It’s 90 degrees on a Sunday morning in St. Louis. I’m standing on line outside the Enterprise Center, home of the NHL’s Blues, next to statues of Brett Hull and Al MacInnis. I’m wearing a black t-shirt and standing under an umbrella I borrowed from the family from Arkansas standing in front me. There is a man named Gene behind me, who I didn’t know a couple of hours ago, talking my ear off about making his flight to Oklahoma City the next day with an enthusiasm that does not match the current situation. My friend who I travelled here with has left me in search of a restroom. I am slightly hungover from the Cardinals game the night before. I haven’t eaten anything all day.
And in this moment, I start reflecting on what’s brought me here: a specially designed, show specific, limited edition Pearl Jam concert poster. An item that, once it’s sold out from the merchandise stand, will be on eBay in a matter of minutes for at least five times its retail price. A souvenir that is so highly coveted by the fan base that they line up for hours in the blazing Midwestern heat to have a chance to get one at the standard price (or to make a quick buck on its resale), hours before the show even begins.
Of course, there’s other show specific merchandise available too: shirts, stickers, hats, buttons. Anything that can be branded for this show and city has been. Pearl Jam’s merch is so desired on this current tour that the band opens a stand at 1pm on the day of the show, with the goal being to reduce crowding of the merch booth before and during the actual performance.
But I’m here for the poster. And there I am standing in line, listening to Gene list every poster he’s ever bought while wiping sweat from my brow. The Talking Heads are playing in my brain as I ask myself – how did I get here?
Concert posters like I described above have become increasingly popular over the last twenty years. There are several bands who provide show specific artwork for every show they play. The artwork used for the poster design is often accompanied by a unique shirt, sticker, and other merchandise for that particular show. Pearl Jam, Phish, Dave Matthews Band, and Tool were at the forefront of this trend in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Notable big acts have followed suit in the years after, like Soundgarden, Queens of the Stone Age, 311, The Black Keys, Jack White, Foo Fighters, Billy Strings, Metallica, and countless others.
These bands generally start the process by paying a fee to an artist to come up with a design for a particular show. The band then pays to print a limited number of posters and sells them at the show for their determined price point, which can range from $20 - $100 (even more if the band signs them). These are called show editions of the poster. Most of the profit for show edition sales go back to the band. The poster artist is then able to sell their own versions of the poster after the show has concluded. These are known as artist prints of the poster, and are how the creators of the posters make the most money for their work. Well-known concert poster artists can charge a considerable amount above the retail price because fans will pay it gladly. The artist print also affords anyone who didn’t get a poster at the show an opportunity to buy as well.
It must’ve been 8 or 9 years ago when the obsession started for me. I was attending a Halloween party at my friend’s house. The theme was classic Halloween costumes. People came dressed as vampires, Freddy Kruger, Jason from Friday the 13th, zombies, and so on. I dressed as Perry the Platypus – a classic in my mind, but apparently not the general public. At some point during the gathering, I ended up needing to use my friend’s bathroom. As I looked around, hanging up in the bathroom was a poster from a Dave Matthews show at Citi Field. It had the band’s name, the date and location of the show, and a unique baseball related design. I was intrigued by how cool of a souvenir I thought this was. I thought to myself, do all bands do this?
I’ve been going to concerts since I was 10 years old. I’ve kept every ticket stub from each show as a memento, a fairly common practice that’s sadly subsided with the advent of e-ticketing. I’d pick up a tour t-shirt if the design was cool. Sometimes there would be posters, but they were usually generic and listed all the tour dates with a bland design. But the thought of this kind of concert poster was different – an original piece of artwork dedicated specifically to the experience of that particular show was an awesome concept to me. I needed to find out more. Specifically, I needed to see if any shows I’d been to had this kind of artwork that I’d missed out on.
My original goal was to look for show posters from the best and most memorable ones that I had attended. What better place to start than at the very beginning? My first concert was the Smashing Pumpkins at Madison Square Garden in 1996 on the Mellon Collie tour. My dad had surprised me with tickets right before my 11th birthday – we ended up right next to a bootleg speaker with a view of the Pumpkins walking out to the stage. Though I may not have known it at the time, the show had a huge effect on me and my love for live music.
