By Anastasia Pantsios

In the early 90s, rock & roll underwent a revolution, taking a dark and introspective turn. In Nirvana's wake, chaotic, difficult-listening indie rock bands like the Melvins, Unsane, the Butthole Surfers, Season to Risk and the Jesus Lizard found themselves- often to their own amazement- on major labels, where they intrigued some fans and frightened and repelled many others.

Imagine translating this sonic world into visual terms, so that it can be seen and felt, and maybe even understood, by those outside that world. It requires a special person: someone who not only has talent, but who has lived with the music until it is in his bones, someone who sees this music as an extension of his own thoughts, fantasies, dreams and nightmares.

That person is Cleveland-based artist Derek Hess. As booker for Cleveland's hip underground rock club, the Euclid Tavern, in the early '90s, he earned a national reputation among managers and agents who work with noisy, offbeat bands, as a man of open-minded tastes and fair business practices. He was the angel of Cleveland's underground scene for about five years, until another priority intervened: his art.

Telephone poles and record store windows were Hess' first showcase for his talents. That's where he hung the white 8 1/2 x 14 flyers he created to promote his shows. For an artist whose work sprung from an underground culture, it was a direct pipeline to the audience the art spoke to and about.

The secret to Hess' growing success is that he was been able to harness a pair of tornadoes: his own prodigious talent and the national resurgence of rock concert poster art, which began in the late '80s, roughly paralleling the emergence into the public consciousness of indie or alternative rock. The new generation of poster artists who toiled in obscurity and poverty in the late '80s, started to get media recognition. Hess soon joined the ranks of poster artists like San Francisco's Frank Kozik, the trailblazer for this new wave, as his inclusion in a June 18, 1994 piece in Newsweek on concert poster art attested.

Hess' early collectors were kids who picked up his work in area record stores and tacked it to their wall, recognizing early on a special element in his work: the ability to visually interpret the musical genre and its practitioners. To them, it was immediately clear that these carefully hand-drawn flyers, with the dark, elaborate visual puns, spoke a special language. Today, Hess's collectors include many people who've never heard of the bands his posters immportalize, people who are simply taken with the vision, imagination and craftsmanship of Hess's work.

Hess's creative impulse runs deep. He was reaching for his crayons as a toddler when is arts-minded parents (his father, who died in 1994, taught industrial design at the Cleveland Institute of Art) encouraged him to draw whenever he complained of boredom. By the sixth grade, he was taking Saturday art classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art. But by high school, he was starting to get derailed. "I developed other interests," he says ruefully, "like drinking and drugs. It got to be a real problem for me."

After high school, he enrolled at the Institute. Ironically, his father's position there allowed him to alternate between being a budding artist and a blossoming fuck-up. "It became easy for me to use (drugs), because Dad was there: I knew I could always take time off and come back next semester. I was taking a lot of things for granted."

In 1987, Hess decided his partying was out of control and decided to try a change of scenery. He transferred to the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit. Once there, he realized that the problem was in him and not his environment; he also discovered that the school had an AA program specifically for artists. Though he says no one incident propeled him to clean up his act ("more of a constant scraping bottom"), he joined up and went on the wagon. He's been sober since January 16, 1989.

"I get like a lot of email from people saying, 'I get loaded when I draw and I think it's the best stuff I've done.' I write back and say. you're fogging the issue, clouding the source. You can't have pure imagery if you're disconnected. I screwed up and screwed around until I figured out what my huge problem is: alcoholism. For me to get anywhere, I had stop and focus on this talent I was given instead of taking it for granted."

After that, "I poured all my energy into my work." He switched from his original graphics major to fine arts and printmaking. He no longer felt compelled to get a degree: instead, he audited classes in order to have access to the studios, where he began creating lithographs. And he took an apartment above th Euclid Tavern where he did odd jobs to earn money. Early in 1990, he proposed to the tavern owners to take over their Monday nights, booking some of the bands that, unbeknownst to the world at large, were laying the foundation for the alternative music of the '90s.

Meanwhile, down in Texas and out on the West Coast, a whole new concert poster art scene was just starting to happen. Austin, Texas, with its concentration of clubs and musical acts, was its hub. It was from there that the towering presence of the new movement emerged. Frank Kozik, noted for his brazen day-glo colors and sharp, punchy cartoon-like figures, created a style aped by countless young poster artists, Derek Hess emphatically NOT among them. Kozik's work first began to appear on handbills in Austin in the mid '80s; by the early '90s his silk screen posters were starting to attract attention and imitators.

