Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back the Bob Left Sets podcast. My
Speaker 1: guest today is a photographer, Goel Burnstein. Joel, how did
Speaker 1: you get started?
Speaker 2: Probably when my parents gave me a little brownie Hawkeye
Speaker 2: camera like a kid as a kid and started and
Speaker 2: being interesting and it interested in it. I started playing
Speaker 2: ukulele at five or six, and then guitar, so I
Speaker 2: actually was really into music before I picked up a camera,
Speaker 2: and that informed I. Don't I guess how I my subjects.
Speaker 1: I was like.
Speaker 2: The first pictures that I developed and printed by myself
Speaker 2: for the then unknown young Joni Mitchell in a coffeehouse
Speaker 2: where she was doing three sets a night for about
Speaker 2: Let's load on.
Speaker 1: Let's load up. How'd you pick up the ukulele at
Speaker 1: age five?
Speaker 2: Well, I just was. I went to. Here's what I
Speaker 2: realized later, unbeknownst to me, I was part of the
Speaker 2: second American folk music revival that started in nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: seven with the Kingston Trio having a number one hit
Speaker 2: with the folk song Hanging Down Your Head Tom Dooley,
Speaker 2: and that started the American folk music craze that you know,
Speaker 2: took off from nineteen seven, went, you know, all the
Speaker 2: way till Bob Noe went electric basically till nineteen sixty five. Okay,
Speaker 2: so I was part of that growing up, and I
Speaker 2: just had I had lessons, guitar lessons.
Speaker 1: Wait a little bit, So it's nineteen fifty seven, you're
Speaker 1: a student of the game. How do you become aware
Speaker 1: of the folk revival?
Speaker 2: Oh? Not until well, at the time, we had what
Speaker 2: were called wing ding, which were home little parties that
Speaker 2: were about bringing your guitar or you're ukulele in and
Speaker 2: people would sit in a circle and you'd have like
Speaker 2: hot cider or snacks, and you would play people what
Speaker 2: you just learned, and they would pass the guitar around
Speaker 2: in a circle, or if you brought your own guitar.
Speaker 2: And that's something I did when I was like five
Speaker 2: or six. You know.
Speaker 1: Okay, no one likes to talk about age, but what
Speaker 1: year were you born?
Speaker 2: Nineteen fifty two. I'm eleven months older than you, Bob.
Speaker 1: I was just going to say that we have a
Speaker 1: lot in I remember listening to Rough and Ready records
Speaker 1: at age five. I remember, you know, wing Bang Wuil
Speaker 1: Walla bing Bang. But for me, I found out about
Speaker 1: most of these folk songs at summer camp. But sure
Speaker 1: in terms of five, that's very early. What was going on.
Speaker 1: I mean it was early.
Speaker 2: I was just interested in it. I don't let's see,
Speaker 2: it was not that uncommon. Honestly. When I started, I
Speaker 2: was in like a group class with five or six
Speaker 2: kids learning to play ukulele, and at some point the
Speaker 2: guitar teacher telling us to close our eyes and tell
Speaker 2: us what chord he was playing on the guitar, and
Speaker 2: I was the only kid who could do it, which
Speaker 2: really surprised me, Like it was obvious to me, like,
Speaker 2: of course, that's a g chord because I can hear
Speaker 2: the high notes up at the top or whatever. I
Speaker 2: had clues, audio clues in my head, so I got
Speaker 2: into that started me off on. Then when hearing things
Speaker 2: on the radio, I wanted to know what chords they were,
Speaker 2: so I would sit with Beatle records. You'll remember that
Speaker 2: some of the early records had the vocals on one
Speaker 2: side and the band on the other side. So if
Speaker 2: you had a friend who had a whose parents had
Speaker 2: a stereo, you could move the balance control and just
Speaker 2: hear the vocals so you could learn the harmonies, or
Speaker 2: you could just hear the guitar part on the other
Speaker 2: side and figure out the guitar chords. So I started
Speaker 2: doing that when I was really young.
Speaker 1: Okay, you started with ukulele, nice Jewish boy. Didn't your
Speaker 1: parents say you had to take piano lessons? No?
Speaker 2: They I think they probably tried, actually to get me
Speaker 2: to play piano at some point. It wasn't for me.
Speaker 2: I folks, learning folk guitar was really easy to me,
Speaker 2: and I gosh, I think I played on a local
Speaker 2: TV station. I played Puff the Magic Dragon when I
Speaker 2: was maybe six or seven something like that, as I remember.
Speaker 2: But I never wanted to be a performer any.
Speaker 1: Okay, but you were pretty good at it. You had
Speaker 1: a natural ability. Yeah, yes, okay, So the folk revival happens. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: there's a TV show Who Nanny Long you know, into this.
Speaker 1: But when Bob Dylan's first album comes out Joan Baiez
Speaker 1: before that, phil Oaks. Is that stuff you're aware of?
Speaker 2: Yes, but I like only peripherally because I'm learning actual
Speaker 2: folk songs and unbeknown I actually was given Let's say,
Speaker 2: my guitar teacher said, could you send one of your students?
Speaker 2: Were doing a thing at the y MHA of what
Speaker 2: is a folk song, so we'd like you, you know,
Speaker 2: just pick a student to be there. So I went
Speaker 2: and I wasn't thinking about it too much. I was
Speaker 2: going to play a song, and I played Blowing in
Speaker 2: the Wind for this panel of adults. And it turns
Speaker 2: out that the lead person was a major figure in
Speaker 2: the folk music scene I know now named doctor Kenneth Goldstein,
Speaker 2: who gently, you know, let me know that that actually
Speaker 2: wasn't a folk song and explained to me the difference
Speaker 2: between you know, I I didn't distinguish at the time.
