California Dreaming: Hollywood Witch Hunters Fought Reds First, But Mike Salisbury Says He Finished The Job With Sex, Drugs & Rock
By Mary Reinholz
“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity, but they’ve always worked for me.” — Hunter S. Thompson
By Mary Reinholz
“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity, but they’ve always worked for me.” — Hunter S. Thompson
When Mike Salisbury was art director at Rolling Stone and known to colleagues as Mad Dog, he encountered famed gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson in a darkened North Beach theater where Bob Marley was to perform.
Thompson happened to be sitting in front of Salisbury. He offered him a tab of LSD with a line print in blue of Mr. Natural.
“Take it, Mad Dog,” Thompson said, according to an entry in Salisbury’s blog, “One Hell of an Eye,” posted a few years after Thompson’s 2009 death from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Woody Creek, Colorado, and again on Facebook more recently.
Salisbury, who now lives in Venice and is an occasional guest speaker at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, told me he kept Thompson’s gift for years until it “melted” in his wallet. “I never dropped that acid,” he explained in his blog. “I never actually dropped any. A Mad Dog needs no help. And the tab was my seal of Hunter’s approval.”
Not much has curbed Salisbury’s stride since that long ago time when he redesigned Rolling Stone and before that West magazine, the Los Angeles Times’ defunct but still widely admired Sunday supplement that supported the New Journalism of the era. (Full disclosure: This writer was on retainer for West for a few years but barely knew Salisbury, then or now.)
After West folded in 1972, Salisbury began his brief tenure at Rolling Stone. He got an offer from Francis Ford Coppola that he couldn’t refuse and art directed his ill-fated City of San Francisco magazine. From there, he provided scenes for Coppola’s dark Vietnam War epic, “Apocalypse Now,” and shot the iconic photograph of Michael Jackson in a tux with glowing white socks and a single white glove for the nascent King of Pop’s “Off the Wall” album.
Salisbury, who studied advertising design at Chouinard Art Institute and held early stints at Playboy and Surfer Magazine, also became known as a prolific ad man and branding machine. His overstuffed C.V. claims he has stamped his imprint on over 300 films, among them “Jurassic Park” and “Moulin Rouge.” He coined the name of Levi’s 501 jeans and has promoted numerous other products, ranging from motorcycles to perfume.
Along the way, he has been called a genius by his admirers and compared to Hitler for creating the notorious Smokin’ Joe Camel cartoon for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company’s ad campaign in 1987.
No stranger to controversy, Salisbury is also the same self-styled biking/surfing bad boy of California design who collaborated (with writer Terry Abrahamson) on the outrageously bawdy Hustler magazine parody of a Campari ad in which a fictional Rev. Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority admits to having had his first sexual experience with his mother in an outhouse. (“We were drunk off our God fearing asses on Campari.”)
As recounted in the film, “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” that imaginary confession of the Protestant minister resulted in years of legal turmoil for porn king Larry Flynt until his eventual vindication before the US Supreme Court in 1988.
“With a writer, I created the ad parody that got Flynt before the Supreme Court and saved the Constitution,” boasted Salisbury during a 2000 interview with Steven Heller, co-chair of the MFA Design Department at the School of Visual Arts in downtown Manhattan and an ardent fan of Salisbury’s vintage work.
A year earlier, Salisbury published a 156-page paperback with numerous pictures called “An Art Director Confesses: I Sold Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll.” In it, he admits having been rejected by the U.S. Naval Academy, kicked out of architecture school and fired “from one of the biggest ad agencies in the country.”
Despite such setbacks, the soon-to-be hot shot purveyor of cool was apparently undaunted. He claims his work has contributed “over $200 billion to the American GNP–$100 billion alone just from the Levi’s 501 brand name I created.” Few have accused him of lacking self-esteem. But the guy has admitted to needing attention and probably having anger issues.
Salisbury’s latest oeuvre includes three television programs in development at his company, Mike Salisbury, LLC, which operates out of his three-story house overlooking the Pacific. One of them, called “Mr. Pop Culture,” began as a documentary about his work and its impact on society. Salisbury hopes to turn it into a TV series, based on the grandiose and unsubstantiated thesis that he helped end the Cold War with his ubiquitous marketing campaigns.
The teaser (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiGDI2E2_kg.) shows his illuminated head against a black backdrop solemnly stating: “My name is Mike Salisbury and I fought communism with sex, drugs and rock n’ roll.” The Beatles’ song, “Revolution,” erupts. Printed words emerge amid images of pop eminences like Andy Warhol and Elvis Presley, informing viewers that they will be looking at “the true story about the birth of pop culture and the CIA operative who engineered it.”
