 I would love to welcome you, Brian Epps, to the Haydash Berry Oral Video Project 60s in the Haydash Berry. I'm really, really happy that you are here. And I want to ask you a few questions about your early beginnings before we get into the meat of this interview. Sure. My name is Rebecca Nichols and I'll be your moderator. So, I've heard that you're a native Californian? Yeah, I was born at Stanford Medical Hospital when my father was stationed at Moffitt Field when they were still flying blimps out of there. He was a naval blimp pilot, sort of an esoteric kind of thing, you know? They're called the Heli-Mits in the Navy, you know? But he loved blimps and flew them. What year was this about? It was exactly, 1942. Beautiful. What was your father's name? Marion Henry Epps. He was a graduate of the Naval Academy and flew all kinds of aircraft, not just blimps. He was on one of the cruisers during the attack on Pearl Harbor that was out at sea with Halsey's carrier group. Wow. You know, he was a lifer in the Navy. He was a wonderful man. I really, really, really miss him, you know? Yeah. Well, we're honoring him in this video because you wouldn't be here. That's true. And what was your mother's name? Her name was Dorothy. Dorothy and she was quite the gal. She had been, her father was a dentist in Long Beach. And she actually was born in Canada. And Walter, her father, actually adopted father. Adopted she and her sister, Isabel, who was also quite the lady. She was, she kind of reminded me of the, of the Dragon Lady from Terry and the Pirates. Right. She was always mischievous with it, with the long cigarette holder and, you know, she smoked camels one right after the other. Right. She was a wonderful lady though. And I, so it was an interesting kind of family. Sure. Sounds like you had a wonderful beginning. Did you have any brothers and sisters? My sister was living in that Riverside now and her husband is the dean at, one of the deans at University of California Riverside. What is your sister's name? Epi. Epi. Evelyn, there's a real name. Epi is the name that she got when she was in boarding school because she hated Evelyn. So she was Epi Epps. As a reto, actually, now. She's, she's, she married a, I'm just going to long comment. Sure. That's her last name now. Yeah. She's, she's a wonderful girl. She, we went through a lot of things, the big service for us. We went through quite, we had quite a life, you know. We ended up in. You were in touch once in a while? Oh yeah. That's great. All the time. And you, you found someone in your life and then had some children? Well, yeah, that went back to North Beach. Katrina, who was my son Seth's mother. She and I were, we lived together for my seven years and then ended up getting married, which turned out to be not such a good idea since we didn't last wear on, but we had a good life and, and he turned out to be pretty good. And then I did discover, this is the interesting about the internet thing is that I was sitting at the computer doing surfing. I, there was a while there when I first got hooked up to the net where I just, man, I was there all the time. Yeah. Let's go here. Let's go there. You know, what's this? What's that? And anyway, so I get a call and there's this voice at the other end and it says, are you Brian Epps? I said, yeah, man, that's me. What are you, what are you trying to sell me? He says, no, no, no. I'm not trying to sell you anything. I'm your son. Oh my goodness. And I said, whoa. And then I went through the whole thing. I, did he have some kind of agenda or what was up? He said, no, no, I just want to come down and see you. And when he walked in the door, you know, there was no doubt. It was like seeing myself, you know. Right. And the first thing he said to me is you want to smoke a jay. And I said, that's my son. What's his name? What's his name? His name is Rob. So you have a son named Seen. Seth. Seth. And his son named Rob. And what do they do in their lives now? Are they interested? Well, Seth is a, he's an avid snowboarder, you know, a devil. Sure. You know, one of the, one of the, no, no risk is too great a risk, you know. Let me jump off of a hundred foot mountain on a snow. Right. And he's married and living up in Reno. And I, last time I knew he was, he was being a, being a chef. I don't know whether he's doing that now or not. Sure. And then Rob is a, he's a painter, really an excellent painter. And he's living up in the North country of Arcada. And so he's a happy camper up there. That's wonderful. And I'm living in Marinette. And you're living in Marinette present. I'm sort of in the middle. And here we are in 2005. And I'm going to take you on a spaceship and bring you back to 1960s. And I'm asking you, when do you remember first seeing H Street? Approximately. Yeah, it was, it was probably, I think it was like 1959 or 60s somewhere in there. Because there was like a, there was a tribe of lesbians that lived in the, in the, here in the Hague. And they had, they had LSD, the world's best LSD, the Sandoz kind. You know, there was, there was the, the... So what year did you first start taking LSD? It was... Approximately. Maybe 1960, 61. So wow, that's really... About the same time that Leary was... Experimenting with Harvard. Yeah. And in fact, some of that, some of those experimental things sort of managed to find their way west. Right. Mysteriously, we never figured out why. Right. So it sounds to me you came again to H Street. When did you first start living in Hague, Ashbury? Well, let me see. And, okay, it was kind of a weird story. In 64, 60, I think, 63, I was discharged from the Navy for Muscular Distribute. They gave me a medical discharge. And I saw it was for the LSD for a year. And I went to work for Bank of America, thinking that I was going to be a, I've been coming back here and stuff. And I just got bored to death. And somebody turned me on to some acid one night. And I said, you know, bank things is kind of not much fun. And then, you know, there was