PORT TOWNSEND — Love and Peace. A New Dimension.
Throw in a pink flamingo, and you have the key to understanding Winter Woodstock posters.
“There’s subliminal stuff in all of them,” Michael Yazel says.
Yazel, aka Captain Yazu, is a rock ‘n’ roll impresario whose all-ages dance, Winter Woodstock, brightens up first weekend in March.
And every year, he commissions a poster as psychedelic as the retro rock dance it promotes.
“There are so many talented artists in this town,” Yazel says. “I wanted to support them.”
The first year, Michael Hale set the color scheme, acid yellows and pinks, purples and blues.
The faces of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin gaze out from beyond the grave through the arms of a peace symbol on Hale’s work.
The word “peace” is subtly hidden in the background, scattered with small hearts and daisies.
In the top left corner is a picture of a pink flamingo standing on the neck of a guitar.
“I always ask that there be a flamingo in the picture,” Yazel says.
The dove is a symbol of Woodstock, the three-day, no-holds-barred rock concert that shook upstate New York in 1969.
But Yazel’s icon is the flamingo — he has 140 versions of the pink bird in his home, including a metal-sculpture flamingo playing a guitar.
This year’s Winter Woodstock will be one night, March 4, but will start earlier.