Speaker 2: Now I'm very deeply into the distinguishing one from the other,
Speaker 2: the singer songwriters. But that's how I got into the
Speaker 2: from folk music, and you know, learning those guitar chords
Speaker 2: and then figuring out how to play them, that's how.
Speaker 1: I okay, how did you segue from ukulele to guitar?
Speaker 2: So the guitar is just two more strings. The chords
Speaker 2: are the first four strings are the same on a
Speaker 2: guitar as the four strings of a ukulele. So if
Speaker 2: you learn the ukulele and then you learn to play
Speaker 2: a guitar, you only have two more strings to learn.
Speaker 2: So I think that's something that was kind of common
Speaker 2: at the time, And there's a picture of me asleep
Speaker 2: my mom took with my ukulele resting by my head
Speaker 2: at like I've played it till I've fallen asleep in
Speaker 2: my bed at nine years old. So it's kind of
Speaker 2: a funny thing.
Speaker 1: When was the last time you played a ukulele?
Speaker 2: Probably around then. I didn't go back after I learned
Speaker 2: to play guitars, very exciting to learn to play the
Speaker 2: much fuller notes of the and of course, like many
Speaker 2: other folkies, including David Crosby, when when I heard the Beatles,
Speaker 2: I was like, I know those chords. I know all
Speaker 2: of those chords.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: That takes your head and puts it in a different
Speaker 2: direction than folk music like it did his.
Speaker 1: You know. Okay, So where do you grow up.
Speaker 2: Suburban Philadelphia? I was in Teltenham Township.
Speaker 1: And how far is that from downtown from the action?
Speaker 2: Oh, it's still like eight or nine miles. It's a
Speaker 2: near suburb, just over the city line of Philadelphia.
Speaker 1: How'd your family end up in the Philadelphia area?
Speaker 2: You know, they were from there, from a big family
Speaker 2: in New York. My grandparents were I came from the
Speaker 2: area around Poland and Russia. And settled in the Lower
Speaker 2: East Side, and my grandparents, Uh, they had a tragic
Speaker 2: two tragic accidents with in which their first two children,
Speaker 2: their eldest children, were killed in different accidents in New
Speaker 2: York City, and they were so distraught that they left
Speaker 2: everyone they knew and there to go to come to Philadelphia.
Speaker 2: In there, they just couldn't bear to be on the
Speaker 2: streets of New York anymore because both of their children
Speaker 2: died on the streets of New York. So that's so
Speaker 2: they they left to go to Philadelphia and founded the
Speaker 2: Philadelphia Wing of This is a very very poor family,
Speaker 2: eleven kids in the poorest part of town.
Speaker 1: So what did your parents do for a living.
Speaker 2: My dad was a truck driver and in the Depression,
Speaker 2: and he met my mom after World where he became
Speaker 2: a sol He enlisted for World War Two and he
Speaker 2: became a sergeant and he was in the D Day
Speaker 2: invasion on Omaha Beach in Normandy on the second wave.
Speaker 2: And I always try to imagine what that experience would
Speaker 2: have been like for anybody and how it was. I
Speaker 2: don't see how anybody could walk off that beach. It
Speaker 2: was such a murderous place. I wouldn't be here if
Speaker 2: he hadn't made it. But he survived that and walked
Speaker 2: through Europe till v day to the end of the war,
Speaker 2: and I met my mom after he came home. I
Speaker 2: think it's a pretty typical story. I was thinking about
Speaker 2: Billy Joel's song Allentown where he talks about our fathers
Speaker 2: fought the Second World War. Am was like one of
Speaker 2: those kids.
Speaker 1: Okay, Traditionally men from that generation didn't talk about being
Speaker 1: in the war. Did your father No.
Speaker 2: He did not. He did not at all, and we
Speaker 2: had to kind of pull it out of him. And
Speaker 2: there would there would be reunions and he would get
Speaker 2: notices like, hey, we're we're having a reunion of our
Speaker 2: division of our company. And he never went and he
Speaker 2: felt like he told me. I asked him one time
Speaker 2: why he didn't go, and he he just said, you know,
Speaker 2: these people act like like this is the biggest thing
Speaker 2: that ever happened to them. You know, you got to
Speaker 2: just keep looking forward and like keep doing what you're
Speaker 2: doing and not like be looking back at what you did.
Speaker 2: So but later I will say that he later my
Speaker 2: brother I'm the oldest of five and my brother Stephen
Speaker 2: took my dad to see Saving Private Private Ryan. So
Speaker 2: the invasion sequence at Normandy, my dad was there there.
Speaker 2: In the film, they're depicting the first wave of the
Speaker 2: same company, so you have the same divisional at the
Speaker 2: Blue and Gray in a circle in the movie that
Speaker 2: that he experienced. And my dad started crying in the
Speaker 2: theater and he like, broke up, broke, you know, it
Speaker 2: broke his h It broke It opened him up emotionally
Speaker 2: to relive that. And my brother asked him, was was
Speaker 2: the movie? Was that was the movie like his experience?
Speaker 2: And he said it was just like that, only much worse.
Speaker 1: So it's the late sixties, you're protests against the war.
Speaker 1: What does your father say about that?
Speaker 2: That's a really interesting question. I at some point point
Speaker 2: right before in nineteen sixty three, I think I was
Speaker 2: very I was a very introverted kid. I liked to
Speaker 2: read and I like to hunch, like play my guitar
Speaker 2: by myself, hunched over. I think they my parents were
Speaker 2: worried that I was being that I was too shy.
