“Greetings from Higher Ground. My name is Alex Crothers,” begins a letter to Michael Jager written on June 25, 1998. Crothers, the writer, was 22 at the time; two months earlier, he had cofounded the music venue Higher Ground in a Winooski strip mall. Jager headed JDK, Vermont’s biggest design company, whose clients included Phish, Def Leppard, Burton, Pepsi and, later, Patagonia, Nike and Xbox.
Could Jager, Crothers asked, design silk-screened posters for Higher Ground shows? Crothers was unable to pay, and the posters would be given away to audience members for free after concerts. “It would be a labor of love,” Crothers wrote.
That letter is reproduced in a commemorative book of concert posters created for Higher Ground’s 25th anniversary, titled ECHO: A Survey at 25 Years of Sounds, Art and Ink on Paper. The square-format book gathers all 367 concert posters created over the past quarter century through the music venue’s ongoing collaboration with JDK — which rebranded as Solidarity of Unbridled Labour in 2014 — and Solidarity’s offshoot, the nonprofit Iskra Print Collective.
“The fact that I still have that letter is kind of astonishing,” Crothers joked by phone. Like the copies of each poster made over the years that Higher Ground retained, he said, the letter moved from “under my bed to a closet, then a bigger closet, then a shelving unit and eventually the office we have now” — near the American Red Cross in Burlington, which holds the venue’s archives.
The nightclub, too, has moved, from Winooski to a former movie theater in South Burlington. And the book is being issued in the midst of Higher Ground’s extended effort to construct and move to a larger venue in Burlington’s South End.
To celebrate the book and what it represents — all those great acts over the years whose audiences took home a tangible “echo” of an unforgettable evening — the trio of collaborators will host a launch party on Saturday, April 1, at Iskra, in the basement of Karma Bird House, the Maple Street building that also houses Solidarity. Along with a gallery showing 100 of the posters and a looped video of all 367, the presses will be up and running. Visitors can try out silk-screen printing, using screens set up with art designs based on the posters, and take home their commemorative print.
“It should be quite an event, a gathering of people in the community who love art and design,” Jager said during a phone call.
Sales of the book as well as original posters auctioned off on the Higher Ground website will benefit Iskra, a volunteer-run screen-printing education hub founded by Jager and Burton master printer Leo Listi a year and a half before Crothers wrote his letter.
Jager said Crothers’ request struck a chord. “I was fixated on silk-screen printing because of Andy Warhol and [activist poster printer] Sister Corita Kent and Robert Rauschenberg, who was repurposing silk-screen printing,” he recalled. “And I had grown up in the music scene.”
Crothers, he continued, “knew I loved music and was going to shows in Winooski, and he, thankfully, had the wisdom to write me a letter.”
Crothers said he took his inspiration for gift posters from the Fillmore music venue in San Francisco, which handed out basic full-color prints. He put his own spin on the idea, making the posters as limited-edition silk screens signed by the designer.
ECHO opens with Higher Ground’s first poster — a comic strip depiction of 8 Foot Fluorescent Tubes, the first solo project of Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio, from a show on April 17, 1998. Anastasio is sketched as a cross-legged, four-armed Ganesha-like god, with two hands pressed in prayer and two more holding a guitar and mic. The book ends with a black-and-white poster for the National’s July 2022 show by Byron O’Neill.
Most of the posters are eye-catching design statements in only two or three colors and sized at 15 inches square to honor LP sleeves. A few have stories appended, such as tour schedule posters for the Vermont runs of Anaïs Mitchell’s folk opera Hadestown in 2007 and Grace Potter and the Nocturnals’ 2013 Bringing It All Back Home tour. Crothers organized both tours.
Ween’s audience on July 23, 1999, walked away with an iconic poster image — and the only piece of Ween memorabilia that lead singer Gene Ween (aka Aaron Freeman) has kept in his house, according to an interview with Crothers conducted by Jager’s son, Eli, who also interviewed his father in the book. (Seven Days cofounder and art editor Pamela Polston copyedited ECHO.) The image, by Todd Wender, uses a brown background to highlight a pair of pink, knock-kneed legs standing in a puddle of yellow pee, the edge of which spells out “Ween.”
Some posters are truly labors — of love or otherwise. George Mench’s poster for Ray LaMontagne’s July 2, 2005, appearance, in rust red, black and white, prints the singer’s name as if it were stitched. Meanwhile, rows of actual hand-stitched lines bisect the poster, their threads hanging off the margins. The poster had an edition of 145 — which is a lot of stitching.
The designers, all volunteers, created their own posters at Iskra as side projects in their free time, during “countless weekends and evenings of mixing ink and experimenting,” Jager said.
