What I really wanted to do was design rock ’n’ roll posters.
From Hatch Show Print’s letterpress forms to the incredible work coming out of the Pacific Northwest, from clean Britpop sans-serifs to Bluenote-referencing boldness, there was just so much work to covet and admire. I yearned to be a part of it all.
Over the years, it happened.
Sometimes I have to remind myself of that: It happened.
I was able to design a whole heck of a lot of “showprint.” (That’s how us nerds refer to posters that promote live concerts.)
The concerts I designed posters for ranged from super-intimate performances in my hometown (Mark Hutchins’ memorable Sleepy Furnace and Stuntman One shows), to national concerts (Robert Plant and Alison Krauss), and even a few international (my twin-brother-from-a-European-mother, Danny George Wilson and his bands).
Somewhere, all those posters exist, and someday, I’d like to be like my pal Jake and compile the entirety of ‘em in one spot. Or at least the ones I still like.
Until then, here are five of my favorites.
Marah: The Brass Rail / June 20, 2010
When they were still active, MARAH were my favorite working band in America.
In 2005, they made one of my all-time favorite records: If You Didn’t Laugh, You’d Cry. It remains an astonishing listen.
At its best, Marah’s music sounds like an at-speed sonic collision between The Replacements of the early-80s and Bruce Springsteen of the late-70s, and their live shows were much the same—in both all of the best ways and worst ways and all of the worst ways and best ways possible. They were “beautiful losers,” I guess. Which made ‘em winners in my eyes.
Theirs was the sound of disappointment and resilience and hope and anger—lonely ballads and broken anthems. Theirs was the sound of a long-dreamt-of kiss on the fire escape. Or the sound of seeing someone you liked kissing someone else on the fire escape. And in either case, the kiss was interrupted by an actual fire.
We presented the band at The Brass Rail a few times (and The B-Side once!); Marah had long been my most coveted “get,” and those shows marked my musical soul in a deep and breathtaking way.
The poster above is from their first Fort Wayne appearance, part of the Lucky Ten series of shows that celebrated One Lucky Guitar’s tenth anniversary.
I still remember the amplification as they opened the show; they were so…fucking…loud. Each and every person in The Brass Rail—from the band, to the audience, to the bartenders, to the bouncer and the sound guy—each and every person was soaked in sweat by the downbeat of the second song.
It was, quite obviously, glorious.
We did a fair bit of design work for Marah over the years, including posters for shows in Philly, New York City and Asbury Park, an album cover, some tour merch and more.
Like Rocky Balboa, Marah has the city of Philadelphia coursing through its veins in an unwavering way. And so for the poster for that first show, the design featured the city’s iconic Liberty Bell, a graffiti-painted heart, and a well-placed fissure.
I looked it up: the Liberty Bell’s crack is attributed either to a flaw in the casting, or the bell being too brittle.
Bit like life, right?
Hey—I get it.
If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.
Rayland Baxter: The B-Side at One Lucky Guitar / Feb 23, 2015
This show was on my 41st birthday; it was the second of Rayland’s three B-Side shows. (We later presented him at The Brass Rail, when he had outgrown the intimacy we offered.)
Rayland Baxter is the son of Bucky Baxter, the multi-instrumentalist who sold me the lucky guitar. Rayland’s appearance at The B-Side—in an office named after the guitar his dad sold me—was, to me, proof that the circle will be unbroken.
We brought Rayland to Fort Wayne soon after his first album, Feathers and Fishooks, was released.
At the time, Raybs was a little-known singer-songwriter; we charged just seven bucks a ticket and basically begged people to attend the concert. I always thought it was better to lose a little money on a show and have a bigger crowd, and never wanted a ticket price to be the reason someone who was on the fence would decide it was a pass.
For Rayland, I guess I just wanted everyone I knew to be part of this little poetic moment. I remember even my parents came. (It was the last time my dad ever set foot in One Lucky Guitar.)
After the show, Rayland and I were talking about Bucky, and he asked if he could see the lucky guitar; was it around? Well of course it was. I went to the back room and retrieved it—that 1964 Gibson B-25 in red, orange and goldenrod sunburst.
Rayland seemed to recognize it.
I checked the tuning—in the 24 years I’ve owned it, the guitar has never once lost its tune, but I’ve also never not been nervous, so I needed something to do—and then Rayland picked it up.
