San Francisco Light Works

My name is John Brand. I founded the San Francisco Light Works back in June of 1967.

We were part of the "second wave" of light shows that played the Fillmore West and the Winterland arena. Our show had the advantage that I owned a professional Audio Visual company which gave us technical resources beyond the reach of most light shows. It allowed us to work both long throw venues, like the Fillmore as well as short throw rear projection venues like Winterland Arena.

Founding members were myself, Christine vanDerslice, John vanDerslice, Jim Bosecker, Vivian Bosecker and Suzie Alexander.

Suzie was under strict supervision since she was only 13 at the time. That was 48 years ago. She is still in the show. The San Francisco Light Works name came from Gail Harper.

We performed at the closing week of the Fillmore and we were the only light show to perform at Moscone Center for Bill Graham. We also continued to work for Graham in a number of other venues because of our flexibility and adaptability for different enviroments. We were especially grateful for being able to work with the Blues Brothers when the performed one of only a few live shows in their career. We also did a few road shows along the way including the first, last and only Edmonton International Pop Festival.

Late in the '70's we merged with the Pablo Light Show of New York. That added Charles Suttles and Jay Moss to the crew replacing the Boseckers who had moved on.

Our other claim to fame is that we were the light show that was featured in the Oliver Stone film, "The Doors" staring Val Kilmer and Meg Ryan.

We now have all of our original light show equipment intact and in storage in Southern California. It mysteriously dissapeared from its storage area the night before it was to be auctioned off for unrelated reasons in 1986.

It later resurfaced years later. The show is now ocassionaly performed by various children of the original members, several of who work in the music industry in other capacities.

I now live in New Zealand and have performed as San Francisco Light Works a few times on a limited basis.


Regards,


John Brand CTS
Brand Presentation Services, Ltd.
PO Box 225
Greenhithe 0756
Auckland NZ

January 7th 2015

Poster by Randy Tuten 1982

Thanks to Glen Beebe for the scan