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New York Times
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
David Edward Byrd, Whose Posters Captured Rock's Energy, Dies at 83
David Edward Byrd, who captured the swirl and energy of the 1960s and early '70s by conjuring pinwheels of color with indelible posters for concerts by Jimi Hendrix, the Who and the Rolling Stones as well as for hit stage musicals like 'Follies' and 'Godspell,' died on Feb. 3 in Albuquerque. He was 83. His husband and only immediate survivor, Jolino Beserra, said the cause of death, in a hospital, was pneumonia brought on by lung damage from Covid. Mr. Byrd made his name, starting in 1968, with striking posters for the likes of Jefferson Airplane, Iron Butterfly and Traffic at the Fillmore East, the Lower Manhattan Valhalla of rock operated by the powerhouse promoter Bill Graham. For a concert there that year by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Mr. Byrd rendered the guitar wizard's hair in a field of circles, which blended with the explosive hairstyles of his bandmates, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell. Mr. Byrd also put his visual stamp on the Who's landmark rock opera, 'Tommy,' producing posters for it when it was performed at the Fillmore East in October 1969 and again, triumphantly, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York a few months later. In 1973, he shared a Grammy Award for his illustration work on the London Philharmonic Orchestra's rendition of 'Tommy.' For his poster for the Rolling Stones' 1969 U.S. tour, which culminated in the violence-marred Altamont festival in Northern California, Mr. Byrd paid no mind to the band's increasingly sinister image. Instead, he opted for an illustration of an elegant female nude twirling billowing fabric, drawing for inspiration on the late-19th-century motion photographs by Eadweard Muybridge. Mr. Byrd's theater work included a surreal poster for 'Follies,' the bittersweet 1971 Broadway evocation of the Ziegfeld Follies era with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The design featured the cracked face of a somber-looking woman wearing a star-studded headdress that spelled out the show's title. The poster was enough of a hit that the producer Edgar Lansbury called Mr. Byrd in for a meeting at his office near the Winter Garden theater, where 'Follies' was playing, and asked him to design one for the Off Broadway production that same year of 'Godspell,' the flower-power retelling of the Gospel of St. Matthew. In his 2023 book, 'Poster Child: The Psychedelic Art & Technicolor Life of David Edward Byrd,' written with Robert von Goeben, Mr. Byrd recalled Mr. Lansbury telling him to peer out the window at his 'Follies' image. 'I want that poster,' he said, 'and I want it to be Jesus.' Mr. Byrd missed out on a brush with history when his original poster for the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969, featuring a neoclassical image of a nude woman with an urn, was replaced for various logistical reasons by Arnold Skolnick's — the now famous image of a white bird perched on a guitar neck. Mr. Byrd took it in stride. 'I didn't think of it as any kind of 'branding' for the event,' he said of his poster. 'I thought of it as a souvenir of the event.' Mr. Byrd was impressed by — and to a degree, aligned with — the work of the so-called Big Five psychedelic poster artists of San Francisco: Alton Kelley, Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse and Wes Wilson, who were known for using kaleidoscopic patterns, explosions of color and fonts that seemed to bend and ooze like Salvador Dalí clocks. But, based 3,000 miles from the Haight-Ashbury scene, Mr. Byrd was also influenced by Broadway and advertising, employing standard typefaces and drawing on the Art Nouveau movement of 1890s Europe. His work is 'kind of like Art Nouveau on acid,' said Thomas La Padula, an adjunct professor of illustration at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where Mr. Byrd taught in the 1970s. Throughout, however, Mr. Byrd could enjoy the unfettered freedom afforded by the music world in those days. 'With rock, there was no basic subject matter,' he wrote in 'Poster Child.' 'It was just whatever you wanted to do that was eye-catching.' David Edward Byrd was born on April 4, 1941, in Cleveland, Tenn., the only child of Willis Byrd, a traveling salesman, and Veda (Mount) Byrd, a part-time model. His parents divorced when he was young, and he spent most of his youth in Miami Beach with his mother and his wealthy stepfather, Al Miller, an executive with the Howard Johnson's restaurant chain. After receiving a bachelor's degree in fine art and a master's in stone lithography from Andy Warhol's alma mater, the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie Mellon University), he settled in an upstate New York commune, where he was painting in the vein of Francis Bacon, the Irish-born artist and master of the macabre, when college friends, including Joshua White, who designed the dazzling light shows for the Fillmore East, hooked him up with Mr. Graham. Fillmore East closed in 1971, but that did not mark the end of Mr. Byrd's work in music. For a Grateful Dead concert at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island in 1973, he came up with an impish illustration of two clean-cut 1950s teenagers boogieing under the self-consciously corny tagline 'A Swell Dance Concert.' Mr. Byrd also produced a retro-inflected album cover for Lou Reed's 1974 album, 'Sally Can't Dance,' as well as posters for the band Kiss. He made a foray into Hollywood with his poster for the 1975 film adaptation of 'The Day of the Locust,' Nathanael West's dystopian Hollywood novel. Mr. Byrd moved to Los Angeles in 1981 and worked there as the art director for Van Halen's 'Fair Warning' tour. Later that decade, he spent four years as the art director for the national gay news publication The Advocate, and in the 1990s he worked as an illustrator for Warner Bros. on its consumer merchandise. He and Mr. Beserra, a mosaic artist, moved to Albuquerque last year. Mr. Byrd often said that he found the making of art more fulfilling than the end result. 'The final art product is merely the doo-doo, the refuse, the detritus of the creative experience,' he said in his book. 'The golden moments in my life have always been the personal, magical world of the 'Aha!' moment.'
