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Rock and roll saved my life? Why, yes...and in many ways. The music, the lyrics, the performances, the art work...and yes, the posters: they all served as little life-rafts for me through the years. I've built much of my adult life with the raw materials of rock and roll. I can't imagine 'me' without it.

Some of you are familiar with the 'flying eyeball'. It is a 'rock and roll' poster icon, used most famously on a concert poster by artist Rick Griffin for a 1968 Jimi Hendrix show in San Francisco, but used by other artists as well. Griffin was familiar with the mythology around the sacred 'Eye In The Sky', the all seeing eye that peers through human deceit & illusion. He was also familiar with southern California pinstriper Von Dutch, and his flying eyeball logo: a quirky take on the ancient icon.

When Griffin's version of the flying eyeball made it's appearance, though, something was different. This eyeball hovered, more visceral and aware. It held a glare that burned through you. The stare was arresting...taking an accounting of you, measuring you as a human being. Some have commented that Griffin sometimes spoke of the eye as 'god'.

To me, an artist who's life has been greatly affected and transformed by the 'rock and roll poster', the eyeball IS 'rock and roll'. It is the perfect visualization of the aura and the experience: rock and roll's 'Holy Ghost'. This music is a living thing. It peers into your soul, discerning thoughts and intentions, motives and fears. In my darkest hours, it stood by me. It helped define for me a purpose and repeatedly showed me the 'roads less traveled', cramped and waiting there in the shadows if I dared to wander upon them. The visual art of the rock poster, specifically, is a breathing and pulsing religion. For me, it's prophets were men like Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse, Wes Wilson, Guy Juke, Ray Pettibon, Mad Marc Rude, Frank Kozik, and others...all pointing the way to a freedom that COULD be had. 'Rock and roll' showed me 'hands' that I didn't know I had. So, i knelt there...bare and exposed, and let the music and the art wrap themselves around me & swallow me whole.'

- jr