A 1967 Fillmore Poster by Bonnie MacLean

BG-75 — Bonnie MacLean for Bill Graham, July 1967. The Doors and The Yardbirds at the Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco. Deep frame, wide mat. The living area.

San Francisco, July 1967. Six nights at the Fillmore Auditorium with The Doors and The Yardbirds on the same bill: The Doors with “Light My Fire” at number one, The Yardbirds a few months from dissolving into Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page already in the line-up. This is the poster for it.

Who drew it

Bonnie MacLean had come to the Fillmore to help Bill Graham run the office — taking calls, handling tickets, hand-lettering the chalkboard that announced each night’s bill. When the house poster artist Wes Wilson left, Graham gave her the job. The two of them had married a few weeks earlier. She went on to design more than thirty posters for him.

It is numbered BG75 in Graham’s catalogue: “BG” for his initials, and a running count of every Fillmore show. The original is a little over twenty-one inches tall and carries the printer’s credit for Neal, Stratford & Kerr in the corner, which is the detail collectors use to identify a first printing.

Why this one

We chose it over the hundreds of other Fillmore posters for two reasons. The first is obvious enough, given the name above our door. The second is that it does not shout. Most psychedelic posters from that year are a legible-at-ten-paces fight between fluorescent colours. MacLean’s are ordered, symmetrical and drawn: a calm face framed by shapes that read as peacock feathers, with the lettering curving into the design rather than sitting on top of it.

The influence is Alphonse Mucha, which is where it stops being only an American story. Mucha’s Art Nouveau reached Malta too — the curves and floral motifs on townhouse façades here from the 1910s through the 1950s come from the same source, often sitting alongside early Art Deco geometry. A building of that period in Gzira is a reasonable place for this poster to end up.

It hangs in the living area in a deep frame with a wide mat, which gives it room and a bit of gravity. It is the loudest thing on any wall in the building, and it is deliberately in the room with the speaker in it.