Insert Foot visits the Fillmore concert poster room. Original image: Mike DeWald/STAFF.

I had a dilemma this week. A very first world problem, not a “Sophie’s Choice” kind of dilemma.

It was more like that feeling well-off suburbanites get when forced to park their SUV an extra row away from the gym’s front door, making them very irritated when walking an extra seven yards to go exercise. My mom was planning some redecoration and asked me if I wanted my framed print of The Floor Scrapers by French impressionist Gustave Caillebotte. She bought it for me years ago and promptly hung it in her own home so she could be reminded daily what wonderful taste she has in gifts.

This sounds pretty ironic until I remember the Christmas I bought an 8-year-old girl  (my daughter) a PlayStation, then immediately used it until it just about exploded. Once she started beating me at Mortal Kombat, it was time to find a new shared activity.

So I started looking around my apartment for a space to put my new/old print because I really do love it. I then realized I have no wall space. That means I either need a bigger place to live (I do) or even a piece of “real” art I love isn’t good enough to replace something I already have on the wall. I started looking around and wondered what another grown person would think of my décor.

It’s mostly rock art. It’s all stuff to which I feel very connected. Some of it was given to me when I worked for a SoCal art publisher (for whom the pop culture artist Jim Evans also worked, which allowed me to see a lot of the magnificent concert art of the ’90s actually being created). Much of my collection is from the Fillmore and Warfield, when I was a full-time music writer, and is on the wall simply to remember so many amazing nights. And most of it is in closets where I can’t see it.

I guess it still represents who I still am or still want to be. It’s definitely about the experiences upon which I’m built. Which of course includes pictures of, and by, my kids.

I never understood my friends who lived in what looked like model homes decorated by someone else. They were nice, often expensive homes, to be sure. But sterile and somewhat lifeless. Seeing someone’s walls is a great clue as to who they are.

All of us decorate with other people’s opinions in mind. But that seems to be less of a motive as we age. At least at my house. Maybe I need to throw more parties.

Concert art is a way of saying “Look at all the cool places I’ve been.” But it’s more than that. It represents communities, memories, times in our lives when perhaps we were more optimistic and hopeful, and feelings we want to have again.

I had a good friend named Paul Grushkin, who was once the archivist for Bill Graham Presents. Later he wrote books like “The Art of Rock,” “The Art of Modern Rock,” and “Rockin’ Down the Highway,” which chronicled the connection between rock and roll and cars.

They’re gorgeous coffee table books, mostly on the connection between live music and the art made specifically for those events.

Paul and I tried collaborating a few times and spent some together during the aughts. His business was these books and he never got tired of discussing the magic of music and the magic of art and when he’d get to the part about combining them, his eyes always lit up like those of a child at the gates of Disneyland.

I’ve honestly never met anyone who loved rock and roll as much as Paul without being an actually working musician – and more than almost all of them – and that love manifested itself through the artwork.

Paul’s memories of everything in his collection were more impressive. Each piece was like a time capsule packed with stories and, for a true music lover, the magic just about spilled out of his words.

“ECHO: A Survey at 25 Years of Sound, Art, and Ink on Paper.”

San Francisco, Bill Graham Presents and the Fillmore may be best known nationwide for its rich concert poster traditions, but we’re not the only ones. We were recently mailed a new coffee table book of concert posters and related art from Phish territory — Burlington, Vt. — where another music hall rich in history, Higher Ground, has been working with art firm Solidarity of Unbridled Labour for years. That’s what got us thinking about this.

“ECHO: A Survey at 25 Years of Sound, Art, and Ink on Paper” has a beautiful matte finish and includes not only hundreds of prints (a bit like the Fillmore poster room) but the stories behind the art and the concerts. It’s like a mobile museum.

There’s the original poster for Anaïs Mitchell’s “Hadestown” tour, a forward by Jeff Tweedy, an exploration of silkscreen printmaking and the story of the partnership that has been merging art and music for more than a quarter of a century.

I no longer own a turntable, but I still own all my records from when I was a kid. Mostly because of the album covers, which – just like what we hang on our walls – was a big statement about the musicians making the music. Looking at those covers reconnects me to the kid who spent hours staring at the covers while listening to the music.

It’s a different experience now, which is probably why concert art was rejuvenated around the same time physical albums went away. They affected how we heard the music by which many of us identified ourselves. The art still does it.

Now excuse me while I go find a new place with more wall space.

Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.