After graduating from high school, at age 18, in 1965,  I rented a 30’ x 60’ store front at West 4th Avenue and Bayswater in Vancouver's Kitsilano area. 
 

Earlier in the year I had made the acquaintance of jazz pianist Al Neil who I had seen play live twice in Vancouver jazz venues and once on CBC television from the Cellar.
 
The Cellar was a legendary  club which among other claims to fame had been the place that gave the ground breaking Ornette Coleman Quartet
their first concert  outside of the U.S. in 1958. It had also featured  through the 50's and 60's the groups of Charles Mingus, Art Pepper, Harold
Land (with Elmo Hope, Scott LaFaro and Lennie McBrowne) and many more high caliber west coast hard bop bands of the day. Al Neil was
usually the house pianist for these visiting greats.

Significantly, it was also where future Intermedia Director, Barry Cramer, produced plays such as Krapp's Last Tape and other works by the
writers of the Theatre of the Absurd. Vancouver, it seems, has always had a tendency to investigate a mixed media approach to the arts and this has been evident through several decades since Al Neil recorded with the beat poet, Kenneth Patchen, on the Folkways label producing a very well received album entitled Kenneth Patchen Reads Poetry In Canada (With the Alan Neil Quartet).


Charles Mingus at the Cellar, early 1960's (photo:Mitzi Gibbs)

After an initial introduction to Neil and then wife Marguerite, in their small cottage wedged behind some highrise apartments in the West End, a life
 long relationship began.  I was brought to meet Al Neil by one of Vancouver's other legendary figures of the beat era, Curt Lang, a poet and painter who had once been taken by fellow poet, the late Al Purdy to meet Malcolm Lowry at his Dollarton Beach house on the North Shore, not far from
the spot where Neil himself landed a decade or more later.

There was an immediate current of excitement as I realized that after abandoning any regular career choices, I might indeed be on the threshold of a unique musical enterprise with Al, and bassist Richard Anstey, who I had been playing with in groups such as the New Dimension Jazz Trio and with pianist, Bob Buckley. Richard, who lived in Vienna until his passing in 2004, was also playing with Al's group at the Flat Five Jazz Club on West Broadway.

Our first musical strategy  session was an eye opener. Al was pretty well into his cups the night he hauled out his little electric Wurlizter piano with its fragile reeds, half of  which he managed to break while slipping from the piano stool to the floor at least three times. The 'score'  for the music he was about to played me consisted of chopped up  music paper collaged together with fragments from various popular magazines.
 
Al was playing a kind of tortured, mystical yet intensely lyrical music I could only describe as a cross between Bud Powell, Edgar Varese and Debussy. I know however that Al hadn’t yet heard the work of a musician he superficially resembles, the tumultuous New York pianist, Cecil Taylor whose music was just beginning to be known in 1965. But Al at this time and had come up with this lyrical, yet cataclysmic, style on his own.

Although an authentic hard bop musician, Neil worked in many other influences from pioneer dadaists like Kurt Schwitters, painters like Bradley Tomlin and Mark Tobey to the cut-up writings of William S. Burroughs, works on alchemy and mysticism, and the fevered visions of the French surrealist,  Antonin Artaud. Obviously a multi-media kind of jazz was bound to occur from the collaboration we were embarking on..

For the first two rehersals the Al Neil Trio was actually a quartet with the presence of altoi sax palyer, Bob Buckley, who went on to fame and
fortune with the rock band Spring and later as a producer. But it was the trio of Al on piano, Richard Anstey on bass and myself on drums that emerged and by late fall we were rehearsing regularly at the little store front which eventually opened as the Sound Gallery, a mame I contrived to encompass both my two fields of endeavour, which also presaged the era of multi-media that followed.


Because I also need somewhere better to paint than the family home, the studio at 4th and Bayswater  became a multi-media operation from the beginning. First I drew from the model there and continued working on a series of abstract oil paintings which reflected the influence of late Modernist geometric painting. The place was unheated and several little electric space heaters were employed to keep things bearable as winter approached.

As the little circle of friends who came to the studio expanded there was a movement started to have sessions and everyone chipped in on the rent to keep the place going.  Fledgling poet Michael Coutts was a regular, although he like many others who participated in the period, didn't survive the
60's. Richard Anstey, who lived in the area of the studio also brought in other neighborhood buddies like drummer Harley McConnell, who helped me put together a drum kit for the great drummer, Philly Joe Jones then playing, with mind shattering volume and relentless drive, over at the Flat Five. To this day I credit my contact with Philly Joe as the major influence which formed my playing style although with the Al Neil Trio waiting in the wings this
was one of the last times I played  hard bop style azz until a decade or so later.

Our first recording session was on December 15th, 1965 and the Al Neil Trio  plaed several improvised pieces for a small audience. The music was nothing short of extraordinary, combing snippets of melodies like Summertime, which appeared through waves of arpeggios, polychromatic chord clusters, whirling dervish modal lines and atonal passages. We were still playing jazz we all thought. Iin Anstey and my case, we were both very
 recently influenced by the work of the John Coltrane Quartet and of Charles Mingus who we had seen live together at the Blue Horn as the
Flat Five Club had been renamed. Al liked to perplex other musicians when they asked what all this stuff was and he would say,
“ I like to think I'm still playing jazz”!
 



