Randy Tuten was one the dozen or so design artists who made posters for Bill Graham’s rock concerts in San Francisco in the 1960s. As such, those original posters are quite collectible today, particularly the ones for Led Zeppelin concerts. Tuten emblazoned his posters with fancy typography, often paid with a mundane but incongruent photograph of a boat, train, or automobile. Graham didn’t give Tuten a lot of direction for his posters, and trusting the artist’s instincts led to some memorable posters.
“When I started working for Bill Graham,” Tuten says, “I learned pretty quickly that the band names were more important than the artwork. If I did a nice piece, that was all fine and dandy, but it was the band name that made the poster collectible.” In fact, Tuten designed a lot of Led Zeppelin posters that have since become quite collectible. “Rick Griffin ended up doing most of the Jimi Hendrix posters for Bill,” he says. “I ended up doing all of the Led Zeppelin posters. It wasn’t planned that way. It was just an accident.”
Many of those posters have become iconic, including the one shown here that was a recycling of a college project. Read how that came about, as well as Tuten's other posters for Led Zeppelin and other concerts (for decades afterward) at Collectors Weekly.