THE BEATLES' 1966 Shea Stadium poster broke the sales record for a concert poster when it was auctioned at ItsOnlyRocknRoll.com for $132,736.52 last December.

American concert posters, which  were first printed in the 1920s, advertised specific musical events featuring performers ranging from Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday to Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. For decades, concert posters were the orphan child of pop culture collectibles. While thousands of aficionados flocked to lively markets for baseball trading cards, movie posters and other mainstream collectibles to spark escalating demand that pushed prices into the stratosphere, concert poster enthusiasts saw values of even the rarest

A circa 1957 Elvis Presley poster promotes “Tupelo’s Own.”

and best posters remain relatively modest. Until a few years ago, these posters only rarely changed hands in four-figure territory; even scarce posters regularly sold for a few hundred dollars. “Two years ago, my Shea Beatles poster would have gone for $35,000,” Diamond says.
 
But recently, two developments coalesced to clarify a murky market and make it accessible to greater numbers of collectors. In 2002, Bill Sagan’s purchase of the Bill Graham archives and the subsequent online valuation of thousands of so-called psychedelic-era posters on his WolfgangsVault.com brought transparency to this particular market. Then, in 2003, the debut of Marc and Debra Zakarin’s ItsOnlyRocknRoll.com online auction site facilitated simple point-and-click bidding, attracting deep-pocketed investors and eye-popping sales prices.
 
Many veteran concert poster collectors remain astounded at how quickly revalued their once virtually secret passion became as it exploded into general consciousness. Of the five bidders who ventured more than $50,000 for the record-setting Shea Beatles poster, Zakarin says three were not established music poster collectors. They had jumped over to this market from the other fields, such as collectible coins and sports memorabilia.

“I realized this stuff had tremendous likeability, while at the same time I felt it was an untapped segment of the art market,” says New York collector David Swartz, who dabbled in the hobby until six or seven years ago when he sensed its approaching maturation. Swartz says his vast concert poster collection is now worth millions. “Movie posters were much more valuable and commanded significant prices, and it didn’t make sense that major concert posters lagged so far behind.”

Style Over Substance

VALUE JUDGMENT Online auction sites have energized the traditionally sleepy market for concert posters. Once hoarded only by avid music fans, posters advertising specific concerts by artists such as the Beatles and Billie Holiday are now valuable items that command six figures. Novices in this quirky market, however, should beware: design, era, artist reputation and authenticity are everything to finicky collectors. Some posters are priceless while others are not worth the paper they are printed on.

Even with its growing popularity, the hobby has many quirks. Habitués draw a clear distinction between collectible (and potentially valuable) concert posters created to sell tickets to a specific event, and generic promotional posters that have no real collectible value. Furthermore, the concert poster market seems tepid, at best, for posters produced after 1970. “I tell people I turn into a pumpkin at midnight on December 31, 1969,” Howard says. Zakarin agrees: “All the serious guys use that as a break point. A Four Tops poster from 1969 could be $1,000, while one from 1970 could sell for $150.”
 
More crucial, however, is the difference between concert posters labeled “cardboard boxing style” and those termed “psychedelic” or “art rock.” Boxing-style posters are straightforward advertising tools designed in the highly readable style of prizefighting placards and printed on sturdy cardboard. They have been in use since the 1920s, although they peaked in popularity during the seminal rock decades of the 1950s and 1960s.
 

PSYCHEDELIC POSTERS: Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead played Bill Graham’s “The San Francisco Scene in Toronto” in 1967

The most coveted examples feature iconic performers such as the Beatles, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. Identified with the eastern half of the United States, most boxing-style posters were taped onto record store windows or nailed to utility poles (the record-setting Beatles Shea poster was torn from a pole in Brooklyn). “The whole reason these posters are collectible and valuable now is that they weren’t then,” explains Howard, who is so passionate about his hobby that he maintains a website (postercentral.com) devoted to it.
 
Psychedelic posters were born in the mid-1960s under the aegis of famed San Francisco concert impresario Bill Graham, and for a few flamboyant years helped sell tickets to concerts of the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and the Doors. Poster artists such as Wes Wilson, Stanley “Mouse” Miller, Alton Kelley, Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso and Lee Conklin created these intensely stylized graphic extravagances. They proved so visually appealing and emblematic of their zeitgeist that they were prized as art almost from the moment of their publication and were collected from the start. Largely a West Coast phenomenon, they were primarily printed on paper rather than cardboard and routinely produced in multiple runs, of which only the first is generally collectible.

