Prices Nice For Vintage Rock Concert Posters

Remember those old rock concert posters you hung on your bedroom wall after yanking them off a telephone pole?

If you can still find one - maybe under a dusty pile in the garage - you may have unearthed a gem that could help pay for your child’s college education.

Vintage concert and record company promotional posters are now fetching big bucks from collectors, who reportedly are paying upward of $10,000 for the rarest items. Among the most prized pieces: original British Invasion concert posters, cardboard R&B revue posters from the ‘60s and just about anything from the ‘60s depicting the Beatles.

“Poster collecting is exploding,” says Pete Howard, editor and publisher of the influential ICE CD newsletter and a major collector himself. “Everybody is realizing that (music formats) are going to continue to become obsolete - we’ve all seen the value of our vinyl collections drop substantially - so the music collecting community is sort of turning its eye toward paper collectibles.”

Not surprisingly, older rock fans are credited by dealers for driving up the price of vintage posters.

“As the baby boomers reach a certain point, we’re not all rushing out to fight with 16-year-olds for concert tickets,” says Jacaeber Kastor, owner of the Psychedelic Solution poster shop in New York. “We think more of decorating our homes and having things that remind us of good times.”

Adds Jeff Leve, a Los Angeles collector and owner of Sound Investments, which specializes in rock memorabilia: “These posters are monuments to pop culture. That’s your music, that’s your life. You saw those shows, you went to those concerts - or you wanted to go to those concerts.”

Debi Jacobson, owner of L’Imagerie poster shop in Studio City, Calif., traces the beginning of the current boom in poster collecting to the publication in 1987 of Paul Grushkin’s definitive tome on the subject, “The Art of Rock.”

“That really changed things,” she says, “because now there was a reference guide for collectors all over the country.”

Especially prized are posters advertising early concerts by the Beatles. One promoting an appearance at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, the band’s proving ground, would probably sell for $10,000, collectors say.

Also among the most coveted items are Motown revue-tour posters from the ‘60s, which are extremely scarce, and a poster from Germany that touted Jimi Hendrix’s last official concert. The latter was sold at auction by Sotheby’s for about $7,000.