Gary Grimshaw: Detroit Poster Artist
By hquerroOctober 5th, 2008
He describes himself as chronically unemployed and unemployable – A hippie, an artist, an activist, and a Vietnam War veteran. Although he hasn’t experienced much nationwide success, he is a hometown Detroit hero in many respects. He has produced many pieces of art that are held close to the hearts of Detroit music lovers from the past as well as the present. Anyone who calls themselves a Motor City music enthusiast will have seen his work at some point, whether it was sold at concerts, printed on t-shirts, on the cover of an album, or hung up around the city. Gary Grimshaw helped put a face to the Detroit music scene as it came into existence in the late 60’s, when local kids found themselves in the aftermath of Motown and in the middle of a political upheaval. His psychedelic style and unique hand crafted typography are directly connected to this time in history and the need for music poster artwork he helped to establish would continue to live on to the present. Grimshaw was one of the artists at this time in history that would realize their voice could be heard through art as well as music, and that the two could join together to convey a stronger message. As a young boy growing up in Detroit, he would never have guessed that his artwork could make such an impact – But being in the right place at the right time will often work to one’s advantage.
One aspect of Grimshaw’s childhood that would serve as a major driving force behind his creativity and artistic ability would be the influence and the talents of his family. “If you want to go way back, the adults in my immediate and extended families were all somehow connected to the visual arts. My father was a mechanical engineer who brought home drafting tools and blueprints. I remember one in particular that was a blueprint of the whole factory (Shatterproof Glass in the former Tucker Auto Plant in the extreme southwest corner of Detroit) that I meticulously traced.” Having the support of the fellow artists in his family would be a significant bonding experience as well as an opportunity to learn about various kinds of art from around the world. Grimshaw calls upon memories of doing paint-by-number sets with his mother, whom he describes as being very “craftsy and literate.” She also enjoyed teaching her son about the history of art during these craft sessions. This relationship between art and family would not stop there. “My grandfather on my mother’s side was an airbrush artist for the Oldsmobile division of Fisher Body/General Motors. My aunt was a window display artist for Kresge’s, now K-Mart. Her husband was a printer (Crown Press, Dearborn) specializing in full-color restaurant menus who later printed all the Grande Ballroom posters.” These connections to family artists would also help Grimshaw later on down the line as he grew into a more established designer in Detroit. But even from the beginning, as an intelligent child with an artistic flair, Grimshaw would receive much positive re-enforcement and feedback when passing around his current pieces of work at family gatherings.
Grimshaw began to come into his own as an eccentric individual while making his transition into adolescence. “I stopped wanting to be a kid anymore and discovered Mad Magazine, the Hot Rod culture, black people’s music, and girls.” Grimshaw would start to become involved in activities that would associate him with hanging around the wrong crowd. “My mother thought I was hanging out with the wrong crowd, but she didn’t understand that I was the wrong crowd. I was determined to be bad and I wasn’t afraid of anyone.” His artistic ability was used to impress his peers by drawing the sorts of things kids found appealing: monsters, dragsters, and custom cars. Grimshaw boasts about these drawings, and claims “all the fearsome bullies in school had my drawings in their collections.” From an early age, Grimshaw understood the sort of impact an artistic voice could make. He could establish a reputation for himself, secure his place as a part of the “wrong crowd,” and control the way his peers thought about him through his artistic talents.
As an ambitious young boy, Grimshaw recalls his first experiences making money on a paper route. “I turned a 50-customer paper route into a 250-customer mega-route, the biggest downriver.” Wayne Kramer, a future member of the revolutionary Detroit band MC5, and his family were one of the families covered on this paper route. His willingness to work hard would soon pay off, as Grimshaw claims he was “fabulously wealthy” for a 12 year old and was content to spend his earnings on magazines, books, and records. Still the “bad boy”, however, Grimshaw began to run into serious conflicts with the school system. His problems in school were not that he was unable to keep up, but that he found his coursework to be too slow and tedious, even after moving up two grade levels.
