Gemini Psychedelic Supermarket -- Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out --
Fabulous 3-D Action walk-through of Hollywood Boulevard, circa 1968 -- includes online chatroom feature & Server.
Just Look At What You Get:
Oh, look -- there's Mel & Gary Jacobson, the owners, and their best friend, Gemini Store Manager Tommy Kelly, standing just in the entrance; Tommy & Eppie Epstein's Poster Shop (they later opened the "Alter-Ego" just around the corner on Hollywood Boulevard) is to the left, and to the far left you'll see "Famous Gene" sitting on his elevated chair, so he can scan the entire record shop below....
Then there's Vinnie, who became "Alice Cooper" -- it was all about re-awakening a prior lifetime in which "Vinnie" had been burned at the stake in Salem, Mass. a long, long time ago...
And over there is Steve Sachs, Moon-Lite Co. over in Culver City, who has his latest inventions -- Ocean in a Bottle -- originally made with brake fluid floating in gasoline, and his lava-lamp, his Moon-Light (a translucent lamp globe turned upside down and stuffed with Christmas tree lights wired to an amp driver for varying colors with music), which became the "Color Organ", and many other brand-new just-invented psychedelic lighting devices up on the counter. He did lightshows -- the first ever -- for most of the early psychedelic era bands, and used pools of mercury set inside upturned speaker cones to flash lasers off rotating mirror balls overhead. Crude, but effective.
Use your mouse to wander downstairs into the sub-basement of the former Hollywood restaurant, where jam sessions featured every major rock talent of the sixties, who came to play with Gary, one of the greatest guitar players of the sixties, now unhirable by any band of that period (even zits were enough to get you on the Permanent Unhirable List of any entertainment beaurocracy) since he'd been confined to a wheelchair after the accident in which he was struck by a speeding car. Gary's settlement check paid for the restaurant, which was turned into the Psychedelic Supermarket and painted black throughout, when the City denied Mel and Gary their restaurant license. They had to do something -- they couldn't back out of the lease!
SEE the ever-popular turn-on spot ... the ! That's where you can find that couple in blacklight, the love poster, the Escher Staircase Blacklite Nightmare, the old lady smoking the joint, the LA Cop by Ron Cobb, Mister Natural in the Nude, and much, much more!
This 3-D ACTION walkthrough is so immersive, you'll feel as if you're back there again! Wild Man Fischer...there he goes! And Caesar...and Billy Byers, Jr. over at the Gold Cup...and look! Isn't that Lester the Jester (Sidney Plotnik) going into "Hell-Bent-For-Leather"...? Could that figure over in the corner sitting high above us all overlooking the record stax where you can buy the "Live at Leeds" bootleg for $2.50 "Famous Gene"???
And who can forget the first song of the day to come blaring out of those X-7 Monitors at Gene's booth at precisely 11 a.m. every single morning ... cutting through the stale smoke and sweat and incense of the night before, breaking like waves against the enormous psychedelic and rock posters that hung everywhere above Tommy & Eppie's counters???
It was always Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and then Zeppelin, after which came Blind Faith and then, of course, Three Dog Night...and on and on into the wee morning hours....ending with Electric Prunes and Stone Poneys...and then quiet for a short respite before the tumult began again the next day, and the next and the next and the next....
Rock on, Keep the Faith, and Keep the Party Going!
