Al Neil playing zither and piano
(photo by Michael deCourcy)
Our last gig there was with Don Thompson and P.J. Perry
both
ex-associates of Neil from the Cellar days. Al came down to hear us but didn't sit
in. I think the other
musicians
knew we
were up to something
different though. In fact a
year or two later when Al played some of the trio tapes for
bassist/
pianist Don Thompson, now a Canadian jazz icon, asked him,
"Al, how do you get those
guys to play that
way ?"
This was no easy thing to explain. The
Trio had a unique
empathy
for improvisation not unlike a group like the Bill Evans Trio. Although much
more frenzied, it did
have
some of the
interwoven, independent
melodic lines of the Evans
group . But that was when something like a tune or song
form
was involved. What was unique to this group was the way it could move
into non-verbal chanting,
collaged
textures
utilizing toy instruments, tapes, records or radios and still keep the feel of a
jazz trio. Noise music
mixed
with political protest was employed on
one of a kind pieces like State of the Union
where a radio speech by then
President Johnson on Viet Nam was smothered in clattering textures and insane
shrieking, all recorded in a totally
darkened Sound Gallery. It was a
long way from bebop.
By March, 1966 after a month long hiatus from Al, Richard
Anstey and myself returned from playing an engagement at a Banff hotel and we
were back at the old studio
and
ready to take
things up a notch. During the
winter I had thought of the
name Sound Gallery for the space and as
it seemed to be a hit with everyone, we designated it as such for a series of weekend
concerts which began in March.
Advertising
was a large piece of construction paper hung in the window with stenciled letters
advertising: Al
Neil
and his Royal Rascals represented
by some campy collage elements. Admission was by
donation as we had been
told we could avoid hassles with the authorities that way. For a later concert
at the Kit's Theatre the group
became the Royal Canadians.
Also around that time we started to invite others into the evening
concerts.
The first new
participant to arrive at the Sound Gallery was composer Gerry
Walker , a new music composer
who worked with tape and prepared piano in the era before synthesizers.
He shared a studio four blocks
down 4th Ave.with film maker
Sam Perry who was to become the guru for
multi-media presentation in the next year, the last of his life. The atmosphere in
their studio was a little like
a laboratory in a 50's sci-fi movie. It was a perfect complement to our operation down
the street and a collaboration
seemed inevitable and natural.
Almost immediately the Saturday night concerts at the Sound Gallery
became
a place for poets, artists and dancers to collaborate. Among those who
appeared were painter
Gary
Lee Nova who had just shown a remarkable set of hexagon shaped
paintings at the UBC Fine Arts Gallery and
would go on to collaborate with Perry on the making of imagery for
the light shows, a name that wasn't being used yet
in Vancouver.
Gary Lee Nova: Dreadnaught
acrylic on canvas, 1966
Soon after we were joined by dancer/choreographer Helen Goodwin
who had recently worked with New York-based Jean Erdman, a pioneer
performance/ dance artist. The Sound
Gallery cast was assembling and
it included the Al Neil Trio's
music, Sam Perry's films and
projections,
the Helen Goodwin dancers, composer, Gerry Walker and often a poet.
Poetry was an important medium in the 1960's and readings were given
regularly
at the Sound Gallery. One notable one was by Milton Acorn
which was a raucous affair as
always
with
the crusty writer. Also in
attendance were bill
bissett, Gerry Gilbert and
Judith Copithorne, the latter also one of Goodwin's dancers.
One memorable solo piece,
involved Copithorne
improvising a dance which
evoked flying to one of the Trio's melancholic ballads, with Perry's
projected film of an actual flying
bird
playing over her. It was one of the best pieces in the
collective repetoire. Copithorne
stayed with Goodwin for
a number of years through the Intermedia period, but later preferred to work
solely as a poet, producing several
books of verse
and visual poetry done in a
beautifuly fluid calligraphy. her credit. Two others in Goodwin's
company also became noted
perfomers later, Karen Jameison and Evelyn
Roth. In addition
she employed other modern dancers, such as Heather
MacCallum, Rita Watson
and Joan Payne.
