A Beautiful Pandemonium: How Rick Griffin Became the Unlikely Herald of the Psychedelic Revolution

Steve Barilotti provides a biography of iconic surf artist Rick Griffin.  This piece follows Rick from his days as a high school student contributing the Murphy comics to Surfer Magazine, to his eventual conversion to Christianity and illustrating the book of John.  The path he took was anything but ordinary.  He started the mid sixties in art school in Los Angeles, but ended up right in the middle of the psychedelic experiments at the height of the hippie movement in San Francisco.  While there he created groundbreaking psychedelic poster art and album covers for the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and many others. He was also a part of the influential Zap Comix founded by R. Crumb.  After an apocalypse scare lead him to New York in the late sixties he came back to Southern California and worked with John Severson and Surfer Magazine again, creating the tremendous artwork for Severson’s film Pacific Vibrations.