Speaker 2: And they had a friend who sent his son to
Speaker 2: a military academy for the summer session and said it
Speaker 2: was the greatest thing that ever happened to him and
Speaker 2: it really turned him around, and so my parents decided
Speaker 2: to do the same for me. This was Valley Forge
Speaker 2: Military Academy. This is where Norman Schwartzkoff went to school later,
Speaker 2: much later, and that so I was very excited about
Speaker 2: it because I because I was so proud of my dad.
Speaker 2: I studied World War Two a lot. I knew a
Speaker 2: lot about I made models, I knew a lot about
Speaker 2: the maps and who did what and all of that,
Speaker 2: and so I was excited to go to this military academy.
Speaker 2: And uh, it was really a difficult, uh summer for me.
Speaker 2: Sorry to get so deep into the details here, but
Speaker 2: I'm just trying to answer your question. I uh I
Speaker 2: I came away with it, h with a Instead of
Speaker 2: thinking war was really great and cool, I had it
Speaker 2: just a glimpse of like, no, it's not. And the
Speaker 2: discipline involved in going this is our Our teachers were
Speaker 2: ex army guys, and so the the you know, like
Speaker 2: waking you up at two or three in the morning
Speaker 2: to do calisthenics or bouncing a quarter on your sheets
Speaker 2: when you major bed, and for inspection, you know, and
Speaker 2: how how shine can we see your can the officers
Speaker 2: see his reflection in your belt buckle, your brass belt
Speaker 2: buckle when you've polished it. And do you eat if
Speaker 2: you can imagine eating what we're called square meals, where
Speaker 2: you do this, that's how you're supposed to.
Speaker 1: Well, this is audio only he's moving his.
Speaker 2: Arm in a I'm sorry, it's like a square meal.
Speaker 2: Imagine a right angle, lifting your your fork with your
Speaker 2: hands straight up and then straight to your mouth and
Speaker 2: then back, you know, in a right in a right angle.
Speaker 2: It is like the craziest thing. So just as a
Speaker 2: as a memory anyway. So I went through that, and
Speaker 2: then I got to hear a lecture of a senator
Speaker 2: US senator named Wayne Morse who was talking about how
Speaker 2: wrong the war in Vietnam was and there was a
Speaker 2: lot of literature there. I saw the first pin that
Speaker 2: had the peace symbol on it. That was the first
Speaker 2: time I saw that, and I was I think I
Speaker 2: was really prepped, like from my experience at the military
Speaker 2: academy to be like, yeah, this is wrong. Like I
Speaker 2: was really just a young naive kid, but I really
Speaker 2: felt like, yes, this is wrong. So I became a
Speaker 2: very early when it was very uncool to protest the war.
Speaker 2: Maybe it was in sixty four that I started doing that,
Speaker 2: and I was really a big part of my life too,
Speaker 2: to protest against the war and to work for the
Speaker 2: Eugene McCarthy presidential campaign and things like that.
Speaker 1: And what did your father, as a experienced soldier have
Speaker 1: to say about your protests?
Speaker 2: A good question. He thought I was right. He thought
Speaker 2: that Vietnam was wrong, was just going to be a quagmire,
Speaker 2: and that he had no illusions about the glory of war,
Speaker 2: and he thought it was a an empire building, economically
Speaker 2: driven move that we shouldn't have gotten involved in.
Speaker 1: So when your father came back from the war, what
Speaker 1: did you do for a living?
Speaker 2: So he had been a truck driver. It was a
Speaker 2: family business. It was run by his oldest brother. Again
Speaker 2: he's one of who is the tenth of eleven kids.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 2: So he was put in charge of a division called
Speaker 2: the export packaging division to ship things to Europe because
Speaker 2: we now had a lot, We're doing a lot of
Speaker 2: business there. And so he the family grew a storage
Speaker 2: business and then a separate moving business, and he did
Speaker 2: the export packaging business and designed crate for industry. Like
Speaker 2: all of he shipped all of the Boeing helicopters that
Speaker 2: were shipped aroun the world. Each individual crates for example,
Speaker 2: like you got to put the fuselage here, and you
Speaker 2: got to put the propellers up, you know, you got
Speaker 2: to fold them and put them in a separate crate.
Speaker 2: So we got to see how he made those and
Speaker 2: how they were shipped and things like that. That's what my
Speaker 2: dad did.
Speaker 1: Hey, did any of your brothers go in the business?
Speaker 1: Be what happened to the business?
Speaker 2: Good question, good questions. Let's see the family. But it
Speaker 2: eventually went to cousins of ours to run the business,
Speaker 2: and a combination of factors that included deregulation where the
Speaker 2: moving business at that time had been federally regulated and
Speaker 2: you had to be licensed and meet certain requirements to
Speaker 2: be able to ship people across interstate want to ship
Speaker 2: their goods. At some point they we sended those regulations.
Speaker 2: At the same time, there was I'm trying to think
Speaker 2: there was some other economic thing that was going on
Speaker 2: that caused the moving business as they were doing it
Speaker 2: to collapse. I was already gone by that point, so
Speaker 2: I don't know the details of it. But my brothers
Speaker 2: did go into that business and in fact what happened
Speaker 2: just as a segue in nineteen seventy four, not to
Speaker 2: skip ahead here, Well, I am skipping ahead. In nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy four, I was on tour with Crosby, Stills, Nash
Speaker 2: and Young as a tour photographer, and we were doing
Speaker 2: our last show at Roosevelt Raceway in Long Island, a large,
Speaker 2: really large show, and we had one more show to
Speaker 2: do in England, and I overheard a stage manager talking
Speaker 2: to the tour manager saying, I think when we're doing
Speaker 2: this gig in England, we can't just use the paperwork
Speaker 2: that we had going into Canada for that one gig.
