With proof positive that I have too much time on my hands as I halfway keep my ears and hearing impaired ears on the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament this evening, I've decided to vent on a subject that I'd like to see happen one of these times.
You know what I wouldn't mind paying anywhere between $19.00-$25.00 range for? Print images of our favorite bands and musicians from over the years. I'm not talking about standard posters (although if it came down to that, I'd like to see it happen here as well for the usual $8.99 or $9.99) either.
We are all not getting any younger. It bothers me that we still do not have any affordable print images of musicians in their prime in different phases of their careers being offered much nowadays. I'd like to be able to get these so that I could go for a run out to, say, a Michaels' Arts & Crafts store and get some nice frames to put these in.
I could see the smallest of the sizes for the prints being in the range of 16 x 20's.
Any person can go to a famous photographer site and see some prints that you can get if you happen to be somebody who considers anywhere to be about $350.00-$1,000.00 to be the equivalent of a penny drop in the bucket. These are the kind of prints for elitists. We need to have affordable prints for the people who are responsible for making the bands and the record companies very comfortable over the years-that means us.
The inspiration for this post is over mainly 3 things and then branches out into a whole universe of possibilities. a) how is it that a guitar player like the incredible late great Duane Allman can finish #2 in a Rolling Stone Magazine All-Time Great Guitar Players Poll and yet a fan of his can't find an affordable poster or print anywhere of the guy? This is ridiculous. It gets to a point where a person is reduced to having to cut out any picture in a magazine they can find of the guy and hope they can accumulate enough of them to make a collage or hope that an idividual picture from said magazine is big enough to put in a picture frame to display.
b) As per my many year complaint: Why is it that it's so incredibly difficult to find any pictures of The Rolling Stones from the Mick Taylor Era with Taylor himself actually in the image?
c) I see where The Doors have started to offer various print images on their site. They are great images. But there's only one drawback, they each cost somewhere in the $300.00-$350.00 range (you get my drift).
I would really like to see somebody either individually or collectively who is well-placed in the industry and with different bands to put a bug in somebody's ear that they could tap into a market among boomers to start making affordable prints for people.
There are a ton of us here and at other music boards who are sophisticated enough to know that they want specific print images of different bands from when they were considered their best. The most preferable, at least for myself, would be live shots. I mean, among the many different images I'd like to have, would be of Jimmy Page playing guitar from back in the days when his hair was so long that when he was hunched over doing some particularly tough fretwork, that his face would be covered completely (like during "Dazed and Confused") back in '69 or '70. How about some classic Springsteen '78 shots? How about Townshend from the Moon Era doing one of his leaps or windmills? How about Jerry Garcia during the '60s' or the '70's. I've seen the great t-shirt of Garcia sitting backstage playing a guitar. Why can't this be a print or a poster as well. I still don't own a Jerry image I want to have yet and I'm dying to put one up on my walls.
On top of it, I'd even like to see images of some of the lesser thought about greats as well. How about Trower during the '70's or Jeff Beck in the '60s or '70's?
There's got to be someone out there who can figure out a way to get this worked out. I can see the prints being beautiful color or black and white shots that may be just slightly enhanced (computer) so that they look really nice.
So, I'm beseeching anybody out there who has ever given this some thought and has never gotten the push to do it to please pursue this. This is nuts (well, so am I come to think of it, But that's besides the point). I'll say this much, there are a ton of old posters I don't have anymore that I got in the '70s that should be reissued. I still have the great posters from the early '80s of Hendrix, Janis & Grace Slick and Janis of Marshall. This is the type of stuff that should be re-released as well as having new images presented to us. Can somebody out there please make this come true? Please?
In the meantime, I have been picking up some of the Rolling Stone Magazine cover prints lately. Sorry I took up so much space. But I was going to burst this evening if I didn't let this out.

Steve,
Many great rock photos are in books and magazines. If one is "crafty" enough,
or knows a good framer, some of these look great when matted and framed nicely.
I'm not suggesting necessarily tearing out pages of a good book, but say the "Rolling
Stone Covers '67-'97" book - a few years ago I ended up with two of these, so I took out some of the nicer cover illustrations and had them matted and framed (simple single-mat and modern frame) and hey, don't they look great along my hallway walls! Alot of these
"Rock History" books are on "discount" tables at Borders, Barnes & Noble, etc..
I got a Jim Marshall photo book "Not Fade Away" a few years back (great book, he took
some of the best shots of '60's artists like The Band, Hendrix, The Dead, Janis etc.) and
the photos were of such high quality, that I bought another copy of it so I could take the
pictures out and mat and frame them - well worth the price of the book and framing!
People look at these and think they are professional prints. A nice mat & frame job
really"makes" the print or photo. So if you look around a little and are "resourceful"
you can put some real nice things together. Framing album covers is fun to do also -
Restoration Hardware (.com) has pretty decent frames (w/ glass not plastic) that are
made so you can just slip your nice L.P. cover into it and hang it up - they look great!