NewEnglandFilm.com

On February 9, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston presents Psychedelic Cinema, a retrospective of the collection of 8mm films, originally projected at The Boston Tea Party concert hall in the 1960s. MA Native, Ken Brown directed the films, more than 40 years ago, for projection at the light shows to accompany some of the legendary music performances of the psychedelic era. A live musical performance will accompany Brown’s film performed by a group of silent film accompanists, including Ken Winokur, percussionist in Cambridge-based Alloy Orchestra. NewEnglandFilm.com writer, Dave Walker talks with Brown and Winokur about their work and offers a glimpse of what it might have felt like to be a part of the countercultural revolution.

Brown’s 1960s Light Show Films

It was 1967, and Ken Brown was 23-years-old. He had just landed a gig as the resident filmmaker and projectionist at The Boston Tea Party, a rock and blues club that served as the premiere Boston music hall of the time. Brown’s guidelines were simple – shoot and project footage that would reflect the spirit of the times and embellish the music. Brown shot with a Fujica Single-8 — the only camera that would allow him to film, rewind, and film again, creating double- and sometimes triple-exposures. While he tried systematic fades in and out so that the film would not wash out, each roll came back from the lab a surprise. Short animated motifs and jaunts through the city would fold back on footage of his friends, nature, or the light projections themselves. “Sometimes, literally it was cinema magic,” Brown recollects. “It’s kind of a risky game, but I’ve always done it – trying things, experimenting. Most of the time, during that period, the experiments worked.”

His films emulate the work of Stan Brakhage, an experimental filmmaker exploring similar techniques at the time, like collage animation, in-camera editing, and multiple exposures. While Brown admired Brakhage’s films, his own creations are unique. They unfold like an undulating veil, as if successive layers of vision and hallucination are being pulled away, revealing deeper and deeper levels of consciousness.

The club played sounds with a new and raw style, drenched in volume and frayed with distortion. Amidst driving rhythms and swirling guitars, the songs conjured beatific visions and strange trips deep into the mind, while vocalizing the discontent of a restless generation. Brown suddenly found himself, in the throes of a new countercultural movement, shooting the reels of film to be cast onto the walls behind some of its most iconic figures. His films, at times conveyed something slow and hypnotic, other times quick and feverish, cutout animations mixed with nature footage or human portraiture; then dissolving into kaleidoscopic pools of color and light. Interwoven with the music and light show, the films contributed to a dense, audiovisual tapestry, and over the next two years, they accompanied performances by the likes of The Who, The Velvet Underground, Santana, Sly and Family Stone, and Jimi Hendrix.

None of it was planned. In his first job during college, Brown worked as a film projectionist at an educational film studio in Watertown, MA. The job gave him access to 8mm projectors, which he took down to a church youth night on Beacon Hill to project the reels of film he was shooting in his free time. At one of these raucous youth nights, three other young hippies, Roger Thomas, John Boyd, and Deb Colburn, approached Brown. Impressed by the ebullient energy coming through his films, they told Brown that his movies might make a nice addition to the lightshow they ran at The Boston Tea Party under the moniker “The Road.” Brown joined the group.

At the time, light shows were becoming an integral part of rock music performances in both the U.S. and England. Sometimes employing dozens of large projectors, light designers would mix layers of colored mineral oil, alcohol, and other liquids of varying viscosity under the heat of the projection lamps. The morphing color patterns that ensued conveyed the changing emotional states of a musical performance. These “liquid light shows” played at other major venues around the country like The Electric Circus, The Avalon Ballroom, The Winterland Ballroom, and Fillmores East and West. Brown’s films became central to The Boston Tea Party’s shows, unlike other clubs, which commonly included assortments of stock footage to support light projections, strobes, and other elements.

Regardless of their oft-debated consciousness-expanding powers, psychotropic substances played a pivotal role in the visual language of the day, and particularly the aesthetic of the light shows. As the use of marijuana (and it’s hemp-derivative delta 8 THC), amphetamines, LSD, and other drugs expanded, the first-person experiences and lexicon surrounding them became embedded in popular culture, spawning a variety of new graphical styles and visual paraphernalia.

The lightshows at rock concerts not only siphoned the garish imagery of LSD trips, but they fueled the explorations into altered states. Brown is candid about the blurred line between self-discovery and indulgence: “I always remember these kids would come in and say, ‘Turn on the strobes!’ and they would whirl around and fall on the floor. It was part of the scene.”

But within the spectrum of audiences flowing into The Boston Tea Party, there were plenty of concertgoers who appreciated the lightshows as a complementary and nuanced element of the show. Sometimes the members of The Road would slow the projectors down, as far as six frames per second, to synchronize with the music. The team often worked spontaneously – choreographing the light shows on the fly. “I didn’t always know who was playing or what,” Brown concedes, “But we would do it for three or four nights in a row and usually by the last night [of a run], we were really getting in the groove.”

As their own brand of visuals gained prominence, other venues throughout New England hired The Road to do light shows. “I did one show with Jimi Hendrix at the Rhode Island Civic Center,” Brown reminisces. “I still remember hanging from the rafters, projecting films onto these circular screens made with parachute material. Huge hoop screens, dangling from the ceiling. And here’s Hendrix in what turned out to be probably the last six months of his life…What a moment to be hanging from the rafters.”

