When he completes his current run, Vollmar takes his screens into the bathtub to hose them off. It costs Vollmar $2 to make each poster, and that's exactly what he gets paid by the 15th Street Tavern.
It's a situation that Kuhn can empathize with. Last year, after record sales, Kuhn broke even. "I know he's not making any money off it," Kuhn says of Vollmar. "He's doing it because he thinks it's cool."
Sean Hartgrove
God save the screen: Lindsey Kuhn in his warehouse studio.
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Vollmar and hundreds of punk-rock kids around Denver may think it's cool, but the authorities consider it illegal.
Both Seattle and Austin were once known for thriving poster-art scenes, thanks to the prolific music there. But flier-filled streets became a political platform for city officials. The artists called it a continually changing urban landscape, but city officials called the posters eyesores. The city officials won.
To get rid of the posters, the Seattle city government decided to cut down telephone poles and demolish a fence along streets with punk venues, where artists plastered their work. In Austin, the city scraped clean Guadalupe Street, a mile-long, postered phenomenon known as The Drag. Both cities eradicated the art form -- exterminating the artists in the process.
In Denver, where hand-made posters are splattered along 13th Street near the various Wax Trax stores, the city has been relatively lax in its efforts. Since 1985, according to Denver's Municipal Code, it's been illegal to "post, paint or attach, or to directly or indirectly cause to be posted, painted or attached in any manner, any handbill, poster, advertisement or notice of any kind upon public property except by permission of the manager of public works pursuant to established rules and regulations." Five years ago, bands competed to see who could get their posters highest on telephone poles, says Dave Kerr, who has been a Wax Trax manager for seven years. But in the last few years, citizens' groups have taken it upon themselves to remove fliers and posters in the area.
"Every few days the neighbors come along and rip them down from the poles, but you're not going to stop the kids from stickering them up," Kerr says. "The neighbors, I've noticed, have been getting lazy lately. And the kids are winning."
Inside his brick warehouse, Kuhn stands among stacks of more than 10,000 punk-rock posters, countless buckets of gooey poster ink, bulky silk screen and printing machinery. If word got out that Kuhn had a bum wing, who knows what it could do for business?
Hell, when Lindsey Kuhn muttered to a friend a few months back that he was interested in doing a Tom Waits poster, desperate collectors called him within hours, offering to buy the entire run.
A Kuhn poster for a June 21 Brian Wilson concert at the Boston Symphony Hall sold on eBay three weeks after the show for $75, surprising even Kuhn.
"I looked at that and I said, 'That's not right.' It kind of pissed me off," Kuhn says of the price-gouging. In fact, if Kuhn sees a private collector overpricing his posters on the electronic auction house, he'll e-mail the bidders and offer a lower price.
Now, both Kuhn's style and his client list are expanding. He's starting to draw his posters freehand instead of relying on the clip-art images that have defined the punk-rock poster aesthetic.
Kuhn's prominence in the art form has allowed his appeal to cross into the mainstream. He now finds himself working on a poster for, of all people, Linda Ronstadt.
"Why would Linda Ronstadt want some punk-rock poster guy to do a poster for her?" Kuhn asks. Then he says, "I'm going to do it because I think it's funny to do a poster for Linda Ronstadt."
Kuhn is also working on a limited-edition CD cover that he'll ship to Japan. He uses a noisy, generator-powered water gun to blast ink-stained screens and squeegees. Eight hundred of the prints will sell in Japan and only 100 will stay in the States.
After he finishes washing his equipment, Kuhn pinches his left hand at the knuckles of his ring and middle fingers. Now he shakes the hand. That's it, he says. He won't work anymore today.
Now he'll go drink a beer, maybe skate around town, maybe take in a show. He can afford the break.