He said, “I bet the Buckman did this, right?” and started into this little finger-picking run, with his shoulders hunched and his entire torso subtly bouncing along to the light tapping of his foot, an unmistakeable grin revealing his delight, a shimmer flashing in his eyes as he raised his brow in an echo: “Right? Right?” And none of us who ever met Bucky needed to answer, it was so clear and so obvious that yes, right, he was his father’s son—an osprey, an owl.
Bucky sold me that guitar as he was putting together money for the recording studio he was building in “Hooterville Hollow,” the rolling, hilly forest outside Whites Creek, TN that he had nicknamed after the owl that kept watch over his work.
The designs we did for the studio incorporated the visual of that owl; Bucky wrote “The Hoot Owl Moans” there, which Rayland covered so beautifully on that first record, and at that first show in The B-Side, as I sat behind my own father, an osprey, an owl, each listening to that most lonesome song.
For this poster, which was all made practically and photographed in the then-abandoned space above One Lucky Guitar, the ceramic owl held the same incense Bucky used to burn, along with the guitar strings that were on the lucky guitar when it first came into my possession.
Eef Barzelay: The Lotus Gallery / May 23, 2012
Tim Rogers: The Lotus Gallery / May 30, 2012
The B-Side (it didn’t have that name until years later) started with a David Bazan “living room show” in December 2009.
After that, we did a few more small shows in our own office space, but also staged a couple memorable concerts in the much-larger studio on the first floor of 1301 Lafayette—the current-day Baptiste Power Yoga, at the time, The Lotus Gallery.
These particular shows had a certain amount of magic and divination to them.
We’d brought Tim Rogers—one of my all-time favorite songwriters—to town for a show at Columbia Street West back in 2006. (If Marah was my favorite working band in America, Tim’s band (Australia’s brilliant You Am I) was my favorite working band in the world.)
Tim was set to return to Fort Wayne in August 2008, but, just days before the gig, his visa got held up, and the stateside tour was canceled.
Since we already had logistics in place—tickets, sound, and so on—we replaced the Rogers show with a concert from another singer-from-a-favorite-band; one who just happened to share record labels and booking agents with Rogers.
The artist was Eef Barzelay, from the band Clem Snide.
This memorable concert was Eef’s first Fort Wayne appearance, and started an enduring relationship that persists to this day.
Moving forward to 2012, we had the chance to present both Eef and Tim—in separate concerts, but the available dates were just a week apart.
We marketed the shows together, and I made these hand-cut companion posters.
Once I had the notion, they only took about an hour to design, and I suppose I wish I’d spent more time drawing out that typography, but I think they got the idea across.
We had the Philharmonic’s brass quartet open for Rogers, and it was flabbergastingly surreal watching Tim stand in the back of the room with his jaw agape. The Barzelay concert was filmed by John Burkett, and we went on to make a film about Eef.
(It now occurs to me that three of the six posters in this gallery feature a broken heart. And that most of the stories I’m sharing are drawing full circles around full circles. That’s just the way it is, I guess—or at least what happens when you believe in your latest-last-chance is your best chance yet.)
The Replacements: Riot Fest / Fall 2013
Back in 2003 I was at the South by Southwest music festival hanging around the Club DeVille with a Lone Star in my hand and despite it being a swelteringly hot Thursday afternoon I was wearing a black Paul Westerberg Stereo / Mono tour t-shirt and I met Peter Jesperson who had founded Twin Tone Records and ‘discovered’ and later managed The Replacements and we got to talking about music and the Midwest and the life & times and eventually laughing about how badly Paul would loathe SXSW.
(That sentence remains so implausible to me—despite being entirely true—that I don’t even know how to punctuation to it.)
Later, and also at SXSW, I met Paul’s current-day manager, Darren Hill.
Darren and I exchanged contact information, and every now and again, I’d drop him a line to remind him that—should they ever need anything—I’d give my liver to contribute art direction and design to one of their projects.
Well, during the late-spring of 2013, it was announced that Paul’s old band (said Replacements) (the greatest then-not-currently-working band of all time) would be reuniting to play three dates at Riot Fest—Toronto, Chicago and Denver. These shows would be their first in 22 years.
I remember this next bit with staggering specificity: I was in Cincinnati with my family, my parents, and my brother’s family, taking in a Reds game before heading to King’s Island the next morning. It was the year before my dad’s stroke, and this particular trip remains one of my mom’s favorite (and most bittersweet) memories, ever. As we got back to the hotel after the game—a Drury Inn north of the city—an email came in on my phone. It was from Darren Hill. Darren wrote, “Maybe you heard, but the band is going to do a few dates. Would you want to design a poster to commemorate the shows for us to consider?”