Of course, when Hess started his shows at the Euclid Tavern, he didn't know he was joining an about-to-explode art movement. He just knew that he needed to promote his shows, he had no money and he had his art training. So he began to turn out the flyers that became so familiar in record stores and on bulletin boards and phone poles around the Cleveland area.

Derek Hess' flyers were clearly in a different league right from the start. Unlike most, they were based on his own draftsmanship rather than executed via cut-and-paste methods. His long years of training have allowed him to concentrate on developing the concepts that have made his work so striking. "Knowing that drawing comes easily means I can focus on content. I don't have to struggle with the figures, so my creative energy is freed up to focus on content."

Although he was doing lithographs at CIA, when he began doing work on his own, he had neither the means not the space to install the equipment needed to do litho work. So he evolved a drafting style full of small strokes that emulates the appearance of lithography, first drawing his image in pen ad ink, then photostating his original work and scratching on the photostat with a razor blade.

In the fall of 1993, Hess reached a turning point. His flyers were starting to create a buzz around the country, disseminated by the touring bands and their managers, agents and record companies. It was then that he hooked up with poster collector/dealer Marty Geramita, who'd moved his business, Altered Images, from San Antonio, Texas to Cleveland in the fall of 1993.

When he arrived in Cleveland, Geramita recalls, "I picked up some of (Derek's) stuff in record stores and said, this is amazing, how could somebody not recognize this?" He contacted Hess, asking him if he'd done any posters. Hess ruefully told him he couldn't afford to. Marty offered to bankroll him.

It was like opening the floodgates. Starting with a color silkscreen poster for a Cows/Pop Defect/Dimbulb show at the Euclid Tavern in October 1993, Hess began to turn out posters at a prodigious rate. Offers started coming from concert promoters such as Belkin Productions in Cleveland and Texas' Pace Productions, from magazines like Your Flesh and Planet, and from bands he'd become friends with over the years who were doing CDs, like Bluto's Revenge and Craw. It was clear to him that he needed to tend to his muse, and by the end of 1995, he gave up the booking and promotion of the Euclid Tavern to become a full-time artist. He marked his commitment with his first full-scale solo show "Stretch Marks" at the Busta Gallery in Cleveland in January 1995, and he's never looked back.

Hess worked at a feverish pace throughout 1995, turning out the largest number of posters he has produced in a single year. "It was just poster after poster after poster after poster, which was good because the poster market kind of peaked at that point. There was a bit of a decline because the market was saturated. A lot of new people got into it who didn't do the footwork and learn the skills so there was this glut of average to below average poster art flooding the market. So that's when we pulled back and said, let's print less and make it more desirable."

Hess began to take his work on the road. Since 1995, he has mounted gallery and museum shows across the country from Vermont to San Diego, and in Germany as well. He started to get coverage in both music and arts magazines, including Spin, Affiche, Juxtapoz and Seconds.

"It helped me validate what I was doing. When I got to other cities, people I don't know from Adam were coming up and saying basically the same things people in Cleveland said, that they like the drawing because of this or that and were drawn to it."

Looking at Hess's work, it's not hard to see why. A major factor in his growing acclaim is the perfect mesh of his personal style and that of the underground music that emerged in the early '90s. Hess' strong but struggling, threatened and threatening figures in cryptic, but clearly unfriendly, environments and situations, already appeared in his work before he began drawing concert flyers. Perhaps the inner conflicts that produced such work also attracted him to the music. Hess has evolved a world defined by his personal iconology: sinuously muscular figures, frequently shackled, menaced by anthropomorphic machinery, attackers whose identity is hidden under helmets, malevolent angels or angry dogs.

"I've developed my own languages of images. I use cupids a lot. I like underwear showing, baggy jeans, football helmets," says Hess. The recurring images, sometmes inhabiting a barren landscape reminiscent of the surrealists, especially DiChirico, perfectly reflected the aggressive stance of such bands as Helmet, Season to Risk and Tar and the jagged soundscapes of Cop Shoot Cop, Pain Teens, Jesus Lizard or Craw. He speaks of a modern world full of threats and dangers that aren't always the obvious ones, like the vague fear of crime in the abstract that keeps people prisoners in their homes, separating them from each other.

