\n<\/p>\n
David Edward Byrd, who captured the swirl and energy of the 1960s and early \u201970s by conjuring pinwheels of color with indelible posters for concerts by Jimi Hendrix, the Who and the Rolling Stones as well as for hit stage musicals like \u201cFollies\u201d and \u201cGodspell,\u201d died on Feb. 3 in Albuquerque. He was 83.<\/p>\n
His husband and only immediate survivor, Jolino Beserra, said the cause of death, in a hospital, was pneumonia brought on by lung damage from Covid.<\/p>\n
Mr. Byrd made his name, starting in 1968, with striking posters for the likes of Jefferson Airplane and Traffic at the Fillmore East, the Lower Manhattan Valhalla of rock operated by the powerhouse promoter Bill Graham<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For a concert there that year by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Mr. Byrd rendered the guitar wizard\u2019s hair in a field of circles, which blended with the explosive hairstyles of his bandmates, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Byrd also put his visual stamp on the Who\u2019s landmark rock opera, \u201cTommy,\u201d producing posters for it when it was performed at the Fillmore East in October 1969 and again, triumphantly, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York a few months later. In 1973, he shared a Grammy Award<\/a> for his illustration work on the London Philharmonic Orchestra\u2019s rendition of \u201cTommy.\u201d<\/p>\n For his poster for the Rolling Stones\u2019 1969 U.S. tour, which culminated in the violence-marred Altamont festival in Northern California, Mr. Byrd paid no mind to the band\u2019s increasingly sinister image. Instead, he opted for an illustration of an elegant female nude<\/a> twirling billowing fabric, drawing for inspiration on the late-19th-century motion photographs by Eadweard Muybridge.<\/p>\n Mr. Byrd\u2019s theater work included a surreal poster for \u201cFollies,\u201d the bittersweet 1971 Broadway evocation of the Ziegfeld Follies era with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim<\/a>. The design featured the cracked face of a somber-looking woman wearing a star-studded headdress that spelled out the show\u2019s title.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The poster was enough of a hit that the producer Edgar Lansbury<\/a> called Mr. Byrd in for a meeting at his office near the Winter Garden theater, where \u201cFollies\u201d was playing, and asked him to design one for the Off Broadway production that same year of \u201cGodspell,\u201d<\/a> the flower-power retelling of the Gospel of St. Matthew.<\/p>\n In his 2023 book, \u201cPoster Child: The Psychedelic Art & Technicolor Life of David Edward Byrd,\u201d written with Robert von Goeben, Mr. Byrd recalled Mr. Lansbury telling him to peer out the window at his \u201cFollies\u201d image.<\/p>\n \u201cI want that poster,\u201d he said, \u201cand I want it to be Jesus.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Byrd missed out on a brush with history when his original poster for the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969, featuring a neoclassical image of a nude woman with an urn, was replaced for various logistical reasons by Arnold Skolnick<\/a>\u2019s \u2014 <\/em>the now famous image of a white bird<\/a> perched on a guitar neck. Mr. Byrd took it in stride.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t think of it as any kind of \u2018branding\u2019 for the event,\u201d he said of his poster. \u201cI thought of it as a souvenir of the event.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Byrd was impressed by \u2014 and to a degree, aligned with \u2014 the work of the so-called Big Five psychedelic poster artists of San Francisco: Alton Kelley<\/a>, Rick Griffin<\/a>, Victor Moscoso<\/a>, Stanley Mouse<\/a> and Wes Wilson<\/a>, who were known for using kaleidoscopic patterns, explosions of color and fonts that seemed to bend and ooze like Salvador Dal\u00ed clocks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But, based 3,000 miles from the Haight-Ashbury scene, Mr. Byrd was also influenced by Broadway and advertising, employing standard typefaces and drawing on the Art Nouveau movement of 1890s Europe. His work is \u201ckind of like Art Nouveau on acid,\u201d said Thomas La Padula,<\/a> an adjunct professor of illustration at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where Mr. Byrd taught in the 1970s.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Throughout, however, Mr. Byrd could enjoy the unfettered freedom afforded by the music world in those days. \u201cWith rock, there was no basic subject matter,\u201d he wrote in \u201cPoster Child.\u201d \u201cIt was just whatever you wanted to do that was eye-catching.\u201d<\/p>\n David Edward Byrd was born on April 4, 1941, in Cleveland, Tenn., the only child of Willis Byrd, a traveling salesman, and Veda (Mount) Byrd, a part-time model. His parents divorced when he was young, and he spent most of his youth in Miami Beach with his mother and his wealthy stepfather, Al Miller, an executive with the Howard Johnson\u2019s restaurant chain.<\/p>\n After receiving a bachelor\u2019s degree in fine art and a master\u2019s in stone lithography from Andy Warhol\u2019s alma mater, the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie Mellon University), he settled in an upstate New York commune, where he was painting in the vein of Francis Bacon<\/a>, the Irish-born artist and master of the macabre, when college friends, including Joshua White<\/a>, who designed the dazzling light shows for the Fillmore East, hooked him up with Mr. Graham.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Fillmore East closed in 1971, but that did not mark the end of Mr. Byrd\u2019s work in music. For a Grateful Dead concert at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island in 1973, he came up with an impish illustration of two clean-cut 1950s teenagers boogieing under the self-consciously corny tagline \u201cA Swell Dance Concert.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Byrd also produced a retro-inflected album cover for Lou Reed\u2019s 1974 album, \u201cSally Can\u2019t Dance,\u201d as well as posters for the band Kiss. He made a foray into Hollywood with his poster for the 1975 film adaptation of \u201cThe Day of the Locust,\u201d Nathanael West\u2019s dystopian Hollywood novel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Byrd moved to Los Angeles in 1981 and worked there as the art director for Van Halen\u2019s \u201cFair Warning\u201d tour. Later that decade, he spent four years as the art director for the national gay news publication The Advocate, and in the 1990s he worked as an illustrator for Warner Bros. on its consumer merchandise.<\/p>\n