American Dream, California Spectrum,

Lost Dogs, Napoleon Fish

All of these lightshows were run by Jim Mazzeo who started doing lightshows for Buffalo Springfield and Moby Grape at The Ark in Sausalito in 1966.

Jim did shows for the Animals (their first US show) the Beach Boys, The Mothers of Invention, The Doors and Andy Warhol. These first shows were as American Dream and then California Spectrum. Later work with Neil Young the lightshow was under the name Lost Dogs and a Moto Sanahari lightshow was billed as Napoleon Fish.

On The Road with Jim Mazzeo (an excerpt from Maz’s Tales):
For six months from Jan 1967 to June i signed with Three Star Agency in Chicago to travel with a band called the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. We played small clubs private parties and barns during the worst winter blizzard to strike in sixty years.

We had a brand new Chrysler station wagon and a thirty-four foot Bol Aires house trailer full of band and lightshow equipt. Totally overloaded and over weight, we blew two engines traveling all over Illonois, Kanas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Michigan and Pennsylvainna.

In addition to playing the visibles with the traveling band my agency would book me out to other concert performances, that is how i came to do the first Animals concert at Northwestern University 1967, i think that was in Feb or March ...the band changed its name to the California Spectrum so we would get more bookings....the name California was thought to have as much booking value on the flyers and ads as the word "lightshow" had proven itself to have had. The kids travelled through blizzards over two lane back roads to the barn that some Cedar Rapids promoter owned and booked during the winter time advertising the lightshow that the kids had only read about in magazines and papers reporting on what new cool things were occuring on the west coast music scene.

Courtesy Jim Mazzeo © 2000

photo Courtesy of Jim Phillips © 2000