Occasionally, as one might expect, Hess' irreverent, underground attitude collides with mainstream sensibilities. One of his most memorable Euclid Tavern flyers was for a show by Washington, D.C. band Shudder to Think, though the flyer wasn't widely seen because the tour was postponed and the date cancelled. It featured a Barney-like animal in a Nirvana t-shirt with a hole in its head and a shotgun propped beside it, and the slogan "Eddie Is a Poser Until He Pulls the Trigger." Pearl Jam's handlers were allegedly extremely upset and made inquiries about taking action against Hess; they just couldn't figure out what action they might take. Another Hess flyer, for a Cannibal Corpse show in Morgantown, West Virginia, was spotted on a phone pole and sent to the mayor, who arranged to have the show cancelled. Apparently the band's name and its music (undiluted death metal of the most abrasive sort) weren't enough to trigger a response, but Hess' poster, with an angel being pulled from the sky by devils who pull its wings apart, was a flashpoint.

The explosive power in his figures derives from twin childhood passions for figure drawing and superhero comic book art, though in Hess' world that power is often frustrated, bound up, held at bay. Something of an anti-intellectual when it comes to tastes in art, Hess acknowledges that when his art school classmates listed impressive rosters of artistic influences, he's come up with comic book artists like Gil Kane (who drew Hawk, Atom, Flash and Green Lantern in the early '70s). "His stuff really flows," says Hess of Kane. "That's the way the body moves. Now a lot of comic artists just draw steroid freaks. They're not looking underneath at how the muscle is attached to the skeleton, how a muscle pullling on one side of the body pulls a muscle on the other side of the body." He's also attracted to fantastical artists like Bosch and Brueghel and the neo-surrealism of the British '70s album art company Hipgnosis. A long-time heavy metal buff, he even picked up a few pointers from metal art, though often more in the "not to do" vein.

The dense, angry, post-punk, post-metal sound that Hess' posters most frequently illustrate can be mean, menacing and turgid, but it sometimes evinces a twisted sense of humanity which Hess expresses in sophisticated visual puns. His Guided by Voices poster, for instance, featured a blind figure with a cane around whose head flutter an angelic and a demonic cupid whispering in his ears.

The color palette his silkscreens display is also unique among concert poster artists. Rather than the bam! pow! primaries and eye-grabbing neons favored by many of his colleagues, Hess leans towards browns, greys, golds, subtle blues and marky pastels- moody colors. "The colors are from my own experience, more environment oriented. I think the image should carry the poster and the color should complement it. I use a lot of greys. I look out my window; that's what I see. I'm from Cleveland; I lived in Detroit. People here struggle against the environment."

Admirers of Hess's work always get back to one point: his mastery of the ability to tell a band's "story" in a single, gripping image that draws the viewer in and translates the band's music into terms even non-fans will understand. "This is an exciting way to express the feel of the music and my view of the human condition," says Hess.**

Hess's reputation has brought more offers for commissioned work his way. "They call us, we don't seek them out," he says with satisfaction. Among other things, he designed the poster for the concert that marked the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, created two tour posters for Limp Bizkit and designed the CD sleeve for Tommy Lee's Methods of Mayhem project. But it's still the intense underground bands that inspire him the most. He's recently done art for Converge, Snapcase, Boys Sets Fire and Grade. "There's a lot of music out there that I'm passionate about again."

Cutting back on posters and being more selective about commissions allowed Hess to take another step in his development: to focus more on his fine art prints. Though initially he spun off the ominous imagery of his posters, his recent fine art work has lightened up considerably. His latest work is a series of nudes called "Tan Lines."

"As far as the fine art stuff goes, I was doing some really heavy subject matter but I've kind of taken a break from that. I feel I can express that heavier slant with poster art through the mutual feelings and mutual ideas the bands and myself have. I still have dark feelings. But I found that the more I pushed them image-wise, the more they weighed me down."

Hess's work is also evolved technically. "Up to about 1997, I was still honing the drawing skills, trying to learn everything that I didn't know about the human anatomy, or relearn it if I'd forgotten something, which is still an ongoing thing. I always want to make sure I'm on top of my game as far as that goes. But from in 1997 to the present, I'm wanting to do more expressive, looser drawing and also print with less colours, try to get more mileage out of less. I'm finding that kind of exciting- being real loose and more expressive and letting the colour carry the line."

Ideally, Hess says, he'd like to be doing 80% fine art, but vows that he'll never give up his main inspiration, the music. That Hess's posters are in the collections of both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and the Louvre shows their importance both as pure art and as an expression of the music scene they sprang from.

Professionally, Hess's goal is to expand on the inroads he's been making, to do more shows internationally. Via his website and poster distributors, he's already acquired strongholds in Europe and Australia. "I'm about 50% satisfied with where I'm at," he says. "The other 50%, I'm satisfied with where I'm going."

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