Summer of art
Psychedelic spirit of ’67 on display at de Young, other local galleries
The psychedelic light show that Bill Ham has created for the upcoming Summer of Love expo at the de Young will be his second San Francisco museum exhibit.
His first was during the Summer of Love itself.
For his debut at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1967, Ham brought in three overhead projectors, a set of clear glass mixing bowls and bottles of food coloring. For three days, he worked to a live musical accompaniment, swirling and sloshing his liquids like a gold-panner, to “paint with light.” These paintings-in-motion were then projected onto a screen, an art form he had perfected during rock dances at the legendary Avalon Ballroom.
For his follow-up at the de Young, as part of “The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion, and Rock & Roll” which opens Sunday, April 8, Ham would prefer to work live again. But the museum hours are longer and the
show runs through August. Plus Ham is now 84. So he is finally willing, for the first time, to entrust the experience known as “Bill Ham Lights” to digital reproduction.
“Up until very recently, all of my art only existed during the time it was projected. It required any viewer to be there when it was made,” he says during an interview at his rent-controlled ground-floor apartment and studio in the Western Addition. Before him are three digital monitors pulsating with color and a roach in the ashtray waiting to be lit.
Minus the roach and the perfume of burning cannabis, this is the atmosphere visitors will enter in “Kinetic Light Painting,” a 28square-foot room. It is the highlight of the exhibition, which is the first opportunity in 50 years for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to show off the counterculture artifacts it has been collecting since the 1960s.
The blowout commands the entire Herbst Exhibition Galleries downstairs at the de Young. Ham’s installation, the “Kinetic Light Painting,” is the payoff at the end. Before reaching it a visitor will “journey through the key moments of the 1960s, from the Trips Festival to Haight Street to the Human Be-In,” says Jill D’Alessandro, co-curator of the exhibition.
The light showroom has a capacity of 15 or 20, and there is no time limit for watching the lights, which will run on a 15-minute loop.
“People are going to walk into a room that’s enveloped on four walls with this projected imagery that will be continuous,” Ham says. “There will be room to move, and people can be in the art.”
His is the only gallery with a ’60s soundtrack, though he is not involved in selecting it. That’s probably a good thing because he never did care for the psychedelic music that accompanied his psychedelic light shows.
His taste runs to John Coltrane and the jazz masters that played in the North Beach cellars in the late ’50s and early ’60s. An aspiring abstract painter, Ham came to appreciate how every jazz performance was different, and that gave him the idea to try that with his painting.
At the time, he was a pre-hippie longhair living in a rooming house on Pine Street near Japantown. He got ahold of an opaque projector and some clear crystals used on wall clocks, and food coloring because it was cheaper than paint. He also got ahold of some jazz players and started mixing his lights with their sessions in the basement.
When Dan Hicks’ band, the Charlatans, took up residency at the Red Dog Saloon in Nevada City, Ham brought the lights for what historians consider the first San Francisco psychedelic rock ’n’ roll concert, in June 1965. A year later, when Chet Helms’ concert production company, the Family Dog, took over an old upstairs dance hall on Van Ness and Sutter streets, Ham became a partner with Helms and sound engineer Bob Cohen.
The Avalon Ballroom had a wooden floor and small bandstand at one end. There was no stage lighting and there was no atmosphere, and that is where Ham’s talents came into play. He made a backdrop out of white plastic to cover the wall behind the band and set up his overhead projectors in the balcony at the opposite end.
When the music started, Ham would start pouring his paints into the clock crystals and holding them over the flat surface of the overhead projector. Two overhead projectors became three and Ham moved among them to layer his bowls of paint, forming multicolored amoebas on the 40-foot sheet he had hung at the other end of the room.
“By using several overheads,” he says “all those images become one.”
The options at the Avalon were to either sit on the hard floor or stand up. Most stood and flailed their arms, and the light beaming from the balcony would filter around them and the musicians before hitting the screen, creating an acid trip spectacle.
“In the very early weeks of this taking form, nobody knew most of the bands,” he says. “People chose to come to the Avalon because of the light shows.”
Ham was paid the same as the band, $350. That was for a full night’s work — four sets of music by two bands.
By 1967, Ham had left the Family Dog in a dispute with Helms. But a farsighted curator at SFMOMA had caught his show and invited him down the street. Ham brought all his gear plus two jazz musicians to form a trio called Light Sound Dimension.
“The first public performance of a new
environmental art form ... cited as a ‘giant visualization of a Dylanesque world’ ” read the SFMOMA announcement.
“I painted the ceiling black, put in screens and had about six overhead projectors,” Ham says. “I broke all attendance records.”
After that Ham built the Light Sound Dimension Theater, with a capacity of 200 on California at Polk, in a defunct piano store that would later become the Lumiere movie theater. Weekly performances lasted more than a year.
Meanwhile, without Ham’s lights, the Avalon Ballroom folded in less than two years. Although the bands were recorded live and albums and CDs have been issued, the technology did not yet exist to adequately film the light shows. Ham’s magic was never recorded.
But the technology exists now. Working in his basement, just as he did when he started out, Ham has created light paintings and filmed them. This film, transferred to CD, is what people will see in “Kinetic Light Painting.”
The effect is to re-create the frantic visual excess of the mid-’60s dance concerts. Walking into the gallery for the first time, Ham stands in the center of his painting, colors moving across his face as if he is back in ’67, with Janis being piped in.
“You’ve got a ballroom with about 400 people dancing madly because there was no sitting and watching in the Avalon,” he says, taking it all in. “You’ve got a band playing louder than anybody has ever heard. This is as close an approximation as we can make.”
“I painted the ceiling black, put in screens and had about six overhead projectors. I broke all attendance records.” Bill Ham, on his 1967 SFMOMA light show