like a lot of people experimenting. It was, it was, it was weird. It was like some kind of psychic network where all these people were experimenting with these different light things, you know. And then... Do you remember who some of these people were you hanging out with in the pre-pre-early? Well, in the early days, it was pretty much me and Bob Polum, who was a companion spirit. He'd been up here in 66, and he was trying to find a straight gate. He never found one. Then came back to Stockton. We ran into each other. You know, we were like, like, like spirits, because we were experimenting with all different kinds of things. And then we, sometimes in that period of time, it's all kind of cloudy. Sure. You were remembering more than most. So I think, okay. But... What were the kind of things you were experimenting with, film? Yeah, we were doing film. And one of the... Oh, I'll never forget this. This was... We had this dance. It was called the Dance Studio. It was in Stockton. Right? And I was dating the girl whose mother owned the place. We started... We called it... What did we call it? The Place. Right? That's what we called it. We were having... We had these weekly dances. And we had these two overhead projectors, and we had no glassware, except we took the cover plates off of TVs. Wow. You know, the protective thing that protects the tube. Sure. Took them off, and we had them on a large piece of glass. Right? Well, there was all wonderful. Except one night, while we were doing... Right in the middle of this, while we were doing it, we got so hot that the glass cracked, right? And I'm looking in horror, you know, as part of the glass, and the strobe light is going... Down to the floor, you know? And I thought, Uh-oh. We got to find a better way, right? So it was just like... It was stuff like that, you know? And another thing that was really cool, too, was Bobby invented this... Really wonderful bubble machine, right? It was like a... It took parts of a swamp cooler and put these huge rotors in there that had all those little paddles for bubbles. Sure. And it was just wonderful in the strobe light, except it would get down on the floor. Everybody would... Womp, you know? Slippin'. Slippin'. Slippin'. So it was an early, early bubble machine. Yeah. And it was like... But everybody forgave us, you know? Sure. It was like... Experimental. Experimental, you know? It was like... How did... Do you remember how the idea for the plates that people... Well, that's quite simple. I saw Bill Ham. I came to San Francisco and Bill Ham was doing a show somewhere. Maybe it was at the... I saw him doing it. And here he was, you know, up on this platform, surrounded by beautiful women, rock and roll music. Everybody's loving him, and I'm saying... I want to be there. That's it! I want to do that! Right. And, yeah, so it was like... It kind of... That was the inspiration. And then I went on a search all over California to find... Plates. To find the plates. Tell us about the plates, because people listening to this don't know about this. When you do liquid projections, what you have is you can have as many as three plates, but normally what you have is you have a large, like a 16-inch plate that's a bottom plate. You put liquid, you know, which is oil and water and isopropyl alcohol in this plate. And then you have another plate that's probably 12 inches in diameter that you use to manipulate the liquid in the bottom plate. So one goes on top of the other. One goes on top of the other. And on the bottom plate is a mixture of an oil pigment, color, with mineral oil. And then you're using water dyes on top of that. Is that correct? And then the second plate is sandwiched. And by manipulating the second plate, you're able to... Yeah, and when you really begin to understand the liquid, you realize that you can use the surface tension of the plate to actually manipulate the liquid without really even touching the bottom of the plate. We used to do this kind of like Zen exercise to see who could do go through a show without ever touching the bottom of the plate. And if you did, you got five bucks. So I saw that. I heard that light show artists had very strong muscles in their arms because you don't realize what hard work that is to be moving. Yeah, oh man, I'm telling you, it would get you in the shoulders like all night long. Sometimes a dead would play. And I remember in film art one time the dead played so long that I fell asleep standing up doing like a wood side. And it was like they would go on to like three and four o'clock in the morning, you know? And they'd say, okay, just one more song, right? You know, three hours later everybody would go, wow, you know, and then they'd launch into something else. Sure. Do you remember in those days some of the other people that worked with you, any other people helped you volunteer? Oh yeah, man. Names that we should know about, not be forgotten? Well, Bob Poem, who was my partner in Stockton, and is now in Smart Boy. He's on the big island. Hawaii. Hawaii and doing light shows there. You know, he's living in a real kind of small community, which is great, you know. It sounds like he's managed to find the sixties there. Safe, right. And Mark Maxman, who was one of the who originally had the gig at the straight theater. What was his light show? Do you remember what it was called? It was called Aerial Transit, is what it was called. Aerial Transit. What it was, what it happened is that Mark had been working with Roger Van Meter from North America and Iowa South Chemical. And they had a, they split the sheets, as they said. And so Mark ended up with about eight carousels. And we had overhands, we had run overhands that we put together. And so we came into the straight theater one night and just arrived with all our equipment. Said, we're here. And I can't ever remember being so absolutely terrified in my life, you know. I said, what happens? Here we are. We pulled all the plugs on everything. You know, I've given up my house. I've