Our new bluesy sound was rewarded with a gig at the prestigious Afterthought on Fourth Avenue. Our first date there was January 13, 1967. We shared the bill with The Unforeseen. The Trans Euphoric Express Light Show provided the psychedelic lighting. The lighting was intended to suggest the swirling colourful hallucinations of an acid trip; that is, LSD-25. I had heard of it, knew that young people were beginning to experiment with it, to take 'trips' on it, but I didn‘t know anything about the stuff. While we played, the lights pulsated on the white screen hung unevenly behind us, on us and on the audience as they danced spontaneously in wide whirly-bird circles. I wanted to imagine that I was on an acid trip but I didn't quite know what to imagine so I just played the songs.
The light show set-up their equipment at the front of the balcony and created some amazing effects from their basic components. They had black lights, whose sole function seemed to be to make the lint show up on your jacket, and strobe lights that flashed on and off at a rapid pace and caused some of the dancers to fall over laughing on the floor. As a drummer, I found it best to shut my eyes when the strobes went off so that I didn’t lose time. They also had slide projectors and 16mm film projectors and the most important piece of equipment of all, the overhead projector.
The lightshow artist would pour some coloured water (say red) into a large glass dish (usually a clock face) and add a contrasting coloured-oil (say yellow). Then he or she would place the dish under the lamp and squish down on the mixture with another smaller glass dish so that the oil and water, while struggling to repel each other, would form wildly colourful amoeba-like blobs. By pounding the top dish up and down on the gooey mixture, the amoebas would create wild dancing shapes. These dancing shapes would be projected onto the screen, walls, band and the whirly-bird dancing humans. I didn’t know if it was as good as acid but it was mind-blowing at the time.
The long-haired manager of The Painted Ship, Doug Hawthorne, opened a shop across the street from the Afterthought and called it The Psychedelic Shop. He sold incense, scented candles, rolling papers and tiny little pipes. He also sold posters from music shows at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco.
Although the bohemian ambiance frightened me, I would wander in and stare at the strange yet extraordinary posters by artists such as Wes Wilson and Bonnie MacLean and a new Vancouver artist, Bob Masse. They were swirls of colour and ballooned, distorted shapes that spoke of exotic names like, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Big Brother & The Holding Company, Charlatans and one that really intrigued me, Country Joe & the Fish. I left with a box of sandalwood incense and an EP by Country Joe & the Fish.
I shut the door to my bedroom, lit up the incense and played Thing Called Love, Bass Strings and Section 43 real loud. I learned the drum and percussion parts to all of the Fish’s songs. This wasn’t easy given that their drummer Chicken Hirsch played all kinds of weird stuff like bells and bits of metal hanging on cords but I figured it out anyway. I’m sure my parents thought I was already on drugs but, as usual, they didn’t say anything.
I'm no sociologist but, in my opinion, this little EP by Country Joe & the Fish best represents the heart and soul of the hippie movement of the mid-to-late-sixties.
Not far away, in the Oakridge area, a band called The Shapes of Things had formed with an organist named John Hall. The singer in The Shapes of Things, Mike Bentley, was a Hershey who went to Churchill and was a friend of Steve’s. Mike told us about John and said he was like us. The Shapes of Things were still playing a lot of the tough British stuff but were attracted to the new sounds that we were playing.
We were told that John had heard that The Seeds of Time were “really great” and he came to check us out. We were playing a small church hall in our neighbourhood on Ash Street near Forty-fifth Avenue. John must have been impressed because the next thing I knew he was meeting with Bob in his rec-room and hanging out with me, listening to Paul Butterfield, The Blues Project and Country Joe & the Fish.
John Hall joined The Seeds of Time at the beginning of March.
John was only fourteen at the time, with a thick mass of long stringy brown hair that hung down over his eyes, but had already developed a cache of eccentricities. He was possessive, pensive, particular, stiff and suspicious and, if he didn‘t know you or if you came on too strong, he could be pretty gruff. He was also talented, intelligent, enthusiastic, dedicated and caring and about as good a friend as anyone could ever hope for.
He came to us with an Acetone organ and a Vox Cambridge amp but soon after upgraded to an Eko-Sonic organ and a Leslie. A Leslie was a large wooden cabinet usually associated with the Hammond Organ. It had two horns at the top that whirled around and a large speaker facing down into a chamber that whirled around the other way. It could be controlled to go fast or slow or stop. It produced a very unique and exciting sound. John’s wardrobe consisted of jeans and an old tweed sports coat that he bought at the San Francisco Pawnbrokers on Hastings for Two Dollars and wore with pride. That jacket got him thrown out of John Oliver High School because he wore a sport coat without a tie. I never saw him without it - knowing John, he probably still has it.
My heavy-petting sessions with Liviana had come to an end. She couldn’t break loose from her strict Catholic conditioning and go all-the-way with me while I was driven by urges that compelled me to do so as soon as possible. We just kind of drifted apart.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t getting anywhere with anyone else either. I don’t think it was due to my appearance but probably that I was still immature and introverted. Mostly I dated the girls who were friends of the girls that dated my friends. Steve had a girlfriend named Donna, who had the best rack in school, and she had a friend named Julie who I got to accompany to a party or two. Dave, who had hosted the make-out party at his house last year, had a girlfriend named Marie. One day Steve and Dave swapped girlfriends and then I was dating Marie’s best friend. That’s the way it went for me.
Steve had no problem attracting women. They loved his confident swagger and his animated personality. He met a beautiful little weekend-hippie chick from North Vancouver, Marilyn, who had a pretty weekend-hippie friend named Louise who got me in the deal. I was hopeful about my chances here as Louise had a liberated and open attitude and 'free-love' was the mantra of the day. As Steve and I drove over to North Van in his mom’s 1964 Ford Fairlane grooving to the sounds of The Young Rascals, Groovin’ on the radio, I was confident that free-sex was about to be mine.
That Fairlane was amazing. We would pull into the gas station at Fourth and Cypress and pool something like eighty-six cents and Steve would carefully pour the eighty-six cents worth of gas into the tank. We’d ride for days on the fumes.
Once again my optimism was teased and tantalized before it was thrashed. Louise's attitude may have been open but her legs were not. Our make-out sessions deteriorated into wrestling matches with me grappling to pry her knees apart and her slapping my hands away in an impregnable defense. I never won a match but I was determined to keep climbing back in the ring. The struggle continued in the back seat of cars, in the park, at the movies, even on the sofa in her parent's family room.
In my painfully slow attempt to scale Mt. Eros, Camp Louise was a disappointing slip on the slope. It would be a long time before I would recover.
The Seeds of Time must have done well enough at the Afterthought because we were asked back on March 4th. This turned out to be a prophetic weekend as William Tell & the Marksmen, who had become our cross-town competition, played Friday with Carousel. We were to play Saturday. I attended their Friday show and once again was awestruck by Geoff’s stage presence. He was mesmerizing. And Lindsay was even better the second time I heard him. He