Los Angeles Times
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘It got a little messy': Stephen Stills and Graham Nash on CSNY's early days
On Sept. 20, 1969, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young played the fourth of four concerts over two nights at the Fillmore East in New York City. A month earlier, the quartet had played the now-legendary Woodstock festival — its set began at approximately 3 a.m. — which itself was just the band's second gig following its live debut the previous evening at Chicago's Auditorium Theatre. Superstardom was on the horizon for this rock supergroup that combined former members of the Byrds (Crosby), the Hollies (Nash) and Buffalo Springfield (Stills and Young). 'Déjà Vu,' the first album by CSNY following a 1969 LP credited to Crosby, Stills & Nash, would top the Billboard 200 in May 1970 on its way to a Grammy nomination for album of the year and eventual sales of more than 7 million copies. That night at the Fillmore, though, the band was still figuring itself out. A new concert album captures the moment: 'Live at Fillmore East, 1969' documents the two sets CSNY played on Sept. 20 — one acoustic, one electric — comprising 17 songs, including 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes' and 'Helplessly Hoping,' both from 'Crosby, Stills & Nash,' and '4 + 20' and 'Our House,' both of which would end up on 'Déjà Vu'; there's also a ripping 16-minute version of 'Down by the River,' from Young's 'Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,' which had come out that May. Weeks before Nash, 83, and Stills, 80, performed together at last month's FireAid benefit concert, the two gathered on a Zoom call — Nash from 'yet another hotel room' before a tour stop in St. Louis, Stills from 'my extremely messy office-slash-bedroom' in Los Angeles — to discuss the live album, Joni Mitchell's return to the stage and their memories of Crosby, who died in 2023. Stephen, you famously said onstage at Woodstock that you guys were 'scared s—' because the festival was only the band's second time before an audience. I wondered whether that was still the case a month later at the Fillmore. Stills: Scared s— was gone by, I'd say, bar 16 of the first song at Woodstock. Nash: We did pretty good there. I've not actually seen the entire 'Woodstock' movie — I've seen [John] Sebastian and Richie Havens — but we did pretty well. When we started the suite, it sounded fabulous to me. Wait, you've never seen all of 'Woodstock'? That seems insane. Nash: You know, Woodstock has taken on this incredible myth in the years since, and I understand why — it was an incredible gathering. But it's gotten larger and larger and larger, the myth of it all. Stills: Quite frankly, Coachella is just as big now, so it's like: So what? It was just the first time all the hippies of the world got together. You'd argue that the myth is now out of proportion with the event itself. Nash: We're still talking about it. Stills: See? Do you remember playing the specific Fillmore show documented on this new live album? Stills: I have no specific memory of the show, but hearing the tape took me right back. We were a brand-new band just learning to play together electric. We were playing insufferably loud, which made it all the more surprising how good the singing was. Was insufferable the goal for the electric set? Stills: It was the trend — everyone played incredibly loud back then. The Hollies didn't. Nash: That's true. Stills: But big stacks of Marshalls were all the rage. I tortured my bandmates enough with those. Nash: When we made ['Crosby, Stills & Nash'], we kind of realized that it was coming out at a time of Led Zeppelin and Hendrix and stuff. We thought that the acoustic-y feel to our first record would sneak its way through. And it did. Stephen, you said the music takes you right back. Does hearing it make you think about the relationships in the band? The culture at the time? Stills: This record reminds me of where we were maturity-wise. Graham was the seasoned bro, and David and I had had a stab at it. The Byrds had more more success — everybody had more success than the Buffalo Springfield — but we were as yet unformed. As for the culture, it's like suddenly we were the spokesmen for it, which led to some disastrous things. A reporter sticks his microphone in your face and says, 'So how are you going to change the world?' It got a little messy. But we lived. In 2014, you guys released 'CSNY 1974,' which documented a tour of stadiums