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 SPECIAL FEATURE | |
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by John Lynskey Click here to view the Jeff Wood HTN Poster Section! | |
For years now, the world of poster art has been divided into two groups: Jeff Wood and everybody else. Jeff's posters usually sell out quickly, with avid collectors impatiently waiting for each new release like kids on Christmas morning. He has won every major award in the business and been featured in books on the subject. Most recently, Jeff was the featured artist in Hittin' the Note #60 and he did the ABB 40th Anniversary screen print for the Beacon shows (sold out), as well as the 40th Anniversary 3D poster (still available), both of which have been big hits with the ABB community.
We are delighted to announce a new partnership between Jeff Wood and Hittin' the Note. From now on, HTN will be an official fulfillment house for many of Wood's concert posters that are related to our ABB family of bands! As a way of celebrating this new partnership, we are including a reprint of his recent interview with Kirk West from HTN #60.
How did you get started doing this? I'm 47 years old, and I'm originally from Commerce, GA, which is right outside of Athens. I was very involved in music all through high school, and I picked up my first airbrush when I was 14 years old. Airbrushing was the rage in the '70s, and I hung out at the Atlanta International Dragway and watched all the hot rod artists work on cars. I started painting T-shirts for friends during high school to make extra money, and in 1980 I went to the Art Institute of Atlanta. I graduated in '82, and was hired to work for Mount South Innovations, which is a T-shirt company that specialized in tour shirts for the Scorpions, .38 Special, and Pat Travers. I lived, ate and breathed music and everything that revolved around it. I got into formal screen printing in 1990, and from there I took on the computer, and learned it inside and out. Then I moved to Myrtle Beach, and went to work for a guy named Craig Keefer. Craig started Island Screenworks, and we got licensed to do Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley T-shirts. From there, it escalated to where Craig owned the Headroom, which was a bar/ nightclub in Myrtle Beach. I started doing posters for Marilyn Manson and Seven Mary Three and basically, any of the bands that came through the venue. So that was that the first poster work you had done? Yeah it was, but there's a funny story about the first poster work I did for High Times. I was in New York having a meeting about the posters for the upcoming Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam. I found out that the art work Stanley Mouse had submitted had been turned down because of some religious reasons. I happened to be there with a bunch of this native art I had done, and lo and behold, Steve Hagar, the editor, walked out and saw my art work, and said he wanted us to do the poster. That kind of blew me away because Stanley Mouse is one of the reasons I do what I do. He was my inspiration, so to have that weird little synchronicity take place – Stanley handed me my first big poster job. I flew home from New York and knocked that poster out, which was for the 1996 Cannabis Cup. In 1998, I moved back to Athens so I could be closer to a music town and focus on the poster business a lot more. In '99, I went full-time into it because I was able to sell enough posters on eBay to keep the bills paid. Then I started soliciting work from bands like Widespread Panic and some of the larger bands based out of Athens – doing posters for the 40 Watt and the Georgia Theater when bands were coming through. We would give the band a bundle, we gave the promoter a bundle and we had 15 or 20 posters that we would sell, and then we would move on to the next poster. Then we just kind of self-perpetuated that until contract work and commission work phased out all the promotional work – I'd say that started around 2001.  At that point, I never looked back, and Johnny has been there, illustrating with me under the Drowning Creek banner. Johnny was featured last year on the cover of International Tattoo Art magazine – he's a world class tattoo artist. He goes by Johnny Thief in the poster and tattoo community, and he's like my brother – he actually gave me my first tattoo when I turned 40.
The commission work picked up, and I happened to step into the jam scene at a very opportune moment because no one was really doing screen-printed pieces for jam bands. I stepped in and started doing it, and immediately we had a lot of bands flock to us to get it done. For two or three years, we just cranked away, working with Widespread Panic and Gov't Mule and some of the other bands. In 2003, I did a poster for Trey Anastasio's spring tour, and in 2004 Phish commissioned me to do three posters. From there, the collector community latched on to me, and it went through the roof at that point. 2004 and 2005 were just plain madness. We were cranking out six to eight posters a month and I barely slept. It was good – the collectors at that point started paying attention. In 2004, I was commissioned to do the 35th Anniversary poster for the Allman Brothers Band, and Umphrey's McGee was another big band for collectors, as I had moved from Phish over to Umphrey's. I loved them and wanted to do a lot of work for them, but they were apprehensive because they weren't one of those major venue bands at that point; they were still a small, mid-level band. Then they started selling out poster runs, and a lot of it was because of the association with Phish; those collectors were looking for where those artists who had done work for Phish were moving to. They started collecting my work and the next thing you know, Umphrey's posters are flying out the door. We were selling out runs, which was kind of unheard of for a mid-level band to be selling out 300-400 piece runs over a period of a couple of weeks. In 2006, I was diagnosed with Bell's Palsey; I had a situation where my face was half-paralyzed and it made me have to chill out a bit and not stress so much. I backed off the work somewhat, but we've still been very steady, cranking out anywhere from two to four posters a month. Now I'm focusing more on working with long-time clients like the Allman Brothers, Derek Trucks, and one of my favorite guitarists in the world, Warren Haynes. We've focused on the music that I love the most. We still take on some commission work every once in awhile, but I'm starting to paint more now and produce more art prints, and we're pretty much gonna stick to the few-poster-a-month deal and just crank out art prints and whatever commission work we want to take on. 
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