Big Brother and the Holding Company
Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco, Dec 9-10, 1966
Artwork and commentary by Victor Moscoso

“This was my first successful dancehall poster. I had done about three posters prior to that one. The first one was a failure, the next two were not too bad, but this one was in the park. Did I attend this show? I don’t remember which shows I attended and which ones I did not, with the exception of a few, like Jimi Hendrix­—‘cause I only saw him once, and that was at Winterland. Big Brother I used to see all the time, because they were the regular house band at the Avalon Ballroom. Chet Helms, who was the manager who ran the Family Dog at the Avalon Ballroom, was also the manager for Big Brother and the Holding Company. And in fact, it was he who put Janis together—he knew Janis from Texas—with the house band, Big Brother.

“That was the Family Dog logo. You can see right at the end of his joint that he’s smoking—there’s this logo there; it says Family Dog Presents. Each poster had the Family Dog logo in it, you know. So what I did for this poster is I got the Family Dog logo Indian that Chet had gotten out of a book somewhere—I don’t believe he was smoking a joint (I don’t know what the story with that one is)—but Wes Wilson put that design around it, and that became the logo for the Family Dog. Each of the main poster artists—Wes Wilson, Mouse, and Kelley had done posters featuring the Family Dog logo Indian, so I figured, ‘Hey, I’ll do it too.’ And this is my take on the Family Dog logo. The Indian was in the center of it. And it worked really well, the vibrating colors and all that caught people’s eye. And all of a sudden, I was at speed, you know? I was in the game.”

See more artwork by Victor Moscoso