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Wed. January 21st, 6pm
Join us in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Trips Festival, featuring a screening of The Trips Festival Movie (2007) and Q&A with director/producer Eric Christensen.
Members: Free / $10 General Admission / $8 Students, Educators, Seniors
Christensen’s documentary includes excellent footage from the Trips Festival itself, along with interviews from Bob Weir, Rock Scully, Ken Kesey, Stewart Brand, Ken Babbs, Bill Graham, George Walker, Ramon Sender, Allen Cohen, Ben Van Meter, Mountain Girl, Chet Helms, Gerry Mander, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Narrated by Peter Coyote.
It’s been sixty years since the Trips Festival was held at the Longshoremen’s Union Hall in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. Organized by Ramon Sender, Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Owsley Stanley, Bill Graham and others, the event lasted three days (January 21–23, 1966) and drew ten thousand attendees, with many more turned away each night.
One of the first rock & roll music festivals, the Trips Festival was more than that, showcasing a wide array of artists and experimental media. Ken Babbs designed sound systems for the event, engineering a solution to the problem of the venue’s concrete floor causing music to sound distorted at high volumes. Stewart Brand showed his slide presentation “America Needs Indians”; audiences were treated to one of the first fully developed projected light shows; the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and other rock bands performed; along with appearances by poets Allen Ginsberg and Marshall McLuhan; there were acrobats; experimental theatre; Chinese Lion Dancers; Rob Boise’s “Thunder Machine”; even a pinball machine overseen by the Hells Angels.
Programming was loose and largely impromptu, audience participation was encouraged, and the whole experience was imbued with a surreal, even ecstatic quality. Though the event’s namesake quite obviously invoked tripping on psychedelic drugs, and many did indeed partake in LSD-spiked punch, Tom Wolfe described it as “An LSD experience without LSD… But mainly the idea of a new lifestyle was making itself felt.”