THE SOUND GALLERY

        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, 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
        and many more west coast hard bop bands of that caliber. 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).

        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 Bob Buckley. Richard, who now lives
        in Europe, 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 loaded 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 popular magazines, including some girlie magazine pictures.
        Al was playing a kind of tortured, mystical and 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 all on his own.

        Although an authentic hard bop musician,  Neil worked in so 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, that a
        multi-media kind of jazz was bound to occur from the collaboration we were embarking on. on.

        For the first two rehersals the Al Neil Trio was actually a quartet with the presence of altoist Bob Buckley who
        later  went on to fame and fortune with the rock band Spring and later as a producer.  For some reason or other
        the trio of Alan on piano, Richard Anstey on bass and myself on drums was what emerged and by late fall we were
        rehearsing regularly at the little store front which eventually opened as the Sound Gallery.

        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 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 bebop jazz until a
        decade or so later.

        The first recording session at the studio as it was still referred to 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 snippits 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, especially
        in Anstey and my case as 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”!

        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 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 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 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 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  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, 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,
        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,
        ith 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.

         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 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 1266 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 precursors to 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 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 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.  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.

        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.
        -Gregg Simpson,1995