Denver Art Museum’s “Psychedelic Experience” Phone Booths, 2009

I was leafing through pages of an old payphone industry trade journal when I spotted a small story about an interesting sounding phone booth installation from 2009. I looked it up and was led to this video playlist of 25 short recordings from an interactive piece involving phone booths at the Denver Art Museum.

Two wood phone booths containing rotary dial payphones were placed in a Denver Art Museum gallery as part of an exhibit called “Psychedelic Experience”, a show focused mostly on rock band posters and artwork from the 1960s. From these phones visitors were invited to record memories from or associations with the 1960s, whether they lived through that decade or not. Speakers knew they were being recorded, and curators at the museum uploaded a selection of the videos to YouTube.

The claustrophobic feeling of being in or, in this case, simply seeing the enclosed atmosphere of a phone booth almost invariably reminds me of the Catholic confessional. Indeed, some of the memories shared by visitors to this exhibit sound a whole lot like confessions. Was this woman joking when she said she helped kill somebody in Central Park in the 1970s? She states, matter-of-fact: “A homeless man came up and we killed him.”

What did she think this was, the Apology Line? The story seems eerie but the opinion of a seasoned interrogator or police investigator would be in order to detect clues that she is or is not making this up. I looked for other videos from this person because it sounded to me like she might have been continuing these comments from a previous video. I did not find any others.

My reference to the Apology Line refers to how calls made to Apology in which the caller “confessed” to violent crimes and murders were almost always debunked and laughed at by others who either recognized the signs of someone lying or had evidence to prove that some particular detail of the story could not possibly be true. This video from Denver might be too short for that kind of analysis.

She details that Central Park was not especially safe back then, and that everyone carried knives, then ends by saying that she knows she looks pretty good for having been around in the ’70s. That last needlessly gratuitous flourish makes me think she was lying.

Most stories from the exhibit touch on matters of LSD parties, Bob Dylan, Woodstock, and all the stuff you’d expect to hear about in 1960s reminiscences. I found a few that lamented the drug scene of the day, particularly from people who were younger in the 1960s and whose parents and older siblings were basically taken away from them by drugs.

Several other recordings from the “Psychedelic Experience” phone booths can be found by searching YouTube for “Psychedelic Experience at DAM“.

A favorite of mine is from a man whose earliest living memory was being two years old and having an older girl stuff dead grass into his mouth. Welcome to life, kid.

It seems like every one of these recordings is marred by annoying static, and several of the segments feature speakers with nothing of substance to say about the 1960s, or anything else. For some viewers the grainy video quality probably doesn’t help either, though in this case I would prefer grainy quality to the too-real 1080p.

It is a unique and interesting little series, thanks to the organizers of “Psychedelic Experience” at the Denver Art Museum and museum visitors who made it happen all those years ago. This uncredited photo from the aforementioned payphone industry trade journal (which I will identify and talk about later) shows what the two phone booths looked like at the exhibit.