As a teen-ager in the 1960s growing up on New York’s Long Island, Marc L. Rubinstein found himself in a rock ’n’ roll band and soon realized that he wasn’t cut out to be on the stage. Rubinstein’s 2023 memoir, Let There Be Light … Show (An Alien’s Journey Through Humanity), tells how this adopted child and high-school dropout instead became a wizard behind the curtain, creating all kinds of vivid psychedelic imagery with his signature Pig Light Show, and working with bands including the Grateful Dead, Black Sabbath, Allman Brothers and Santana.

“I asked myself do I want to be one of the million people trying to be singers or do I want to be one of the very few light show experts in the world?” Rubinstein told PureHoney from his Boynton Beach home on a lazy Easter Sunday afternoon. “By 17 I was doing the lights at Fillmore East and my life changed.”

His goal in writing an autobiography was twofold. “I wanted to talk about the light shows I put on, how I did it and what my inspiration was,” he said. “But I also wanted to talk about how I always felt like an alien. Like so many people in rock ’n’ roll I always felt different.”

For all the famous rockers he encountered through work, Rubinstein said he only got starstruck meeting Beatles: Paul McCartney (in disguise) and John Lennon (with Yoko Ono) at a Mothers of Invention show; and George Harrison during planning sessions for Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh.

It was years later at a bar with friends in Portland, Maine that Rubinstein realized how special those Fillmore East Pig Light Show years were and how his experiences might interest readers.

“One song after another would come on and I told my friend, ‘I worked with them and I worked with them and I worked with them,’” Rubinstein said. “My friend’s jaw hit the ground. And I realized my life was outside the norm.”

Let There Be Light … Show (An Alien’s Journey Through Humanity) by Marc L. Rubinstein is available through Barnes & Noble, Amazon and other booksellers. ~ David Rolland