John Grady interviewed Rick Griffin in 1989, in Sonoma, California. This is a shortened and edited version of the transcript Grady later sent out to friends

You met Neal Cassady at one of the Acid Tests. What was he like?

Neal was one of the most nervous men I ever met. He was the closest thing I ever saw to a living personification of the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character. Just a whirlwind of energy. First he was here, then he’d do a pirouette or a twirl and totally disappear and appear over there, the whole time talking nonstop, talking to himself, talking to the shadows, talking to people. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Neal was a great influence on Jack Kerouac, he was Dean from 

, he had an effect on Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. Did he have any effect on you? What was happening for you at that time?

He didn’t really have an affect on me. I just noted him as a real character. There were a lot of them in that group. Another one who was just really intense, was Paul Foster. Paul was the only person who was actually apprehended by the police and arrested. If you could have seen him, it’s no wonder that he was arrested. I think the police knew what was going on [at the Acid Test], but were more or less powerless to do anything about it; acid was still legal at the time. But they had the place surrounded and at one point I walked outside and saw what appeared to be hundreds of squad cars circling the place, parked all up and down the street. I thought it best that I not be outside so I went back into the building.

I think it was Hugh Romney, who later became Wavy Gravy, who yelled out, “Listen, what we're doing isn't illegal, but the dogs are out there and I think it’d be best if everybody stayed inside.” But Paul went out there anyway, and they arrested him because he was dressed as some weird kind of bird man. His face was painted half one color and half another, and he'd glued a big beak onto himself and was wearing some sort of winged coat. So he'd come flying right up and get in your face and issue forth with some incredible dialogue and then fly off. Everybody else there that night was an old hand at events like this, but I’d never seen anything like it. 

They sent some undercover agents inside to try to get a handle on what was going on, and the agents wound up drinking the Kool-Aid. 

This one woman detective was so dosed that she lost all judgement as to what she was doing and why she was there. She would up in a sleeping bag behind the Quonset hut, just spilling her guts, talking about why she had come, what her objectives were, how those objectives no longer were relevant, how she didn’t care, they didn’t care, we didn’t care, nobody cared. She just went on ranting and raving and baring her soul. It was a beautiful pandemonium inside that hut. 

The Dead would play a set, then would peak out and forget what they were doing and wander off the stage. Other people would go up on the stage and play.

I was affiliated with the Jook Savages, which was a band of artist musicians. We had a jug band.

I played an instrument called the one-string zither, which was a paint can on a two-by-four with a wire stretched from a bridge into the paint can. This thing would be bottle-necked with a half-pint bottle and you'd hit the string with a stick and it would give this weird, strange effect like a theremin. 

It was loosely put together, but had a real rustic charm. Folk music was in full bloom at the time, and people were interested in different approaches to music, and the jug band fit right into all that. 

What was happening with your art at the time?

I was doing the Griffin-Stoner Adventures for SURFER magazine. 

Didn't you have kind of a confrontation with SURFER around then? You were getting into a whole new scene in San Francisco. 

Well, looking back on it, the whole thing was kind of silly, really. Say there was a situation which called for me to portray myself working on a piece of art, I’d have myself surrounded with my art supplies and cans of paint would be stacked up and I’d label the cans, Panama Red, Acapulco Gold, stuff like that. Little inside jokes. 

This went unnoticed for a while, then it was pointed out to the SURFER editors by some of their bigger and straighter advertisers that I was putting all this—what would you call it—all these dangerous references in my cartoons. So the SURFER editors were told, "If you don’t get this guy to straighten out, we’re pulling our ads." This was Hobie Alter, specifically. Hobie put the pressure on SURFER to get me to clean up my act or else.  

John Severson said, "Hey, you gotta cut this shit out."