Show specific posters were not as common in the 1990s. You’d get a random one here and there, but they were rare compared to the current day. This show was a particularly interesting case, as it was rescheduled from the prior year due to the band cancelling dates due to their touring keyboardist’s overdose death.
But I was in luck. Mark Arminski, who was one of the go-to poster artists for alternative rock bands in the ‘90s, had designed one for this show. It even had a note about the tickets being honored from a year prior, which accentuates the story surrounding this show and encapsulates that time in the band’s history. I could have done without shirtless Billy being the focal point, but the sentimental value of the poster outweighs the questionable design. $70? No problem. This was going to be easy.
I started looking for other memorable shows I’d been to in hopes for similar success. Metallica’s S&M show at MSG in 1999. Tool at Nassau Coliseum in 2001. Motorhead, Dio, and Iron Maiden at MSG in 2003. Opeth and Porcupine Tree at Irving Plaza in 2003. Stone Temple Pilots at Jones Beach in 2008 and at the Paramount in 2012. And I came up bone dry.
The only one I was able to track down was a Soundgarden poster from a show at Hammerstein Ballroom in 2013. The band had recently reunited and ripped through 28 songs spanning their entire catalog. I was all the way in the back – I couldn’t understand anything Chris Cornell said in between songs, but he came through loud and clear singing, putting on one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. Sadly, this poster was damaged by a water leak in my apartment and I needed to replace it years later. There are only 250 of these in the world, and because of some slumlord building owner, I own two of them.
Over the next few years, I kept an eye out on eBay for anything to pop up from other shows. I started searching out merch stands at the concerts I attended. I picked up a few this way – Alkaline Trio at Music Hall of Williamsburg playing all of From Here to Infirmary stands out. I usually waited until the end of the show. If I determined I had a great time, I would go scan the merch stand for a poster.
One such case was in 2016 when I was driving to Iowa to see my brother pitch for the Cedar Rapids Kernels. My friend and I had stopped in different cities along the way to see baseball games, but needed an event for Chicago because the Cubs were out of town. It just so happened that Pearl Jam was playing at Wrigley Field. I’d never been to one of their shows, so we bought last minute tickets and were on our way.
The show was incredible. The band ran through 35 songs. Dennis Rodman came out to join the band share lead vocals for one. They dedicated another to Layne Staley. Someone gave us $50 for beers out of the kindness of their heart. Eddie Vedder read a letter to the crowd from a young woman who had survived cancer and was in attendance, before leading into the next song, dedicated to her. The whole experience was amazing. During the show, I decided if any show was poster worthy, this one was it, and I scored this one below from the merch stand from some sparse selection.
With the poster secured, my friend and I needed to get back to our hotel room. Finding an Uber in Wrigleyville after a large concert with 50,000 other people apparently isn’t as easy as we thought it would be. We ended up walking a considerable distance away from the stadium, where we ran into two girls who were also looking for a cab. We confirmed we were going to a similar location and agreed to share the ride back.
On our way back to our respective locations, we spoke glowingly about the show. One of the girls was especially adamant about it, saying that she couldn’t believe Eddie Vedder read her letter. My friend and I looked at each other and were perplexed. Then it dawned on us – this was the girl who survived cancer who had the song dedicated to her. It was a sobering moment – what were the odds of that? At the end of the ride, having nothing else to offer besides platitudes, I asked her if she wanted my poster to remember what was already a clearly memorable night for her. What could be a better keepsake than that? I thought I had outdone myself with my generosity.
She declined.
Over the next few years, I continued casually collecting the usual ways. I wandered around venues during songs I didn’t care for to look at merchandise stands. I looked through eBay for anyone selling older concerts. I’d use Google to see if the shows I attended even had one available. One time, I even gave my friend’s girlfriend a ride home from Boston in exchange for him buying me a poster.
A few early ones from my collection.
At this point, I thought I knew what was out there in terms of artwork from my shows attended. Every now and then, I searched out a show that I neglected to do my due diligence for in the past. I must have been reflecting on Chris Cornell and his passing one day. I was lucky enough to see him perform three times – twice with Soundgarden and once with Temple of the Dog. I had posters for two of the performances, but not for their 2014 show at Jones Beach. They opened for Nine Inch Nails. Cornell gave a typically great performance that peaked with the high octave closer “Beyond the Wheel.” And I started thinking maybe I missed out on a poster at that show. I’d never really looked into it, so I started to investigate my hunch. And that’s when I saw it.
