‘Artlaw’ Boyd Elder’s ‘Chingadero Show,’ Venice, 4-2-72

Notorious Texas “artlaw” and Laurel Canyon-Troubadour fixture Boyd Elder displayed large-format acrylic pieces and other recent works at a one-man exhibit in Venice, California, he called the “El Chingadero Show” in April 1972.

The venue was a gallery in a former auto garage at 201 San Juan, just off Main Street.

Renowned surf-psychedelic poster artist artist Rick Griffin, an Elder friend and Chouinard Art Institute classmate a few years earlier, nicknamed him “El Chingadero” (Tex-Mex Spanglish for “The Fucker”). Griffin created a limited-edition poster for the Venice event that was folded and mailed to invitees (Boyd said Graham Nash paid for the postage). It’s now very rare, especially if unfolded, and/or signed by Elder or Griffin.

Another Elder friend and patron, rock and roll album cover art director Gary Burden, staged the exhibit’s opening reception on Easter Sunday, April 2, 1972.

With friends, patrons, and clients including Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Cass Elliot, David Geffen, Ned Doheny, Mark Volman, Joel Bernstein, and dozens more attending, the Laurel Canyon-Troubadour music and Venice art scenes gathered for a fiesta fit for El Chingadero.

Burden also invited a new group of Troubadour bar habitues signed to Geffen’s Asylum label to perform at the show. Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Randy Meisner, and Bernie Leadon, billing themselves as “Eagles,” played their first performance for an L.A. audience of their peers at the “Chingadero Show.”

The group had already recorded their first album in England with producer Glyn Johns, and Henry Diltz, the renowned photographer and also a close friend of Elder’s, had shot stills of the band during a peyote trip in Joshua Tree for the Burden-designed album package. Asylum was gearing up to launch a media blitz in May leading up to the album’s release on June 1.

Diltz also shot stills and some Super 8 footage of the jam session at the “Chingadero Show,” as Elder called it for short. Special thanks to Henry and Henry Diltz Photography for permission to reprint a few pics here.

Burden also shot some early video at the show (brief and different clips appeared in the 2007 BBC documentary “Hotel California: L.A. from the Byrds to the Eagles“; the 2012 PBS “American Masters” profile “Inventing David Geffen“; and the 2020 Epix Laurel Canyon documentary).

“We weren’t really fit for public presentation at that point,” Henley said about the “Chingadero Show” gig in the latter doc. “But we were just happy to be hanging out with that crowd. It was the greatest thing because all the people trying to write songs and trying to make records were very supportive of one another.”

Several months before the event, Griffin had sent Elder a special present for Christmas: a scalloped, painted, and pinstriped turkey breast.

After a fire a year later on May 31, 1973, in Elder’s garage studio on the family ranch in Valentine, Texas, destroyed most of his previous works and several in-progress pieces, he found inspiration in the ornate bone his friend had sent. Elder would create his best-known works – the series of painted and adorned animal skulls he called “American Fetish – RIP” – over the next few years.

Three of Elder’s “American Fetish” pieces and his lettering were featured on Eagles album covers: One of These Nights (1975); Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975) (1976; still the best-selling album in U.S. history at 40 million-plus and counting, certified quadruple Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America in its January 2026 tally); and The Very Best Of… (2003).

So untold millions of music fans around the world might not know Boyd Elder by name, but they know those images.

Read more about Boyd Elder aka “El Chingadero” here.

The art and story book “Boyd Elder, Artlaw: The Greatest Artist You’ve Never Heard Of” was in progress when he died. Coming someday maybe to a brick-and-mortar or online bookstore near you.

Stephen K. Peeples is a Grammy-nominated multi-media writer-producer and award-winning radio/record-industry veteran raised in Miami and Los Angeles by career newspaper journalists and music lovers. Introduced to Boyd Elder by mutual friend Henry Diltz, he wrote his first story about the “artlaw” in 1978. Peeples is based in Santa Clarita, California. See the “About” page on his website. More original stories and exclusive interviews are posted on that site and on his YouTube channel.

Article: Artlaw Boyd Elder’s ‘Chingadero Show,” Venice, 4-2-72
Category: Blasts From the Past
Author: Stephen K. Peeples
Article Source: stephenkpeeples.com