Well, no. Not really. I just had to be a little more cunning about expressing those things in the magazine, is all. But that didn't really work either. By this point the SURFER guys were getting paranoid. Like I'd draw myself in a cartoon wearing a Family Dog T-shirt and they'd think it was a drug ring or something. "We can’t have this!" So they'd erase the Family Dog logo from my shirt—stuff like that. I did this one illustration of myself and rest of the Jook Savages, and for the background I used a bunch of the Avalon Ballroom Family Dog posters by Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley. When the strip  came out in SURFER they'd taken the background out and replaced it with a Zipatone dot pattern. I started getting real pissed off. My heart was less and less in it.

The Mouse and Kelley posters were so good. 

See, one of the reasons I went to San Francisco in the first place was to collect these posters. I went there with the Jook Savages and we had had an art show at the Psychedelic Shop. The Psychedelic Shop itself at that time was a bold establishment. The feds actually used to film everybody who went into the store and try to get a line on what was happening with all this counterculture activity. So the Jooks were having a show there, and I did the poster for that. That was my first San Francisco poster. But yeah, apart from the show itself, I went up there to collect these posters. 

Did that poster help get you started up there? 

It did, yes. People on the scene saw it and invited me to begin to start doing posters for the Avalon Ballroom. 

Were you still in art school at the time? 

I was still at Chouinrd, yeah. Still living in LA. But I was already having trouble there. They referred to me as a “mere cartoonist” and told me to  abandon my whole former approach and all my self-training and become a "true artist" and do abstract expressionist paintings. I tried, but by that time [1966] the kind of art that appealed to me most were thesee beautiful engravings on old package labels, and of course the detailed penmanship of the early 

 gang. That satirical approach—a satirical translation of modern culture, and taking recognizable icons out of their original advertising context and putting it into a sort of cultural mandala, as it were—that's what I wanted to do. And that wasn't happening at Chouinard. So I dropped out and made my way to San Francisco to collect posters and play in the band. 

What was a typical day like in San Francisco for you at that time? Wake up, hop on your Harley, cruise around . . . 

San Francisco, to me, was a wonderland. I mean, it is a beautiful city, there is no getting around that. Beautiful from stem to stern. Those early days were spent just exploring the neighborhoods, taking trips up to Marin County, walking through the woods, driving up Mount Tamalpais, crusing out to Stinson Beach. I couldn't get enough of it.

Some, although I didn’t surf a lot during that period of my life. I was still healing. This was all during that first couple years out of high school, when I was actually restricted a bit from the surfer’s life. 

[Note: Griffin had a near-fatal car accident in 1963.]

So you do the Jook Savages poster, and you get asked to do some more posters. How was your style changing at that point, compared to what it had been during the SURFER years? 

Well, you can see where I'm going in the Griffin-Stoner Adventures. I made those drawings, or parts of them, look like old labels, with the engraving style that you find on dollar bills. That was a type of art that really appealed to me. So you see that, but even more so, with the Jook Savages poster, around the border especially. The lettering is different, of course; that wild, kind of out of control lettering. That’s another thing. I always like to do that type of lettering, and in fact I even did some on drum heads for various surf bands when I was in high school. Our surf club used to put on surf movie nights, and I always did the posters for those. SURFER like it, too. So I developed this whole kind of beatnik approach to lettering and had a lot of examples of that in my portfolio to art school. Well, they told me that if I was going to go into commercial art I had to do lettering the right way; I had to learn formal type styles and all kinds of tedious bullshit like that. So that's another reason why I left art school. 

How did you get involved with the Human Be-In? 

, which was the cool underground newspaper in San Francisco that everybody read. The 

 people saw the poster and said to me, “Hey, this is great stuff. We want you to do some for us, and we’re having this big event in the park a week from now. It’s called the Gathering of the Tribes.” They also called it the Human Be-In. That was the first of a series of events like this that happened all over the country, which ultimately led to Woodstock.

The Human Be-In was mostly poets and writers. 

Yeah. It was Allen Ginsberg and all the luminaries from the beatnik days.

Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure . . . 

Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and all San Francisco bands too. They asked me to create a poster, which I did in a similar style to the Jook Savages one. It had an Indian on a horse cradling a guitar in his arms, and holding up his ceremonial blanket. So then Chet Helms saw those posters and asked me to do some work for the Family Dog. I mean, I just sort of stumbled into the Bay Area and got right into this whole scene. 

Then pretty soon you were using much more color than you ever had before, right?

That’s true. Most of my work to that point had been black and white. Now  all of a sudden we had, at our fingertips, all these fantastic four-color presses. We had to learn how to use them. The printers themselves were very helpful, but what was great was I learned that stuff first-hand, through actually doing it, whereas if I had had to learn it in art school, it wouldn’t have been half as interesting. I would have learned the mechanics and principals and everything. But it was great to be able to make a poster once a week and then take it down to the printers and actually learn the process, learn how to use the inks, learn how to use lithography. It was a fantastic period in my life, a real education, just on the technical side.

You weren’t just trying to get realistic color at that time, either. You were all trying to get the colors to pop out and live.

Well, we were just working with basic primary lithography colors. Victor Moscoso was probably the real pioneer at getting the colors to pop and jump. He actually pursued that, trying to get colors to vibrate. My posters didn't too much on vibrating colors. Like I said, I was still into that old-time labels look; that kind of busy look. It went hand-in-hand with the Barbary Coast, the Victorian buildings, and just the sort of like a roaring feeling San Francisco had at the time. 

I guess if you had to think of a message or a summary of all these posters, it would be sort of a celebration, like a festival of color and form and ideas, and anything goes.

That sounds fantastic, John. I think you should write articles.

Zap started just about the time that whole poster thing was beginning to wane. Family Dog no longer existed. The Avalon was taken over by another group. People were leaving San Francisco and going out to the Southwest. Another thing that happened was that the posters were getting really popular. 

 Magazine came out to San Francisco and did an article on the poster craze 

["The Great Poster Wave," cover story, September 7, 1967],

 with pictures of all the main poster artists. It was getting a lot of news coverage, which all sort of culminated in the Joint Show, which was a group show by myself, Mouse and Kelly, Wes Wilson, and Victor Moscoso. The Joint Show was an enormous success. Janice Joplin and Big Brother played at the opening. There were thousands of people there. But after that, the Family Dog decided that well, these guys have made it. These guys are old hat now. It’s time to find some new artists and get a new approach to the posters. After that, the quality of the posters really dropped. I don’t know what the problem was. Some of the posters from  that era were good, but the basic continuity was broken, and that coupled with the fact that a lot of artists left town just sort of brought an end to that whole era.

One of the last posters I did was in the form of a comic strip. It looked like a front page of the Sunday funnies. That was the gimmick. That was the joke for the poster. Victor Moscoso had meanwhile gone to New York where he did a poster for a friend of his, a filmmaker, and unbeknownst to each other we'd both created these comic strip posters. So he brought his poster back and I showed him my new poster and we realized that we'd stumbled into this comics format. Robert Crumb saw them, too, I guess, because I came home one day and there was Crumb sitting on my front porch. He introduced himself. I'd seen his cartoons and I'd seen his first issue of 

 the one with the car on the cover. He said he was going to start publishing 

 as a periodical and wanted me to come on board, and he asked if I knew of any other artists that were working in a cartoon format. I told him about Victor Moscoso. Crumb asked me to extend an invitation to Moscoso. That’s how Victor and I wound up in the comics. Posters were over. Underground comics hadn’t emerged yet because 

 had folded. All these things were very short-lived. They were like the grass in the spring, you know. As soon as the summer sun gets on it and scorches it, it all withers away. These things, although they were extremely vital at the time they flourished, they didn't last long. Its like almost anything of this kind, if you look back through history. The status quo or the establishment usually moves in and neutralizes it. So then all that raw energy migrates and springs up in some other form.

