David Edward Byrd, who captured the swirl and vitality of the Sixties and early ’70s by conjuring pinwheels of shade with indelible posters for concert events by Jimi Hendrix, the Who and the Rolling Stones in addition to for hit stage musicals like “Follies” and “Godspell,” died on Feb. 3 in Albuquerque. He was 83.
His husband and solely rapid survivor, Jolino Beserra, mentioned the reason for dying, in a hospital, was pneumonia introduced on by lung injury from Covid.
Mr. Byrd made his identify, beginning in 1968, with placing posters for the likes of Jefferson Airplane, Iron Butterfly and Site visitors on the Fillmore East, the Decrease Manhattan Valhalla of rock operated by the powerhouse promoter Invoice Graham.
For a live performance there that yr by the Jimi Hendrix Expertise, Mr. Byrd rendered the guitar wizard’s hair in a discipline of circles, which blended with the explosive hairstyles of his bandmates, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell.
Mr. Byrd additionally put his visible stamp on the Who’s landmark rock opera, “Tommy,” producing posters for it when it was carried out on the Fillmore East in October 1969 and once more, triumphantly, on the Metropolitan Opera Home in New York a couple of months later. In 1973, he shared a Grammy Award for his illustration work on the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s rendition of “Tommy.”
For his poster for the Rolling Stones’ 1969 U.S. tour, which culminated within the violence-marred Altamont pageant in Northern California, Mr. Byrd paid no thoughts to the band’s more and more sinister picture. As a substitute, he opted for an illustration of a chic feminine nude twirling billowing cloth, drawing for inspiration on the late-Nineteenth-century movement images by Eadweard Muybridge.
Mr. Byrd’s theater work included a surreal poster for “Follies,” the bittersweet 1971 Broadway evocation of the Ziegfeld Follies period with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The design featured the cracked face of a somber-looking lady carrying a star-studded headdress that spelled out the present’s title.
The poster was sufficient of a success that the producer Edgar Lansbury referred to as Mr. Byrd in for a gathering at his workplace close to the Winter Backyard theater, the place “Follies” was taking part in, and requested him to design one for the Off Broadway manufacturing that very same yr of “Godspell,” the flower-power retelling of the Gospel of St. Matthew.
In his 2023 guide, “Poster Youngster: The Psychedelic Artwork & Technicolor Lifetime of David Edward Byrd,” written with Robert von Goeben, Mr. Byrd recalled Mr. Lansbury telling him to see out the window at his “Follies” picture.
“I need that poster,” he mentioned, “and I need it to be Jesus.”
Mr. Byrd missed out on a brush with historical past when his unique poster for the Woodstock Music and Artwork Honest in 1969, that includes a neoclassical picture of a nude lady with an urn, was changed for numerous logistical causes by Arnold Skolnick’s — the now well-known picture of a white fowl perched on a guitar neck. Mr. Byrd took it in stride.
“I didn’t consider it as any sort of ‘branding’ for the occasion,” he mentioned of his poster. “I considered it as a memento of the occasion.”
Mr. Byrd was impressed by — and to a level, aligned with — the work of the so-called Huge 5 psychedelic poster artists of San Francisco: Alton Kelley, Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse and Wes Wilson, who had been identified for utilizing kaleidoscopic patterns, explosions of shade and fonts that appeared to bend and ooze like Salvador Dalí clocks.
However, primarily based 3,000 miles from the Haight-Ashbury scene, Mr. Byrd was additionally influenced by Broadway and promoting, using normal typefaces and drawing on the Artwork Nouveau motion of Nineties Europe. His work is “sort of like Artwork Nouveau on acid,” mentioned Thomas La Padula, an adjunct professor of illustration on the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the place Mr. Byrd taught within the Nineteen Seventies.
All through, nevertheless, Mr. Byrd may benefit from the unfettered freedom afforded by the music world in these days. “With rock, there was no fundamental subject material,” he wrote in “Poster Youngster.” “It was simply no matter you wished to do this was eye-catching.”
David Edward Byrd was born on April 4, 1941, in Cleveland, Tenn., the one little one of Willis Byrd, a touring salesman, and Veda (Mount) Byrd, a part-time mannequin. His dad and mom divorced when he was younger, and he spent most of his youth in Miami Seashore together with his mom and his rich stepfather, Al Miller, an government with the Howard Johnson’s restaurant chain.
After receiving a bachelor’s diploma in high-quality artwork and a grasp’s in stone lithography from Andy Warhol’s alma mater, the Carnegie Institute of Expertise in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie Mellon College), he settled in an upstate New York commune, the place he was portray within the vein of Francis Bacon, the Irish-born artist and grasp of the macabre, when faculty buddies, together with Joshua White, who designed the dazzling mild exhibits for the Fillmore East, hooked him up with Mr. Graham.
Fillmore East closed in 1971, however that didn’t mark the top of Mr. Byrd’s work in music. For a Grateful Useless live performance on the Nassau Coliseum on Lengthy Island in 1973, he got here up with an impish illustration of two clean-cut Fifties youngsters boogieing below the self-consciously corny tagline “A Swell Dance Live performance.”
Mr. Byrd additionally produced a retro-inflected album cowl for Lou Reed’s 1974 album, “Sally Can’t Dance,” in addition to posters for the band Kiss. He made a foray into Hollywood together with his poster for the 1975 movie adaptation of “The Day of the Locust,” Nathanael West’s dystopian Hollywood novel.
Mr. Byrd moved to Los Angeles in 1981 and labored there because the artwork director for Van Halen’s “Honest Warning” tour. Later that decade, he spent 4 years because the artwork director for the nationwide homosexual information publication The Advocate, and within the Nineties he labored as an illustrator for Warner Bros. on its shopper merchandise.
He and Mr. Beserra, a mosaic artist, moved to Albuquerque final yr.
Mr. Byrd usually mentioned that he discovered the making of artwork extra fulfilling than the top outcome. “The ultimate artwork product is merely the doo-doo, the refuse, the detritus of the inventive expertise,” he mentioned in his guide. “The golden moments in my life have all the time been the private, magical world of the ‘Aha!’ second.”