Say what?
Asked on the telephone if this was a joke, Salisbury replied, “No, it’s true.” He cited Niall Ferguson, the Scottish neo-conservative history professor at Harvard, who has said that oppressed proles behind the “Iron Curtain” had craved jeans and Coca-Cola — the kind of merch Salisbury has turned into household names for years.
OK, but, ahem, was he ever a CIA operative?
Salisbury said something I could barely hear during his call to my New York home office, and then abruptly signed off, later sending me an email quoting celebrities such as French Marxist Regis Debray, a comrade of Che Guevera, who has said there is “more power in jeans and rock and roll than the entire Red Army.”
Later I asked a few of Salisbury’s old associates at West magazine if they ever considered him a government agent back in the 1960s and ’70s when there seemed to be a lot of hipster moles around, mostly from the FBI, infiltrating radical groups like the Black Panthers.
“CIA operative? Mike? Doesn’t sound possible unless it’s part of a musical comedy,” quipped one.
Another former colleague noted that Salisbury, a peripatetic Navy brat in his youth and an avid reader of Mad Magazine, often put together tongue-in-cheek graphics to accompany articles.
“West magazine’s content was consistently witty and often hilarious — starting with funny writers who gave it a hip satirical style that Mike’s designs enhanced,” said novelist Umberto Tosi who worked with Salisbury at both West and Coppola’s City Magazine in San Francisco.
But Salisbury seems to be dead serious in his apparent belief that communism didn’t stand a chance when a new generation of Reds sought the pleasures of American capitalism.
“People over there wanted to live like us and they wanted to be like us. Like California really,” he told writer Joe Donnelly in the current issue of A Surfer’s Journal. (The article’s headline blares: “Father Pop: How Mike Salisbury defeated Communism with Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll.”)
There are few specifics in Donnelly’s account to suggest that Salisbury, who says in his book that he got married to avoid the Draft, was ever politically engaged during his younger days when the Vietnam war was raging. And there is no mention of the last USSR leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and his role, however inadvertent, in causing the Iron Curtain to crumble with his policies of Glasnost (“openness”) and Perestroika (“restructuring”).
Meanwhile, Salisbury’s “Mr. Pop Culture” is being used as a teaching tool by an adjunct professor at Art Center in Pasadena.
“I include it in all my classes on design,” said Pasadena designer Michael Dooley, who also references his 1996 interview with Salisbury in Print Magazine on his Joe Camel campaign during class discussions on ethics.
Dooley added: “I think he means to be playful.”
Does he think that Salisbury was once a CIA operative?
“I haven’t asked him about it. I guess we’ll have to wait for the program to air,” Dooley responded during an exchange of emails.
Reminded that he uses Salisbury’s fact free trailer for students in his classes (at both Art Center and Loyola Marymount University), Dooley replied, “Yup. I don’t see his supposed role as a CIA agent as significant to graphic design history.”
Salisbury is clearly a talented man whose Zelig-like career took off after he left a prominent Los Angeles advertising agency to reshape the look of West magazine. He was tapped for the job in 1967 by Jim Bellows, the late legendary editor who came to the Los Angeles Times from the New York Herald Tribune where he had nurtured Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe.
Before Salisbury’s arrival, West debuted in 1966 under the leadership of founding Editor Marshall Lumsden who brought in top writers like Ray Bradbury, William Saroyan and Carolyn See. But it was Salisbury who gave the magazine’s graphics a cutting edge within a conservative metropolitan daily that the liberal Bellows called “the velvet coffin.”
“Everyone said not to go as the paper was very conservative at the time,” Salisbury said. “But I saw it as an opportunity to be seen by about two-million people here and more around the world as I shipped Wests to all the major communication outlets. People got to see things about the West they never were aware of.”
His high-concept covers sharply separated West from the daily paper with bold images, such as a birthday candle on a wedge of Swiss cheese for Mickey Mouse’s birthday and the CBS eye shedding a tear when Ed Sullivan left the show. Other covers showed local pop iconography like swimming pools shaped like pianos and guitars. One on a killer drug had a skull with fulsome red lips and the words: “Smack! Heroin’s kiss of death.”
Dooley regards Salisbury as one of California’s most important designers and says so in his classes. “I use Mike as a prime example — along with Push Pin Studios and psychedelic poster artists — of what I call ‘American pre-Postmodern.’”
Salisbury’s detractors include lensman D. Gorton, a former White House photographer for The New York Times who freelanced for West after arriving in Los Angeles from Mississippi where he had been active in the early civil rights movement.
