Relix magazine just put together an entertaining recollection of the 1992 H.O.R.D.E. concert tour, with the festival’s founders (the musicians) going on record about how it all began. Love the fact that most of the tour revolved around giving massive love to Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit. I am quite humbled that I got to see the ARU at their genesis, b/c their show was straight up different from much of the live music I was going to!
Everybody had this common idea that they had to help Colonel Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit. That was like the secret squirrel agenda of the whole thing. – Dave Frey, Blues Traveller mgr. (via Relix magazine)
My brother Mark and I knocked out bootleg tee shirts for the Atlanta and Carowinds stops of the first H.O.R.D.E. tour. Mark had the art skills, we both did graphic design, and I was working in a screen print shop. We printed a nice pile, only to have undercover cops confiscate them before we even had a chance to sell any! Luckily, I’d pulled several dozen to sell to friends and keep back for the NC show if we sold out, so still had a few to sell and break even on cost.
Mark and I had a fun time making the 1992 lot tee image. We thought up and brainstormed the idea, Mark then drew the monster, and we worked on the lettering together via Mark’s Apple computer (and probably Photoshop 1 or 2 or similar). Then I took the file, via a floppy disk, to the Microsoft machine I had at the screen print shop where I worked, printed the front and back images on vellum paper, taped them up and corrected lines, pulled a rubylith separation for the monster’s color screen, and then burned the two screens.
My screen shop boss, Randy, was very cool about letting us schedule our own prints into the shop’s work flow. I’m not sure if he or Freddie, another amazing screenprinter, pulled the ink on these. I bought the shirts at wholesale cost, and whoever did the labor usually got a shirt. We also always helped each other with our own print runs, so the labor usually got paid back in kind. This shirt had a larger run than usual (I think I printed about 3-4 dozen tees), so Randy may have made us do this after hours. Either way, we were all into putting multiple colors into the one screen to easily make the shirt a 4-color job.