“A lot of it is about the designer and Higher Ground having a feeling about the moment.” Michael Jager
Posters are made only for select concerts at Higher Ground or off-site shows the club produces at venues such as the Flynn in Burlington or Shelburne Museum. The selection process for which acts get a poster is “organic” and “wide open,” Jager said. Crothers sends Jager’s team a list of the next few months’ shows, sometimes alerting them to a band he thinks is about to go big and may never return. Other times, the designers have favorite artists.
“A lot of it is about the designer and Higher Ground having a feeling about the moment,” Jager said.
Aside from minimal poster requirements — including the date, venue and names of the act and supporting act — the designers have absolute artistic freedom. Solidarity designer O’Neill, who laid out the book, said that’s why so many designers have been willing to donate their time.
“The appeal of all these projects over the years is that it’s the one opportunity we all have to not have too many constraints. As designers, we are always working to keep things very structured and ordered in a way that just creating a piece of art is not,” O’Neill said. He was able to use his own painting of entwined hands in his June 14, 2016, poster for a Brian Wilson concert.
Printing the posters at Iskra is also a relief from computer screens, in front of which designers spend their days, O’Neill added. “The posters are a way to step away and work with the silk screens and the inks, and deal with all the mess and the mistakes,” he said.
ECHO includes a spread detailing the lengthy process of silk-screening. “You don’t just send these to the printer,” Jager said.
He added that the posters accomplish things digital formats cannot.
In a striking poster for Busta Rhymes’ March 15, 2009 concert, for example, Erik Petersen filled a black background with an open mouth indicated by two rows of white teeth and a red tongue. Only on a closer look can you see the open throat in the middle, in a lighter black, emblazoned with the rapper’s name. “You really can’t see that black-on-black in digital,” Jager said.
Some posters’ runs included a few printed on wood veneer, vinyl or silver paper, Jager added. Craig Winslow’s poster for Bassnectar’s April 17, 2012, appearance was printed with pearlescent varnish. Iron & Wine’s poster, a grayscale mountainscape photo overlaid with a ticket, by Erik Van Hauer for April 17, 2011, was printed with metal filings mixed into ink. Norah Jones is pictured for her July 22, 2016, concert as the Queen of Hearts; the corners of the 18-by-24-inch poster-as-giant-playing card — designed by Ellen Voorheis — are rounded.
Jager designed the poster for Bob Dylan’s June 20, 2017, concert at Shelburne Museum. Based on Dylan’s reputation for playing each show differently, Jager hand-painted a swath of color on each sheet of paper before printing the musician’s shadowed face in black on top. Each of the edition’s 300 posters features a different color; Jager said he used “the full spectrum, from metallics and fluorescents to pink on gold.”
Dylan’s appearance was a big deal but, as Jager pointed out, not unusual in Higher Ground’s lineup. “The people who have come through here are incredible: Sonic Youth, Ween, Cat Power — we did the poster when they came through 22 years ago, and I and Byron just did another two years ago — as well as people from Vermont [such as] Grace Potter, Caroline Rose and Phish.”
According to Jager, Crothers’ ability to bring so many notable acts to Burlington can be attributed to his hospitality. “Alex would make sure they were treated well; fed local food; given good, clean, safe places to stay; and we would make these gifts for them,” Jager said. “It’s really amazing what Higher Ground has done. They have such passion for what they’re doing.”
One of Crothers’ own stories bears this out. When Kevin Smith, director of Clerks and other indie movies, came during a 2016 speaking tour, Crothers recalled that Jager’s team devised a concept of burning Smith’s image into a piece of toast, “like God or Mary Magdalene,” to honor Smith’s big personality.
“I had just read a story — probably in Seven Days — about this guy in Vermont who made custom toasters,” Crothers said. “We called the guy and got a toaster made with Kevin Smith’s image on it. At the show, we put a plate of toast with his image backstage and we gave him the toaster to take home.” Mikey Laviolette’s poster printed the image on an orange background.
As Jager put it, ECHO is “about celebration and respect for this little miracle that happened in Vermont — and is still happening.”
Four more posters are due out in April, the month Higher Ground was founded, according to Crothers — though, of course, audiences won’t know which of the month’s 30-odd concerts the posters will commemorate unless they happen to attend them.
ECHO: A Survey at 25 Years of Sounds, Art and Ink on Paper is available for purchase at echo.highergroundmusic.com. $59.50.
A book launch party will be held on Saturday, April 1, 6 p.m., at Iskra Print Collective in Burlington. karmabirdhouse.co
The original print version of this article was headlined “Wall of Sound | A new book celebrates 25 years of Higher Ground concert posters”
This article appears in The Money & Retirement Issue 2023.
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