given up everything. And I've got a little bit of money. Here we are in San Francisco, you know. Oh, boy. When was this about what you... This was 1967. It was actually after the main madness in the summer of love. Right after that. It was right after that. When you appeared at the straight, did they let you go up and set up and... Yeah, in fact, you know, I thought about that is that the timing seemed to be just... You know, I heard somebody describe it. I don't know who it was, but it was like somebody picked up all these rocks. And all of a sudden, all these people popped up. Blup, blup, blup, blup. Okay, let's go. And it's sort of as if we all knew what to do, you know, that we had no clue. Exactly. And it was... So as you see it, do you remember your first lecture with the straight theater? Do you remember sort of one of the first ones? Yeah, we... You were doing oil projection with overheads? Yeah. You were doing slide projectors? Well, actually, we were kind of weak in that department. What did you have? Films. You were doing... Our thing was liquids. Liquid. Because I know in those days they did a 16-millimeter, and they would use a film loop that would play over itself, over and over again. Yeah. Because there wasn't a video. I was just telling movies that we had these machines that they were like these old school-type 16-millimeter projectors. Steve Goldsmith had some too. And they called them choppers or weed because what they would do is sometimes if you did get them threaded, right, and you were trying to thread them on the fly, they would... Oh, but just... Not only would it break, it would like just go all these, you know, these little pieces of cellulite about this long, right? But then, you know, gradually as... And we had these other... I'd love to know what happened to these things, but they were like these theater projectors that had these long snoots on them. They were made by Kodak. And you could extend this lens and you could get it like a 10-inch focal length, which is right on the wall because it had a 1,000-watt bulb in it. Right. So we had a bunch of these and I just always thought I was lucky. So pretty much when you had either an overhead or a projector, it was really a matter of the lensing and the light. Yeah. If you had good lensing, you would have a good throw and the light would then take whatever you were doing and project it up on the screen sheet or whatever it was. Yeah, so our saving grace was the fact that we had these absolutely stellar machines and we had these two real glass plain old convex lenses, 9-inch, you know, it's back to back. Everything in it was glass and it was built like a tank. It was built. These things were built in 1939, right? Wow. And, you know, they were the most expensive thing to replace is the light bulb, right? No, no, the lens. In fact, right after that candle box tour, I cracked one of my lenses in one of the other old crates and I'd just been frantic. I don't know where to find another lens. I'm sure I want to show up somewhere. Totally. I think that... We'll talk later. Yeah. Totally. But that was it. There was an element because we didn't have video yet. People were playing around with old 8mm movies and cutting them up, 16mm and there was something. Mirrors reflected. All the period was filled with experimented... experimenting on every level of light and lensing projection to get it out there. And then there was an element in film. Oh, yeah, film was really... That is very different than... Today we have light shows, 2005. It's very different having video mixing and this is now. But in the 60s, a whole nother feeling of film being projected on on top of oils, layering, overlaying, a soft kind of feeling. I remember seeing dancers dancing over the oils and the loop going on and on where video is a whole nother media. A lot of what I've seen is really hard edged. I mean, it's super appropriate for time. Sure, sure, sure. To me, there's nothing more sensual than really good labels. I mean, if it's bright and colors are clear and we have the right setup it's just like being in another world. Trying not to make brown. Yeah, right, exactly. I mean, I just... What are some of the colors you could get? If somebody was looking, walked in to straight theater and looking up on the screen and you were doing your oils and what you were proud of in the past what were some of the colors that you would see come off of this, on the walls? Imagine a color. Imagine a color. Like ultraviolets and ultramarines and serrations and you know... Fuchsia and short truths. Those kind of colors the ones that really grab you. So when you really think about it when you're a child and you're learning primary colors yellow, blue, red the whole idea of oils and lights comes back to understanding what happens with color when it overlays on another color. So it's an art form. It's a different... Well, it's a different beast too in the fact that you know, if you mix red and yellow well, you're still... on an overhead you'll still get that color but it's like a different kind of thing it's like a reflected color rather than a... a opaque... opaque colors, yeah. But then if you added if you had a blue and a red you'd have a purple. Yeah, depending if it overlaid on a yellow again it would somehow change in certain areas so if you had a double plate or a triple plate you're able to play with so much. Yeah, the problem with a triple thing is you've got to be really good in order to manipulate three plates. Two is really... What difference could you get from three plates than you would from two? They're good for background static kind of stuff where you could get like say you could put a yellow in the top plate and then you'd have like a clear oil and a red and one and then in the bottom would be like blue and clear or blue and red or whatever and as the colors sort of inter-reacted they would like subtract from each other and you get these... It's really impossible to kind of describe it's like describing the