As a young teenager, Grimshaw discovered a book called “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac. He would later lend his copy to best friend Bob Derminer (also known as Rob Tyner, future lead singer of the previously mentioned MC5), eager to share his excitement over this defining work of the postwar Beat Generation. “We both read it over and over and started reading our favorite passages to each other out loud.” Grimshaw and Tyner would attribute this discovery of the beatnik culture as helping them to find a way out of the “brutal soul-crushing environment” that appeared to be their fate. Like many other boys living in Detroit in the 50’s and 60’s, a job working in the car factories was, essentially, their birthright. Many kids would just accept that their future would be consumed by the auto industry and that there was nothing anyone could do about it. But through reading this novel, Grimshaw and Tyner were shown another option. They found themselves inexplicably drawn to Detroit’s growing scene of beatniks and coffeehouses. When recalling this point in his life, Grimshaw came to a spiritual connection. “Think of the first card of the Tarot, card #0, The Fool. The picture on this card is of a happy person with all of his/her possessions in a little bag on a stick, blissfully stepping off the edge of a cliff. This Fool’s step is the beginning of all art, adventure, and discovery. If you fear that first step you will spend your life cowering on the edge of the precipice going nowhere, learning nothing.”
Next would come teenage rebellion as Grimshaw grew as an artist on into adulthood during the beginning stages of the Vietnam War. “When the government started drafting young people for service in Vietnam, (Grimshaw) chose to enlist in the U.S. Navy rather than be drafted into another force. He studied telephone repair for a year, then spent a year on an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea.” (Metro Times) It was during his travels with the Navy that Grimshaw began to notice the posters for rock and roll shows, mostly in San Francisco, all which featured the names of bands he knew about. He became a fixture at concerts and was fascinated by the light show technicians, studying their techniques closely. He quickly obtained a vast knowledge of strobe lights, slide projectors, overhead projectors, the dripping and spraying of alcohol, oil, pigments, and water into trays to produce “trippy” sort of psychedelic lighting effects on stages. He brought these talents back with him to Detroit after his discharge in 1966, when he began to attend the rock and roll gigs at Detroit’s infamous Grande Ballroom. It was during this same year that Grimshaw would meet a man by the name of John Sinclair, a Detroit poet and activist who would later come to manage Grimshaw’s childhood buddies Wayne Kramer and Rob Tyner in the MC5. “At a party (at the Grande Ballroom) held to celebrate John Sinclair’s release from the Detroit House of Corrections, the MC5 plugged in at 11 pm and scared the living daylights out of Sinclair, worried that the music was so loud that the cops would come and drag him back to jail.” (Metro Times) This style of music was not new to Grimshaw, who had grown up in Lincoln Park with Tyner and Kramer. This would mark the beginning of the Detroit rock and roll music scene, the revolution that began at the Grande Ballroom and Grimshaw helped to promote. It is this work that he is most known for, the artwork that helped to define the Grande Ballroom’s existence in Detroit.
During the end of the 60’s, Grimshaw found himself in the middle of a political upheaval as he joined John Sinclair’s White Panther Party, taking up the central role of Minister of Art. Thanks to the radical nature of this organization, Grimshaw was soon on the run from the very government he was protesting against, moving to various cities around the country while still working and producing artwork for the White Panther Party. It was during the early 70’s that Grimshaw produced some of his most iconic and memorable works of art. At the forefront of these works are the posters he created for the “Free John Sinclair” rally, an event held at the Crisler Arena in Ann Arbor which protested Sinclair’s potential 10-year detainment by the state for the possession of only two joints. In attendance at the rally were many influential performers and speakers such as Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Bob Seger, and Stevie Wonder. Three days after the rally, Sinclair was released from prison when the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the state’s marijuana statutes were unconstitutional. These events inspired the creation of Ann Arbor’s annual pro-legalization “Hash Bash” rally, which continues to be held to this day, and eventually contributed to the drive for decriminalization of marijuana under the Ann Arbor city charter.
After the political movement in Detroit began to die off, Grimshaw left the White Panther Party in search of better professional growth. He became the Art Director for the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz festivals in 1972-73 and returned to Detroit in 74. For the next 14 years he produced posters, recording packages, logos and graphics for all the major promoters, bands, and clubs in Detroit. He would go on to create the infamous posters he was known for as well as bring his talents to a Detroit-based music magazine called Creem, working on the publication as an associate art director from 1976 to 1984. By the 80’s, art enthusiasts began to look back on his poster artwork and recognize it for the fine art that it was. His works were featured at the Detroit Institute of Arts in a retrospective of Cass Corridor artwork and his posters were published into various books on rock and roll artwork.
After a few moves around the San Francisco area, Grimshaw returned to Michigan and still resides in Detroit with his wife Laura. He continues to do work for local artists, including bands such as the Detroit Cobras, the Dirtbombs, and the White Stripes. He has estimated having done around 250 posters and over 500 pieces of other works of art.
