Psychedelic Art: Bill Ham inventor of the Light Show.
Maybe this is how it all started.
Me thinking I’m a photographer. That I have what it takes to make pictures that other people actually see. Not the travel snapshots everybody takes, the trite bullshit clogging up social media feeds from here to eternity. But real photographs. Pictures with an eye.
The thing is, Lee Breuer doesn’t know that. Hell, Lee’s never seen a single frame I’ve shot. Maybe—probably—the only reason I’m here at all is because I was the only person he knew who could get his hands on a camera.
But here I am anyway. Getting paid seven hundred and fifty bucks to photograph Bill Ham. The Bill Ham. Inventor of the light show… that psychedelic extravaganza that defined sixties rock shows. Liquid projections swirling across the Fillmore walls while minds dissolved and reformed to the beat. Lee’s writing an article on the guy, and I’m the idiot with the camera.
We’re in Pacific Heights. Bill’s house, the same place he’s occupied for thirty, maybe forty years. Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company lived across the street back in the day. You can still feel the ghosts.
And Bill. Bill is amazing. Joint going the entire time, of course. This steady ember of consciousness-expansion burning throughout the interview. One gem after another, this cascade of creative genius pouring out of him between drags, stories about color and light and the intersection of technology and altered perception. He’s talking, and I’m completely absorbed, nodding like an acolyte at the feet of a master.
Then Willie Brown shows up. Former mayor Willie goddamn Brown. Walks in, takes a hit off Bill’s joint like it’s the most natural thing in the world, which in this house, at this moment, it probably is, then splits. “Interview,” he says with that signature smile. Gone.
And I’m so mesmerized by the whole scene… the stories, the smoke, the casual appearance of San Francisco royalty, that I forget why I’m there.
Lee has to nudge me. “Take the pictures.”
Right. The camera. That’s why I’m here.
But regardless, despite my amateur-hour unprofessionalism, despite not knowing what the hell I was doing… I think this is where it started. This moment. Me, the accidental photographer, getting paid to document genius while discovering maybe, just maybe, I had something to contribute too.
I had the film developed at CVS.
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a weary world.
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice