Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 15, 1990 TAG: 9005150124
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ISABEL WILKERSON THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: CHICAGO LENGTH: Long
The lamps, called Lava Lites, became standard equipment in hip dens and dormitory rooms and ubiquitous icons of a generation and its drug culture.
Then came the 1980s, recession and high technology, and people were no longer into mellow.
Yuppies replaced flower children, who put their lava lamps in the attic and got running shoes and answering machines.
Now 25 years after the lava lamp first came on the scene in this country, it is making a comeback. Original owners are dusting them off and giving them a place of honor on top of their VCRs.
Their children, now college age, are buying the lamps as campy conversation pieces. And even trend purveyors like Sharper Image are carrying them.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the lamp, the Chicago-based manufacturer, Haggerty Enterprises, threw a party here with 500 lava lamp fans who waxed metaphysical and traded lava lamp stories.
Guests wandered about a new wave club lit by 200 lava lamps, which made the place a kind of lava lamp museum.
And they gazed, mesmerized, into the bulb of a new three-foot-tall version of the lamp, three times bigger than the original.
The lamp was created in the early 1960s by a British engineer, Craven Walker, in an experiment gone awry. No one can remember what Walker was trying to create, only that he started a craze that has a devoted following.
Beverly Merz, 46, a technical writer, stared at the slow-moving globs of wax and smiled.
"I look at this," she said, "and I'm reminded of sneaking into people's parents' dens to make out. Everybody had one over the TV set, and when the lights went out the Lava Lite glowed."
Her co-worker, Rebecca Voellker, 35, remembered how badly she wanted one of the lamps as a teen-ager.
"My parents wouldn't let me have one," she said. "They thought it was too risque."
Chip Chapman, 26, a legal assistant, was 1 year old when the lamps were introduced. He now sees them as a bridge to a popular decade.
"You want anything that is part of the original '60s. Black light posters and a Lava Lite."
As waitresses in hot pants and miniskirts passed out drinks at the anniversary party, guests engaged in serious discussions about the biophysics of the lava lamp and how its contents assume those sinewy shapes.
"It's probably cholesterol," one man said.
Actually, said Kenneth Tafel, vice president and general manager of Haggerty, the lamp bulbs are filled with 12 or 13 ingredients.
"The main components are wax and water," he said.
"It's the close relationship between the gravity of the wax and water that makes it work."
The base of the lava lamp holds a 40-watt bulb that warms the wax mixture, which then rises and descends and floats in the water and takes on different shapes, said Christopher Baldovin, marketing director at Haggerty.
"It's like watching an aquarium or looking at clouds," Baldovin said.
"Everybody sees a different thing.
While the lava lamps' charm is their '60s authenticity, it has almost been their undoing.
The original lamps were available with a gold-colored base, in the shape of an Aladdin's lamp, speckled with plastic flowers or attached to a music box that would play songs by Peter, Paul and Mary.
To spur sales in the '80s, the company started making sleeker, more high-tech lamps with a black matte finish for the minimalist era.
A lot more has changed about the lamps since the days when people picked up the latest Beatles album and a lava lamp.
The original lamps sold for $25. Now they sell for twice that. And the new three-foot version will sell for over $200 when it becomes available in December.
Several million of the lamps have been sold since they went into production.
"You really seriously are just as likely to see them in a retirement home as in a Berkeley dorm room," Baldovin said.
"We sold as many to furniture showrooms as in record stores."
But Friday night some younger people were not impressed.
"They're ugly," said Liza Jones, 23, a teacher.
"They're passive. The whole '60s and '70s thing is an immature longing for something that no longer exists."
The manufacturer concedes that the lava lamp is not for everyone.
"Either you really love it or it's the tackiest thing you've ever seen," Baldovin said.
"This is not a gray-area product."
Last fall, for instance, the company received hundreds of calls from lava lamp owners after the San Francisco earthquake.
Sure, all their worldly possessions were under blocks of concrete, but the main thing heartbroken callers were saying, Baldovin recalled, was: "My Lava Lite did not survive. How can I get another one?"
For fans, the lamps are much more than little pieces of the past.
"It's almost as if the Monkees and Gary Puckett and the Union Gap came back," Voellker said.
"Only this is more entertaining."
by CNB