How did I miss this one? I instantly loved it – the design was awesome, the colors were vibrant, the theme was just a bit dark, and the show was amazing. I decided that I needed to have it. I was prepared to acquire it by any means necessary. What I wasn’t prepared for was the journey I was about to take in order to acquire it, and how it would transform this supposed hobby into an all-out obsession.
I originally found out that the poster existed from an artist’s website. He had it listed for $80, but it was sold out. I did a quick eBay search and came up empty. I followed the artist, Vertebrae33, on Instagram to see if he had any others for sale. I even sent a long, convoluted message to him to see if he had an extra laying around to sell, while promising I wasn’t trying to resell it afterwards. He responded: “Thanks for reaching out – that poster is sold out.”
I had to go to the deeper recesses of the internet. I posted on Reddit on their Soundgarden page to see if anyone had seen it or knew where I could acquire it. No one was selling, but I was given two suggestions for searching. One was a website called expressobeans.com, which served as a database of all kinds of artwork, but mostly concert posters. The other was to join Facebook merch groups, specifically one for Chris Cornell, Audioslave, and Soundgarden show prints. I copied and pasted my post from Reddit to that group and hoped for the best.
In the meantime, I started to explore the website I was recommended – Expresso Beans. Despite the lackluster name, it has become a valuable tool for me. It works similar to Wikipedia in that it’s essentially crowdsourced information. Users submit artwork with information about the show and tour it came from: band, date, artist, location, number of posters available, and so on. Administrators then verify the artwork and post a page for the print in the database. Users can catalog the posters they own in their collection, buy and sell prints, add wanted posters to a list to alert other users, and post on message boards in search of these rare items. Each individual poster’s page also provides information about current auctions on eBay, the average price, users willing to sell or trade, how many posters were printed, and how many users have one in their collection.
I quickly created an account so I could start my search. There was an entry for my holy grail, but no users were currently selling it. Even more sobering was the fact that only 25 posters were printed in the original run and sold at the actual show, making the likelihood of tracking one down much more difficult. The number of prints made for a given show usually varies, but 25 is an extremely low number. The page also noted that nine people owned the poster who were users on the website. For privacy reasons, Expresso Beans does not let you search for what users have a certain poster in their collection. That was no deterrent to me. I decided I was going to systematically search each user’s collection in order to find these nine people who owned it.
Of course, I couldn’t search each person’s collection because that would have taken forever. I decided to search for users who had a large number of Soundgarden prints from 2014. For user names that came up frequently, I would view their personal collection. Using this method, I found five users who had the print listed and sent them an unsolicited message. In so many words, I asked them to sell me the poster because I really wanted it. In hindsight, these collective actions might be the most desperate and pathetic thing I’ve done, but the heart wants what the heart wants, right?
The most common response I got was NFT/NFS. Not for trade and not for sale. Some offered useful advice on where to look. Others encouraged me that one would surface for sale if I was patient. I wasn’t having any of it – I needed it now! The search was consuming all of my free time. I was Ahab searching for my white whale.
Through the chorus of no’s I was receiving, I did get one detailed message back from one user. Let’s call him Woody. Woody explained that he had just acquired the print and was in the midst of trying to collect every official Soundgarden poster from their shows. He said he’d consider selling it to me when he finished the full set. It had never occurred to me that people would collect shows they hadn’t attended. I still have a hard and fast rule for collecting only from shows I’ve attended to avoid bankruptcy. Woody said he might be willing to move the poster for the right price or if I had one of two posters he needed. Since I was a pretender in the poster world and I didn’t have either, I made him an offer for $250. He basically laughed.
Over the next month or so, I continued to search other sites and message other users. I would send a message to Woody upping my offer and he would deny it. I seriously considered a knock off from eBay, which would have been the financially sound decision, but I wanted the genuine article.
Patience is a virtue that I don’t possess. I made a conscious resolution to acquire this thing no matter what it cost. After a couple of beers for courage, I offered Woody $800. A day or so later, he accepted for $900 including shipping – nearly 36 times what the poster is actually worth. I accepted without hesitation. We actually had a nice conversation about Chris Cornell, music in general, and other bands we’d seen live. It turns out he was a veteran too, so thank you for your service Woody - for our country and for my poster collection. I told him if I saw the Jones Beach print out there I would pass it along so he could reach his goal of collecting them all.
