My old buddy,Capn Skyp [a.k.a. Ken Babbs] featured one of my spams on his website http://skypilotclub.com


TUESDAY, JANUARY 24, 2006
From Skypilot R. Register:
21-23 January 1966 Acid Test and Trips Festival.The seventh (?) Acid Test was held at the Trips Festival (Friday through Sunday) which took place in the Longshoremen's Hall, San Francisco. The Festival was a joint effort of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Stewart Brand (who showed his "America Needs Indians" slide show during it), and The Living Theater who had Bill Graham working for them. Augustus Owsley Stanley III was a financial sponsor of the event: He purchased amplifiers and other electronic equipment for the Grateful Dead to use in playing there (and thereafter) and also, so it is inferred, donated LSD which he had manufactured for free distribution at the event.Reference/Source: (Charles Perry, The Haight Ashbury: A History (New York: Random House/Rolling Stone Books, 1984), 44-45. Lou Gottlieb, a former member of the folk group, The Limelighters, and future founder of the Sonoma County commune, Morningstar Ranch, in his regular folk music column for the San Francisco Chronicle (Tue. 18 January 1966), promoted the upcoming Trips Festival as being "of major significance in the history of religion.")





Here's the younger Capn at control center on the balcony at the opposite end of the stage at the Trips Festival. He's telling Pigpen over the loudspeakers for all to hear, "If you want power on the stage look for a plug in and stick your cord in the hole." The loudspeakers ran all around the hall on the balcony rails and the Buchla Box which controlled them had a flat board you could run your fingers across to make the sound go wailing around the hall from speaker to speaker. They dragged me away after a while.-- Capn Skyp

howdy capn skyp,
glad yer feeling well enough to postpix of you and a buchla box...
you changed jumpsuits of course but nary a change in the picture...
i found two buchla boards languishingin the synth lab at cal-arts in valencia...
lab tech said he'd never seen'em being used...
i said, "how long you have you been a lab tech?""oh, going on ten years now..."
sad...big walls of rca jacks and the patch cables just draped over them holding their bent shapeas i lift them up...moog is gone..
.long live buchla...
golly i love synths..
don't miss a chance to impress gear heads withtales of buchla fun capn'...
we're out here...
sincerely,
Roland Oberheim

Ah, the old buchla box! definitely a thing out of the past, but a beauty none the less. I made a variation on the buchla out of parts from a surplus jet com panel for stage lighting patches. If it wern't for military surplus i don't think the rock n roll touring industry would have come as far as it did back in the "wooly" days.jt

nice post about the trips festival, capn! i am forwarding you a post i did on that very same thing, last weekend. glad you are feeling like your usual self again. or should that be unusual self.
-- annie #54
http://aikoanne.blogspot.com/2006/01/forty-years-ago-this-weekend.html
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Thanks so much, Annie. I've used, as you can see, the poster you posted. An inspirational event that brought together all the people in the Bay Area who were into the same sort of creative expressionism.
-- Capn Skyp




Don Buchla built us a customized Buchla Box for the bus. We used it as a mike mixer, an effects mixer and a speaker board. Years later, my son Simon dipped the cabinet and Kesey and I signed it.
-- Capn Skyp

i wasn't at the trips festival. (i was nine years old.) however, my dad was. although i have asked him for details of his experience, he has revealed little to me through the decades. i believe that this was the series of shows when wavy gravy got his name. longshoreman's hall is still there, in the middle of san francisco's fisherman's wharf. walking distance from where i grew up.
-- Annie
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Wavy didn't get his name at the trips festival. that didn't happen till 1969 at the texas pop festivel on the free stage at the campground when b.b. king came to play at midnight and I was on one microphone as the old booger wooger man and, while lying on the floor with another microphone, the man in question said, "if you can be the booger wooger man behind the stage then I can be wavy gravy on the floor."
-- cpn skyp