“The Great Gig in the Sky” will be seen, heard and experienced in the MontBleu Theatre.
“We want to offer that Pink Floyd concert experience that people saw back in the '70s and '80s,” said Dave Marino, the band leader of Eclipse, a tribute band to the British group, who released a series of mind-bending albums and performed live with a laser light show.

“What we want to do is transport people back in time and we have a new generation of younger people who never had the opportunity to see Pink Floyd,” Marino said. “We want them to experience a little slice of rock history.”

The light show will be presented by UV99 Laser Productions, which for 15 years has worked venues such as the Coachella Valley Music Festival, Jim Carrey comedy concerts and even a 1995 gig at Burning Man.

“We were the first to set foot on the playa,” said Skipp Raftery, the lighting director.
Laser Eclipse will begin at 9 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 28.

Pink Floyd, along with Electric Light Orchestra and Blue Öyster Cult, was a pioneer in laser light shows. However, technology has come a long way since those shows in the 1970s and '80s.

“It will be something that people have never seen before,” Raftery said. Many people have seen laser shows and many people have seen Pink Floyd laser shows and this will be vastly different frmo any Pink Floyd laser show they have ever seen.”

But coinciding with the psychedelic nature of Pink Floyd, instead of being monitored by fire marshals, laser shows are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

While Pink Floyd's lasers were just one color, the Laser Eclipse's will be multicolored.
“I saw them live twice in Oakland, once indoors and once outdoors and their laser shows and it was good,” Raftery said.

Eclipse, a quintet from Reno formed nearly three years ago, has performed to lights, but Saturday will be the first time with UV99 Laser Productions.

“I've dedicated myself to studying David Gilmour's guitar technique,” Marino said. “I've been playing guitar for a lot of years and it's very challenging, and it's challenging for all of us. It's very detailed music, a lot of time changes and a lot of it is recreating those classic tones that they had. We use a lot of old-school equipment to try to reproduce their tone.”

Eclipse performs songs from the four albums released from 1973-79 — “The Dark Side of the Moon,” “Wish You Were Here,” “Animals” and “The Wall.”

Pink Floyd went from being a well-known band to an all-time great when it released “The Dark Side of the Moon,” which was on the Billboard top 200 charts for 14 years.

“We wanted to pick the most classic hits they had,” Marino said. “We pretty much play ‘The Dark Side of the Moon' in its entirety.”

All of the band members have played in classic rock groups in Reno. The newest member, Kathie Hull, is the singer for “Great Gig in the Sky,” a tune sequenced with Dorothy's in-house flight on the “Wizard of Oz,” if the movie and album are played at the same time.

“I think it's an amazing coincidence,” Mario said. While “The Dark Side of the Moon” also plays “Money” when Dorothy and her friends enter the Emerald City and the Scarecrow dances while Floyd plays “Brain Damage” (The lunatic is on the grass), band members have denied recording the album with the movie in mind.

Vince Gates, owner of Play Your Own Music in Carson City, plays bass and fills the role of Roger Waters. Rob Lawrence, who owns Humble Bee Records recording studio, is on keyboards and Lars Cerio is on drums.

Three Pink Floyd members are still alive: Gilmour, Waters and drummer Nick Mason. Keyboardist Richard Wright died last year of cancer at the age of 65. Syd Barrett, who went insane and left the band in 1968, died in 2006. Barrett was the inspiration for many of the songs penned by Gilmour and Waters, including the themes for the albums “Wish You Were Here” and “The Wall.”