About four months after this whole saga, I was sitting on my couch doing absolutely nothing in the dead of winter. I opened Instagram and was greeted with a picture of the Soundgarden poster I’d been searching high and low for during the summer. The artist had posted that he had 10 of them for sale. I was stunned – the artist told me they were sold out. Had Vertebrae33 lied to me? I quickly loaded his website to see what how much they cost. I was severely disappointed to learn that the price was $150. I sheepishly sent the site to Woody, keeping my promise. He was ecstatic – I would be too if I sold a poster for $750 over its actual value to a sucker like me. Let this be a cautionary tale to you about patience and financial responsibility, and how they seemingly go hand in hand.
My main objective for using Expresso Beans was to find the Soundgarden poster from Jones Beach, but using the site was the beginning of my descent into sheer poster nerd status. I was quickly distracted by the volume of prints that were catalogued on the website. I started searching for every show I ever attended and found many posters I never knew existed. This was going to be a problem for a number of reasons. I had flipped the switch from a casual hobby to a full-blown obsession. The selection and responsiveness of sellers on the website was slim to none, and I had poster money burning a hole in my pocket. That’s when I turned to the second option recommended to me way back when I was starting out: buy/sell/trade Facebook merch groups.
Nobody really uses Facebook anymore for its original purpose. It’s good for reminding you about your friends’ birthdays, but really, it’s transformed into a cesspool of bad takes about politics and memes that are years old by the time they make it there. Another thing it’s good for is buying things – especially concert posters and band merch. I had no idea at the time, but once I started looking into the buy and sell groups, I realized I was at ground zero of the poster game. This was where all the action was: people looking to sell old posters, raffles for rare prints, pictures of merch stands from a given show, and giveaways. Posters from a show that occurred that night would be up for raffle or sale instantly. If I was looking to score a certain poster, this was the place.
As I explored further, there seemed to be a concentrated wealth of artwork held by a certain number of people within the groups. These people seemed to know each other a bit, and knew which people within the group owned certain prints. Specific posters were regarded very highly – those created by certain artists especially. There seemed to be a conscious effort to keep the prices for certain prints at a certain elevated rate. I remember there being an uproar about someone selling under standard price for a highly coveted piece and it resulted in a classic 100-comment flame war.
I joined many of these groups in order to find the missing pieces of my collection. There were some general ones and specific ones for bands I had seen a bunch (311, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Metallica). There was a fair amount of action on these boards, with some being more active than others, especially when the band was touring. I also entered a group for the artist Emek, a renowned poster artist. He has done many famous posters for Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, Tool, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and countless other bands that resell for hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.
Most of these groups reflected the experience of buying a poster at the band’s concert – a bit of a hassle, a bit of a wait, but dealing with mostly pleasant people. I had also started going to venues early in hopes of scoring a poster prior to the performance to avoid inflated eBay and group prices in the days after the show. A common practice in the poster community is to buy multiple posters and sell the extras in order to reimburse yourself for the show and your own poster. These people are commonly referred to as flippers. You can usually find them standing in line before the venue opens, and you can find the merch they buy on eBay and in these Facebook groups later that evening. The price for a sold-out poster usually exceeds the retail price by a considerable amount. For example, a $45 Pearl Jam print will be for sale on eBay the night of the show for $300. The practice is generally frowned upon, but it works because those who miss out on limited posters will pay the money – myself included. Being tired of acquiring prints for seven times their worth may have forced me to sit through a few terrible opening bands, but it’s been worth it in my mind.
I had relatively no problems finding what I wanted, both at shows and in these groups. That was until I tried to acquire a Tool poster. Tool fans are by far the most rabid fanbase when it comes to merch. Their buy/sell group on Facebook is easily the most active one that I am a member of, and the merch lines at their concerts are fairly intimidating. On their most recent U.S. tour in 2022, people started lining up early in the morning on days of the show to be first on line, and posted pictures of themselves doing it. Posters from the shows are immediately auctioned off for a minimum of $200, exceeding $800 at times. Depending on the artist, a new print for the band is automatically assigned a value by the group, and that number is accepted as the going rate for anyone trying to acquire it. This is especially true of anything involving Alex Grey, who famously designed the artwork for their albums Lateralus and 10,000 Days.
