Garden of Delights

Personnel:

Bob Ellison (Director)
Noelle Olompali
Michele Weston
Walter Doyle

We (Bob Ellison and I), drove in his VW bus to Ohio for his sister's wedding, Summer of 67. Then we drove to Kansas City, where he had attended Kansas City Art Institute with Glenn McKay before moving to California.

Glenn, along with Jerry Abrahms, created the light show Headlights, who did shows mainly at Fillmore).

Here is a link to the Kansas City Star article about Robert Ellison and myself:

https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article153894614.html

It says I was 18 at the time but I really was 16. But because we were traveling across state lines, me as a minor with Bob who was 21, my mom signed paperwork for us to be on the road together...but we kept my age a secret so not to alert authorities.

Bob has a website, he lives somewhere in Ohio now.

We were the first Hippies from San Francisco Kansas City had ever been in contact with.

We had an underground psychedelic music venue, we designed the psychedelic decor, and we were the house light show that summer, it was financed by a retired KC Chiefs football player.

And while we were there the people we stayed with started the first Hippie head shop and newspaper.

When Bob and I returned we lived at Rancho Olompali and did Light Shows at the Avalon, California Hall, Carousel Ballroom, Family Dog on the Great Highway, Longshoreman's Hall, the Ark and misc. smaller venues around the Bay Area.

We also were the first Light Show projected behind Carlos Carvahal's Ballet Company in San Francisco (1968 or 1969).

After we moved to Olompali, 1967, Don McCoy gave us money to purchase the best slide projectors available with the great lenses to cover the distance of Winterland, they were German made Prado projectors, a huge upgrade from the Kodak carousel projectors most light shows used then, that's also when we had custom made (in SF) cases to protect our equipment.

Noelle Olompali Barton - 31st January 2022

Memories from Ben Marks (Collectors Weekly)

In 1968 or ‘69, when I was 12 or 13 years old, I briefly made a pestering nuisance of myself as an assistant with the Garden of Delights Light Show.

At the time, they were based at the Sausalito Arts Center, which was located in a former public school just up the hill from Gates 5 and 6 and all the houseboats.

My mom, Pearl, had enrolled me and my sister Sabrina in a pottery class there while she took a dance class. During one of her classes, she heard music coming from the school’s multipurpose auditorium. There she found two musicians, a flute player named Yasos and a clarinet and piano player named Schawkie Roth.

My mom ended up singing jazz and traditional Middle Eastern tunes with them for a while, the high point being a performance for artist Jean Varda’s 60th birthday party, which was attended by several thousand well wishers.

That auditorium is also where I met the couple who ran Garden of Delights. I want to say that the guy’s name was Bob, and it may have been Bob Holt, but I cannot remember for sure.

I have no idea about the first and last name of Bob's girlfriend or wife. Another person who was involved with the light show (he was in charge of the overhead projector that illuminated the dish of the most flammable liquid we used in the liquid part of the light show) was a guy named Roger, who may have been Roger Hillyard.

My most vivid recollection of Roger is of him showing up one day with cuts on his face from a fight the night before. Roger was cool.

Garden of Delights stored their stuff, practiced, and performed at the Sausalito Arts Center—Bob and his girlfriend/wife may have even lived in a loft that had been built over the stage.

Their gear included three overhead projectors, a color wheel or two, a few 8mm or 16mm film projectors, and maybe a dozen slide projectors, some with carousels, others with horizontal cartridges of slides. They had cases and boxes for everything so that all the gear, including the glass dishes used on the overheads, could be safely moved from gig to gig.

During this period, Garden of Delights was, or had been, doing shows at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco, but I never worked any of those.

In fact, during the brief period when I hung around the light show, business was slow and money was obviously tight. Bob’s conversations with Roger always seemed to concern a guy Roger knew who worked for the Grateful Dead. That guy was going to get them a gig soon, really soon, hang in there, man. That sort of thing.

Probably because my mom sang jazz with Yasos and Schawkie, I was allowed to hang out with the light-show crew. My job was to move things around, clean the glass dishes after use on the overheads, and sometimes aim sheets of fabric attached to grids of mirrors onto a wall or rear-projection screen (in this case, obviously, the slide projector would be pointed backwards at me, away from the wall or screen).

I was mesmerized by all of their gear, as well as the fleeting compositions we’d create on a wall or rear-projection screen. As a preteen, I’m pretty sure I also enjoyed the slides of Bob’s girlfriend/wife naked.

I believe, but cannot be sure, that I helped out on the Varda birthday party, because I do remember working a show at the Sausalito Art Center when my mom was singing with Yasos and Schawkie. That said, it may have been a different event unrelated to Varda. My biggest gig with Garden of Delights was a trip to the Richmond Art Center across the bay for an afternoon event.

I think I was paid 10 dollars, which was almost certainly a greater share than I deserved of whatever meager pay they had probably received.