Vancouver’s hippie history has been brought back to life in all of its psychedelic glory in a new hardcover book by former music promoter Jerry Kruz.

The boy wonder of the city’s music scene in the mid to late 1960s, Kruz produced the first Stanley Park Easter Be-In with Country Joe and the Fish. He also organized a free Grateful Dead concert at the English Bay gazebo, as well as shows featuring Janis Joplin, the Tom Northcott Trio, and the Collectors.

His events were often hyped with magnificent posters by Bob Masse and other artists, which are reproduced in Kruz’s The Afterthought: West Coast Rock Posters & Recollections From the ’60s (Rocky Mountain Books).

“It took me two years and I wrote it two fingers at a time, one finger per hand,” Kruz told the Straight by phone from his home in Victoria. “I would look at a poster and something would overcome me. It was actually very difficult. Each poster tells a story.”

What’s remarkable is that Kruz began producing concerts involving major stars when he was just 17 years old. Afterthought’s 89 posters feature art by Doug Cuthbert, Bruce Dowad, and the late Frank Lewis in addition to Masse’s work.

The first image in the book advertised a folk-music event that featured future newspaper columnist Allen Garr and Diane Kehoe, who performed as Al & Diane for 27 cents in a Vancouver coffeehouse in 1966. At the time, Kruz didn’t realize that this would be the first of many such posters. Nor did he have any idea that his childhood sweetheart and future wife, Julie, would save most of them so that they could later be included in the book.

According to Kruz, he never set out to be a music promoter, believing that his destiny was to become a priest. But he stumbled into the music industry when his brother wanted to help Garr launch a singing career.

“Despite coming from an extremely dysfunctional and abusive family, I had been able to survive my childhood largely because I was blessed with an incredibly supportive and liberated mother, Mary Kruz, who somehow managed to guide me through childhood,” Kruz writes in Afterthought.

To this day, Country Joe McDonald remains one of his favourite musicians. McDonald’s antiwar anthem “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-to-Die Rag” included the legendary line, “Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box.”

“I have a real soft spot for Country Joe,” Kruz said. “I think he was really instrumental in stopping the war in Vietnam because of the songs he wrote. I don’t think he was given the credit he should have been given.”

During the Summer of Love in 1967, Kruz helped keep the Georgia Straight afloat when the publisher, Dan McLeod, couldn’t find anyone willing to print the newspaper. Kruz had a difficult relationship with his father, who was a printer, but they were getting along okay at that time. And Kruz convinced his dad to publish the second issue of the Straight, giving McLeod sufficient time to find a publisher on Vancouver Island.

In 1968, Kruz was sentenced to 18 months in jail for breaching probation and possession of two joints of marijuana. After spending time in the Oakalla penitentiary, he was transferred to the Pine Ridge Camp minimum-security facility in Haney. His then-girlfriend Julie stuck with him, and her family didn’t know at the time that she was pregnant.

“Julie and I were married May 10, 1969, and have been happily together for 45 years,” Kruz writes. “We must be doing something right.”