavy influence on the Impressionist movement. People often say, 'Everyone's copying Matisse.' But Matisse was heavily influenced by Hiroshige and Daoist painters. The key", Daniel says, "is bringing your own vision to what you create". 

At Church California, we see ourselves as students of this history - we're not out to replicate it, but to learn from it and carry it forward in our own way.

When we designed our rainbow roll price board, we drew directly from all of these traditions. Daniel hand-drew every detail. The color palette draws from Moscoso's discoveries about color vibration - combinations that literally bring the art to life as the colors wiggle before your eyes (try staring at it). And when it came time to print, we used the same split fountain, "rainbow roll" technique that Cohen described - dividing the ink well with blocks to separate colors that would blend as they rolled across the screen. It's the exact process that produced the Oracle's rainbow pages and the psychedelic posters of the Fillmore, now creating the gradient on a Church Barber price board.

Every price board we create is a chance to pay homage: to the printers who experimented with rainbow rolls over a century ago, to the artists who turned concert posters into collectible art, to the freedom and experimentation that has always defined San Francisco's creative spirit. We printed our latest poster with Drew Jorstad in the print studio at the Haight Ashbury Art Center.

"Even the process of producing it incites that action to slow down and be present," Daniel said of our most recent poster. "We could have printed it digitally, but the fact that we decided to screen-print it using plant inks and on handmade paper, it creates a texture you can only get from this specific process. Even if the viewer doesn't know that, that's the intent behind it."

In search of inspiration for the poster, Daniel went on a walking meditation one day, noticed a kite bird hovering motionless in the air, looked down at where the ocean met the sand, spotted wild roses on the walk back - and those became the story he would bring to life.

So the next time you walk into Church Barber and see a price board, know that you're looking at a conversation with San Francisco design history. 

Learn the history of San Francisco rock posters by visiting the Haight Street Art Center (in Hayes Valley) - they have frequent exhibits and offer printing classes. And we'd highly suggest visiting Grant's store, SF Rock Posters - he has a great online store which serves as one of the most important historical records for rock posters (they host frequent auctions there too), and he also has a retail store in the North Beach where you can view the posters up close and in-person. Grant McKinnon and Ben Marks were incredibly generous with their time and knowledge in helping us tell this story - thank you guys!