Speaker 2: I think there's something else we need. And I just
Speaker 2: happened to hear that, and I walked over and I said, well,
Speaker 2: you know what you're talking about. You do need different paperwork,
Speaker 2: and this is what my dad does for a living,
Speaker 2: And if you haven't arranged this yet, I suggest you
Speaker 2: call him, like right now, because these things like you're
Speaker 2: going to be doing need to do a lot of
Speaker 2: paperwork to get all of our stuff. There was forty
Speaker 2: thousand pounds of gear that was being shipped over to
Speaker 2: England for this one show and to make a long
Speaker 2: story short, my dad got the gig and my brother
Speaker 2: came to the show, and I guess, let's see, I
Speaker 2: would have been twenty two, so he was seventeen. This
Speaker 2: is my brother's name is David, David Bernstein, and he
Speaker 2: found it fascinating that, like, wow, everybody who's here backstage,
Speaker 2: like all these people are making money on this, not
Speaker 2: just the band this like this is fascinating. So he
Speaker 2: went on from the that experience to found a company
Speaker 2: called Rocket Cargo, which became the prime shipper in the
Speaker 2: world for musical tours around the world, not just of
Speaker 2: American bands but all bands. So he for many many
Speaker 2: years had the lion's share of the shipments going whoever
Speaker 2: the band was, whether it was the Rolling Stones or
Speaker 2: hip hop groups, or whoever it was. That's so he
Speaker 2: became much more wealthy and more famous than me.
Speaker 1: Okay, you talked about being introverted. Yes, A. Were you
Speaker 1: a good student? B? Did you have any friends?
Speaker 2: Good question. I had friends, but I was sort of shy.
Speaker 2: I loved to sit with my guitar and figure out
Speaker 2: how to play songs. I was okay to play them
Speaker 2: for other people, like at campfires, or you know, for fun.
Speaker 2: I didn't want I did never think about being a musician.
Speaker 2: I just loved playing it. I didn't think I was
Speaker 2: good enough to to do it professionally, but I enjoyed
Speaker 2: it quite a bit. And once I got a camera,
Speaker 2: I loved doing that. So now I split my time
Speaker 2: between playing guitar and taking photos and learning how to
Speaker 2: develop film. And the first pictures that I took that
Speaker 2: I developed and printed by myself were of the then
Speaker 2: unknown Joni Mitchell in a coffeehouse. This would have been
Speaker 2: in maybe January sixty seven.
Speaker 1: Okay, before we get to that specific event.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, hey, were.
Speaker 1: You a good student? Not a good student?
Speaker 2: Oh, yes, I'm sorry you asked me that I was
Speaker 2: a good student. Yes, I was good.
Speaker 1: Okay, So you got involved at a royalty level of
Speaker 1: rock and roll very young. Did you go to college?
Speaker 2: So what briefly happened is that so I took these
Speaker 2: pictures of Joni Mitchell. I brought two prints. I was
Speaker 2: very excited to make these prints at my friend's house
Speaker 2: in the dark room. I remember going to the laundry
Speaker 2: room in my parents' house and taking my mom's iron
Speaker 2: and put ironing the print onto the mountboard. You took
Speaker 2: this sheet of paper that turned into glue under no kidding,
Speaker 2: under the heat of the iron, and then you wound
Speaker 2: up with a mounted print. And I made two of
Speaker 2: them and took them down to the coffee house she
Speaker 2: was playing at where I had just taken the pictures
Speaker 2: and asked her to I wanted to give her one
Speaker 2: and would she sign one for me? And she wrote
Speaker 2: the Circle Game Forever Joni Mitchell the one that she
Speaker 2: gave me. And then about a year so I kept photograph.
Speaker 2: I was the photographer of my newspaper.
Speaker 1: Let me stop you here because I want to ask
Speaker 1: some questions before we get into your actual career. Sure,
Speaker 1: of course, so your parents give your parents give you
Speaker 1: a brownie camera, When does it click in your brain?
Speaker 1: And when do you get a reflex camera or whatever
Speaker 1: bitter camera?
Speaker 2: You get, very good question. What happens is my dad
Speaker 2: gets a really good German single lens reflex camera called
Speaker 2: an Exacta, and you know it's it's from my viewpoint,
Speaker 2: of course, it's like it's much fancier than the camera
Speaker 2: I have. But that's he's I'm a kid and he's,
Speaker 2: you know, an adult, and so he's got this cool camera.
Speaker 2: And at some point I get pretty good at I
Speaker 2: have a By that point, I have a rangefinder camera,
Speaker 2: maybe a Konica rangefinder. That is, you're not looking through
Speaker 2: the lens with his camera. You actually could look through
Speaker 2: the lens. And he had two or three lenses that
Speaker 2: you could change. You could have a normal lens, you
Speaker 2: could have a slightly telephoto lens, or a slightly wide lens.
Speaker 2: And I love that. I just thought that was amazing,
Speaker 2: and he lent me to his credit, Unlike many dads,
Speaker 2: maybe even me like that. If I were him, I
Speaker 2: probably would have said, hey, son, look here's a camera
Speaker 2: for you. It is better than your Hawkeye, But why
Speaker 2: don't you just use that? Don't touch my camera, right,
Speaker 2: But he didn't, And so I learned with a single
Speaker 2: lens reflex, and that's when you get into that. Then
Speaker 2: what you're looking at is very similar to the photo
Speaker 2: you're going to be seeing. You see how what's in
Speaker 2: focus and what's not in focus. It's a very different experience.
