Nick was a neighbor and dear friend of mine after college when I lived in Los Angeles. The IMDb entry is incorrect; Nick died in Santa Monica. His picture is a so so scan of a 5×7 glossy color print shot one 1989 afternoon at the Reel Inn in Topanga, California.
Following is one of 2 stories published in CC Magazine out of Vancouver, B.C.:
Three Rail Nick
One Southern California summer afternoon circa 1982 my buddy Brad Schlei and I sat in his bedroom listening to and trading Grateful Dead bootleg cassette tapes. We were in the 11th grade and each of our older brothers had turned us on to the band. Naturally we preferred soundboard recordings such as the “Betty Tapes,” but more often than not we made due with audience recordings. Some of them were quite good but no match for Betty Cantor-Jackson’s tapes.
Brad had a framed concert poster above a bookshelf that caught my eye. It didn’t look new as the surface had a non-glossy finish and the edges were slightly browned. Despite the edges the poster showed no signs that it had ever hung on someone’s wall. It lacked pinholes, folds and tape marks.
“Where did you score that cool Dead poster dude,” I asked. Turns out it was Stanley Mouse & Alton Kelley’s FD-26, aka Skeleton & Roses. FD stood for Family Dog, Chet Helms’ legendary San Francisco concert production and promotion company.
Skeleton & Roses was a well-known Dead graphic that graced the inside foldout the 1969 2-LP “Live Dead” album. It pictured a pelvis to skull skeleton holding one wreath of red roses and wearing another with ribbon for hair. Life and death. Tragedy and beauty. And lots of red roses.
The graphic skeeved me out in middle school when my oldest brother first tried to hip me to the Dead. Why would any one listen to a band whose logo was a skull? Too creepy I thought. In time I would learn.
“I got it from my friend Nick and it’s not a reprint. Nick’s an old beatnic dude, used to be an actor and does carpentry around the house for my mom. He’s buddies with my older brother Bill. That’s how I met him.” Brad replied.
Though I had yet to meet Nick or buy a single poster, I think I became a collector at that moment. Modern reprints weren’t as fascinating as originals for some reason. I craved posters of the bands I enjoyed with history’s dust attached. I also figured that if I was going to spend more than $10 on an ink- stained piece of vellum that I might as well purchase something that could increase in value over time.
I didn’t meet Nick for a couple more years. Not until I finished college, lived in Manhattan briefly, moved back to Los Angeles and into a Santa Monica rent controlled bungalow. My first apartment, one-third of a 1920’s beach bungalow for $525 per month, was on 2nd Street near the Circle Bar on Main. I needed help building a fold-away kitchen table in my pipsqueak of a kitchen and got Nick’s number from Brad.
Nick Pawl helped me build that foldaway kitchen table and soon became a close friend of mine. He was a surrogate uncle of sorts and my window on the past. Many a night we spent together at his and his old lady Flo’s Santa Monica rent controlled apartment just off of Lincoln Boulevard near Ocean Park watching Friday Night Fights at the Fabulous Forum telecasts on Nick’s 15″ black & white television. The watching was always through a haze of one form of smoke or another.
Before I met Nick I had known Debbie Jacobson, the movie and music poster dealer with a gallery called “L’Imagerie” in the San Fernando Valley. Debbie had a ton of stuff and knew very well the value of what she had.
There were no deals buying from Debbie, but her gallery provided an opportunity for me to see first hand what I’d only seen second in Paul D. Grushkin’s mammoth Abbeville Press book, “The Art of Rock-Posters from Presley to Punk.”
The walls at L’Imagerie were covered floor to ceiling with artifacts: primary source documents marking significant and some not so significant movies, concerts and gatherings. As an eager student of American music and popular culture, my regular visits to L’Imagerie served the same purpose for me as a modern art history student’s pilgrimages to MOMA, any one of the Guggenheims or the Tate. Looking at pictures in a book or projections on a wall is no match for viewing an original and being able to reach out and touch history.
The first poster I got my hands on from Debbie was one from the Grateful Dead’s 1977 New Year’s Eve Winterland concert. Framed in brushed metal it was a Christmas present from my parents and instantly hung beside my desk.
The poster’s most prominent feature was a drawn thorny red rose that appeared dipped in mercury. Silver drops hung from leaf tips and red petals. What seemed the coolest thing at the time was that I now had the poster to one of my favorite cassette tape bootleg Dead shows. Never mind that I was 11 years old in 1977 and that my favorite bands at the time were David Essex and KISS. Oh, the ignorance of youth.
One day while hanging out at L’Imagerie, perusing the walls and picking Debbie’s brain-she must have thought me a preppy pest- I asked her if she knew a guy named Nick Pawl. Instantly she put down what she was doing and fixed her gaze on me.
“How do you know Nick?!“ she asked.
“He’s my buddy Brad’s friend,” I replied.
“I wish I knew Nick. He’s got a motherload of posters and never returns MY calls!” she gushed. Right then I realized that I needed to get to know Nick and spend more time with him and less at L’Imagerie.
Nick had a stash of roughly 500 vintage concert posters from the late 1960’s. His story about how he came to own them fascinated me. It still does. The story goes something like this.
Nick had a small publishing company called Satori Productions with a post office box in Santa Monica. In the 60’s he published all sorts of posters and bumper stickers, the best known of which might be the ‘Fuck You’ eye exam chart or the Vietnam War era bumper sticker “Long Time No Peace.”
Nick had a friend and client who owned a small head shop on the Sunset strip near the Whiskey a Go Go in West Hollywood. Said friend and head shop owner dug himself into deep and irreversable debt. So deep that according to Nick, “He put a turban on his head, became a swami, bought a one-way ticket to Bombay and took the fuck off.” Perhaps the hippie ethos conflicted with the need to profit and make rent. I can still hear Nick’s uproarious, coughy laughter the first time he shared this story.
Not only did the guy flee the country and his creditors, he also handed Nick the keys to the store and told him to sell everything as the lease was up in 2 months. The job then was to placate creditors and liquidate a shop full of pipes, bongs, insense, lava lamps, black light posters and a sizable stash of direct-from-the-printer concert posters. It was 1969.
The store’s most valuable asset was the batch of 5,000 or so San Francisco (Bill Graham Presents & Family Dog) and Los Angeles (Pinnacle & Kaleidescope) rock concert posters. The posters were shipped on consignment to the store directly from printers in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York and, therefore, were in mostly mint condition.
According to Nick, who died in Santa Monica in 1999, he sold the lion’s share of the posters to Art Kunkin, the Founder of the Los Angeles Free Press or “Freep,” as it was known in the day. As payment for the liquidation of his friend’s store, Nick kept 500 or so of the posters for himself. Between 1989 & 1993, when I lived in Santa Monica, I hung out with Nick and purchased his posters as often as I could afford to.
Buying a poster from Nick was much more than a mere convenience store transaction. It was an opportunity to deepen a friendship, to learn history from someone who lived it and to soak up the wisdom and humor of a proverbial character the likes of whom my parents never in a million years would have approved of.
Nick told a lot of stories and smoked tons. Stories about The Beanery, Robert Mitchum, and his childhood in the lower east side of Manhattan. Nick’s parents were eastern European immigrants and changed their name from Pavluchenko to Pawl. He told me that he moved to California in his late teens in order to escape “the shithole” that was lower east side Manhattan.
Nick once said that he considered the posters he kept a sort of annuity: something that would make his life easier once he no longer worked as a carpenter. He neatly packed his posters in acid free paper(oh the irony…) sandwiched between 2 pieces of masonite and kept them under his bed for over 20 years.
©Michael G. Halle 2006
Click here to view some of the posters.
