Wellington’s club scene in the last half of the 1960s was a closed one, controlled by two key promoters, Tom McDonald and his Universal Booking Agency, and Ken Cooper, who was loosely affiliated with Auckland’s Phil Warren. Both promoters booked venues and managed bands.

Among the key venues controlled by the pair were Ali Baba’s (at 171 Cuba Street – at the time of writing it is The San Francisco Bathhouse), booked by McDonald, and The Place in Willis Street, booked by Cooper. Both venues flowed with the times and in the 1967-69 period that was psychedelia. To compete with new places like The Psychedelic Id in Majoribanks Street, The Place was “flowered up” and to go with the look they printed a poster. Only limited numbers were printed, and thus it has been rarely seen over the years as only a few survived. AudioCulture has the story.

 

- Design Neil Pharazyn

During the late 1960s The Place, at 49 Willis Street, was Wellington's hot dance venue.

And then psychedelia arrived, straight from San Francisco.

I was a copywriter at a Wellington advertising agency and had created record covers for local bands under HMV producer Nick Karavias. Ken Cooper was one of the guys running The Place and he asked me if I could do a psychedelic makeover of it to bring it up to date. With a tip of the hat to San Francisco's amazing Fillmore stadium posters, I developed this poster, got one of our agency artists to make it happen, and got a print run done.

Some of the artists joined me in painting a huge psychedelic mural on one of The Place walls. We did a head-and-shoulders of a Byrds-like figure with square-shaped dark glasses and surrounded him with alternating fluorescent red and green lines running the length of the wall.

I also used a small film camera to shoot flower power "everything is beautiful" sequences, including zoo animals and close-ups of dandelions. The resulting film was to run in a continuous loop at The Place, projecting blissful images over the dancers.

Finally, we wired up pulsing lights to be operated by a lever under the drummer's foot pedal. 

We had a 50 percent success rate. The poster looks great and likewise did the wall mural. On the other hand, the film loop soon gave up the ghost.

I took some friends there on the opening night. Suddenly, in the middle of the jam-packed action the fuses blew, plunging the place into darkness. Time for a quick exit.

A few days later I examined the sturdy light controller we'd placed under the drummer's pedal. The power of his foot action had bent it in two.

Ken Cooper seemed happy though.

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Peace and Love at The Place

The imagery of The Place may have been aimed at fledgling flower children, but not all the audience got the message. The Dizzy Limits’ Stu Johnstone recalled to Andy Shackleton on his NZ Musos website ...

“One night when we were playing at The Place, some ‘mods’ (as distinct from ‘rockers’, being the other ‘cult look’ that teenagers adopted at the time) stood directly in front of Kelvin while he played and sang, hassling him throughout the set.

“When one of them obstructed his step down from the stage, Kelvin eye-balled him and within seconds they were pushing each other and a couple of punches were thrown. “Having attended karate classes for a couple of years, young Steve leapt from the stage, still wearing his black ‘drumming gloves’, adopted a karate-warrior pose and let out a blood-curdling war cry.

“The mods immediately froze and the dance floor cleared of regular patrons as Frits and I, buoyed by the apparent success of Steve’s heroics, jumped down to join the fray.

“Presumably in response to Steve’s war cry and a desire not to be upstaged, in ran the Place’s feared bouncers, the aptly named Billy-the-Boot and his professional wrestler cohort Martin Joiner. The two of them quickly bundled the four of us and the five or six mods through the Montmartre coffee bar that adjoined the Place and out into Willis Street.

“They then lined us up and spat out a string of threats that, if effected, would have hospitalised all of us and left us banned from the Place for what remained of our miserable lives.

“To our amazement, the stupidest (obviously) of the mods answered one of them back and this resulted in him being smashed to the pavement in a shower of (his) teeth and blood while the other mods ran off.

“After a brief ‘Don’t let it happen again!’ speech we were rescued by the Place manager and told to get back on stage and play.”

– From Andy Shackleton’s NZ Musos website, republished with permission of his estate