Al Neil playing zither and piano, Intermedia, 1968 (Photo: Michael de Courcy)  
Al came down to hear us play with his old band mates from the Cellar, a quintet with pianist Don Thompson, alto sax player, P.J. Perry, trumpeter
Ron Probie and tenor player, Glenn MacDonald, but he 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 recordings for bassist/ pianist 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 the spring of 1966 after a month long hiatus from Al,  when Richard Anstey and myself returned from playing an engagement at a Banff hotel.
We were back at the old studio and ready to take things up a notch. During the winter I had hit on 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 on a large piece
of construction paper hung in the window with stenciled letters advertising:  Al Neil and his Royal Canadians represented by some campy collage elements.  Admission was by donation as we had been told we could avoid hassles with the authorities that way. The next concert the group became
The Royal Rascals and 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 a few blocks down  4th Ave.with film maker Sam Perry who was to become the guru for multi-media light shows in 1966, 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 the Pop artist Gary Lee Nova who had just shown a remarkable set of hexagon paintings at the UBC Fine Arts Gallery and
would go on to collaborate with Perry on the making of imagery for the light shows. 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, 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 performance was by
Milton Acorn which was a raucous affair as always with the crusty writer. Also in attendance were bill bissett, Gerry Gilbert and  Judy 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 and has several books to 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, notably 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, and Dan MacLeod. Jim Brown, a poet,
noveist and co-founder of  Talon Books. He showed an early interest in multi-media and put out the 1968 anthology LP, See Hear and
bill bissett's Awake in the Red Desert. Poets like Gerry Gilbert participated in the earliest days of multi-media in Vancouver with films and multi-media readings. 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, shown 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  the band, dancers and projectionists Perry, Lee Nova and another artist of the period Dallas Selman who, with audio/electronic genius 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.
 



Helen Goodwin (left) with THECO Dancers
(Photo: Michael de Courcy)
 

   

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 The MOTION STUDIO

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. 

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, Perry progressed to creating montages of film loops  which were augmented for performances with magic lantern, slide carousels 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.

The Trips Festival was organized by a number of people but was  co-ordinated through the efforts of a number of people. 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.

Poster for the Trips Festival, 1966 Drawing by Jack Wise, design by Michael Sawyer


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 San Francisco rock bands. 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 as a crash
ad 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.
 



WECO Dancers in a Motion Studio performance, 1966
(Photos by Jack Darcus)


In the fall of 1966 after the long hot summer of the Trips Festival we had the space at 1266 Seymour almost renovated 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 palying. 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 tha slowly stobed. These were  modest, low-tech hworks in the mode of the more sophisticated electric
sculptures made during the Intermedia years by Audrey Doray, Gary Lee Nova and Michael Morris.

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 gray industrial metal. It became both the control for the sound system which was an early version of quadrophonic and a module for the playing of
Walker’s own tape compositions. This ‘sound cage’  looked like something from a B-grade sci-fi movie but was in effect a floating command module for his electronic  tapes and for the sound system.

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 and local rock group Uncle Als' Fantastic Sensations, at the Kits Theatre, 1966.

Poster for the Al Neil Trio (aka Al Neil and His Royal Canadians) and Uncle Al's Fantastic Sensations,  Kits Theatre, 1966

Another innovative development from WECO was the 3 tiered 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. Controlling 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
Buddhist deities, old campy magic lantern slides, footage of the Himalayan mountains, all tied together by the liquid projections and film loops.
Sam Perry's films have apparently been lost or are otherwise untraceable now.

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 from Seven Distances and Phone Book at Motion Studio, given by 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 see what the Council could do for this newly emerging multi-media collective. The obvious success of the Motion Studio and Sound Gallery which consistenly brought out large audiences offered proof of the interest in multi-media performance. Subsequently 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, 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 they were now looking at a co-operative venture with more funding than we had ever expected. Personally I was a bit concerned  that perhaps the original, experimental
energy was going to suffer under an institutional format, yet with the advent of Intermedia Nights at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the larger
audiences and public profile evetually created a whole new era of collaboration.

Two groups met to help create the framework which became the Intermedia Society.One was centred around Victor and Audrey Doray, and
included David Orcutt, a pioneer in holistic theatre. A second set of meetings was held at the home of Jack and Doris Shadbolt, which helped to establish a board of directors.The members included at various times, architects Arthur Erickson, Archie MacKinnon and Bruno Freschi.

The name Intermedia Society was arrived most likely at the suggestion of its first director, the late Joseph Kyle, who was a devoted follower
of Marshall McLuhan. This was the advent of a new era, where artists would realize their visions with technology 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 artist Jack Shadbolt as head of the Board, the Intermedia Society was formally constituted and dedicated to forging new links between art and technology. Canada Council support produced a four story building on Beatty Street was Intermedia's first home 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 almost  no technology available. Beyond a few cheap tape recorders, and some used 16mm film 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.

-Gregg Simpson, 2006



Order a copy of the newly released double CD: Al Neil Trio: Retrospctive 1965-68