Head Lights
by Bob Moses
We just want to share the high, I suppose. The moment. The images we see, the pulse we feel, the inward journey, the memories and emotions. The most abstract of human expression, music exists entirely within each listener’s brain, filtered through natural or learned abilities, physical or mental disabilities. But we have an insatiable urge to blast it outside our heads and onto a wall. To transform it into color, or movement or pixels or all of the above at once. The liquid light shows that decorated the consciousness of the ‘60s were perhaps that urge’s most vivid expression.
Ken Brown was a member of the Road Light Show in Boston, making films for The Boston Tea Party from 1967 to 1969 (the other members of Road were Roger Thomas — founder, now deceased — John Boyd, and Deb Colburn). As the Tea Party was Boston’s ballroom equivalent of SF’s Avalon or the bi-coastal Fillmores, their work enhanced performances by the major acts of the time, from Jimi Hendrix to the Velvet Underground (on multiple occasions). As he recalls in our video interview, their work was of a piece with the light shows coming out of San Francisco and New York. Using slide projectors, movie projectors, overhead projectors with dishes and lenses filled with colorful — and proprietary — chemical mixtures, these light artists wove thick layers of multiple images, pulsing lights, and bending, shifting shapes. Ken’s film work, as seen in his Psychedelic Cinema DVD and in our clip, added a uniquely Boston element to the formula: you can dance, but you’re also going to think. Political commentary pops from the pulse; the foundation for Ken’s later animation work appears in antic cut-out and collage work.
The Boston Tea Party signKen’s Psychedelic Cinema was presented in January at Anthology Film Archives in New York, part of a two-night retrospective of his film work. The show was presented again at Brooklyn’s Monkeytown in June, and will be seen in Boston at the Coolidge Corner Cinema in September. The light show is accompanied by a live band – as liquid light shows really should be — that includes Chris Butler on drums, Ken Sirulnick on guitar, Jeff Rabb on keyboards, Bill Janoff on hand percussion and Bob Moses (yes, me) on bass. Largely improvised on original tunes by Sirulnick amid echoes of authentic ‘60s psychedelia, the music operates in a backward relationship to music than its first incarnation. While the original shows responded to the music emanating from the stage, floating above and responding to the beat and melodies, we reflected in sound the imagery looming over our heads, whether ethereal, bucolic, or propulsive.
We aimed for the same effect as the original shows: synaesthesis, the merging of two senses into one. From Sir Isaac Newton’s time (it’s thought that his somewhat arbitrary assignment of seven shades on our color spectrum come from the number of steps in the Western music scale), through various color organs, Royal Fireworks Musics, color symphonies and scholarly studies, composers, researchers and scientists have tried to create associations between our visual and aural sensations, stimulating bursts of color with sound. Who knew you just needed a ghost-town dive bar full of heads?
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