Kevin’s world of concert posters
When the story of the local counterculture movement of the last three decades is told, Kevin Walsh speculates, it will emerge not in written form but through oral tradition. Fortunately, we have the Columbia music-scene icon/businessman on hand to nudge the lore along with visual aids.
When Walsh opened the experiment Kevin’s World of Music in the spring after 25 years at the increasingly corporate-skewed helm of Streetside Records, he vowed to make the new shop in the old Bangkok Gardens spot as local, personal, community-driven and independent as possible. Features have evolved off the cuff: a rack of Columbia-musician CDs, an old Atari setup, a video screening area, local art, a box of toys, a dorm fridge stocked with popsicles. The latest: on a table just inside the door, a massive and rapidly growing customer-contributed pile of concert posters and flyers dating from the 1960s through the present.
That is, when they’re dated at all.
“Everyone goes to so much trouble to meticulously preserve the posters, but no one bothers to date them!” Walsh grumbles, flipping flyers over to show the blank spots where the year has not been penciled in.
But this oversight lends itself to exactly the kind of discourse, debate, storytelling and strolling (OK, staggering) down Memory Lane that Walsh seems to relish. Customers stop by and toss some posters onto the table; other customers come in, rifle through them and muse, “Was this show1976 or 1977? Wasn’t it the night that …” and let unfold tales of old venues, old scenes and nearly forgotten Columbia characters.
Local musician Sam D’Agostino, a second-generation counterculture Columbian, recently recognized one flyer as a souvenir from his birth. His dad, John D’Agostino, had been performing that night, and his mom, ___________, had gone into labor during the show. Sam stopped by Kevin’s World and saw the poster misdated as 1984—not 1983, the year he was born.
Post-it note amendments are accumulating as quickly as the posters themselves.
The range of bands and eras is vast. There’s a Goldilocks and the Three Bears poster, circa 1965. There’s Husker Du from 1979, Michael Murphy from 1982 and Larry Levis from 1996.
As far as dating goes, the art and typefaces can be deceptive. Without a proper context, it’s hard to say what’s an authentic psychedelic, bubble-lettered, bell-bottomed- band-adorned poster from 1971 and what’s a retro-style kitchy ad from 2001. In some circles, desktop publishing technology has fallen out of fashion; one young artist, Chase Asmussen from the band Pretty Please, brought in his original posters, hand-drawn and hand-lettered on the backs of paper bags.
Many of the older posters showcase the work of Frank Stack, the Missouri artist who is now famous for beautiful and gripping works of oil on canvas but who once scrawled irreverent underground-comix-style illustrations—in the spirit of contemporaries such as Harvey Kurtzman and R. Crumb—on indie-music flyers for The Blue Note back in the day.
The Blue Note is represented by a considerable number of the posters, but others give a glimpse of venues from the past: the 1980s Lee’s Lounge at Ash and Garth, which birthed Chump Change; the rowdy Stein Club at Broadway and 10th; the Titanic Lounge at Hitt and Locust, where John Lee Hooker performed in the ‘70s; the jazzy Flaming Pit in the Parkade Plaza; Fish & Friends, where the Sapphire Lounge stands now; and The Gladstone, which stood across from the Sky Hi drive-in theater on Old 63, a spot where, in the ‘70s, Walsh says, “everyone hung out.”
So what in the world is Kevin Walsh planning to do with all these posters?
He definitely will not stick push pins through any of them or adhere them to the store windows with tape; he cringes at the thought. Rather, he has acquired a large sheet of metal to prop up in the store and a handful of magnets with which to display as many posters as he can.
Mostly, though, the pile of paper is a conversation piece.
“It’s a way to remember to past,” Walsh says. “People need to remember