“We were all getting pretty good at it,” Brown continues, “and then the whole scene kind of faded out at the same time.” In 1971, due to financial difficulties and changing music tastes, The Boston Tea Party closed for good. But Brown and the other members of The Road had already left by the summer of 1970. For Brown, the dissolution of the light show reflects the movement’s darker side. All of their projectors were stolen, allegedly by The Hell’s Angels, and by the early 1970s the light show phenomenon, at least live projections with film and liquids, was on its way out. The emergence of outdoor festivals and arena rock concerts made the small, rock hall obsolete. Perhaps the heyday of the countercultural moment was also flaming out, its reckless, hedonistic pursuits run dry, its idealism falling into cliché, and its trademarks assimilated by mainstream society.

Rediscovering a Cultural Artifact

Thirty-five years later, Brown, was working as an illustrator and photographer in New York, as his old film reels collected dust in a closet of his apartment. He produced and directed dozens of short commissions for MTV, VH1, Sesame Street, AMC, among other clients. While he looks back on those years fondly, Brown is cautious of labels and hints that he never fully identified with the psychedelic and counterculture movements. He calls himself a survivor of the “psychedelic wars,” not one of its champions. “I never really followed [psychedelic music]…Truthfully, when I was making [the films], I wasn’t really thinking about that very much.” For Brown, the notion that there may still be some value or purpose awaiting those old light show movies didn’t occur to him until he attended a show on “The Summer of Love and The Art of the Psychedelic Era” with his daughter Jemma at the Whitney Museum in 2007. Inside the exhibit, they stepped into one of the lightshow displays and talked about how his films might have fit in with these light projections. He realized that his films might be a noteworthy piece among the assemblage of relics from the psychedelic era.

He transferred his films to digital and condensed his footage from two and a half years at The Boston Tea Party down to a fifty-five minute compilation. This screened at the Anthology Film Archive in New York City, alongside a retrospective of his short films from the last forty years. That theater, which was founded in 1970 by filmmaker and cinephile Jonas Mekas as a shrine for film art and a repository of independent and avant-garde cinema, gives the film a degree of artistic stature. But Brown says he hesitates to treat it as a complete work in its own right, at least not in the same sense as his illustrations, photography pieces, or short films. He says he believes the interest in the film is partly due to the circumstances of its creation, calling it “pop culture artifact,” a term which downplays his own artistry.

“In its original state, I meant for [the footage] to be shown in little clips between sets and during the performance. Done in random ways and hardly ever sustained in any way,” Brown explains. Even at this first public showing, live music accompanied the film to provide a narrative hook that, for him, justified a longer period of attention. “I love the fact that it’s a silent film that mutates to the music,” he muses. “Or the music mutates to it.”

Live Music Reinvigorates The Film At the ICA

Ken Winokur, a percussionist in the famed Alloy Orchestra, a Cambridge-based music ensemble that performs live scores to silent films and classic movies says, “The film is very amorphous. It doesn’t have a plot and characters to it so almost any music seems to naturally be fitted to it.”

Winokur is part of the musical ensemble accompanying the film at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The eclectic instrumentation accompanying the film is one of the legacies of psychedelic rock: the fusion of seemingly disparate musical elements. The new group is a mix of performers from the best bands doing live scores of films – Winokur (percussion), Beth Custer (clarinet) of Clubfoot Orchestra, and Jonathan LaMaster (violin, guitar, bass) of the Boston-based Cul de Sac.

Winokur says he plans to incorporate an audio collage of distinctive voices from the era, everything from Richard Nixon to Abbie Hoffman to the Black Panthers, which will form a kind of subconscious, continually bubbling up from beneath the music. “If you don’t hallucinate during the performance, you’re not paying attention,” he quips.

Improvisation will also play a role in Winokur’s interpretation of the film. Psychedelic music was deeply indebted to jazz, whose bebop structures laid the foundation for guitar solos and extended jams, which became exploratory vehicles for sonic pioneers like Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Carlos Santana, and Jimmy Page. “The spirit of the film is about improvisation and was made in that fashion. He wasn’t able to script this all out. It’s made up of thousands of little clips of things happening around him at the time and it was made in a very spontaneous fashion…It’s going to derive a certain energy from the creation on the spot of the musicians.”

Yet Winokur is also quick to point out that purely improvised accompaniment rarely works, even with a film as abstract as Psychedelic Cinema. Scene changes and other transitions present a distinct challenge to improvisers, who must have some framework to make coordinated changes with the film. “It won’t be a completely fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants experience,” he reassures. “Mapping out the film and coming up with specific themes for certain sections glues it all together a little better.”

Typically, when he scores a silent film with Alloy Orchestra, Winokur composes musical motifs that will help explicate elements of the film, sometimes foreshadowing an event, sometimes underscoring the psychological state of a key character. In this case however, those characters are gone. We can imagine them standing there on stage, but only their shadows remain, phantoms of an era and all that it promised.

Musical accompaniment to this film ultimately turns its original purpose upside down. As with any artifact, Psychedelic Cinema traces a sense of loss, preserving a time that, for many who lived it, was slipping away even as it was reaching its climax. Winokur contends that the film is more than a historical document or a projection of nostalgia for a bygone era. “It is such an astounding historical document of a time that we all look back on – the mid to late 1960s, the rock n roll scene, the most amazing flowering of music, and its interplay of visual art at the time. It’s all such a wonderful thing to go back and remember, but this isn’t just a nostalgic or historical experience. That’s one of the great things about having contemporary live music, is that is brings it up to date, so that we are melding this lovely historical experience and the nostalgia that’s associated with it, with the excitement of discovering something new.”

While Ken Brown is characteristically soft-spoken about the film’s merits, his yearning for a different time is poignant nevertheless: “It’s nice to know that something you did long ago still has a life. I wish we all had more time to experiment. Maybe we do.”