Saturday Morning Muse

I was poking around my YouTube account this morning, mostly just killing time, when I realized my “Watch Later” playlist had become a digital graveyard. I hadn’t properly pruned that thing in over a decade. It felt like a perfect, mindless task to tackle in the quiet moments between projects.

As I was digging through years of bookmarked curiosities, I stumbled across a video detailing the origins of psychedelic posters. It hit me with a bit of a “eureka” moment.

Back in the day, those posters were such labor-intensive works of love. I remember being fascinated by the sheer craft of them. I’ll admit, I probably made a few half-hearted attempts to mimic that flowing lettering and those trippy icons, but I never quite got there. I never produced anything that, when you looked at it, truly screamed “psychedelic poster.” It was one of those creative itches I just never successfully scratched.

So, with a little downtime on my hands, I decided to see if I could bridge the gap between my past and the present. I took one of my old snapshots and let Gemini have a go at turning it into a poster.

The result is what you see at the top of this post (and I’ll drop it again at the bottom). But before we get to the “after” shot, I thought I’d share the video that sent me down this particular rabbit hole. It’s a great look at a style that defined an era and, apparently, is still sparking experiments in my corner of the Texas Gulf Coast.

The Spark: The History of the Psychedelic Poster

It’s funny how a bit of digital housecleaning can turn into a trip down memory lane. Here is that experiment one more time—a little piece of my youth recaptured through a modern lens.

Once a while back my youngest son played a gig with his garage band at a bar in North Houston called “Dan Electro’s Guitar Bar”. They would do psychedelic style posters to advertise the shows. For quite awhile I kept a digital archive of those posters. Somewhere in the back corners of my dead hard drives those posters still exist.

And guess what? they are still; doing them…