the band played that summer. Looking back, which were better shows: the stadium gigs or those at theaters like the Fillmore? Nash: I prefer more intimate settings — when you can see their eyes and you can see that they're appreciating it. Stills: The question is answered by the quality of the singing, and the quality of the singing in this concert is what made it for me, because we had our blend. By the time of that stadium tour, we were all moved to separate mics and there was lots of oversinging and overexcitement because you're selling so big. Right before the Fillmore, you did seven nights at the Greek Theatre in L.A. Nobody does that anymore. Nash: Nobody has Joni Mitchell opening for them either. Stills: Those Greek shows are really what made us coalesce. That vocal blend is showcased on the 'Fillmore' record in a cover of the Beatles' 'Blackbird.' Nash: That was Stephen's idea. We had heard the Beatles do 'Blackbird,' of course, and Stephen in his brilliant record-making said, 'You know, I think we can really sing this in some good three-part harmony.' Stills: The thing that set it off is I figured it out on guitar. [Paul] McCartney saw me play it later and said, 'Why so complicated? It's a [different] tuning.' But I figured it out. Harmonically, yours veers pretty far from the Beatles' original. Nash: That was a part of the magic that we had discovered when we first started singing together. The Hollies and the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield were very decent harmony bands. But when David and Stephen and I made our voices into one, we knew we'd struck magic. Stills: I give a lot of the credit for those voicings to David Crosby. He was the master of coming up with the really far-out parts. I referred to him as the glue. Have you heard Beyoncé's version of 'Blackbird' from her 'Cowboy Carter' album? Stills: All I've heard on that Beyoncé album is the treatment she gave my song. She actually gave me a writer's credit [in her 'Ameriican Requiem'] for using 'For What It's Worth.' I'm like, Where is it? [laughs] It's a completely different song, but I was very flattered. She's known for being very thorough in her album credits. Stills: Actually, that's endemic to the whole rap world — much to my benefit. Mailbox money, baby. After opening those Greek shows, Mitchell went with you to New York. She's said to have been in the audience at the Fillmore. Nash: Joan was there, absolutely. I think it was the first time we played 'Our House' live. I remember how incredibly joyous we felt about life. Yes, Richard Nixon was crazy. Yes, the Vietnam War was still going on. But for me, particularly coming from England, it was kind of the difference between black-and-white movies and Technicolor movies. 'Our House,' of course, was inspired by your and Joni's romantic relationship. Did the two of you talk about the song after the show? Nash: Nope [laughs]. What's it been like for you to watch this comeback journey she's been on? Nash: First of all, she's alive. We nearly lost her — I mean, we really nearly lost Joni Mitchell. So to see her come back to life and to see her still performing is amazing. Her range has shortened somewhat, but her phrasing is incredible right now — jazz-like and deliberate. I'm so pleased that she's thriving. How do the two of you think about the ways your voices have changed with age? Nash: I'm amazed that I can still sing like this. Stills: Tony Bennett once told me — I said, 'What's the secret of longevity?' and he said, 'Never be afraid to lower the key or use a teleprompter.' I've taken that to heart. Do you think CSNY might have played together again had Crosby not died? Nash: It really would've depended on the songs. I would say it's unlikely, but when Stephen comes to me with a song that breaks my heart, I want a piece of it — I want to add to it and help him say it. Stills: I don't think we realized how badly we would miss David. Nash: Don't forget what Stephen said: David Crosby was the heartbeat and the glue of the four of us. Did his death come as a shock? Nash: Well, the truth is that even Crosby thought he was going to die decades earlier. It's not funny, but it is. David expected to go years and years ago, and the fact that he made it to being over 80 years old was astonishing. The four of you have made music in any number of combinations. Does the idea of Stills, Nash & Young appeal, or would that just bring too much attention to David's absence? Nash: Feeling his absence is probably why we would never do it.