Salisbury’s detractors include those outraged by his Joe Camel cartoon, saying it was designed to lure underage smokers, a charge he adamantly denies. Others from his days at West recall how Salisbury hit and kicked an older editor in an apparent fit of pique over the editor’s sarcasm, one noting that Salisbury was wearing sneakers at the time “and that mitigated the damage.”
Then there’s lensman D. Gorton, a former White House photographer for The New York Times who freelanced for West after arriving in Los Angeles from Mississippi where he had been active in the early civil rights movement. He still has philosophical differences with Salisbury.
“I have an abiding distaste for the flash that is attached to guys like Mike,” Gorton said. “He was not as inventive as he and his admirers pretend.”
Gorton said that he got few assignments from Salisbury. “He was utterly uninterested in the sorts of things that I wanted to cover: the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, women’s liberation. The work that he pursued, in my opinion, was vacuous, shallow and derivative — just perfect for the world of advertising and ‘branding’ that he would enter.”
Writer Lawrence S. Dietz, who once worked for New York Magazine, had a completely different experience with young Salisbury. He said the mercurial art director was receptive to his pitch for a West spread on “Raymond Chandler’s L.A.”
“Mike loved it,” he said, adding that Salisbury “assigned a photographer who went cruising with me. I wrote an essay. The photos ran with Chandler’s words as captions.”
Years later, Dietz said, screenwriter Robert Towne told a local publication that the West feature got him interested in Los Angeles history and led to his writing the esteemed 1974 film noir classic, “Chinatown,” with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. “I had about 30 seconds of puffed chest and swelled head,” Dietz recalled. “Then I read his last sentence which was that the text of the West piece was pretty lousy, but the photos were great.”
Salisbury’s own photos — including those of George Harrison, Lyle Lovett, Tina Turner, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans — were on display earlier this year at the “Revolutions 2” exhibition held from February 6 to August 2 at the Forest Lawn museum in Glendale where Michael Jackson’s body is entombed. The exhibition, focusing on art tied to the music industry and involving about 40 other artists, filled three studios, according to Museum Director Jane Adan, the show’s curator.
She remembers inviting Salisbury to display his work at a much smaller “Revolutions” show a decade earlier.
Despite Salisbury’s reputation as a merry visual prankster, he wasn’t amused when I mentioned British author Evelyn Waugh’s devastating take down of a Forest Lawn-like cemetery called Whispering Glades, depicting it as a travesty of English rural life in thrall to Hollywood values in his 1948 satiric novel, “The Loved One.”
“It’s a replication but it’s hardly a travesty, and I think they did a good job,” he said of the famous cemetery, later noting that he believes almost all of Southern California architecture and landscaping is “derivative of something else. Even Frank Lloyd Wright modeled his work here after Mayan architecture. Forest Lawn is just bigger.”
He recalled photographing Bill Cosby at Forest Lawn for a magazine feature “on famous people’s favorite places” during the disgraced comic’s younger days.
“My bearded cousin and I picked up Bill in my VW van and drove to Forest Lawn to take the picture of Cosby on a bench under a tree reading the paper with his shoes off at eventide. Later Cosby told my cousin he thought us hippies were going to kidnap him.”
Although Salisbury has assumed many roles over the years, he made it plain he is not now nor has he ever been a hippie despite his attending the first Love In and other seminal events from the now nearly vanished counterculture. “I had jobs and shoes,” he said. He also sent me a list of subjects that he didn’t want to discuss — such as anything “negative” about Forest Lawn — in our next phone conversation.
The rebel who came of age in the revolutionary 1960s appears to have become cautious in his golden years. He’s 73 now and says he no longer surfs or keeps motorcycles at his beach house. He shares it with a female companion identified only as Wendell. He has three “very successful” adult children and dismissed questions about his two divorces as “irrelevant.”
After I asked him just two questions about his “Mr. Pop Culture” project, he seemed to become agitated and said in emails that he wanted to review all quotes I would attribute to him.
When I declined to do so, he wrote the editor of this newspaper asking that all references to him regarding the Forest Lawn “Revolution 2” exhibition be deleted — “unless she uses what I said which is that the art of ‘Revolutions 2’ is the art of the largest, most prolific and free generation in this country and what that era did was bring down the Berlin Wall.”
Chill, Mad Dog. You didn’t say anything remotely like that to this lowly reporter.
Besides, you should know that it was multitudes of joyous Berliners from both sides, along with souvenir hunters, who chipped away at that wall 26 years ago. The two united German governments later reduced it to rubble.
http://www.printmag.com/?s=mike+salisbury&submit=
#
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