The spawning ground for both Helen Goodwin, and most of the
poets,
was the University of British Columbia where the remarkable English professor, Warren
Tallman, a
friend
of both Allen Ginsberg
and Charles Mingus among others, taught during the 1960's
and 1970's. The group of poets
who
published the periodical TISH
including Jamie Reid, Peter Auxier, Maxine Gadd,
Dan
MacLeod
and later, Jim Brown, all
participated in the earliest
days of multi-media in
Vancouver. The poetry scene was
the most advanced and communicative of
any of the groups in Vancouver then.
The University of British Columbia during the 1960s was a revolutionary
cauldron of poetry, left wing politics and ground-breaking art exhibitions and
festivals. The Fine Arts
Gallery,
under the direction of
Alvin Balkind who formerly ran the New Design
Gallery downtown,
the
first to show Claude Breeze, Audrey Capel Doray,
Joy Long and the late
Jack Wise to a wider audience. The
dynamic
survey
exhibition, Joy and
Celebration at The
Fine Arts Gallery in 1967 brought
together several artists
who would later work at Intermedia.
The 1965 Armory Show and the1967 Festival of Contemporary
Arts
were two other important events which brought together artists, poets and
musicians from B.C. and across
Canada
including such
luminaries as Leonard
Cohen and Margaret Atwood. The
experimental media experimenter and
puppeteer
Dave Orcutt was one of the
figures who emerged from this milieu and was to be an
early
instigator
of the Intermedia Society.
The events at the Sound Gallery were getting increasingly popular and
by
June we realized that a larger space was going to be necessary. The crowds in
the 30' by 60' store front
were
making it increasingly
difficult to fit in an audience with the band, dancers and
projectionists Perry, Lee Nova and another artist
of the period, Dallas Selman, who, along with audio/electronic innovator, Ken
Ryan, worked at Sam
Perry's
4th Avenue studio. The problem was solved when Helen Goodwin's husband, a local
realtor, came up with a
reasonably
cheap old building at 1236
Seymour Street on the edge of Vancouver's
downtown.
MOTION
STUDIO
TheCo Dancers in a Motion
Studio rehersal with founder hewlen Goodwoin looking on, 1966
The ramshackle office/warehouse which was the new home of the
Sound
Gallery operation was now called
Motion Studio, the name reflecting an increased effort on
Goodwin's
part to create a more effective dance
environment in collaboration with Sam Perry's light show. The
name
chosen for this collaboration, WECO,
was a tribute to the multi-media collective in New York, USCO,
whose
founder, Steve Dirkey, was a very
influential on Perry. The dance troupe eventually became known as
TheCo.
Sam Perry was a figure who
was both inspiring and perplexing,
His pioneering film and projection work was
ahead of its time with its multiple layered imagery drawn largely from
from Tibetan Buddhist sources. Perry,
like the painter Jack Wise, had been to Nepal and met the Dalai
Lama. Originally working in 16mm film,
Perry progressed to creating montages of film loops which were
augmented
for performances with magic lantern,
slide carousel, and overhead liquid projectors, anticipating the
subsequent
development of rock era light shows.
During this period the underground rock scene had been developing
rapidly
giving the WECO projectionists
several gigs accompanying the rock bands at the Afterthought, a
club located in the old Pender Auditorium
where groups like the United Empire Loyalists held forth to
swaying
crowds of hippies. The largest and best
attended of these early psychedellic era events was the Trips
Festival,
held in the Garden Auditorium of
the Pacific National Exhibition grounds near the eastern boundary of
the
city.
Poster for the Trips Festival with
drawing by Jack Wise
The Trips Festival was organized by Linda Crane and the
late Doug Hawthorn, an
associate of Sam Perry and
a co-founder of WECO. Inside this huge auditorium were 100 rear
projection
screens for everthing from old
Chaplin films to abstract 16mm film loops and everything else from
liquid
overhead projectors to magic lantern
slides from the turn of the century.
