review

milt thomas

If you have ever driven along Sunset Strip in Hollywood, you could not miss the flashy digital billboards advertising the latest movies and TV shows. If you drove the Strip back in the mid-1960s, the billboards would promote the latest rock albums. The biggest difference between now and then is that billboards in those days were not digital – they were hand painted. Driving on Sunset Strip was like an outdoor art gallery, designed to be seen in a moving car.

You can relive those unforgettable days by driving over to the Vero Beach Museum of Art, which is featuring its latest exhibition, Rock ‘n’ Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip. It is a collection of 50 billboard ads promoting new albums from the biggest names in rock and roll. You probably have at least some of these ground-breaking albums in your music collection, but back when those billboards went up, they proclaimed a group’s latest album, or in some cases, their very first album.

That was the case in 1967 when the first hand-painted rock billboard announced a new group called The Doors. It represented a major investment for Elektra Records, or any record label, costing up to $10,000 (almost $90,000 today), requiring ten days to produce, displayed for about two weeks, then whitewashed for the next ad. Custom painted billboards themselves had a limited lifespan, disappearing in the early 1980s with the advent of MTV and eventually digital signage.

This era of glorious yet temporary art would be lost to history if someone had not taken the trouble of documenting it for posterity.

That someone was Robert Landau.

As a teenager, Landau grew up living with his father near the landmark Tower Records store on Sunset Boulevard. He walked past those billboards as they were being painted, then saw them disappear a few weeks later, never to be seen again. An aspiring photographer at age 16, he decided to take snapshots of these pop culture masterpieces. That led him to a career in photography and a number of books, including Rock ‘n Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip.

The new exhibition at our Museum of Art includes 50 photographs, 40 of which are Landau’s, including some he took as a teenager and several are presented on a monumental scale. Other photos show the progression of signage from advertising products to works of art.

Recording artists included in this billboard photo collection include the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, the Eagles, Marvin Gaye, Santana and The Who, among many others. You can even purchase Landau’s book at the Museum Gift Shop.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip is on display all summer until September 1 in the Holmes Gallery. For more information call (772) 231-0707 or email the Museum at info@vbmuseum.org. Visit the website at www.vbmuseum.org.