That work was in a humorous vein, almost like 

, aggressively humorous, satirical, but also really confrontational at times. There was a lot of X-rated business in there. It just went in a few different directions at once. What was your approach in that mix?

My approach was less about the content of the strip, and more about the look. Most of my work–and Victor had a similar outlook–the spreads weren’t so much linear, or a panel-by-panel unfolding of a concept. We were using our penmanship in a form that would look like comics but wasn’t really comics.

Yeah. He was always concerned with telling stories.

Same with Robert Williams and S. Clay Wilson. 

Well, the main purpose of comics, ultimately, is to tell stories. But at the time I got involved, comics were a form that had always been looked at as being juvenile and unimportant and insignificant in terms of art history. Myself, I had always really enjoyed comics. The reason I liked creating art with the appearance of a comic was because it was a throwback to a period of time when I couldn't care less about the status quo or what was acceptable or not acceptable or valid art. It was just pure enjoyment. To me, comics were a really good and enjoyable form, so I began to do comics. Except they weren’t really comics. They just 

 like comics. Before, I'd done my posters so they'd look like the graphics from the 1800s. Now I was doing drawings that looked like comics. I was using these sort of unsophisticated forms because I didn't put too much stock in what would be considered the art world status quo.

Around this same time, you started doing more work with bands like the Grateful Dead.

That was just the natural outcome of having done posters for their shows. When they started signing record contracts, we all just kept working together. The first cover I ever did for the Grateful Dead, I used a piece of art that I had done for the cover of the 

, but the Oracle folded. I showed it to the band and they said that’ll do fine. So it was already done.

We get some vivid colors on that cover, but then we’ve also got the  imagery of the natural life forms and an almost cycle of birth, life, death. 

Yeah. I was trying to get all that in there exactly as you’ve described it.

Did you do it ten times? Did it come out at once? Did you work on it over the years?

No, no. I just sat down at my table and started drawing it. I just did it once. Started from a central point and worked my way out. It was all very spontaneous.

It’s a little bit like the Hawaii poster with the surfing eyeballs. Did you do that around the same time?

That was a little later. They wanted something that looked like the album cover. The Hawaii poster is like the son of 

How did you come up with the surfing eyeballs part?

Those were all done after the Jimi Hendrix poster. When I first came up with that image of the surfing eyeball, John Severson, SURFER publisher, had fallen in with a group of semi-outlaw subterranean surfers who pointed out that he really ought to try and open his eyes and enjoy this of changing of the guard as applied towards all youth culture at that time. Surfing included. They got him to smoke some marijuana. All the things he was very frightened of and horrified of before, he now realized were actually pretty cool.

John was the one who was censoring your work on the Griffin-Stoner Adventure strips? 

Yes. So now, all of a sudden, one of the first things he realized was Griffin wasn’t so bad after all. So he contacted me in San Francisco and said, “Rick, all is forgiven. We want you to come home. We want you to draw for SURFER. We want you to do a two-page Murphy comic strip in full color with a psychedelic effect. We're sorry that we used to censor you and change your artwork and stifle your creativity. We now want you to pull out the stops and create something really electric for the magazine.” So I devised this double page full-color Murphy strip which incorporated the surfing eyeball, which was just weird and wild.

The colors in that strip are more popping and vibrating than what you'd been doing earlier.

Yeah, they are. I owe that to the education in lithography I got from doing the posters. I learned how to get maximum use out of these colors.

You mentioned earlier that you'd actually go in and do your own screens.

Very much so. My first couple of posters for the Family Dog were awful. I didn’t have a clue as to what I was doing. I'd painted before, but had never worked in color separation or four-color process breakdowns, and I was just more or less stabbing in the dark until the printers took me aside and said, Listen, if you understood the technology here, you could really get a lot of mileage out of this stuff. They gave me a crash course on how to work the process, and my posters immediately starting changing. Then I  applied all those things that I'd learned into that one strip for SURFER.

San Francisco, Southern California . . . 

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