A music venue as unique as The Billiken Club deserves advertisements that are just as unique.
Located on the art-savvy Cherokee Street, Firecracker Press has been handcrafting posters for The Billiken Club since 2006. Originally, a member of The Billiken Club committee designed the Billiken Club’s posters.
“When they left, we started looking around,” senior and Billiken Club Manager Sanita Saengvilay said.
In 2006, Busch Student Center and Billiken Club Staff Manager Chris Grabau discovered Firecracker Press.
“There’s a growing trend in the music community—the concert hosting community—where music posters promoting concerts have become an art form … I found out about Firecracker Press from their work, from promoting shows locally, and with The Billiken Club concert series,” Grabau said. “I thought it would be a chance to work with them to create something more than just a concert flyer, to create a series of pieces of art centered around promoting the concerts.”
Saengvilay says that Firecracker Press has a good deal of creative freedom.
“We give the artists free reign to do whatever they want; we just give them the bands and some information about them,” Saengvilay said.
According to Matty Kleinberg, Firecracker’s shop manager, each poster starts off as an idea, as a new part of the story or theme. Next, it is designed and colored digitally—the first and last part of the process that takes place on a computer. This design is then printed and carved into woodblocks, which are cut and inked—one block for each color—and then blocks are inserted into the printing press, along with antique lead type for the headlines. From here, Firecracker can run off as many posters as The Billiken Club needs, all in house.
Firecracker Press has been trying to insert a story or a continuing theme into each year’s posters. For instance, season two featured posters that could combine into one giant image, while season three was more about the layering of the images.
“[This season] has a more particular subject matter, inasmuch as it’s sort of a new wave—’80s meets alien planets … We don’t know what the whole story is … There’s some kind of king or prince behind them,” Kleinberg said. “There’s a family of people in the first couple posters, but it’s not until you get to poster four that you see that this lady might have the possibility to turn people into skeletons.”
A majority of the inspiration for these stories comes from clip-art in the ’80s and photos from magazines that featured people who seemed to have a particular mindset.
“The people were never quite as popular as they might think they should be,” Kleinberg said.
Grabau is happy with Firecracker Press’ work.
“What it does is it advertises the show, as well as creating the artifact; it becomes something people can frame,” Grabau said. “It just so happens to have The Billiken Club on the poster, and it commemorates a very good show. I still have posters of some of my favorite shows. The recent Seawolf show was fantastic, and I still have that poster.”
Firecracker Press is located at 2838 Cherokee St. For more information, visit www/firecrackerpress.com.
For more information about The Billiken Club and its schedule, visit http://thebillikenclub.wordpress.com.