Bill Guardino’s collection of San Jose rock posters from the ’60s just might be the best exhibit ever at History San Jose. If not for the music and the artwork, then for the old newspapers.
For almost six decades, Guardino has amassed more than a quarter-million items, including concert posters, handbills, flyers, underground newspapers and other artifacts, all of which illuminate San Jose’s underappreciated role in the ’60s counterculture. Only a few hundred can fit inside the Pasetta House at History Park, where a Hall-of-Fame-quality show, “South Bay Flashback: Riffs, Rhythms, and Revolution,” opens this weekend. It runs for a year.
When Guardino spilled the origin story of how it all started, he rattled off Blackford High School and Rogers Junior High. He still remembered when he first started collecting.
“At that time, I just loved the art, and just learning the bands,” Guardino said. “And once a week, my brother and I would ride our Stingray bikes down to the record store at Valley Fair and pick up the flyers every week for years.”
Guardino and his friends visited every Tuesday to meet the Fillmore rep from San Francisco, who dropped off stacks of handbills.
“It just snowballed,” he said. “And it’s been a big passion ever since.”
These days, one often sees old rock flyers floating around social media in various states of pixelated glory. To see hundreds of original posters covering the walls, all in the same place, is another experience altogether. The whole show needs to travel. It’s that important.
Aside from the groovy posters, one of the best rooms in the whole exhibit is the one with a few dozen newspapers on the wall. Not only was the South Bay home to a thriving ’60s rock scene, it was also a hotbed for the underground press.
We see the first issue of the San Jose Maverick, with cops brutalizing protestors. Another issue captured the scene when people threw rocks, bottles and eggs at Richard Nixon’s limousine as it rolled up to the San Jose Civic for a 1970 appearance.
Other zine-like periodicals include the San Jose Red Eye, which featured The Dope Column, listing drug prices and the various effects. Another paper, simply called Sedition, was absolutely free. All of them attacked the right-wing political establishments of the day.
Guardino even included multiple copies of the Berkeley Barb, the East Village Other and the Oracle from San Francisco, even though they technically weren’t part of the South Bay. Context is key, of course.
“I collected underground papers from ’65 through about 1970 from all over the country because every major city had their own underground newspapers,” Guardino said. “They were talking about all the social issues of the day—the political scene, the Black Panther scene, the communist scene, the hippie scene big time. The artwork and the concert posters inside the newspapers were just absolutely amazing.”
One extremely rare announcement appeared in a February 1966 issue of the Open City Newspaper in Los Angeles: a hand-drawn ad for the Grateful Dead’s performance at one of Ken Kesey’s acid tests at the Cinema Theatre in LA. This was just two months after the band played its first official gig as the Grateful Dead at an acid test in downtown San Jose.
The content wasn’t just political. The underground press was the primary source for all things San Jose that the daily papers rarely touched.
“It was a major part of the scene and it tied everything together, all different genres of music, all different genres of collecting concert poster and handbill artwork,” Guardino said, of the underground press. “Any major band that was happening at the time would’ve been in these papers, front cover, back cover.”
Guardino says he has over 1,200 of these newspapers.
“I would love to display this underground newspaper scene as a whole separate museum,” he said. “I think people would be shocked to see it. And I wouldn’t just show the front covers. I’d open ’em up to certain pages that really detailed the times. I think it’d be something that people would really love to see.”
Does that mean a sequel? If anyone can plan a South Bay Flashback Part Deux, it’s Bill Guardino.
South Bay Flashback: Riffs, Rhythms and Revolution opens Nov 22 at the Leonard and David McKay Gallery in the Pasetta House, History Park, 635 Phelan Ave, San Jose. Open select weekends noon–4pm. 408.287.2290. historysanjose.org
