One of the most iconic pieces of artwork associated with Providence is a black and white poster with comic book panels that makes the city look like a film noir. Some people know it’s text by heart, which ends with a classic line: “Rich folks live on Power Street, but most of us live off Hope.”
The man who designed the poster, John Peck, recently passed away at the age of 83. Our reporter Ben Berke profiled The Mad Peck almost 10 years ago for the Providence Journal. Morning host Luis Hernandez talked with Ben about the eccentric poster artist, comic book historian, culture critic, and disc jockey.
TRANSCRIPT:
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Luis Hernandez: You met Peck, not that long ago – I mean, almost a decade ago. But really, how would you describe him and the way that he approached life?
Ben Berke: He was really brilliant. I mean, when you talked to him, you could tell he had a sharp wit and an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture for a very wide range of time. He seemed really committed to using these prodigious mental gifts that he had to focus on really low art, common stuff. He was obsessed with comic books, and bad TV, and records made for teenagers in the 50s and Fiestaware. I remember he told me he made a fortune on Fiestaware. He was like, “I knew instantly it would be a hit. I bought up a ton of it. I stored it for years and I sold it.” He was also kind of a hustler in that sense. He really liked buying things that other people didn’t think would be valuable, and he would sit on it and then he would sell it. And I think he preferred making his money that way, even though he could have made money doing almost anything. He was really that brilliant.
Hernandez: Ben, how did you meet The Mad Peck?
Berke: I was looking at the poster one day and I saw the little copyright mark on the bottom that said, “Copyright, The Mad Peck.” I just thought, “This poster is so brilliant. Who is this person?” I googled the words, The Mad Peck, and I found a website that had an email address on it, and I sent an email. I think I put my phone number in the email, and I woke up the next morning to a phone call from him and he was like, “Yeah, sure you wanna meet? Like, come on over.” He gave me an address. It was on America Street on Federal Hill, and I remember walking up and down the street.
I had a hard time finding the house. The house was one of those beautiful old Italianate houses, but it wasn’t in tip-top shape. When he opened the door, he had a striking figure – he was distressingly thin – and he invited me in. And when I first came in, I was like, “Oh man, this house is pretty messy. I don’t know what kind of situation I’m walking into.” But then as soon as we started talking, I started to trust him and really like him, because he was funny.
I realized a lot of the junk around us wasn’t junk. He’d be talking and he’d mention some comic book from the 70s and then he would stand up and he would go over to his insulated cardboard box that said “shrimp” on it and he would find the issue in just a second. He knew exactly where everything was. He had an amazing record collection of doo-wop and oldies, probably unrivaled in the region. It looked like a mess, but he knew where everything was.
Hernandez: Describe more of the poster because there’s something really unique about the style.
Berke: It looks like a comic book, a black and white comic book, Golden Age, like Batman in the 30s or 40s. Think that kind of aesthetic. It’s set up like a four-panel comic strip, basically, and it’s the text of the poster that makes it so iconic, and I’m just gonna read it out loud.
“Providence, Rhode Island where it rains two days out of three, except during the rainy season when it snows like a bitch. Friendship is a one-way street. Rich folks live on Power Street, but most of us live off hope.”
I mean, that is so brilliant and funny. Who’s gonna forget that after they read that? I was living on Power Street at the time. I lived on Hope Street too. He had a real feel for the heart of the city and he got it in that poster in so few words.
Hernandez: What did he say about the legacy of the poster?
Berke: The Providence poster, he loved it so much. I mean, he really sold it as something that almost anybody could buy. He wanted it at a reasonable price point so that it would spread throughout the city. You can, to this day, buy the poster at a place like Frog and Toad.
Hernandez: What did he say to you about the way people approach that poster today? I’d imagine there are people who have it and they may not even know who the artist is.
Berke: Yeah. He had kind of a funny relationship to the very small amount of fame and notoriety he got from that poster. I think he both enjoyed the attention if it was coming from somebody that he felt was maybe smart enough to see the whole shtick he was doing in every aspect of his art. But if somebody wanted to just snap a picture of him to put it up on social media, he was very hostile. I think he, at one point, dismantled a gallery show of his artwork because of some slight or something that he detected. In some ways he was very antifa. But I think he also was yearning to be understood in a deeper way. I think he also feared that the popularity of the poster made him seem like a one-hit wonder, when he had produced quite a lot of work as a young man that was also very clever and related to the comic book idiom.
Hernandez: Obviously, I’m someone who’s only been here for a little while, but I look at the poster and I’m wondering to myself, it’s 47 years, almost 50 years ago. I’m wondering how true is it still to this day?
Berke: Friendship is still a one-way street. Power Street, the houses still look pretty nice. I mean, Hope Street’s getting more expensive, but, you know, I think that’s still a place a lot of working-class folks live on or near.
Hernandez: Reading up on his life, one of the things I found interesting was that, in that era in the 70s and 80s, there’s this counterculture that really was happening here. How does he feel about what that era was like and how it shaped him?
Berke: He was in it. He was selling rock posters. He was selling rock T-shirts. He was selling comic book reviews of rock albums to Rolling Stone and Cream and all the famous magazines of that era. So he was part of the counterculture, but he was also one of those people that I think prefers to have a skeptical view of trends and fashions and society. He was countercultural and I think he started to see that there was a new form of cultural orthodoxy taking place as people started to adhere to this new norm of being a hippie. And he started to see that that could be a little silly and normative in this new way.
Hernandez: Ben, how do you think he would want to be remembered?
Berke: I think he’d wanna be remembered through his work. He was never really that hungry to be written about. He refused to be photographed ever, so he definitely wouldn’t wanna be remembered by a photograph. His work was brilliant and I think, like so many artists, that was the most comfortable way he knew how to interface with the world. He left a lot of good work behind so I’d say he’d want you to go find his stuff and read it.
