 Back to profile of DevinSheehy |
|
Blog
> View Blog Entry |
[] |
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |
 |
|
 |
| |
| Thursday, August 30 2007 01:32 PM |
|
Subject: Base Weblog |
|
Greg Irons-1 |
Gregory Rodman Irons was born September 29, 1947 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father was in advertising and his mother was a registered nurse. Greg attended Upper Marion High School up until the 10th grade and was involved in just about every aspect of the school newspaper. Greg's brother Mark said that Greg displayed intense interest in art at an early age, even at the risk of spankings. "He used to scribble all over the walls when he was young, and mother would wash them off and tell him to stop. Then one day, she moved the bed to vacuum under it, and she saw that Greg had crawled under the bed to draw all over the baseboards there." Greg was a self-taught artist, whose early influences were the Mad pocket book reprints featuring Kurtzman, Elder, Wood, and Davis.
Irons moved to San Francisco during the winter of 1967 and created a rock poster for a band playing at the ballroom, The Western Front. With this printed poster in hand, Irons went to see Bill Graham and got an art gig for an upcoming concert at the Fillmore Auditorium. Ultimately, Bill Graham Productions commissioned Irons for a series of posters for great bands of that era, including Moby Grape, Paul Butterfield, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby-Stills-Nash & Young, Albert King and Santana, to name just a few. Many of these posters can be seen in the book The Art of Rock.
1968 found Irons in London doing animation and working on the Beatle's classic animated film Yellow Submarine. On his return to San Francisco in 1969, he resumed his work on rock posters for Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium and Chet Helm's The Family Dog and began designing album covers for Mercury Records and Bill Graham's Fillmore label. During this period he produced promotional material for Jefferson Airplane's label, Grunt Records. One of my favorite album covers was the one he did for Jerry Garcia's bluegrass band, Old and In the Way. This album has been re-issued with the original Irons's artwork. Look for it!
Poster and album work eventually led to Irons being published in Yellow Dog, a Print Mint commix where he was invited by Bob Rita to do a comix of his own. This resulted in Heavy, published in 1969 and a second comix Light, followed soon after. A Yellow Dog cover is seen to the right.
The 1970s found Irons illustrating Tom Veitch's stories. Ron Turner of Last Gasp published a lot of this material and it was there that Irons began producing regularly. Last Gasp's first book, Slow Death #1, which came out on the first Earth Day April 1, 1970, featured an Irons's cover. One of the more obscure collaborations with Veitch was The Mick Jagger Story, about Jagger's testicles being snipped off by a groupie. The story was ready to be published by Rolling Stone when Jagger got wind of it and put a stop to it. It was eventually published in the newspaper Organ.
Although Irons took a lot of heat for the sex and violence in his work, he was not afraid to tackle social issues. His Auto-Be Recycled was a commentary on the wastefulness of the auto salvage industry, cover seen below. The Legion of Charlies tackled the Charles Manson story and the Town That Fought To Save Itself was commentary about the environment. He also did a piece on the horrors of whaling and Slow Death #10 was about cancer.
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
 |
|
 |
|
| |
