Before the ballrooms, before Bill Graham, before the swirling letterforms that would make him famous — Wes Wilson made this.

"Are We Next? Be Aware" was Wilson's very first poster, self-published in 1965. It was not a concert announcement at all. It was a protest: a Nazi-style swastika superimposed over the stars and stripes of the American flag, a stark warning against the country's drift toward militarism as the Vietnam War escalated. Wilson printed it himself and carried it to anti-war rallies in Berkeley.

There is a small, telling story in its making. When Wilson first showed the design to Ivor Powell, the pressman at West Coast Litho, the poster read only "Be Aware." Powell felt that wasn't enough — that the swastika alone would shock people without telling them what to do with the shock. The question "Are We Next?" was added. The poster found its voice in the print shop.

This is why "Are We Next?" matters to the story told here. Historians often locate the birth of the psychedelic poster in the summer of 1965 — and they point to two posters: the Charlatans' Seed, made for a saloon in the Nevada desert, and this one, made by a man at an anti-war rally who had not yet drawn a single concert bill. One was about a show. The other was about a war. Within a year, the same hand that drew this would define the look of an entire movement at the Fillmore. The first psychedelic poster, it turns out, may not have been about music at all.

We do not know exactly when in 1965 it was printed. Sources place it in the summer, or that fall, distributed at Berkeley rallies. We date it to mid-1965 as a best guess, and say so plainly.