Being a big Tool fan, I had tickets to see them twice in 2022. At both shows, I tried to acquire a poster the old-fashioned way – buying it for $60 after waiting on line with a bunch of dudes with neck beards. I failed both times. One show (UBS Arena) had only 280 available for the entire venue, which made it even harder to come by on the secondary market. The second show, at Prudential Center in beautiful Newark, allowed me to witness something I’d never seen before. Grown men and women running into the venue once it opened to get on line for merch, creating a nightmare for the security personnel trying to screen them. My friends and I followed closely behind to try and see where we might be able to find one of the 830 posters that evening. We struck out. Later in the evening, we saw many people walking around with multiple posters. I saw a woman roll up about 10 and put them in a protective tube, no doubt about to make a great amount of money flipping them the next day.
Expensive wall decorations.
For an idea of what this scene looked like, look at this video below from later on that tour when the band used a print designed by Alex Grey in Cleveland. Secondary market prints were widely posted for sale for just shy of $900 after it was released.
I eventually found what I was looking for from both shows on eBay and Facebook, but at a steep cost. Bands have taken precautions to limit the amount of posters a given individual can buy, but they can’t stop people from going to multiple stands throughout the course of the evening. From what I gathered from all my sources, a fair amount of people attend every show and flip posters in order to supplement their income, which begs the question – why are fans potentially making more than the artists and bands on these prints?
Big time artists like Emek or Alex Grey can reprint any poster they’ve ever created and charge exorbitant amounts for them because fans will pay for them. Grey just released his famous print from Tool’s Newark 2019 show for $555 each, and they sold out in minutes. Originals go for nearly $1,000 on eBay. Emek will release artist prints from his recent shows for a similar amount. Outside of them, and a handful of others, most artists are left with their original fee from the band and what they can make from their own sale of artist prints. Keep in mind that the artist needs to pay for their own printing, which cuts into their profits. The actual bands don’t really clean up when selling posters either, as they are responsible for the original printing. I’ve heard the concert poster described as an item that brings people to the merch stand in hopes they will buy higher profit margin items like t-shirts. Meanwhile, someone who camps out in Newark all day and sprints to the merch stand can buy 10 prints, charge $300 each for them, and walk away with a $2400 profit for being a huge nerd. Something is inherently flawed with the system when flippers can do nearly as well, or even better, than the actual artists.
The line has not moved for over 4 hours now. The stand was supposed to open a half hour ago, and the natives are getting restless. Several people have gone to the front to scope the scene and report back. It seems that the merch workers are only now setting up the stand. My friend has returned from a search for water at the local aquarium. We share it with all of our newly made friends on the line. Some people have tried to cut the line and are summarily told to take a hike, in so many words.
Mercifully, the line starts to move only a half hour late. We estimate how long it will be until we can get back to being on vacation. We guess how many people are in front of us, and guess how many posters the band released for this event. We listen to the guy in front of us give play by play of the football games that are now approaching half time.
After 6 hours on line, we finally approach the booth. There are three people working the booth for a line of well over a thousand people, which explains the delay. The family in front of us, who lent us an umbrella, buy 2 posters each. They were flippers the whole time. I’m disgusted.
Finally, it’s our turn. We blindly spend $125 each on stickers, t-shirts, and of course, the poster and a tube for it. It’s a take on a classic Stan Musial baseball card – right up my alley and primed for top real estate on my walls, which are rapidly losing space for new artwork.
We roll up our posters, head back to our hotel room to stash the goods, and then head back out with limited time before the concert. You know, the actual reason we went to St. Louis. And I realize that I’m no better than any of these other people on line I was silently judging. I’m completely one of them now. I am a bonafide concert poster nerd who spent 6 hours on line to buy a piece of paper with a bird that says Pearl Jam on it.
The show was incredible, too. We ended up sitting next to two older guys from Oklahoma City, who were going to the next show which happened to be in their hometown. I said I’d only been to Oklahoma once to see my brother play in the College World Series. It turned out one of the guys was there, too. That’s the coolest part for me in collecting these posters - I can point to a given poster on my wall and remember who I was with, what we did, what the band played, and how great the entire experience was.
As I’m talking to these guys, I think to myself, wait, I know someone else going to the Oklahoma City show. Then I realized it was Gene, the guy talking to me about his Iron Maiden posters on line earlier in the day.
I really hope he made his flight.
