by Ben Marks for Col­lec­tors Weekly

Feist at the Fill­more, 2007

Over the past decade, a self-effacing artist named John Mavroudis has qui­etly become a player in the noisy world of rock posters. Mavroudis was offi­cially made a mem­ber of the scene in 2004, when he was given his first assign­ment to cre­ate a Yeah Yeah Yeahs poster for San Francisco’s fabled Fill­more Audi­to­rium. That impor­tant rite of pas­sage was fol­lowed in 2011 by his first com­mis­sion from a Bay Area band called Moon­al­ice, which has pro­duced an orig­i­nal poster for each of its 500-plus shows since 2007 (in a unique arrange­ment, the posters are given away for free to fans in atten­dance, then sold later by the band and the artists, who share the copyright).

This week­end, on Sat­ur­day August 18, 2012, Mavroudis joins 20 or so other poster artists from around the United States for an exhi­bi­tion called Rock Art by the Bay, which is being held at The Can­nery in San Fran­cisco and is pre­sented by The Rock Poster Soci­ety (or TRPS, as it’s known). On hand will be local con­tem­po­raries such as Chuck Sperry, Chris Shaw, Alexan­dra Fis­cher, Marq Spusta, and Ryan Ker­ri­gan; icons from the 1960s and ’70s such as Stan­ley Mouse, David Singer, Lee Con­klin, and Randy Tuten; and a hand­ful a guest artists vis­it­ing from around the coun­try, includ­ing Gary Hous­ton from Ore­gon and Jeral Tid­well from Kentucky.

A 2007 screen­print for a show by Ear­li­mart and West Indian Girl at the Inde­pen­dent in San Francisco.

That Mavroudis finds him­self in such com­pany is some­thing he’s still get­ting used to. “When I first started attend­ing the TRPS shows,” he recalls, “I was sur­rounded by all these leg­ends. At first, I was too embar­rassed to walk up and talk to them. I just fig­ured I wasn’t in their league. But recently, over the last year, I’ve got­ten to know some peo­ple a bit. Not really well, but I’ve had a chance to sit down and talk with Wes Wil­son, with Stan­ley Mouse. They’ve all been really, really kind, impart­ing some inter­est­ing wis­dom, and I get to hear some good sto­ries, too.”

Born just south of San Fran­cisco, Mavroudis grew up in San Jose, Cal­i­for­nia, and spent many of his free hours get­ting lost in comic books. “I still recall the first comics I ever saw; it must have been in the sec­ond or third grade. We were walk­ing to school behind a 7-Eleven when we noticed a bunch of comic books that had been tossed. We grabbed ’em, and I col­lected from then on.”

A self-described “Mar­vel kid,” Mavroudis was more than just an avid reader. “We used to take our comics and either trace them or put car­bon paper under­neath the pages. Some of those comics would prob­a­bly be pretty valu­able right now.”

Sleater-Kinney at the Fill­more, 2004.

That’s one source of his cur­rent work. Fam­ily is another. “My uncle was an artist when I was grow­ing up. I both­ered him a lot, ask­ing him to draw, and he taught me a few things here and there. He and my dad were also role mod­els in terms of their sense of humor. We used to watch ‘Monty Python’ a lot, so that was another influence.”

Music was the other con­stant. In par­tic­u­lar, Mavroudis was a fan of early Gen­e­sis when Peter Gabriel in the band. “When Gabriel released his third album, that opened up a whole new world for me,” he says. That album fea­tured mem­bers of the band XTC, Kate Bush, and Paul Weller from The Jam, whom Mavroudis saw at Tower Records in Hol­ly­wood when he was liv­ing in Los Ange­les. “I gave them some art­work,” he remem­bers, “which I look back on now as pretty bad. I was a fan.”

Wide­spread Panic, 2008, Irv­ing Plaza, New York.

This was also the period when Mavroudis was “mocked by Bono,” as his web­site bio puts it. “It was 1982. J. Geils Band was really huge, so they were head­lin­ing the Sports Arena in Los Ange­les. U2 was open­ing for them. I didn’t really care about J. Geils; I went to the show to see U2. After they played, a cou­ple of friends and I waited around where they sell T-shirts and stuff while J. Geils was on stage. We rec­og­nized U2′s man­ager, Paul McGuin­ness, who talked to us for a lit­tle bit. Finally he said, ‘You want to meet the guys?’ and of course, we all said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ And then they all came out. So now I’m talk­ing to Bono, and I told him, ‘I paid $40 to see you guys.’ And he looks over at his band mates and says, ‘Hey, this idiot paid $40 to see us!’ He apol­o­gized right away. He said he didn’t mean any­thing by it. He just thought it was funny that any­body would pay that much money to see U2. I still have their sig­na­tures on a record.”

A job in the mid-1980s at a small startup called Liv­ing Video­text lured him back to the Bay Area. “It was one of the first com­pa­nies that shipped Apple soft­ware,” Mavroudis says. “I went there because I wanted to learn to draw on a com­puter, which was new at the time; Apple had pro­grams like Mac­Draw and Mac­Paint. At first, I worked in the ship­ping depart­ment, then I started doing col­lat­eral for them, design work for their man­u­als, things like that.”

The Kooks at the Fill­more, 2011.