Oh.
My.
GOD!!!!!
My coworkers Jake and Jonathon each designed a poster, and along with my designs, we sent a half-dozen concepts to Darren.
We loved ‘em all, and the excitement was high.
As far as latest-last-chances go, this was pretty cool.
And yet…ultimately, the band went in a different direction.
Darren had reached out to a few different designers, and the band had a lot of posters to choose from. (Plus, the design they selected was pretty great, with a super-smart left-of-the-dial concept.)
It was cool. We were proud of our work. My poster above used typefaces from three different eras of the Minneapolis band’s history, along with colors from the Twins.
While I never heard any verbatim feedback from Paul, just knowing he’d looked at (and rejected) my work was enough for me.
It’s better to have lost and loved, than to never have lost at all.
Something like that.
LOVELINES: A Tribute to The Replacements:
The Brass Rail / August 30 2014
The impetus for that aforementioned Replacements’ reunion was an effort to raise money for their ailing bandmate.
Slim Dunlap was the band’s guitarist for the second-half of its run, and he’d suffered a pretty catastrophic stroke earlier in 2013. (A year later my dad would do the same.)
Independent musicians don’t often have great health insurance, and so, to support Slim’s ongoing care, a couple dozen artists came together to record covers of Dunlap’s songs, with all proceeds going to the Songs for Slim Fund. (Slim had made two excellent solo records after The Replacements broke up.)
Here in Fort Wayne, we wanted to help, too.
So we got together with Corey Rader, proprietor of The Brass Rail, and pitched a Replacements tribute night that would serve as a Songs for Slim fundraiser. Corey—forever and always—was game.
We named the event LOVELINES, after a sinewy song on The Replacements’ Hootenanny record.
(In some ways, this show was a reclamation of the Down the Line concept, which we’d taken from Columbia Street West to the Embassy Theatre, before we moved on and let the theatre manage the event. Another story, another planet.)
We recruited four bands who encompassed the different aspects of The Replacments’ sound—Flamingo Nosebleed (performing as The Placemats) with breakneck snot-rocket punk, Aadia blasting through heart-on-sleeve punk, The Jury and their careening, anthemic college rock, and Austin TX’s Sweet Talk (with Fort Wayne ex-pat and B-Sharps alum Mitch Fraizer on lead guitar), channeling pre-Slim guitarist Bob Stinson’s off-the-cliff-with-only-a-tutu sounds.
The fifth band came together for this set only, and I was in it.
Big Star Big—named after a gleaming, unreleased Slim song—reunited me with my former Go Dog Go and Trainhopper bandmate Chris Dodds, along with Casey Stansifer on bass, Michael Summers on drums and Andrea Atwood and Tim Gordon on vocals.
The Down the Line vibes were all around; Chris and I had played the first Down the Line with the ‘Hoppers; Casey had performed at the event as a member of Definitely Gary, and The Jury had performed at the event in their full, current lineup.
(Plus, six months after LOVELINES, Chris, Casey and I found ourselves in a resurrected Trainhopper project.)
As Big Star Big started to prepare, I got to wondering how The actual Replacements would handle a Replacements tribute night. It was quickly obvious to me they’d do so by not paying tribute at all.
So, Big Star Big opened the The Replacements tribute night by doing just that—not playing any Replacements songs. We instead performing a selection of Slim’s solo songs, all of which were incredibly obscure, before closing with a jam that segued into “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”
For the poster, I found the original October 13, 1982 issue of Minneapolis’s City Pages, which featured the ‘Lovelines’ personal ads page that Westerberg had used in the studio to improvise the lyrics to the song. (Thieves recognize thieves.)
I modified the poster to include the evening’s performers.
We sold out The Brass Rail, and sent Slim’s family a check for nearly two-thousand bucks.
The following week, Slim’s wife reached out with a deep and moving letter of gratitude.
She said she wasn’t familiar with Fort Wayne, but it sounded like a town with a gritty dive bar, loud rock and roll, and great people.
“Slim’s kind of place.”
One of the bestest nights ever.
I’ve admired some of these on the OLG/B-Side walls over the years (and…in the bathroom, yes?), and it will be even better to see them now with the stories in mind.
Beautiful work, Matt. The writing and the posters. I love how several of your passions and talents come together on these poster projects. Well done.