Speaker 2: And so I was able to do that. I want
Speaker 2: to say maybe when I was thirteen fourteen, and that
Speaker 2: shooting with that kind of camera really made a difference.
Speaker 2: For me, and at some point he went on a
Speaker 2: business trip to Japan and got me an Asahi Pentax
Speaker 2: Spot Mattic, the camera that Ringo was using in Hard
Speaker 2: Day's Night, and that became my main camera. And I
Speaker 2: just and then I'll just say briefly, I was the
Speaker 2: yearbook photographer and the newspaper photographer in my junior high school.
Speaker 2: And I learned right away that like, you can't use
Speaker 2: a flash in a class. It's way too distracting to
Speaker 2: just set off a flashing class. But there's not enough
Speaker 2: light in there to use a regular speed film. And
Speaker 2: I went to the camera store where the guy was
Speaker 2: very helpful to me and said, oh, what you need
Speaker 2: is this thing, this film by code I called Triax.
Speaker 2: You need to use this. The ASA is a four hundred,
Speaker 2: not one hundred or fifty or sixty four. It's four hundred, really, yes,
Speaker 2: which means it's just very sensitive to light, which meant
Speaker 2: that I could without a flash take people's photos in
Speaker 2: class at school, and when I was in like eighth
Speaker 2: grade or you know, I could use it to take
Speaker 2: football practice photos outdoors. But I could shoot, finally for
Speaker 2: the first time, indoors. And that's how I learned to
Speaker 2: shoot with what referred to in photography as available light,
Speaker 2: meaning you're not bringing in any supplemental light, you're just
Speaker 2: using what's available.
Speaker 1: Okay, so I got very good at that. Hey, did
Speaker 1: you go to public school? Yes, b you know there
Speaker 1: was a photography boom around the turn of the decade
Speaker 1: of sixties into seventies, but you were in early yes,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't like schools had dark rooms. How did
Speaker 1: you learn by trial and error? What?
Speaker 2: Amazingly, I will say, I'm sorry to interrupt, No interrupt,
Speaker 2: how I learned? Okay, how my school actually was the township,
Speaker 2: the tax base of it as a suburb was good
Speaker 2: enough that they actually did have a dark room. They
Speaker 2: had just put in a dark room a couple of
Speaker 2: years before I was there. But I learned at the
Speaker 2: dark room of friends of mine who had set up
Speaker 2: an enlarger and a dark room at their parents' home,
Speaker 2: and they showed me how to develop film, how to
Speaker 2: put how to develop the negative. So I had several
Speaker 2: friends who did that, and it just became a home thing.
Speaker 2: Like it was amazing to me that you could actually
Speaker 2: it was very, very exciting to know that you could
Speaker 2: get a roll of film loaded in your camera, go
Speaker 2: around after school and take pictures of whatever you wanted
Speaker 2: to come back into the dark room, develop the film,
Speaker 2: and then there would be the negatives of the picture
Speaker 2: the pictures you just took, like hanging wet in the
Speaker 2: dark room. After you finally processed it, and then after
Speaker 2: it dried, you could put it in the enlarger and
Speaker 2: actually make a print of it. This process to me
Speaker 2: was like magic. You know, this could happen and you
Speaker 2: could do it in a matter of hours and it
Speaker 2: wasn't that complicated. So I really latched onto it. And
Speaker 2: I think I still was playing guitar and probably played
Speaker 2: every day, but it became my second love of things
Speaker 2: to be doing. And then, like I was saying, when
Speaker 2: my first You'll probably remember this first time I went
Speaker 2: to with my parents to look at records and it
Speaker 2: was at a newly newly made EJ. Corvette's department store
Speaker 2: that didn't.
Speaker 1: A lot of records at Corvette.
Speaker 2: Okay, So there I was with my parents the first
Speaker 2: time and they're there after seeing Okay, we have to
Speaker 2: go back and say, this would be after seeing the
Speaker 2: Beatles perform on Ed Sullivan, like one of the seminal
Speaker 2: moments you probably discussed with ninety percent of your guests,
Speaker 2: where like, what was that like? So as a folky
Speaker 2: like I said, as a folk student of folk music,
Speaker 2: I was like, that's a scene, that's a name. I'm like,
Speaker 2: I know what they're doing. It's like, this isn't magic,
Speaker 2: this is so Literally. When I went to my next
Speaker 2: folk music lesson, the guitar teacher and her daughters were like,
Speaker 2: no folk music today, I forget that. We are going
Speaker 2: to like can you did you figure out that thing?
Speaker 2: And I want to hold your hand? Right?
Speaker 1: Did?
Speaker 2: We were like, we were all into it and that
Speaker 2: just set us off onto that whole new trajectory.
Speaker 1: Okay, now you talk about shooting Joni Mitchell before we
Speaker 1: talk about that actual event. So were you an avid
Speaker 1: club goer concert goer? How did you end up with the.
Speaker 2: No, I wasn't at all. I never went to clubs
Speaker 2: and I didn't go to concerts. I never didn't occur
Speaker 2: to me to go. I had friends who would go
Speaker 2: to who went to see the Beatles like a packed
Speaker 2: sports stadium. A couple friends I knew who did that,
Speaker 2: who told me they could not hear like a single
Speaker 2: note of the Beatles for the screaming I don't know.
