Every Friday and Saturday night, in Salt Lake City's Hansen Planetarium, 200 young people crowd the lobby, waiting for the midnight laser show.
Most of them weren't even born 20 years ago, when their parents sat around listening to Led Zeppelin while watching a light show. To them, perhaps, this concept of putting lights to music is a modern idea, as modern as laser technology.Recently, 16-year-old Jascha Zeitlin took in his first 3-D laser show at the planetarium. The music was grunge and the light effects were "pretty neat," he says, although his eyes got dry because he was too busy watching to blink. Did his parents ever do anything like this? Did they go to a concert or a dance with a light show when they were his age? "I don't know," he says. "They never talk about any of that stuff."
Chances are they did. A generation ago, it was high school and college kids who discovered the basic principle: Listening to rock music can be a psychedelic head trip - if the music is accompanied by pulsing lights. It was a truth that was almost lost to the world. In the mid-1970s, when the flower children turned in their bell-bottoms for business suits, most of them forgot all about light shows.
Not Doug McCullough. He lived in Virginia and ran a light show company, traveling around with bands. His business was so flat by the mid-1970s that he had to take a job as a mail carrier to support himself.
Then he fell in love with a woman named Joanne, a woman who believed in his art. She'd seen the things he could do with strobe lights and crinkly cellophane, with fire, with colored oil between two slides projected on a screen. She figured all he was missing was a laser, so she sold her house and all her furniture and bought him one. Soon, Doug and Joanne got married.
In 1978, they formed a company called Audio Visual Imagineering, along with an engineering whiz named Wade Davis, who also hadowned a light show company.
They were not the first to use lasers in a light show. In 1973, a would-be filmmaker named Ivan Dryer tried the new technology in something he called "Laserium." Dryer wasn't big on rock music, so his first show included Strauss' "Blue Danube" waltz. Rocked-up versions of his show have been running six days a week for nearly 22 years now, at Griffith Park planetarium in Los Angeles, making Laserium the longest-running live show in the city's history.
But back in the '70s, nobody knew this concept had any staying power. The McCulloughs and Davis lived on their savings for more than a year while they tried to market their idea.
One of the first places they visited was the Albert Einstein Planetarium at the Smithsonian, in Washington, D.C. Von Del Chamberlain was the planetarium director at the time. He thought they were nice young people but he didn't book their show. "I never dreamed they'd do so well. Their company is now one of the best in the world."
How ironic it is (one might even say "mind-bending") that after Chamberlain came to Utah to direct the Hansen Planetarium, he realized that laser shows were perfect for planetariums, and that the AVI productions would draw the largest crowds.
In the early 1980s, the Hansen Planetarium tried several different laser show companies, including AVI. Since 1988, they've contracted exclusively with AVI.
The Hansen Planetarium was one of the first to use a Digistar star projector in combination with the laser technology, says spokesperson Doug Lowe. The brand-new Digistar II is even brighter.
The laser show technology keeps changing. The expensive and somewhat uneven three-dimensional effects were improved in 1994 when AVI replaced 3-D projection with a new kind of holographic film 3-D glasses, for the audience to wear.
Joanne McCullough says, "We didn't invent the glasses, but we were able to help develop them and to obtain exclusivity. So we are the only laser company that can use them. And they work perfectly with lasers."
As with most planetariums across the country, the Hansen Planetarium laser shows bring in more money and more viewers than astronomy shows do. The crowds keep growing. In the mid-'80s laser shows only brought in about 25,000 customers a year. Since 1990, they've been bringing in at least 70,000 people a year. "We get far better attendance at laser shows than at star shows," says Chamberlain, which, as an educator, he regrets. "I wish it were the other way around."
Tickets to the laser shows are $7.50. The Hansen Planetarium keeps 40 percent of the gross revenues and AVI keeps the rest. Last year the planetarium netted $180,600 off laser shows and $104,000 off astronomy shows.
AVI produces five or six new laser shows a year. Lowe says they run each laser show until attendance starts to wane. Occasionally they have success with a show that features cuts from different bands, but for the most part, audiences like one-band shows, and sometimes even one-album shows. Currently the planetarium is featuring Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Stone Temple Pilots, U-2 and, on a Saturday matinee, Billy Joel.
The lasers provide the colors, the glasses provide the 3-D effects and the planetarium's Digistar projector puts stars on the screen and spins them, giving the sensation of motion. "It's a mind-boggling sensory experience," says Lowe.
There is really no arguing the point. Lasers are, technologically speaking, groovier than slide projectors. But sometimes Mike Mills still misses the old days. Mills works for AVI. He is stationed in Salt Lake City, putting on the laser shows at the Hansen Planetarium.
He talks about his early days with AVI, when the technology was new and lasers ran off joy sticks, and the company had to rely on some of the old light show techniques to spice up the show. Twelve years ago, it took at least two people and ten slide projectors to put on a laser show, says Mills. He'd do the "liquids," rolling mixtures of oil, alcohol, food coloring and water between four layers of glass, in front of a projector, while he used a foot pedal to vary the brightness. His partner ran the laser.
Today, Mills works alone, sitting at a console, using a computer to run Digistar while at the same time making the laser lights dance. "It's a better show for the audience, but I must admit, there were elements of the live stuff I enjoyed. As a performer."
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Laser shows at Hansen Planetarium
Laser Billy Joel in 3-D plays Saturdays at 1 p.m. Admission is $5 for children and seniors and $6 for adults and teens.
Admission to all other laser shows is $7.50. Laser Stone Temple Pilot in 3-D plays Wednesday through Saturdays at 9 p.m. Laser U2 3-D plays Fridays and Saturdays at 10 p.m. Laser Zepplin 3-D plays Fridays and Saturdays at 10 p.m. and Laser Floyd in 3-D runs at midnight on Fridays and Saturdays.