Putting the 'Sting' into dancehall posters

Mel Cooke, Gleaner Writer

The poster for Sting, the mega concert at Jam World, Portmore, St Catherine, dubbed 'The Greatest One-Night Show on Earth', is as much a landmark as the event itself.

DiMario McDowell does many things which put him in the public eye (among them singing - he won his first trophy in a church-singing competition when he was nine years old), but it is the Sting poster which pulls the most public eyes towards his work.

His work in fusing graphics and music did not start with Sting (in fact, it was two years after he met SupremePromotions head Isaiah Laing in 1984 that McDowell got a crack at the top poster and still does it, up to the 2009 staging). He started out by hand doing a batch of about 24 posters for the Tastee Talent Contest.

And he launched out as an Excelsior High School boy, making the trek up Mountain View Avenue to the Inner City Promotions office, where he met Lois Grant and Mike Tommlinson.

"I wanted to make money on the side. I wanted to be an entrepreneur," McDowell said.

"I went specifically to do graphics. At the time I did not know the word 'prospecting'."

He was heading away from not only his high school, but also his parents' hopes for what he would do to earn money.

"I was sure I could have done it. My parents were not in agreement that I should do graphics. They wanted me to do something more solid, like engineering, construction, anything."

McDowell is quick to point out that "when I went into the business I was not the only person doing this", naming Bagga Case, Paul Aiken, Paco and well-known cartoonist Limonious among those who would design posters, heavily utilising caricatures.

King of album covers

Neville Garrick, renowned for his work with Bob Marley and the Wailers, "was the king of the album covers".

So "we knew all these pretty things were possible", McDowell said.

Possible, but not easy. McDowell did small signage (like 'no parking') for Inner City Dancehall's 'Saturday Nite Live' at Harbour View Drive-In in 1983, then met Laing at singer, producer and emcee Tommy Cowan's home in 1984, the same year he went to do graphic arts at the School of Art at the now Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. Laing was doing sound clashes and smaller events at the time, but Sting was in the offing. And McDowell saw a graphic possibility in it.

"I thought that, more or less, the poster was regular, and if we could get something exciting going we could build on a niche market and excite that niche market and maybe elicit support from other people," he said.

"It is like you wanted to do a Jamaican roots play in this time but you wanted to do it so beautifully that you could put it on at Carib on Christmas morning.

"I did not know how to term it, but I knew what I wanted."

In 1986, he came up with the snake logo for Sting, going to the University of the West Indies library to get the image and then having the songs coming out of its open, long-fanged mouth. It created a firestorm of publicity, and then in 1987 the image was changed to the bee, those first designs using the busybody insect filling the entire poster.

McDowell recalls how the Sting posters caught the public imagination, this especially so in an era of limited media, where the artistes were more heard than their images seen.

Many were taken down off walls and put in people's homes. In at least one instance someone putting them up was attacked and posters stolen. They were sent overseas to friends and family, and in one striking case, a poster over a man's bed may have saved him a lot of trouble when the police came calling, as he used it to identify himself as working for Laing putting up Sting posters.

Although the Sting posters are his most renowned work, McDowell points out that in the mid-1980s to late 1990s there was a season of about 26 shows in as many days, from December 1 through to Boxing Day, Supreme Promotions handling about half of them. And McDowell did posters for them all.

'Inseparable' posters

He also did posters for the 'Inseparable' series, centred around Dennis Brown, and the 'Fresh' beach concert series.

The technical process was tedious, McDowell talking about cutting and pasting pictures, separation and then sending the project on for separation burn. "It was never ever get up and press a button," he said, identifying Sting '92 and '93 as especially difficult years.

He said Steve Hewitt and 'Mikey' from Lithographic were the best strippers in Jamaica, and "they did 148 burns to burn the poster - and the poster had to be done in three parts". Then there was going to Jacksonville, United States, for the first Sting colour poster and encountering racism.

Even at home there was some opposition, as there were those who told Laing that Sting was already known and he need not waste money on the poster, but Laing stuck with the landmark poster.

The Sting poster has had a tremendous impact.

"People say I have made a great contribution to the music, because signing and branding are now buzzwords that never existed in my days," McDowell said.

And he pays homage to those who had a kind word in the very early days.

"I met some good people when I got into the business, people like Sassafras, Paco, Bagga Case, Paul Aiken, Limonious, Linval Gibbon, all of whom were good to me. You had some who gave me hell, but not these people," McDowell said.