Light shows 1967: Part One

Light shows 1967: Part One

by Don Paulson - SGN Contributing Writer The hippie "summer of love" pilgrimage of the late 1960s was not, of course, exclusively straight. Gays played roles as participants, musicians, management and light show artists. Gays were generally accepted but this was before Stonewall. The term originated by a remark about Civil War confederate General, Stonewall Jackson, who "held on to his battlefield position like a stone wall." The Big Bang was the first light show, and people have tried to capture its essence ever since. As an art form, four artists put on a light show in San Francisco's Morrison Planetarium by projecting on the dome patterns, colors and moving shapes in a vortex of sound. This inspired a lot of multimedia interest - beats used lighting effects at poetry and jazz recitals, and with the emergence of hallucinogenic drugs, experimentation with psychedelic effects was done in hip living rooms up and down the coast. Light shows quickly became a staple in the rock 'n' roll palaces. I was head of Lux Sit light show, five straight and three Gay, their boyfriends, a variety of light show helpers and even a few groupies (some of us got lucky). It was a spirited time, a quasi-revolutionary happening, short-lived but with far-reaching, positive 21st century results. Carol Burns of the Union Light Co. light show company said, "I thought that we had discovered a new way to make people happy." It was a unique opportunity to explore a new medium and thrilling to create moving landscapes of swirling shapes and colors, patterns, prisms, and slides of real objects - all taken out of context and woven into surrealistic scenarios coming in and out of view, in sync with the beat of rock music and the brutal flash of the strobe light. The most shocking effect was selecting an image and projecting it a thousand times bigger, a sexy provocative image or a flower - or, at the outdoor Bullfrog Music Festival, with the Jefferson Airplane playing on stage, I projected on a hillside an image of the American flag as tall as an eight-story building and a city block long. Overhead exploded a spectacular fireworks display. Five thousand people stood up and cheered. It was a showbiz moment. Our biggest light show was the Trips Festival at the Seattle Arena, 10,000 feet of light show and billed as the biggest light show on earth, starring the Byrds, the Jefferson Airplane and Don and the Good Times - I was frantic to cover such a large area so I hired anyone who was warm and had a projector. The show went well until someone came up to the light show platform and demanded one of our helpers stop projecting snakes and lizards because a lot of people were on LSD and were freaking out! I knew he was projecting his rubber play reptiles but I was unaware just what he was doing with them. He placed them on the overhead projector - shocking, fifty-foot Godzillas - and started cutting them up with scissors and making it appear the creatures were alive and writhing in pain. For blood he used red food coloring. I was shocked and stopped it immediately. Light shows have a responsibility not to abuse the power of suggestion or to mindfuck! We did a show with the Allman Brothers - I had rescued an insecure dog from the dog pound who stuck to me like glue. One member of the band insinuated over the speaker system that my dog and I are so close we must be having a sexual affair! He needed to be tied up& Our smallest show was for the Rainbow Girl Scouts. I was to give a talk on art but showed the girls how to do a light show instead. The mothers were a little upset and one took her daughter and left, but the girls had a good time. Lux Sit were practicing light show effects at the Eagles Auditorium when the Grateful Dead came in and also started practicing for a show that night. For a while it was a real pleasure to rehearse together but the Dead began to complain that our lights were distracting them. But they were not polite about it and referred to us as those 'goddamned lights!' Well, we had a bad day, too, and said we can't practice with that 'goddamned music," and we were here first, so go to hell! Then all verbal hell broke loose, cussing each other out. We would have let them have their way at the start, as we loved their music, but they started it - did not, did too - and we soon let them have their way and consoled ourselves at having the opportunity and privilege of fighting with a famous rock band!