The Byrds, Joe Cocker & His Grease Band with Pacific Gas & Electric at The Filmore West, June 1969

The Byrds, Joe Cocker & His Grease Band with Pacific Gas & Electric at The Filmore West, June 1969

Just two months before he would stun a half-million people gathered at Yasgur’s Farm in Woodstock with his breakout performance, Joe Cocker took to the stage at Bill Graham’s Filmore West where he delivered a blistering set of blues-fueled rock backed by his supporting musicians dubbed The Grease Band. As was the case at Woodstock, audiences that caught Cocker’s sets at The Filmore West were transfixed as he burned through covers by The Beatles, Traffic and The Box Tops, whose ‘The Letter’ became a Cocker signature. Though Cocker’s sets would help launch him to fame, the show’s headliners were The Byrds, though the band had essentially been remade since its 1965-67 heyday of Mr. Tambourine Man and Eight Miles High fame and they took to the stage at The Filmore West during these sets only one original Byrd remained: Roger McGuinn. The perennial leader of the band was joined by legendary guitarist Clarence White, bassist John York and drummer Gene Parsons. It was this lineup that had released ‘Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde’ earlier in the year and were actively recording their album ‘Ballad of Easy Rider’ that would be released in November 1969. Los Angeles blues-rock band Pacific Gas & Electric, freshly signed to a deal by Columbia Records and their first eponymously entitled album coming out opened the shows. Artist Randy Tuten was tapped to produce the promotional poster for the shows by Graham and Tuten gave the image something of an 1920s era feel with stripes and port scene that harkened back to an era often evoked in various psychedelic handbills, band names and other ephemera from the 1960s. The Light Show was provided by Little Princess 109. A San Francisco artist by birth, Tuten would go on to be one of the most notable artists producing promotional art for the Filmore over the decades that followed.

 Dimensions: Fourteen inches horizontally, Twenty-one inches vertically (14 x 21”)

Condition: Great