Compliments of Garcia

Jerry Garcia’s second album, “Compliments of Garcia” was release in June 1974. It includes one newly written song by John Kahn and Robert Hunter but is otherwise composed of covers. The album peaked at number 49 on the Billboard albums chart.

The album came to be called Compliments after its release, because early promotional copies had the word "compliments of" printed on the front, above the title Garcia. This has helped to distinguish it from Garcia's first solo LP, which was also called Garcia.

This large poster was created by Victor Moscoso to match the album cover art. The poster was expected to be used in record stores to promote the album for a few months, then be thrown away and so it was printed on thin paper  -  we have had this one preserved by backing it with archival linen.  Moscoso was one of San Francisco’s “Big Five,” psychedelic poster artists  who laid down that roadmap in the 1966-1968 concert posters of San Francisco. Here he uses a breezy colorful portrait of Jerry that’s a little reminiscent of Peter Max or Yellow Submarine.

Moscoso was born in 1936 in Oleiros, Galicia, Spain and his family moved to Brooklyn when Victor was 4. After studying art at Cooper Union in New York City and at Yale University, he moved to San Francisco in 1959. There, he attended the San Francisco Art Institute, [MS, Painting, 1961] and then became an instructor. Moscoso was the first of the rock poster artists of the 1960s era with formal academic training and experience and was the first of the Big Five to have his posters shown in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work is in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and in the Library of Congress and many other Museums around the world.