Speaker 2: I was a shy kid and I didn't So I
Speaker 2: learned to play songs from books from my guitar teacher. Occasionally,
Speaker 2: like at those hooton nannies or wing dings, you would
Speaker 2: learn some thing. Let's say, somebody would play a song
Speaker 2: that you knew how to play, but they they knew
Speaker 2: another verse, Like what is that verse? I never played?
Speaker 2: Where did you learn that verse? What do you mean?
Speaker 2: Why are you using an A minor there?
Speaker 1: Like that?
Speaker 2: That's an E minor?
Speaker 1: What you know?
Speaker 2: So you was really a good, good uh lesson in
Speaker 2: learning songs. And then like I said, uh, like you,
Speaker 2: I'm imagining your ear is you know, glued to AM radio.
Speaker 2: You're I was like vaguely aware of it. I was not,
Speaker 2: you know, like Elvis was already in the past. It
Speaker 2: was like it was like that's for my older cousins.
Speaker 2: Not doesn't do much for me. Uh, you know, the
Speaker 2: first Beatle things were electrifying to me. And also I
Speaker 2: have to go back and just say I think there
Speaker 2: was a major, a major slingshot effect. I think that
Speaker 2: happened when the death of John Kennedy was so shocking
Speaker 2: to people, to kids my age, who I was a
Speaker 2: Kennedy kid in terms of my outlook and in terms
Speaker 2: of America and being patriotic and what could you do
Speaker 2: for your country? And his youth and his humor we
Speaker 2: as kids like really identified with and to have him
Speaker 2: assassinated like that in a way that previously you only
Speaker 2: heard about things like that going on in third world countries.
Speaker 2: This did not this kind of thing didn't happen in
Speaker 2: our country. It was so disheartening, so sad, tragic the
Speaker 2: day of and sad for so long, which only happened
Speaker 2: a matter of months before the Beatles played on at Sullivan.
Speaker 2: And I feel that wherever the Beatles themselves were coming from,
Speaker 2: in terms of their career at the time, how exciting
Speaker 2: it was for them to come to America, they probably
Speaker 2: at the time didn't quite realize that there was a
Speaker 2: nation of young kids who were really hurting and were
Speaker 2: so needing the kind of up energy and fun and
Speaker 2: positive energy that they were putting out there. That it,
Speaker 2: like I said, it was like a slingshot effect of
Speaker 2: going from being feeling so sad and heartbroken and what
Speaker 2: happened to our country to this very happy, exuberant kind
Speaker 2: of energy. And I think that that, you know, began
Speaker 2: in America, a lot of what the sixties became starting
Speaker 2: right there.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the Joney photographs were the main point.
Speaker 2: No, there was before I photographed her at the main point,
Speaker 2: Thank you for asking. This was at a place called
Speaker 2: the Second Fret.
Speaker 1: Okay, the Second Fret. When you went the night Jonie
Speaker 1: was there and you took the photographs. How many times
Speaker 1: have been to that club previously? None?
Speaker 2: Okay, I only I only went there because I knew
Speaker 2: her name from from hearing Tom Rutt. What happened is
Speaker 2: you'll appreciate this briefly. Of course, you had to have
Speaker 2: a transistor radio. When you know, at a certain age,
Speaker 2: when transistor radios come in as a as a kid,
Speaker 2: they're just like taking you into a whole other world.
Speaker 2: I was given at some point a transistor radio with
Speaker 2: a large whip antenna, not the kind of pocket size
Speaker 2: that you would take to school, but a larger one
Speaker 2: that you could have at home. And I was shooting
Speaker 2: baskets one day in the driveway and I had the
Speaker 2: radio on and I realized, wait a sec, I can
Speaker 2: hear it's sunset and now I I can hear New
Speaker 2: York like clear as day, I can hear Boston, I
Speaker 2: can hear WLS in Chicago. So that whole thing really
Speaker 2: was another big eye opening thing because instead of only
Speaker 2: being able to hear the records played by your local DJs,
Speaker 2: you could pick up you could hear what the DJ's
Speaker 2: were playing in New York and what their pattern was,
Speaker 2: and what their names were and their personas, and so, I,
Speaker 2: you know, really love that. And my favorite station was
Speaker 2: the one called WBZ in Boston that clearly the daytime
Speaker 2: manager when you know, after five o'clock when he left,
Speaker 2: didn't care what the night shift the like, just just
Speaker 2: didn't put it on, didn't turn his radio on because
Speaker 2: they were doing really crazy stuff on the radio. Was
Speaker 2: the first time I heard screaming Jay Hawkins, I put
Speaker 2: a spell on you like on AM radio if you
Speaker 2: can imagine, right, they would do Stan Freberg ads and
Speaker 2: things like that. So it was a very exciting experience.
Speaker 2: And one day I was listening to it, as I said,
Speaker 2: playing basketball, and and it was a I didn't know
Speaker 2: it was a tape at the time. I thought he
Speaker 2: was live in the studio. Tom Rush, who I knew
Speaker 2: was a folk singer and whose album one of his
Speaker 2: albums I had came on and said, this is a
Speaker 2: song I just learned from my friend Joni Mitchell. It's
Speaker 2: called the Urge for Going and played this song and
Speaker 2: I thought, oh my god, what a great song that is, Like, Wow,
Speaker 2: Joni Mitchell, the Urge for That's just fantastic. And that
Speaker 2: was the first time I heard of her. And then
Speaker 2: she and her husband were playing at the Second Frat
Speaker 2: and they were going to appear at a folk music weekly.