northern lines Exactly. Did you ever some of the early lecture artists painted their own slides? Did you ever try to experiment with that a little bit? In fact, we had the greatest house when we went to work for Bill at the Fillmore West we finally had some money we rented this great old house and we had like one of those little rooms in the back we had a laundry sink and that was our paint room because the paint that you put on those slides is like you know tie-weed, heavy-duty stuff that just knocked you into next week and especially if you're snowing join on top of it come back but yeah, that was that was a lot of fun and then there was a whole period where people were doing their own you know, coat-a-las start black and white our thing was always no corners, no sharp edges and everything should flow together Do you remember doing a live show on H3? Do you remember doing a live show like this, right? Do you remember who might be playing on the stage? Well it seemed like as Hillel described when Santa Ana was there it seemed like we kind of jokingly said well it's great to have a practice band I'm just very curious there was like a wide variety like one I remember really well was this crazy group called Firmius Bandersnatch that was I believe they were headquartered here in the head and then Clover which is the group that used to open for Quicksilver and Huey Lewis was in there That's right, he was long hair and beard That's right Yeah, there were a lot of groups that passed through there and I'm telling you at that particular time in our career we were probably so dosed most of the time it just sort of seemed like this flowing Well just drop a few names this is the place to drop it any of the venues you worked and did live shows Tell me, it doesn't matter where just tell me some names there was Chuck Barrow we even worked with the craziest one was Buck Owens and his Buckaroos they were trying to do a light show to a country western band that was it and the most incredible night that I ever can think of was when Miles Davis played with Grateful Dead there were all these dead ends here and Miles came out on the stage and he had a white bass player and I said he'd be bass player and I said something's up and it was during the bitches brood period I forget what day it was but he came out there and he stated it was right they were just completely blown away by Miles Davis they just went wow exactly it was an incredible gig and then after that me and Ed went on to Mexico for a while and there was kind of like a misunderstanding at the time because we went to take photographs and he thought we were splitting the set you know, anyway I have a question I've heard your name associated with Brotherhood of Light we're closing up right now and I'm going to invite you back for a wealth of information tell me some of the beginnings of Brotherhood of Light we're in the third generation of Brotherhood of Light yeah, no kidding so, somewhat quickly if you could tell me a little bit about Brotherhood of Light well what we did a show me, Mark, and Bob did a show up in in Sebastopol and we had been reading the Brotherhood of Light Tarot book there is a change of light it's like these lessons yes, another book okay so we said duh we're brothers we do light shows why not the Brotherhood of Light? that's it it beat the hell out of aerial transit which was kind of we had this thing about how the molecules of light were being transmitted the aerial you know it's amazing so I know that Brotherhood of Light is still going on right now and I think a relative of yours is involved with it am I correct or not right now it's Peter it's Peter and Chris basically doing it I believe the last time I was from they were working with Almond Brothers they work with the Almond Brothers I don't know if that's true or not they hung in there doing it for like 12 years exactly basically in 85 was Eddie another member of the thing sold it off sold off the Brotherhood without my knowing it but I was up lazing in the hot springs up at Harvard but forever we have this tape as we're closing I want to thank you so much for being here I think a lot of the people watching this in the future don't even know what glass plates are know what light shows are I want to thank you for being here for being part of the scene the scene was a lot of people contributing to make it what it was to make it what it was and just real quickly I'm going to ask you if somebody saw this tape in the future what would you want young people to get about what you live through in one sentence what would you want people to get about the period, the creativity, the family just to look on their bright side be Monty Python be positive be positive yeah I mean it's like come on you know you've got this beautiful thing called life you know live it for every takes you know that's basically it that was what the whole light show thing was about was you know I think you've seen color look at this you know and that was always our you know with music you know it was just like I couldn't remember times of being just absolutely transported you know just being you know I felt like I was bouncing around among them but your work and your contributing to what you did as lifestyles and work whatever made everybody else feel like that and that was the gift that kept on giving through the 60s that what made the whole scene happen with hundreds and thousands of people and we're really honored to have you here today we want to thank you so much for this and we will be asking you back and I just want to thank you so much for being here and sharing and and continuing to inspire and thank you so much Brian well it was a great day I was glad to see those many acts that he'll allow and with her I hadn't seen them and I don't see a time of 69 whenever we film our west open I know it's a historical day and we want to thank you so much thank you so much Brian thank you I'm glad to be here I always love coming to the Hayden especially on a sunshine new day exactly