The
Al Neil Trio opened for Janis Joplin and Big Brother
and
the Holding Company and other acts
including the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Sevice, the
Daily
Flash, poet Michael McClure
and other Seattle and Bay area acts. This was before these groups
achieved
any national prominence and were
basically still underground Bay area groups. Topping everything
off
the Motion Studio played host to the already
legendary Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters with their
soon-to-be
legendary bus. Vancouver was into
the 60's full tilt.
<>
In the fall of 1966 after the long hot summer of the
Trips Festival,
we had the space at 1236 Seymour almost
rennovated and ready to open. The weekend before the official opening
there
was a jam session with the
Al Neil Trio plus tenor sax player, Glenn MacDonald, a
talented
musician who had worked with Neil at the
Cellar in the early 60's. In the middle of one tune, probably a
bebop
standard which is what Glenn favoured,
I looked up from the drums at one point to see to my amazement a ring
of
overcoated, fedora-wearing figures
all about 6' 4" and very mean looking surrounding the bandstand.
This was none other than the Vancouver Police Drug Squad led by the
inimitable
Abe Snedenko, who had
harassed both Neil and MacDonald throughout the years. I just lowered
my
head and kept swinging. It turned
out that a certain well known rock promoter was stopped earlier in the
evening and when asked where he was
going with all the LSD, he said: "Motion Studio" and there we were
playing
our private opening party for a
handful of friends. No one actually was arrested, but some people,
anyone
faintly odd looking, were taken
upstairs and searched. The next weekend, the official opening,
went
smoothly and our old audiences from
4th Ave. made the trek to the new home of multi-media in Vancouver.
The Motion Studio itself was a rabbit warren of rooms, somewhat dimly
lit,
but generally spacious compared
to the 4th Ave. Sound Gallery. The entrance room I made into a
small
gallery where I displayed the work I was
doing at the Vancouver School of Art. These were boxes hung on
the
wall with back lit mandala patterns, modest
hommages to the more
sophisticated electric sculptures made by Vancouver artist, Audrey Doray.
The next series of rooms were offices and shops largely devoted to
sound
and light equipment with experiments
going on continually under the resident electronic experts, Ken Ryan
and Al
Hewitt. Following through to the
back the visitor came upon the main performance area which was a large
hall, about 30' x 60' with a high ceiling
Suspended from the ceiling was the famous cage for composer Gerry
Walker
made of L-shaped grey industrial
metal . It became both the control for the sound system which was an
early
version of quadrophonic and a
module for Walkers own tape compositions.
The sound was manipulated around the speakers and the room via a joy
stick
similar to an airplane control stick.
It was reported by Ken Ryan that this system knocked him over when he
walked
through the convergent point
where the sound from the four speakers crossed during a light show at
the
Kits Theatre in 1967. The cage
looked like something from a B-grade sci-fi movie but was in effect a
floating
command module for the tape
and sound system.
Another innovative development from WECO was the 3 storied
projection
tower that was built to house the
array of projectors which were utilized in the weekend
performances
by the Al Neil Trio, Gerry Walker and the
WECO Dancers. Contolling the battery of projectors on the
tower
was a keyboard made from photo cells stuck
in a strip of foam plastic. When the fingers of the 'player'
lifted
up, a rheostat brought on the projector. A resulting
kaleidoscope of projections shot forth hitting the turning mirror
strips
interspersed with strobe flashes. In the
relatively confined performance room the effect was totally
kaleidoscopic.
The incredibly dense montage of imagery emanating from this battery
included
Sam Perry's 16mm films, many
with imagery suggesting Tantric or Hindu deities, old campy magic
lantern
slides, Himalayan mountain footage,
all tied together by the liquid projections and film loops. Sam Perry's
films have apparently been lost or are
otherwise untraceable, although the archivist of USCO apparently has
some
film material in his possession.
Two other special effects were debuted that fall, one being the first
strobe
light in Vancouver. One of the first
experiments involved WECO associate Gordon Bell with red, flowing beard
and hair performing with a skipping
rope under a fast strobe. It was definitely hallucinatory but in
an innocent and experimental way sense. Then there
were the lengths of mirror hung by wires from the ceiling which turned
and caught the light from the projectors
spinning fragmented shards of images around the room The
psychedelic
trance for one couple was momentarily
broken one evening when a length of mirror crashed down beside them,
luckily
with no ill effects.
