This Day in History, 1945-2026: Legendary psychedelic poster artist Bob Masse dies

In the 1960s, Bob Masse would get $10 or $15 to do a poster for a rock gig.

But over time, his intricate art nouveau-like designs became internationally renowned and treasured collectibles of the psychedelic era.

The Grateful Dead liked his 1967 poster of their Vancouver shows so much the band hung it up in their office. A mint copy sold for $15,000 at an auction in Florida in 2021.

Masse had health problems in recent years. He had a stroke around 2020 and fell off his motorcycle in 2022, suffering a compression fracture that left him in constant pain. He then developed Parkinson-Plus Syndrome.

He died at Lady Minto/Gulf Islands Hospital on Salt Spring Island Sept. 21. He was 81.

Masse was born on April 5, 1945, in Burnaby, where he grew up. After high school, Masse attended the Vancouver School of Art, which is now Emily Carr University.

His first posters were for ”beatnik coffee houses” like the Inquisition and Bunk House in the early ’60s. He also did window displays at Woodward’s department store.

His first big commission was a Bob Dylan show at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on April 9, 1965. But he called him “Bob Dylon” on the poster.

“You’ve got to realize, he was big in New York, but that was 17 million miles from the west coast,” Masse reasoned in 2021.

“The thing I find amazing is I did the artwork and gave it to the customer, the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, and nobody said anything. It wasn’t for a couple of weeks that nobody said, ‘Hey just a minute you guys …’”

Spelling wasn’t always his strong suit. One of the quirks of his 1967 Grateful Dead poster is that he misspelled the Agrodome “Agradome.”

When promoter Jerry Kruz started Vancouver’s first psychedelic hot spot, The Afterthought, Masse did most of the posters. The famous one is for Steve Miller at the Kits Theatre from March 17 to 19, 1967, which is included in a coffee-table book, The Art of Rock.

It shows an old man with crazy long hair and a crazy long beard that explodes all over the page, on top of psychedelic lettering. It came together quickly.

“I told him that I wanted an old man (on the poster) for some reason,” said Kruz, “and he drew it on a napkin, right there and then, like just boom.”

Many of Masse’s early designs featured young, scantily clad hippie women as centrepieces.

“That was all Alphonse Mucha and art nouveau,” said artist Kerry Waghorn, who used to share a Gastown studio with Masse. “That’s where he got all the style from, which is really where all the San Francisco guys started out too.”

San Francisco was the birthplace of psychedelic posters, and Masse visited it several times in the 60s — at one point he stayed at the Grateful Dead’s house in Haight Ashbury. He relocated to Los Angeles for a spell in the late 60s, living in Laurel Canyon when it was one of the hot spots of the musical world.