Britton Neubacher sat on the bookstore floor, cross-legged, paging through the oversized copy of "Plenty for All: The Art of Rick Fröberg."
Occasionally, she smiled to herself or ran her hand across an image on a page.
"Here's a lot of the band stuff. He was the artist for all of his band art — all the bands," she said, pointing out page after page of show posters and album art for Rick Fröberg's bands Drive Like Jehu, Hot Snakes and more.
Event: 'Plenty for All: The Art of Rick Fröberg'
Panel discussion and acoustic set with Rob Crow, Pall Jenkins, Sohrab Habibion, Britton Neubacher, Johnny Temple and Alexis Fleisig.
7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 20 | The Book Catapult, 3010-B Juniper St., South Park | Free
Neubacher, an artist and owner of Tend Living, met Fröberg when she was a teenager. The two remained friends for decades, until finally falling in love.
"Rick and I met in 1987. We became fast friends — over the course of our friendship, eventually partnered up, joined forces, both romantically and creatively, but above all, Rick was my friend," she said.
The couple collaborated on several artistic projects, including Neubacher's Art Alive installation at the San Diego Museum of Art and the otherworldly, intergalactic plant life decor in South Park's Mothership restaurant — which won a San Diego Architectural Foundation Orchid Award for interior design in 2024.
Fröberg died in 2023 at age 55. The news shook the local and national music scenes; his musical journey was one of those rare "made it" stories.
Through all of his musical success, he was always making art.
"Rick started drawing as soon as he was old enough to pick up a pencil, and he really never stopped," Neubacher said.
Almost immediately after his death, Neubacher and other close friends and collaborators started putting the wheels in motion on a project — one that Fröberg had discussed during his lifetime — that would eventually become "Plenty for All."
"A few of us friends, who had a lot of history and had actually made his art a study — and I would say even the man himself a study — informally got together and decided it was a good idea to move forward with that for him," she said.
Neubacher worked with a team to gather some of his visual art for the book — including Sohrab Habibion and Rich Jacobs, both of whom contributed short essays to the book.
"A lot of the work is gone. It's been given away mostly. He was not good at making money off of his work. He was not really interested in that. He did a lot of illustrative work for other bands, mostly friends, and everybody got a smoking deal. So Rick really didn't monetize his work, but for him the point was to make it and set it free," Neubacher said.
The group spent six months scanning Fröberg's archive and reaching out to collectors and fans.
"This has really been a labor of love in every respect," she said. "That was my purpose and my passion."
Johnny Temple, editor in chief of Akashic Books and friend of Fröberg, said that music and visual art are a natural pairing — tracing back to the development of the record.
"[The LP] is such an incredible format for visual art, a 12-inch-by-12-inch canvas. And I think that always, ever since there started to be LPs, visual art was always almost by definition linked to it. So it's really baked into it," Temple said. "I think that the visual art of Rick's that most people were familiar with was album art. And part of what is blowing people's minds about this beautiful book is how diverse Rick's visual art output was."
Even if fans appreciated his band-related art and posters, that is just a fraction of his body of work.
San Diegans may have a particular advantage in understanding Fröberg as a multi-talented creative. His posters still plaster the walls of venues and local spots like Fall Brewing, the Casbah stocks Fröberg-designed merch — and art galleries have even featured his work.
In 2022, local curator Melody Jean Moulton held a solo exhibition of Fröberg's visual art at her former South Park art space, Trash Lamb Gallery. The show was a success, with a line winding down the block and most of the art sold within the first few hours. An artist statement Fröberg wrote for that exhibit is also collected in the book.
The book is divided by medium, with chapters for pencil, pen and brush sketches; etchings, linocuts, woodcuts and other prints; band art; graphic design and commercial work; paintings, ink, and digital work; and watercolors. The pages showcase his range, talent and furious drive to create.
"He was incredibly prolific. I've known him for 40 years, and I myself was stunned by how much work he created and how much he saved," Neubacher said.
To celebrate the book's release locally, Rob Crow, Pall Jenkins, Alexis Feisig, Habibion, Temple and Neubacher will host a panel discussion and short acoustic tribute set at 7 p.m. Tuesday at The Book Catapult.
For Neubacher, it's been a long time coming.
"Being able to actually, in our own small way, advance his art so that more people can see the side of his talent that often gets overshadowed by his musical career," she said. "And to be able to give back in any way that we can from all of the inspiration that Rick planted in us at early ages that continued to enrich our lives in such a deep way. To be able to share that feels very meaningful and overdue actually. Not just timely but overdue."
Ultimately, she hopes the book sheds more light on a storied career.
"I also am excited for people to get maybe a more intimate sense of the person himself — a deeply complex and huge-hearted force of nature who could be at once so difficult to know and also so deeply easy to connect with," Neubacher said.