Speaker 2: Folk music show hosted by someone who's who's went under
Speaker 2: the name Geene Shay Ivan Shane his name was, but
Speaker 2: he was called Gene Shay had a show called Folklore
Speaker 2: every Sunday and who played folk music and would also
Speaker 2: UH folk acts that would play at the Second Fret
Speaker 2: or the main point would then go to his show
Speaker 2: if they were playing over a weekend, and then play
Speaker 2: be interviewed and then play posician audio or TV audio.
Speaker 2: This is all all all on radio and it was
Speaker 2: a mono FM uh, And so I.
Speaker 1: Got to.
Speaker 2: I was too young to get into this club. Either
Speaker 2: I had homework or I was too young, I don't
Speaker 2: remember which. I couldn't go to the show, but they
Speaker 2: were going to be playing at this radio station, so
Speaker 2: I tuned in the radio. My dad had just brought
Speaker 2: home a little micro cassette recorder to replace his dictaphone
Speaker 2: and had showed me like how it worked, so I
Speaker 2: he let's see. I took the micro cassette recorder and
Speaker 2: put it next to the speaker of the radio and
Speaker 2: recorded Jony and her husband, Chuck Mitchell doing their set
Speaker 2: and their interview. And the last thing they did was
Speaker 2: a song called the Circle Game, which was new to her,
Speaker 2: which was which I'd never heard, and I by the
Speaker 2: time the song was over, I was like, I have
Speaker 2: to learn how to play that song right now. That
Speaker 2: is the greatest thing I've ever heard. I didn't know about.
Speaker 2: So there's things called tunings and guitar So ninety five
Speaker 2: or more percent of the guitar work in the world
Speaker 2: is played in what's called standard tuning, with a strings
Speaker 2: tune in a particular way, and the chords that you're
Speaker 2: taught as a guitarist are based on your tuning the strings.
Speaker 2: In that tuning, she was taking the guitar and tuning
Speaker 2: it to a chord like a g chord and then
Speaker 2: playing different chords than any of the ones I knew
Speaker 2: in that tuning. And so let's see, briefly, I'd been
Speaker 2: studying cryptanalysis, which was code breaking at the time, and
Speaker 2: the logic that you need to figure out how somebody's
Speaker 2: playing something in a tuning is what are all the
Speaker 2: open strings? First? Are what notes is? Each string? Is
Speaker 2: what I need to figure out. And then once I
Speaker 2: figure that out, how what chords is she playing? So
Speaker 2: I taped that performance and I just stayed up till dawn.
Speaker 2: I would have been fourteen to figure out how she
Speaker 2: played it. And I did figure it out, like by
Speaker 2: six in the morning. Took me that long, but I
Speaker 2: did figure it out. And so that started me off
Speaker 2: in a lifetime of figuring out how to play Joni
Speaker 2: Mitchell songs. And later later when she would forget an
Speaker 2: older song, I would go actually and teach it back
Speaker 2: to her. Back in the seventies, I would do that
Speaker 2: seventies and eighties.
Speaker 1: So how long after that was the gig where you
Speaker 1: took the photos?
Speaker 2: Good question. I think that was about that would have
Speaker 2: been about well, she was there with her husband. She
Speaker 2: broke up with him right after that, and left where
Speaker 2: they were living in Detroit and moved to New York
Speaker 2: and I saw her. It was really just about now
Speaker 2: that I'm thinking of It would have been only about
Speaker 2: two or three months later that I started that She's
Speaker 2: played at the second Fret and I was able to
Speaker 2: get into to literally three sets a night, four of
Speaker 2: maybe you know, twenty five minutes each and about a
Speaker 2: dozen people listening.
Speaker 1: Okay, things changed over your career. We're bringing a camera
Speaker 1: to a gig would be an issue. People would stop
Speaker 1: whatever you're going. At age fourteen fifteen, you're bringing your
Speaker 1: camera not thinking twice. No one stopped you.
Speaker 2: No, there was no nobody cared. I mean, it's like
Speaker 2: it's too it's too low level. There's not It's not
Speaker 2: like later. If let's say, if I am going to
Speaker 2: the first rock show that I went and photographed, I
Speaker 2: knew the opening act. They were friends of mine and
Speaker 2: they were opening for I'm Not Kidding Cream at the
Speaker 2: Spectrum in Philadelphia. Later, Ariic Clapton was quoted as saying,
Speaker 2: this was the great single, greatest Cream concert of all
Speaker 2: time by.
Speaker 1: Far this shell.
Speaker 2: It was on a rotator stage in the middle of
Speaker 2: the arena, and I can remember photographing them as the
Speaker 2: stage is going around waiting for our Clapton, Jack Bruce
Speaker 2: Ginger Baker. It was amazing and I can still remember
Speaker 2: as the stage turned, the huge marshal stack that our
Speaker 2: Claptain was playing through would every thirty seconds or so
Speaker 2: like beam like a like a huge heat ray into
Speaker 2: my ear. It was so loud, like the loudest thing
Speaker 2: I'd ever heard in my life as I was lifting
Speaker 2: my camera up trying to take the pictures. So that
Speaker 2: was very exciting to do that.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you give the photos to Jonie, Yes, and
Speaker 1: she signs one. Obviously that's a thrilling moment. Do you say, oh,
Speaker 1: that was a thrilling moment. You say, I did it once,
Speaker 1: I'll do it again.
Speaker 2: I just thought, well it was I was. We got along,
Speaker 2: and so she was fine for me to come, and
Speaker 2: I saw her again at the second Fret, and then
Speaker 2: the next year, I still meant going to high school.
