Maybe you should hear the band first. Here’s a short, non-litigious clip of the opening of “Ebeneezer,” by Shiva’s Headband:
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They were my favorite local Austin psychedelic rock band. When an art student friend of mine asked me to help run a light show for their next gig, I was ecstatic! The year was maybe 1966; the place, a rough little boogie joint in East Austin. What a bunch of white hippies playing in a band led by an crazy bearded guy with an electric fiddle were doing in a black club on the other side of town is something of a mystery, but that’s the way it was back then — only in Texas, and the essence of Austin.
I was half scared to death just to venture onto the east side, which shows you how naive I was at the time. I don’t remember much about the venue, but I don’t think many people were there except for a few regular patrons. There was a little stage at the far end of the room, and my friend and I set up his equipment near the front, just inside the door.
The really cool thing was that light shows for rock bands was still a very new phenomenon. We’d heard about what was going on in San Francisco using overhead projectors, but no one was hip to that yet in Austin — it wouldn’t take long, though. What we did have were two battered 16 mm film projectors, a shopping bag full of assorted film clips from a University of Texas trash can, and an assortment of colored pieces of glass, translucent plastic, and the like. With both projectors running at once, we each grabbed strips of film at random and ran them on through, altering the projected images by manipulating the colored bits in front of the lenses, tilting or shaking the projectors, and anything else we could think of. Sometimes the strips of film would get jammed in the projector and melt, creating an awesome visual backdrop for the music. At other times, the superimposed moving images were either impossibly weird or just hilarious. Every moment was completely improvised, and I was in heaven: it was one of the most exciting and satisfying things I’ve ever done in my life.
Oh, and that sound! VERY loud and inaccessible for most of the audience, it gave me goosebumps…
A few weeks or months later, my friend and I put on a couple of light shows at the Vulcan Gas Company on South Congress for Shiva’s Headband and The Conqueroo. By then he’d learned the overhead projector & colored liquid trick, but I still got to play with the 16 mm. It was a hoot and a half, although never quite as much of a thrill as that first night in East Austin. Being in on the beginning of the creation of a completely new cultural form like that was electrifying to me, and in that respect, I honestly can’t recall a better time: every morning I’d wake up with my heart pounding, anxious to get up, circulate, and find out what new wildness was in the air.
The current zeitgeist could NOT be more different! I’d like to find a way to communicate this more directly — so many people seem to have it mostly wrong about those days.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
First, please let me say that your perspective, your sense of your place in the world and the way you write about it really resonates with me. Or put another way, I love this blog!
I don’t go to big-time concerts any more, but the ones I see on TV have giant walls of flashing lights behind and surrounding the performers, all manner of theatrical stage lighting as well as banks of spinning, pulsing, undulating disco fixtures, and all of it is timed flawlessly to the music. I’m sure it’s run by computers, so nothing is left to chance.
By contrast, what you were doing in 1966 was pure chance, and the unpredictability of it was pretty much the point (From the sound of it, the band wasn’t completely sure where they were going next, either.). I especially like the fact that the film would burn occasionally, not only producing a spectacular effect on the screen, but also guaranteeing that your exact performance would never be seen again.
None of this would be acceptable today. The performers have to put on perfect shows, to protect their reputations (for putting on perfect shows), so that everyone will feel like they got good value for their ticket purchase, so more tickets will be sold for the next show, so the band and the ancillary circus known as The Music Business can — say it with me — make more money.
Of course there are still garage bands all around the country playing their hearts out in similar spirit to those guys in 1966, but it seems to me that they are marginalized by the fact that the audience at a single Madonna concert dwarfs all the fans of all the indie bands at all the venues in all the cities of America. You can say you’re playing just for fun or for the pure creative joy of it, but you are validated by people coming to participate.
To sum up: It’s the money.
It’s a sad state of affairs, but on the bright side I’m glad you had a rock’n'roll birthday, and I wish you as many more of them as you can stand.
Jesus, this is the best blog comment in the whole freaking world. I’ll have more to say, hopefully, when I recover from TONIGHT’s gig, the third in five days!
Thank you Larry, and I hope you come back soon. It looks like I have a million things to write about, and I’ve just gotten started.
GOD…I wish I could express myself like Larry…..BUT….”What he said…” John…..HA!
Good job Larry…(and coming from an ex-musician myself!)