08/31/2026
🐍 THE STORY BEHIND THE SNAKE 🐍
In 2011, Wes Wilson explained to an interviewer how the artwork for his last poster of 1967 for Bill Graham came about:
“I had signed a contract with Bill. I’d been copyrighting my posters, so he said, ‘We’ve got to work out a contract.’ By that time, people were starting to collect posters, so we sat down and worked out a deal. We signed and initialed it. His attorney was supposed to clean it up, make a copy, and then we were going to re-sign it. It was all officially approved, but it was kind of messy because it had all these handwritten notes on it.
I was going to get a 6 percent royalty, which was pretty good. I knew what was going on at that point. But then he broke the agreement right away. An article came out in Time magazine reporting that he'd sold 100,000 posters. So I said, ‘Look, Bill, I want to see more of my royalties. I'm due $6,000, just for that one thing.’ He got all upset, and we went from being friends in the morning to being enemies that afternoon.
On the last poster I did for him at that time, I was so mad that I added a snake with a dollar sign in its mouth.”
A small detail with a bigger story behind it — just one of the many pieces of countercultural history on view in the Epicenter as part of Forever Grateful at Haight Street Art Center — closing September 20th.