Weekend evening performances continued through the fall of 1966,
until the tragic suicide of Sam Perry which
ended the existence of WECO and Helen Goodwin eventually renamed her
dance
troupe TheCo. Aside from
the regular appearances of the Al Neil Trio the only other event
involving
music was the evening given by poet
Gerry Gilbert, reading from Phone Book, with the
late Martin
Bartlett's music for Seven Distances.
This collaboration in many ways pre-figured the type of work which
Bartlett
and others would carry on at the
Western Front seven years
later.
Poster for Seven Distances and Phone
Book at
Motion Studio, a concert with Martin
Bartlett and Gerry Gilbert
On one particularly great evening that fall saw a distinguished member
in the audience from the Canada Council.
This was David Silcox who was in Vancouver to have a look at
funding
a multi-media collective. The obvious
success of the Motion Studio and Sound Gallery which consistenly
brought
out large audiences offered unqualified
proof of the interest in multi- media performance. Subsequently, over
the
few months, several meetings were held
which determined the eventual creation of Intermedia.
Over the next few months after we abandoned the Motion Studio the Al
Neil
Trio which had launched the original
Sound Gallery evenings and steadily drew in the crowds continued to
rehearse
and perform locally, notably at
Simon Fraser University and the University of B.C. Likewise Helen
Goodwin’s
THECO dancers kept together
and perfected their particular approach. The visual artists like
Gary Lee Nova and Dallas Selman who had worked
with Sam Perry forged ahead with new paintings and sculptural projects
which would come to full fruition in 1968
and 69 with the Intermedia Nights at the Vancouver Art
Gallery.
There was a feeling of expectancy in the air as if we hadn't quite seen
the total fulfillment of the promise of
multi-media. When many of the artists from the Sound Gallery and Motion
Studio attended a meeting in early
1967 at the building at 575 Beatty Street we were now looking at a
co-operative
venture with more secure
underwriting than we had previously. Personally I have always
felt
that perhaps the original, experimental energy
was going to suffer under an institutional format, yet there wasn't
much
choice except to participate in the new
venture rather than lose connection to something we had helped start.
Two groups had been meeting to help create the entity which became the
Intermedia Society. One was centred
around Victor and Audrey Doray 's circle which contained one of
Sam Perry's colleagues, David Orcutt,
a pioneer in holistic theatre and puppetry. A second set of
meetings
at Jack and Doris Shadbolt's were held
which also involved UBC's Archie MacKinnon. Board members at various
times
also included architects
Arthur Erickson, Archie MacKinnon and Bruno Freschi.
The name Intermedia was arrived most likely at the suggestion of its
first
director, Joseph Kyle. Kyle, now
an accomplished hard-edge abstract painter, was then a devoted follower
of Canadian media guru, Marshall
McLuhan. The promise of an new erawhere artists would combine art with
technology was being made and the
multi-media performers of the Motion Studio working with the most
advanced
visual artists in Vancouver at the
time were the logical ones to carry out the program.
With painter Jack Shadbolt as the head of the Board, the
Intermedia
Society was formally constituted and
dedicated to forging new links between art and technology. Canada
Council support became available and
the four story building on Beatty Street, Intermedia's first home
was leased. It was another rambling, but more
solid old building than past venues, with plenty of room for studios
and
rehearsal spaces including large open
performance areas.
Film editing was located on the ground floor with open spaces for
performance
on the second. The third floor
included the Al Neil Trio's studio and blewointment press run by poet
and
visual artist bill bissett. The top
floor contained more technical and fabrication spaces including tape
recording
and editing rooms.
The truly interesting thing about this interface between art and
technology
is that, by today's standards, there was
no technology available. Beyond a few cheap tape recorders, 16mm
film editor and some other very rudimentary
equipment there was not a lot to build a technological art experiment
on.
What Intermedia really represented
was collaboration between like minded artists and performers, just as
it
had been at the Sound Gallery and
Motion Studio.
The year 1967 was a watershed for the future of Vancouver art.
Intermedia was
about to begin.
-Gregg Simpson, 2012
