As I wrote this story last month about a time 50 years past, it was freezing outside. I was preparing to go to San Francisco for Christmas with my wife, to visit our eldest daughter and her family. We had just participated in a Christmas crafts festival called A Touch of Saltspring.

The timing was strange because 50 years ago, as a promoter, I was preparing to put on as many Vancouver weekend rock shows as possible in December and then go south to San Francisco. Now here I was doing Christmas fairs to promote my book about my times in the 1960s. As I worked those fairs, I started to realize that they all had their roots in the sixties.

Christmas had not been high on my agenda throughout my late teens, and I did not know at the time that this would be my last Christmas at home as a teenager. The following year, I would be in jail serving time for possession of cannabis. It would take being in jail for me to appreciate that time of year.

The year of 1969 would be my first Christmas with my own family. Now 48 years of family Christmases have gone by, and it continues to be very special to me, my wife, our children, and our grandchildren. When you don't have something is when you learn to appreciate it. I had tried to get a pass to go home for Christmas, but it was denied as I was considered a security risk. I never did figure that one out; it was not uncommon for low-risk offenders to get a pass for Christmas. However, I was considered a high risk.

Now to the vintage concert poster presented up top. Up until this December 2 poster, all of Bob Masse’s work had been printed with one colour. The poster above had two ink colours on coloured stock. The beautiful woman depicted thereon is Julie Christie.

The headline band was the United Empire Loyalists, which, at that point, was essentially my house band. I was their manager and we were long-time good friends. The Unforseen were formally known as the Mods, and they had managed to get a recording contract. They recorded one single, "These Are the Words”, which made it to number one on the Canadian charts. This was a local band, but they had a British flavour and a lot of harmony. I believe they were a great band, but for some reason I only booked them this one time.

For the Christmas show, the last of the year, I vowed that It would be big. I arranged to have one date on December 23 and a second on the 26th. The 24th would be the first of our family’s two Ukrainian Christmas Eve dinners, since not everyone was available for the traditional date of January 7.

The West Fourth Avenue hall was not available for New Year’s Eve, and I wanted a big show to end the year. I booked the Tom Northcott Trio and William Tell for the Friday, while the last show of the year, on Boxing Day Monday, would feature Don Crawford & the Right People, as well as the Northwest Company. Don was a friend of my brother’s, and he was a folksinger. However, just like Tom Northcott, it turned out he could go from folk to rock. This lineup proved to be a great success.

The poster—again, a three-colour one—was also a great hit. Today, a full-colour poster would not be a big deal, but when these were being printed we had to run them through the press one colour at a time, with separate negatives. Two-colour presses were a new technology in those days, and my printer father had only a one-colour AB Dick machine.

At the time, I felt we were at the cutting edge when it came to posters.