Orlando designer Jeff Matz revisits his Figurehead years at the History Center

As discussed earlier in these very pages, maverick concert promoter Figurehead (figureheaded by one Jim Faherty), for a halcyon period in the late 1980s and 1990s, attempted to do for Orlando what entities like Factory or 4AD did on a worldwide scale: Build a scene, promote and host adventurous music, make gorgeous artifacts promoting it, and have a ball while doing so, bottom line be damned.

So, as 4AD's Ivo Watts-Russell had Vaughan Oliver and Factory's Tony Wilson had Peter Saville, Faherty tasked a core cadre of adventurous designers to craft a stunning visual arm of his promotional enterprise. Thomas Scott, Jeff Matz, Scott Sugiuchi, Greg Reinel and Klaus Heesch did so more than ably. Though a later addition to the Figurehead fold, Matz — now of Lure Design — quickly made his reputation through alternately stunning, stately and eccentric poster/flyer designs for the likes of Low, Guided by Voices, Wilco and Melvins.

This weekend Matz will revisit those formative years as part of the History Alive program at the Orange County Regional History Center. Matz will do a screenprinting demo and take part in a walkthrough of the Music and Mayhem Figurehead retrospective exhibition.

Talking to Orlando Weekly recently, Matz recalled that the beginning of his partnership with Faherty was also almost the end: "The first poster he had me work on was for Anita Baker," remembers Matz. "It kind of sucked. And I really thought Jim wouldn't ask me to do another one after that."

Anita Baker poster merits aside, Matz was immediately tasked with many others by Faherty over the years of their partnership (including a poster for a young Low, who with that show became his favorite band) — with more or less complete aesthetic carte blanche.

"Jim trusted us enough to just to give us the work and allow us to do whatever we wanted," recalls Matz.

Though primarily influenced by commercial graphic design rather than music media, Matz's methods were just as eclectic. He would do collage work for flyers, spin out a single lyric from a headlining band into an entire design schema, or in the case of a Melvins poster, interpret a raw and visceral heavy sound into a flyer featuring a "bloody slab of raw meat." All very much working from the guts and the heart rather than traditional promo strategies.

Remembering one favorite, Matz breaks down his process: "Guided by Voices had a song called 'Gold Star for Robot Boy' and I took an image of an old robot, put a little boy's head on it, and we glued a gold star to the top of the thing. So it was a literal visual representation of the song title."

Though Matz and Lure don't do much in the way of concert promotional material in the present, he still credits his Figurehead work and colleague Thomas Scott as being pivotal to his career. A poster design for a Wilco show at Firestone blossomed into more posters for the band and eventually Lure Paper Goods, producing graphically striking cards, journals and posters: "None of that would have happened without this experience starting all that."