Electric Rainbow

Hi.

A lightshow to add to your list(s): Electric Rainbow, out of Belleville, Illinois and St. Louis, MO.

Electric Rainbow was a project of my late older brother Brian Harvey (helped by myself and our extended family and friends.) We started out in a small local club called Prince Knight's Palace in Belleville (an Illlinois town across the river from St. Louis) and grew to become the leading lightshow in the St. Louis area for several years in the late 60s early 70s.

During a stretch from roughly 1968 to 1972 we worked shows at local clubs and dances and at major concert venues including Kiel Auditorium, the Fox Theater, the Mississippi River Festival, and Washington University Field House.

Over that period Electric Rainbow did five shows with the Grateful Dead, and shows with Country Joe and the Fish, Buddy Miles, Vanilla Fudge, Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Louis, Bo Diddley, John Mayall, Faces, Chicago, The Guess Who, Velvet Underground, The Beach Boys, Hour Glass (with Duane and Greg Allman), Taj Mahal, Albert King, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra.

The two orchestra shows were performances of Scriabin's "Prometheus, Poem of Fire" which had never before been successfully performed with it's score for accompanying colored light. After a long break, our last show together was an outdoor reunion concert of a local band (and close friends) called Spur (originally the Unknowns) on the downtown square in Belleville in 1994.

We haven done a show in over 20 years and had to rebuild a lot of the equipment out of spare parts. Brian passed away in December of 2004.

Below I've attached a recently created Electric Rainbow poster, which is a photoshopped and enhanced version of our "official" program photo from the 1970 Mississippi River Festival program.

Brian's the guy in the middle. The picture is only a fraction of those of us who worked the lightshow at various times (basically everybody who was around the house, where many of us lived or were staying, on the day the photographer showed up.)

Patrick Harvey - March 2011