Mad Peck’s Poster Art
By Alden Stetzer
Posters have been a topic of conversation in the current arts dialogue in Providence.
In 2006, they ranged from activist images, at eye-level on phone-poles or being stripped from Downtown public spaces, to the current RISD museum retrospective “Wunderground” — from sliding-scale art sales and local show advertisements, all the way to igniting public dialogue on community issues. One more notch on the bedpost that consummates the city’s tumultuous relationship with posters is “The Real Deal Poster Show,” an exhibition of rock concert posters designed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the Mad Peck.
On a cool Sunday afternoon in late October, people crowded into the narrow basement aisles of What Cheer Antiques and Vintage, a cozy store in Wayland Square specializing in Rhode Island ephemera. As patrons mingled with frosty beverages provided by show sponsor Narragansett Beer, thumbed through old records, and took in the poster art, conversations weaved around an aspect of Providence history few have been able to read about, let alone look at with their own eyes.
The posters in the show represent artifacts of the visual and audible explosion from an era that came to be considered crucial to the growth and development of American culture. Janis Joplin, Cream, The Byrds, John Lee Hooker, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Blood Sweat and Tears, Grand Funk, The J. Geils Band, Muddy Waters, Mose Allison, and Jefferson Airplane, among others, are some examples of the musicians who defined and influenced the sounds and philosophies that swept through radio stations, living rooms, and rock halls. Their tour buses traveled through Providence, and their shows were advertised by the graphics of the Mad Peck.
Wayland Square native Ted Widmer was invited to speak at the opening. The current Director of the John Carter Library at Brown University (and former Clinton speechwriter and Upper Crust guitarist) remembered a time when Providence was a cultural gulch. When Minerva’s Pizza opened on the corner of Wayland and Angell, it was the first cool thing Widmer could recall in the Wayland Square of his youth. Then, he remembered a radio show on WBRU, hosted by someone named “Dr. Oldie,” which broadened his cultural horizons. Curiously, the mysterious “Dean of the University of Musical Perversity” who deejayed as Dr. Oldie was none other than the artist who signed his posters as “the Mad Peck.”
Looking back, you might consider Peck’s work peculiar representations of the full-force eye-blurring posters we see today. Yet our eyes are by now well trained in the imagery of psychedelic art. The Mad Peck’s posters were a precursor, a latchkey dangling around the neck, a cool new tool to express the new music. Back then, his posters represented a breakthrough in culture, music, and artistic expression: they rocked the visual world. Our distance from that era allows us not only to look at the posters with keener eyes, but also informs our new art with the happy habits of a loony expert.
