On a recent Thursday evening, Courtney Tucker—a tall, blonde twenty-two-year-old art major at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse—stood behind a twenty-four-channel effects console in the school’s darkened planetarium, her face reflecting colored shadows from a baffling array of buttons and knobs.
She tapped several of the buttons, and shooting stars showered down from the white dome, illuminating the room—a mere twenty-four feet in diameter, with two rows of padded red benches lining the perimeter. “Time Warp,” Tucker said. “That’s my favorite.” She turned a knob. The stars slowed, then shot upward. She scribbled a few notes on a sheet of paper.
This was Tucker’s second time running Album Encounters, where a record (alternately classic and modern rock) is spun to a choreographed light show each Thursday night during the school year. She had already spent eight hours preparing Pink Floyd’s Meddle, and the show was scheduled to start in an hour. She was visibly nervous.
Tucker is the successor to astronomy professor Bob Allen, who ran Album Encounters from 1974 or 1975 (he forgets the exact year) until last spring, when he retired. And although she had three shows under her belt, this was Tucker’s first time playing the music through the planetarium’s computer system, which has the nasty habit of freezing. One of the lighting effects had stopped working earlier in the week, and one of the two speakers had sputtered and crackled during Tucker’s preshow run-through. Allen, who hand-wired most of the system, had kindly sat through the previous week’s show to offer occasional assistance. On this evening, however, he’d stayed home.
In a telephone conversation, Allen described himself as an admitted astronomy and music junkie who is “into space” and “fell head over heels for synthesizers.” He first saw Led Zeppelin (favorite band) play at the Met Center in Bloomington back in 1970 and later saw Pink Floyd play the Milwaukee County Stadium (favorite concert). He started Album Encounters to entertain friends and touring rock bands, and eventually opened it up to students.
When Allen finally retired, he feared the program would disappear, but Tucker, formerly his assistant, enthusiastically offered to take the reins. “How could you not love it?” she said. “It’s music under the stars.” Her nineteen-year-old assistant, Brian White, showed up around seven p.m. wearing torn jeans and toting a skateboard. He offered a similar story: “I came to a few of the shows freshman year and really liked it, and at the end of the year I was, like, pretty motivated to keep it going. I emailed Bob to see if there was anything I could do to help, and here I am.”
Besides the main board (offering fifty-five effects) and the sky-projection equipment, the planetarium has a hodgepodge of other bells and whistles added by Allen over the years, including several strings of Christmas lights, a strobe light, a disco ball, and a light-up alien that Allen refers to as the Big Green Man. Tucker and White have taken to waving laser pointers through ornamented thrift-store glassware. “Bob liked rapid transitions and mixing different-colored lights,” Tucker said. “I like the heavy, slower stuff that kind of consumes you.” She paused. “But I still like the strobe light for big moments.”
The first arrivals, showing up fifteen minutes early, were two girls in sweatshirts and jeans who entered reverently and, after a bit of deliberation, sat in the back row. They gazed up at the lighted dome, then leaned back in the familiar planetarium posture: a deep slouch, with feet extended and head nestled on the top of the seat. The shows are promoted through flyers and word-of-mouth, and attendance varies, though certain bands (Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin) tend to draw larger crowds than others (Dandy Warhols, Bright Eyes). Only seventeen people had showed up the previous week for the year’s first show, featuring the music of Mason Jennings (Allen had never heard of him). But by eight o’clock on this evening, the planetarium, which comfortably holds about sixty people, was filled with seventy-five students sitting knee-to-knee, whispering about parties and David Gilmour solos.
At 8:05 p.m., Tucker dimmed the lights and pressed play. The second speaker crackled and fell silent. She turned up the volume. The song skipped briefly but recovered. Five minutes into it, the music climaxed, and Tucker, whose head swung furiously between her written notes and the control panel, layered Star Field Clouds (spinning stars) over Color Organ (colored lightning above a cloud cover), transitioned into Time Warp, and punctuated the combination with a single flash of the strobe light.
“Wow!” one girl exclaimed from the back row, and was promptly shushed by a boy sitting in front of her.
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