Rock posters were still a ways off. “At the time, I wanted to be a polit­i­cal car­toon­ist. I was a still big music fan, but I hadn’t really put two and two together.”

A string of regional news­pa­per jobs fol­lowed, and slowly the con­nec­tion between his inter­est in art and music began to gel. “I started putting out fly­ers and posters for bands. I’d show up at shows in small places like Bot­tom of the Hill [in San Fran­cisco] and just bring stuff, stuff that now I would be kind of embar­rassed by. It was a good learn­ing expe­ri­ence, though.”

For a bit, Mavroudis also worked as a DJ at a small alter­na­tive col­lege sta­tion called KFJC (“The Wave of the West”). “I did the Sun­day night-Monday morn­ing overnight show,” he says, a trace of resid­ual weari­ness creep­ing into his voice. “That led to more chances to do poster work, fly­ers, and things like that for bands. I remem­ber doing stuff for Soul Asy­lum and Sonic Youth when they came through town. It gave me a greater con­nec­tion to the music. I actu­ally ended up doing a six-hour spe­cial about XTC, one of my favorite bands of all time, and got to inter­view them live.”

The Yeah, Yeah Yeahs at the Fill­more, 2004.

Finally, a pair of friends who made posters for the Fill­more, Isabel Sama­ras and Mar­cos Sorensen, sug­gested he get in con­tact with Arlene Owse­ichik, who was the cre­ative direc­tor for Bill Gra­ham Presents. That led to the poster for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in 2004. “Since then, I’ve done about three or four posters a year for the Fill­more. Not a whole lot, but just enough to hang in there.”

Some­where along the line, Mavroudis got a full-time job with the Cal­i­for­nia Film Insti­tute, where he’s an art direc­tor. And in his off hours, he man­aged to find the time to sub­mit cover ideas to “The New Yorker” (he’s had a few of his pitches pur­chased by the illus­tri­ous mag­a­zine, but so far, no cover bears his signature).

Most recently, Mavroudis joined the ros­ter of first-, second-, and third-generation rock-poster artists cre­at­ing images for Moon­al­ice. “I’d been going to TRPS shows for a lit­tle bit,” Mavroudis says, “and I kept see­ing Alex Fis­cher and Chris Shaw there rep­re­sent­ing Moon­al­ice. Nat­u­rally, I bugged them a few times about doing a poster. Finally I got an e-mail, and that was that.”

M Ward at the Fill­more, 2006.

Mavroudis says his accep­tance by the Moon­al­ice tribe has been easy. “There’s such a won­der­ful feel­ing about work­ing with them,” he says of Chris, Alex, and the band’s ring­mas­ter, Roger McNamee, who, coin­ci­den­tally, is part­ners in a venture-capital fund with the same Bono who jok­ingly mocked Mavroudis all those years ago. “I’ve never felt like ‘the new guy’ or that there’s some kind of bar­rier between us. There’s such a nice cama­raderie, it’s almost a tan­gi­ble thing. It just makes you happy to work with peo­ple like that, and they seem to like the posters.”

The Moon­al­ice poster exhi­bi­tion and gig at the Brook­lyn Bowl in April of 2012 helped cement some of the rela­tion­ships he’d been devel­op­ing with his fel­low artists. “Brook­lyn was awe­some,” he says. “I had no idea what to expect. The Moon­al­ice peo­ple just treated us won­der­fully, and it was a fan­tas­tic venue, with a bowl­ing alley, a bar, and a stage. Before the show, Roger met with all the poster artists and gave us all quite a pep talk about how poster art has been under­ap­pre­ci­ated, and how he was going to see what he could do about that. It just made you feel good, like you’re among peo­ple who have the same goals and aspi­ra­tions as you, the same mindset.”

This poster for a 2012 Moon­al­ice show fea­tures repro­duc­tions of the entire Bow­man 1952 set of base­ball cards.

One of his lat­est posters for Moon­al­ice is per­haps indica­tive of the sense of artis­tic free­dom he’s feel­ing. Cre­ated for a free show in San Francisco’s Union Square in May of 2012, the sur­real poster fea­tures a catcher in full squat, mitt in hand, his head replaced by a puffy cloud float­ing in a René Magritte sky. Sur­round­ing this appari­tion are base­ball cards, and not just any base­ball cards but a com­plete set of 1952 Bow­man por­traits of Willie Mays, Mickey Man­tle, and other greats of the game. “The ’52 Topps set is prob­a­bly the gold stan­dard of base­ball cards,” Mavroudis says, “but the ’52 Bow­mans are like lit­tle mas­ter­pieces. They’re so beautiful.”

Base­ball, you see, is another early influ­ence on Mavroudis’ art. “I always wanted to do some­thing with base­ball cards,” he con­firms. “I thought the Bow­mans made a really nice frame for the illus­tra­tion I was work­ing on. I tried to do it in a play­ful way, like group­ing all the pitch­ers with their arms over their head, all the left-handed hit­ters, the right-handed hit­ters, the catch­ers. I put a bunch of Phillies in promi­nent places because Roger is a big Phillies fan, but the show was in Union Square, so of course there were a lot of Giants in there, even if they were still wear­ing New York uni­forms back in 1952.”