The photo used for this poster was taken by David Warrington, a professional photographer from Oregon who's been snapping Neil for quite some time now (primarily performance photos). He's also snapped the Grateful Dead and other big West Coast bands. He's proud of the fact that a crowd shot he took during a Dead concert became Bill Graham's favorite poster.

His photo above was quite the accident, though. Turns out that David was on the way to Neil's performance at The Gorge in 1993 (with Booker T & The MGs) when he caught up with Neil & Co. out cruising on bikes. Neil took a wrong exit, David caught up with him and re-introduced himself, and Neil agreed to a few "Somewhere On A Desert Highway" shots.

(A note about the picture of the poster up above: the distortions near the bottom of the picture are only in the digitized picture - they are NOT present on the actual poster. They were introduced during the scanning process.)

To my knowledge, this is the first actual "poster" Neil has authorized for sale. (Steve Babineau's photos aren't really "posters", they're enlarged photographic prints.) All of the other Neil posters I've seen weren't produced "for sale", they were produced for promotional purposes (e.g., album or show promotion or advertising).

Regarding the Rust & Chrome signature, it's my understanding that this is the first time that Neil has made a direct reference, in writing, to the Rust List. Of course he did it in his usual ambiguous way... (Is it really OUR Rust he's talking about? Sure is!   :-)

About the Harley Davidson motorcycle that Neil is riding: The bike is a Harley "Fat Boy", with custom paint including Dream Catchers and Broken Arrows.

Virtually nobody (except The Bridge School) got any profit from this poster:

• David Warrington donated the photo, all photographic developing, a fair amount of postage and cross-country long-distance calls, and his time spent working with the printer.
• The printer, Northwest Printing of Portland, Oregon, gave us a major break on the cost of the printing and paid for the shipping of the printed posters from Oregon to Florida.
• The company that did the high resolution scanning of the photographic master to prepare color separations for printing gave us some small break (though I consider their cost to be way overboard to start with).
• The company that produced the tubes that will be used to ship these posters sold them to us wholesale (though no extra discount was involved).
• I've made lots of long distance calls, gave Pegi & Neil my own original purchased copy of the photo to keep, picked up the shipping tubes 75 miles from home (to save shipping cost), made scores of trips to the post office, contributed some supplies (tape, etc), fronted all the advance costs, and expended mucho time in processing the orders.

To avoid even the slightest possible hint of inpropriety in the handling of the money involved in this project, I opened a seperate checking account for managing the funds ("Bridge School Fund"), and kept "the books" right here on HyperRust for all to see.

In short: EVERY POSSIBLE CENT went to The Bridge School. I did not start reimbursing my front money until after $2000 in contributions had been made to the school, and I only re-imbursing myself gradually, between donations to the school. It was almost two years before my front-money funds were fully recouped.

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