Larry Cartmell remembers well the first concert poster that he acquired. The headlining act was the English punk band Buzzcocks, with The Cramps, an American psychobilly band, opening the show. The concert took place at the Boomer Theatre in Norman, Oklahoma, on December 6, 1979. Cartmell was a student at the nearby University of Oklahoma. (He later graduated from the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. He’s been working as a pathologist in Waco for 28 years.)
“That was an incredible show,” Cartmell said. “I had The Cramps’ first records and they were awesome. I got their autograph at that show, and that was like wild and dangerous then. I was an undergraduate at that time and we were all knocked out by the show and I saw them again a year later and by then I’d already had a bunch more [posters].”
That first Buzzcocks/The Cramps poster began a collection that continues to grow. It spans music genres from punk to Western swing, psychedelic rock to swamp pop. He’s got posters from iconic Austin venues such as Vulcan Gas Company and Armadillo World Headquarters; both Fillmore East and Fillmore West; and many from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which he’s been attending since 1994. Anything that enters his collection now has to be from an artist whose music he enjoys, “and I’ve got to like the poster too,” he said.
“I’ve gotten to where my flat file is full. And if it’s not something now that I’d put on the wall or frame, I just let it go.”
More than 500 items from Cartmell’s collection comprised “If These Walls Could Talk,” an exhibit at Art Center Waco that closed on March 21 after six weeks of display. The most iconic poster in the exhibit was actually a bootleg version, he said, a knockoff reproduction of a Jimi Hendrix poster that he acquired at the Austin Record Convention sometime in the ‘90s. He bought 10 copies of the poster for $5 each. The not-quite-dry ink was a pretty good indicator the vendor was not selling the real thing. A near-perfect version of the original Hendrix poster sold a few weeks ago for $46,000, Cartmell said.
Concert posters are still being produced and used to promote performances, especially in musical hotbeds like Austin, Houston, Seattle, San Francisco, Cleveland, Detroit and several others.
“All of those places have good venues and good promoters where the material’s all used before the shows,” he said. “The best thing about it is everybody has their own style. And if you find somebody whose style you like, you can just go nuts getting stuff because they’re all prolific.”
One of the best places to buy posters close to Waco is at Flatstock, an art exhibition and sale that is held during South by Southwest in Austin each spring, Cartmell said. The free-admission show is sponsored by the Poster Institute, a nonprofit “dedicated to furthering public awareness and appreciation of the poster art form,” according to its website. Its numerous events each year allow poster fans to meet — and buy art from — the artists who are creating those works.
