Sean Carroll sounds every bit a man content to play hard to get.
Or, in his case, hard to poster.
Carroll, who grew up in Sandusky and now lives a few blocks from downtown, for years has been the man behind one-man operation
Sandusky Bay Poster Works, through which he’s created posters for concerts in Cleveland, Detroit and beyond.
“I do everything by hand – my press is in my basement,” Carroll says during a recent phone interview. “For about a five-year stretch, I did about a hundred posters a year.
“It was just a stupid amount of posters.”
Those days are over.
Probably, kinda sorta. But we’ll get back to that.
As you’d guess, Carroll grew up loving rock music and art, and he remembers drawing a poster for a Michael Stanley Band concert at Blossom Music Center for a high school art class project.
There was a flirtation with studying architecture, but he ended up attending the since-closed Art Institute of Pittsburgh, where he met his wife, Linda.
Although the idea to create rock posters had been kicking around his head in his 20s, he says, the “kick in the ass” came in the mid-’90s’ when grunge rock gave way to punk.
“That, literally, was what motivated me to do it – I wanted to go to a lot more shows,” Carroll says.
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Carroll advertised Green Day's 2015 Cleveland concert in poster form. (Photo/Courtesy of Sean Carroll)It started out with him hauling posters to shows in Cleveland, selling them to fans outside venues. From time to time, he’d encounter a musician, such as a member of Bad Religion, who told him his poster was awesome and asked if he could send some to the band.
“I was like, ‘I could be on to something here,’” Carroll recalls.
Venue-approved jobs followed – making posters for shows at the Beachland Ballroom, Peabody’s DownUnder, the Odeon, etc. – as did more bands taking notice. He met Less Than Jake frontman Chris DeMakes and signed a poster for him, which was the beginning of a long-term relationship with the punk act.
“I've done so many posters for Less Than Jake -- I can't even tell you how many it's been over the years,” he says.
The list of bands and shows he’s done concerts for rocks on and on. Motion City Soundtrack. Panic! at the Disco. Nine Inch Nails. Pearl Jam.
Among his career highlights are seeing his work included in books about rock posters, selling a Henry Rollins poster to huge music-industry figure Clive Davis at an event at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and impressing someone who’s done design work for legendary punk act The Ramones, who told Carroll his work suggests he understood the artists and the kids who like them better than most.
“My head grew seven times bigger that day,” he says.
While continuing to crank out posters, he eventually took a gig as an “event runner” for Live Nation.
“I, for lack of a better term, was the ‘band bitch,’” Carroll says. “The band needs laundry done – I take the laundry in. Or they need groceries or they need beer or whatever – that’s what I ended up doing.”
It all became a lot, and then came the pandemic. He was at a Northeast Ohio venue the day the state shutdown that March, and he soon wasn’t busy with anything music-related.
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One of the many posters Carroll has created is for the rock band The Aquabats. (Photo/Courtesy of Sean Carroll)“I found I didn’t miss it,” he says, referring specifically to the 90-minute trek to Cleveland – along with the drive home in the early morning hours on a poorly lit two-lane highway – and often working on posters when he got home. “‘You know,’ he thought, ‘I don’t need to do this anymore.’
“At that point, I wasn’t sure I’d even do another poster.”
Plus, he was becoming busier with
The Frozen Tiki.
“My wife and I thought it was a brilliant idea to open an ice cream cart downtown,” he says. “Who knew because of COVID nobody could do anything, so all people did was go out and walk around outside.”
Carroll says he enjoys a tradition that has developed with Frozen Tiki – “When the sun's going down, we play Journey's ‘Lights’ and everybody sings along and we all applaud,” he says – and he’s also working for a local screen printing shop that’s long helped him out.
“I don’t really have a lot of time in my life left for stuff.”
In fact, he’s repeatedly told people he’s “retired” from poster creation, but that’s not exactly true. He’s made one here and there when asked and knows that will continue. For instance, he’s unlikely to refuse anything asked of him by the Less Than Jake guys.
“I can tell you I’m not going to be doing stupid amounts of stuff – I’m happy if I’m doing one to two posters a month,” he says. “I’m not opposed to doing a poster for any band at this point, but if they’re not friends, they’re going to have to pay me a stupid amount of money to do it.
“I know there are people out there getting stupid amounts of money doing it.”