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| The trippy, inauguratory poster for the erstwhile Electric Theater, Aaron Russo’s psychedelic club on N. Clark St. (Chicago 1968). Artist unknown |
By Bob Boldt
“The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.” –Robert Burns
Aaron Russo, the impresario of the Electric Theater, the 60’s psychedelic night club, bottomed out financially when the planned opening week in April 1968 was severely hampered by a curfew due to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that same week. The club limped on under its new name, Kinetic Playground, but finally closed in 1969 due to fire. The Playground had a six-month resurgence minus the famous light show until the sheet was finally pulled over its face in 1973.
The litany of talent staged at the Electric Theater/Kinetic Playground during its tenure included all the great talents performing during that period. List available upon request.
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| Eric Roberts, Aaron Russo, Cheech Marin |
I was hired early on as the Artistic Director. The official Artistic Director, Russo’s friend Richard Sheldon, and his girlfriend Jackie were at the time devoting most of their talent to developing an impressive coke habit and just couldn’t be bothered. Hey! it was the “Peace Out, Brother” sixties, after all.
The result was I was tasked with single-handedly producing a six-projector 360-degree cycloramic motion picture show to be projected on huge screens surrounding a room the size of a basketball court. It was to be the highlight of the evening.
Very long story short: after over three months of the most intensive 24/7 production schedule, I was ready with over an hour of 16mm, six-projector, frame-sync programs. I was told I had to wait a bit because there were some “problems” with the syncing of the projectors. It turned out that Peter (may his name live on in infamy) not only had not set up the projectors properly, he had absolutely no idea of how to do it! The reason I had Russo stipulate that I would have frame synchronization was to have accurate continuity from the action occurring on all the screens. Believe me, it would have been a far easier affair just to have a series of sloppily integrated, trippy, abstract movie footage synchronized by chance as I had been doing for years at my light shows around town. Talk about a total obliteration of my time and talent. It was one of the greatest disappointments of my life. What resulted was a series of chaotic, mis-edited scenes that were largely comic in their irrelevance and ineptness.
And to add insult to injury, and as a result of the curfew the opening week, attendance resulted in microscopic revenues, so Russo decided to stiff the staff their wages. That was OK for many hand-to-mouth hippy types who drifted in and out of their duties. For me it was a disaster. Not only was I out nearly three thousand dollars in promised back wages and other expenses, but also I owed big bucks in camera rentals to my equipment provider. I was so focused on the creative production side of things that I failed to see that no provision was being made for fiscal matters that were solely dependent on opening-week revenues. Russo, it seemed, was willing to walk away leaving me holding the bag. Kids: never embark on a project of this size and scope without a tough-as-nails producer watching your back.
Long story short (as promised), I ended up stealing as collateral one of Russo’s expensive 16mm arc projectors and all of my projection film. He finally paid my bill, but not the equipment rentals. Mensch that he was, Jack Behrend, my rental provider, forgave me what I owed him – to my eternal Karmic debt to the man. Sadly, I never had the scratch to get the thousands of feet of my “masterpiece” transferred to video. It is lost to time. Too bad the best-shot frames of many projects “gang aft agley.”
Contrary to the drugged-out impression of the film, I was going for more of a transformational, spiritual experience with my aborted portion of the program. So it goes....
| Copyright © 2018 by Bob Boldt |
I can't imagine how you felt, losing what you yourself call your masterpiece. As ephemeral as those shows were, to not even have it come off right one single time! Heartbreaking is the only word I can come up with.
ReplyDeleteAll the projectors movie, slide, and overhead liquid projectors were stuffed into a small 360 degree round projection booth they called the "Eye" suspended over the dance floor. For the premier press preview event I did my damnedest to try to manually keep all six projectors in sync. I ran from one to another alternately switching them off and on to try to keep the pictures in sync with each other. That was the only night the show came even close to my initial vision.
ReplyDelete2018 is an important year for me as it is the 50th anniversary of so many historic, mind-fucking events that took place back in that watershed year of 1968. I believe it is no hyperbole to state that when the history of this country is discovered by the anthropologists from some distant star system that date will stand out as being nearly as significant as all our wars.
