At first glance, these look like concert posters from the acid-tripping, free-loving, anti-war San Francisco of the 1960s, right? Look again. Believe it or not, they're from Detroit.
Check the dates. The top one, with the Sea Gull, is from October 7, 1966. That's the day LSD became federally criminalized. That evening, while the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band played a now-legendary show at Bill Graham's Fillmore in San Francisco, the kids in Detroit were having their minds blown at 'a dance concert in the San Francisco style' at the Grande Ballroom by a local band, MC-5.
The middle poster is from April 30th, 1967, advertising a Love-In on Belle Isle. That's months before San Francisco's legendary 'Summer of Love' made Haight Ashbury a mecca for hippies everywhere.
Clearly, there was a thriving counter culture scene in Detroit concurrent with that of San Francisco's. One could argue that musically, Detroit was even a bit more progressive: While the San Francisco Sound tended to center around electrified versions of old blues and country-folk songs, the MC-5, with its stripped-down sound and anti-establishment lyrics, are now widely credited as being among the primary sperm donors of what became punk rock.
All three posters are the work of Gary Grimshaw. A Viet Nam vet, Gary came home to Detroit, joined the anti-war movement, and became the primary poster and light show artist for Detroit's psychedelic Grande Ballroom from 1966 to 1969. He worked as an art director for CREEM, the Detroit-based bastion of rock journalism whose editors had an ongoing feud with their counterparts at San Francisco's Rolling Stone magazine over the soul of rock music.
The bottom poster is for another MC-5 show at a club called The See, on Woodward Ave. near the campus of Wayne State, Detroit's equivalent to San Francisco State.
The date of the show is June 23, 1967. Exactly one month later, the halcyon days of Detroit's psychedelic scene would end.