The library is more than just books, and our series Books and Beyond with Milwaukee Public Library showcases just that. We share resources, book recommendations and some cool stuff you might not know about.
This month, we’re exploring the Wisconsin Concert Poster Collection. It’s a unique showcase of Milwaukee-area music history in the early 1980s. Bands like the Violent Femmes, Die Kreuzen and Sacred Order were just getting started, and Milwaukee's punk scene was thriving.
Milwaukee Public Library rare books librarian Timothy Rush says the poster collection started in 2002 when the library received a donation of more than 150 posters from Steve Bertolas-Jeske — who collected the posters during weekend visits to his grandparents' house.
"They lived just south of Brady Street, which was a hopping area for Milwaukee music and all the venues down there," Rush notes. "He would just walk up and then he would just pull down as many concert posters as he could, and he would accumulate that over time."
The collection offers unique insight into a slice of Milwaukee music history — a time before artists promoted their music on the internet and instead promoted their performances by word of mouth and DIY fliers.
"Half of these bands I will try to research and, because this is the '80s, they don't have a web presence," Rush says. "You maybe get them mentioned because they showed up in the thumb notes of a Die Kreuzen or a Violent Femmes article, but a lot of these folks don't get their story really told."
For Rush, tracking down various defunct music venues poses a unique challenge too, and he's been surprised to learn what some former venues have become since the '80s.
"There is this Dead Kennedys concert that takes place at the top of the hill at the corner of Mitchell and 9th, which is exactly Mitchell Street Library now," he says, naming one example.
From hand-drawn posters to collage and early digital design techniques, the collection varies in complexity. It also reflects the countercultural ethos of the scene at the time, with some posters featuring provocative art lifted from magazines and advertisements — and others providing biting political commentary.
"The most prominent example is probably with the poster we have that's for a councilman's fundraiser effort," Rush says. "The poster is literally for an event called 'Rock Against Reaganomics,' which features a little caricature of Ronald Reagan sitting at the bottom of a cliff and a bunch of people trying to push a rock off the cliff."
Beyond punk rock, Rush says the collection also includes various posters for new age, avant-garde and other acts, including the prog-rock band Snopek.
"You've got folks like Sigmund Snopek who show up in these posters," he says. "While another fairly unsung hero of Milwaukee music, just recently last year, somebody put out a six-and-a-half-hour documentary about him entitled 'The Complete History of Space-Time (Destination Milwaukee).'"
If you have any vintage posters, recordings, lyrics books or any other rare Milwaukee music artifacts, Rush says you can contact the MPL archives at this link. You can also contact MPL to set up an appointment to view the collection in person during the week. "We're a public library collection, it's not locked away in a vault. It's here to enrich you, the Milwaukee public," says Rush.
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