ReplyDeleteAndre Codrescu has stated that, in the 60s, the Cosmic Egg broke open yielding it's golden light to a generation of drugged out mystics, apprentice shamen, and those who saw that a better world was possible. The Chicago Democratic Convention of 68, Altamont, Charlie Manson, and the psychopaths who rule over us, slammed the Egg shut for all time. In the words of Prufrock, an entire generation had seen the moment of its greatness flicker and watched the eternal footman hold our coats and snicker.
I was blessed to be in the thick of it back then with my pen and camera eager to experience and report on it all. (See my non-fiction short story on these pages for my take on the '68 Convention. Critics and historians will continue to comment on the significance of that year and scrutinize its sources with all the intensity of viewing a film by Abraham Zapruder.
For those eager for yet another diagnosis of that tumultuous time, and those merely eager to know what the fuss was all about, check out a series of essays in The Chicago Reader.
https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/michael-cooper-chicago-1968-democratic-national-convention-photographs/Content?oid=57900028
You'll be glad you did.
Bob, I have been trying to figure out where I was in 1968, for I don’t have your sense of a “historic, mind-fucking...watershed year.” I have emailed a friend who was in my high school class: “Does your own, personal sense of 1968 compare much to Bob Boldt’s? I remember relatively little personal effect on my psyche as young father, young IBM employee, young commuter from Marin County to San Francisco. Flower Children were curiosities. I do remember your excitement, sometime in there, upon listening to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album.” If he replies, I’ll fill you in with the view of another member of my cohort, which is about five years younger than yours.
ReplyDeleteThe friend I queried had perhaps an even more “personal” 60’s experience than I or “Unknown” (see comment below). He replied: “One thing that I remember was being at a public park where an attractive young woman was dancing topless. I had a Super 8 movie camera with me and I shot one or two minutes of her dancing. I got the film developed and watched it a few times. But I was concerned that [my wife] would see it, so I threw the film away.”
Delete1968 was more personal and less cosmic for me. Trying desperately (unsuccessfully) to finish my PhD. Still eligible for the draft for a year, my deferment under threat, and deciding whether to move to Canada. Discovering that a year-old marriage was a terrible mistake. Craving travel and adventure and chained to a desk, while my besties were off to France and Australia.
ReplyDeletePraying that someone would gun down Nixon. Not the best year.
Bob, this provocative commentary has me thinking how deeply an individual’s “take” on 1968 is rooted in his or her own life concerns. As I have come to appreciate about you, your own life concerns have essentially included journalism reporting on “the larger scene,” as well as audiovisual art. And beyond being a journalist, your continuing concern in life has been to study and reflect on political and social developments, which I comprehend as your being a tenacious and indefatigable cultural intellectual. I know that my own modest tendencies to “being an intellectual” pale by comparison. Of course you are going to see more significance in the “historic, mind-fucking events” of 1968 than I (or most other people) can see!
ReplyDeleteI write this as an admiring tribute to you, and not as some Prufrockian attempt to “formulate you in a phrase.”
By the way, given that I mentioned Sgt. Pepper above, I love it that the Chicago Reader article you pointed us to describes one of the people who went to Chicago to cover the Democratic Convention (Michael Cooper) as having “shot the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
ReplyDeleteBob, I am so glad to have read that article, which I appreciate very much because of its talking about or alluding to writers (and a filmmaker) I am very familiar with from reading them all (and seeing all of his films): William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick. I was not familiar with the name Michael Cooper, only with that Beatles record album cover.
ReplyDeleteWouldn't you love to have assisted in the creation of that SPLHB album cover? One of the sacrifices (for me) that has come with the modern miniaturization of the digital age is the death of the 33&1/3 album cover. Try getting that whole entourage from the Beatles cover on the plastic sheath of a thumb drive. Ha ha
ReplyDeleteAnd these days they wouldn't think of trying to assemble all those people, props and plants on one massive seamless background in a Soho studio. They would just Photoshop them all in. No sweat.
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