The most-prized first printings of the psychedelic posters have only recently edged into trophy collectible territory. “The visual jewels of the psychedelic era are into five figures now,” explains Howard Kramer, the curatorial director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, which has a large collection of concert posters on display.

Expert collectors, however, consider only boxing-style concert posters to be genuinely collectible. They claim psychedelics are inferior because they are still relatively easy to find, and at least some of their worth is dependent on their subjective value as art.

THE FIRST printing of the poster is valued at $15,228. A first printing of the 1966 Grateful Dead Skull and Roses poster sold for $3,893.

“A concert poster should celebrate a musical artist as opposed to a visual artist, which is why psychedelic doesn’t interest me at all,” Diamond explains. “They’re also common. You can pick up a phone and, if you have the money, buy a Jimi Hendrix Flying Eyeball poster.”
At WolfgangsVault.com, such a design sells for over $7,500 for a first printing or $1,400 for a second printing. “But,” Diamond continues, “if you want a Beatles Shea Stadium, you can’t call the Beatles store. You can’t find a Billie Holiday 1948 poster or a Buddy Holly poster at the drop of a hat the way you can the psychedelic posters.”

Armstrong, who collects both types of concert posters—he owns all 287 posters in Bill Graham’s exuberantly psychedelic numbered BG series, as well as Beatles and Rolling Stones boxing-style posters—thinks the dispute is silly. “These posters are the story of the music and the art. To say only a certain kind of poster matters is kind of ridiculous.”

To come across a poster advertising Elvis Presley’s first tour in 1954—none have surfaced yet—would be the equivalent of discovering King Tut’s tomb.

Fake, Rattle and Roll
According to Howard, three variables make a poster from the collectible period valuable. “In a nutshell, it’s the caliber of the artist, the poster’s appearance and its scarcity. If it’s a C-level artist but it’s a killer-looking poster and really rare, it’s not going to do well. If it’s a killer artist and is really rare but it’s an ugly poster, it had better have some historical significance. And if it’s a great artist and looks great, but there are 200 of them, nobody gets excited.”

The growing problem of counterfeits preys on the minds of inexperienced collectors, particularly those interested in boxing-style posters. “There are a lot of forgeries and frauds out there,” Zakarin says, “especially now with the big money.” He tells of a new concert poster collector who showed him an Elvis Presley poster for which he had paid more than $8,000, but Zakarin quickly pegged it as a phony. “Unfortunately, the only way somebody can protect himself is by asking the advice of reputable dealers, or knowing whom to talk to in what I call the network of real,” he adds. Though the same caveat emptor rules apply for psychedelic posters, assistance is easier to find. WolfsgangsVault.com certifies the authenticity of everything it sells, and Eric King’s pair of invaluable but hard-to-find collectors guides help level the playing field.

Kramer

THE JIMI Hendrix Flying Eyeball poster, advertising the musician’s 1968 performance at Winterland in San Francisco, is the quintessential psychedelic poster, valued at $7,758 for a first printing and $1,400 for a second printing.

explains that generally, only a very select group of posters command large amounts of money. In many ways, too, the sale of the Beatles Shea poster remains something of an anomaly. “Because they’re so enduringly popular and there were so few posters actually made, the Beatles are kind of the spike on the curve,” he says.

The spike, however, continues to climb: At the most recent ItsOnlyRocknRoll.com auction, which concluded in late June, a third 1966 Beatles Shea poster sold for $72,970.30. Its condition was not nearly as pristine as the record-setter. Armstrong claims that he recently heard about a Rolling Stones cardboard that sold privately for $60,000. In the psychedelic market, former Microsoft executive Paul Allen has also become known as a devoted collector of Jimi Hendrix concert posters. His presence alone may be enough to drive this sector. “The high end of the market is still in its infancy,” Swartz notes.

Many collectors, however, assert that the search for rare posters and the love of the music they represent—not necessarily the money—keep them engaged. They dream of being the first to find the poster that hung on the wall of the Cavern Club behind the early Beatles in an enticing photograph. Perhaps a dusty Dylan poster, when he was still known as Zimmerman, is hiding in a Minnesota basement or attic. To come across a poster advertising Elvis Presley’s first tour in 1954—none have surfaced yet—would be the equivalent of discovering King Tut’s tomb.
 
“You need to love music,” says Howard, who dreams of acquiring a Louis Armstrong concert poster from the late 1920s. “I can’t imagine entering this hobby without a passion for the subject matter. It would be like collecting Indy car parts and not caring about racing.” 

Richard John Pietschmann, based in Los Angeles, is a frequent contributor to Worth.