Speaker 2: I'm in tenth grade. What happened was that she when
Speaker 2: her first album came out, which would have been like
Speaker 2: March of sixty eight, she then could get kicked upstairs
Speaker 2: to the next level of club, which was the main
Speaker 2: point that you mentioned out on the main Line, a
Speaker 2: nicer club, more seats, and the main Point had only
Speaker 2: only had people there who had a record deal. So
Speaker 2: Joni Mitchell back in the day was not going to
Speaker 2: be They wouldn't have taken her at the at the
Speaker 2: main Point. But because she had her first album out,
Speaker 2: she could get booked into the main Point. And while
Speaker 2: I was there and so so her fan base was growing.
Speaker 2: I could see, Wow, there's a lot more like this is.
Speaker 2: There's like three times more to it. Wow, and people
Speaker 2: are into it, they're paying attention. This is like what
Speaker 2: had been this very little thing that you know. And
Speaker 2: of course back when she was playing the Second Fret,
Speaker 2: nobody had heard of her. I was raving about this
Speaker 2: person to all all of my friends and anyone else
Speaker 2: who would listen, and I could see that this was
Speaker 2: like taking off. And there were college kids from Bryn Marr,
Speaker 2: which is where the Main Point is, right And anyway,
Speaker 2: what happened is in the interim that year, I spent
Speaker 2: a lot of time. A friend of mine had a
Speaker 2: tape recorder and he would every time Joni would go
Speaker 2: to that folk music show I talked about with geene Jay,
Speaker 2: she'd play a few songs and we'd record those and
Speaker 2: then I would stay up and figure out how to
Speaker 2: play those songs. So my whole poppy that was like
Speaker 2: my biggest thrill. I didn't collect baseball cards by then.
Speaker 2: I didn't like I just what I you know. The
Speaker 2: thing I wanted to do was to figure out how
Speaker 2: Joni Mitchell played her songs. So I did that, and
Speaker 2: she was writing her songs in different tunings by then,
Speaker 2: so it was very it was it was an exciting
Speaker 2: thing for me to do. So by the time I
Speaker 2: went to see her at the main point, after she
Speaker 2: now had her first album come out and she had
Speaker 2: fans from from that album being played after. At first
Speaker 2: I took a picture of her that I remember thinking, God,
Speaker 2: if I got that thing that I just saw, it's
Speaker 2: really going to be good. It's going to be the
Speaker 2: best picture I ever took of her, for sure, And
Speaker 2: and I did get it. And so that that happened first,
Speaker 2: and then later a few minutes later, I took out
Speaker 2: a list that i'd of her songs and she said, oh,
Speaker 2: she's very nice.
Speaker 1: Again.
Speaker 2: Let's see, I'm sixteen by that point and she is
Speaker 2: nine years older than me, so she's twenty five. Very
Speaker 2: few twenty five year olds have much to say to
Speaker 2: six that there's not much going on there. But she
Speaker 2: was very nice, and she says, oh, is that a
Speaker 2: list of songs of mine you've heard? And I said, no,
Speaker 2: those are the ones I can play. And her eyes blazed,
Speaker 2: and she took her guitar by the neck and thrust
Speaker 2: it at me and said show me. So I took
Speaker 2: the guitar. I retuned it. I was pretty nervous, I'm
Speaker 2: sure I started playing one of her songs. She just
Speaker 2: stared at my hands, like he figured this out. Like
Speaker 2: it blew her mind that this kid, this nature, had
Speaker 2: figured out her professional secrets, the things that she was
Speaker 2: doing on stage, because she had these very breezy stories
Speaker 2: and stuff she would be talking about as she's retuning
Speaker 2: the guitar to another tuning. Nobody in the audience is
Speaker 2: noticing what she's doing kind of thing. And so the
Speaker 2: fact that I had figured these out, she said, play
Speaker 2: play another one when I got done. So I played
Speaker 2: her a second song. She says, Okay, we are fast
Speaker 2: friends now. And then a few weeks later, a letter
Speaker 2: came from California in my parents' mailbox. Dear Joel, would
Speaker 2: you please come to I'm writing you. Thank you so
Speaker 2: much for sending the Prince. I really love this one.
Speaker 2: I'm writing to ask you, would you please come to
Speaker 2: Carnegie Hall my first concert at Carnegie Hall in New
Speaker 2: York City on February first. So imagine this is February
Speaker 2: of eleventh grade. Getting this letter, which by the way,
Speaker 2: has a beautiful multi colored pen drawing on construction paper,
Speaker 2: Joni Mitchell drawing on the first part. She folds it
Speaker 2: in half and makes it into a reading card, and
Speaker 2: there's the letter from Joni. Pardon me, a letter from
Speaker 2: her inviting me to Carnegie Hall. So you can imagine
Speaker 2: how exciting that was. I took the train to New York.
Speaker 2: I can remember standing outside the stage store of Carnegie Hall,
Speaker 2: which is still in the same place, and each time
Speaker 2: I've walked by it since then. I remember standing there
Speaker 2: and how nervous I was with my camera bag. And
Speaker 2: I went there and I met her, and her parents
Speaker 2: were there, and her manager, Elliott Roberts, was there, and
Speaker 2: he said, I hope you brought a lot of film tonight,
Speaker 2: because we're recording the show and you're going to do
Speaker 2: the album coverew. So that was very intense and I
Speaker 2: did the best I could shooting her backstage and on stage,
Speaker 2: and it was like a big throne. She did a great, great,
Speaker 2: great job, like she really rose to the occasion. It
Speaker 2: was nothing like her, folks, like seeing her at a
Speaker 2: little coffee house. The audience went crazy. You can now
Speaker 2: hear pardon me, you can now hear that performance of
Speaker 2: hers live at Carnegie Hall. It's been released with I
Speaker 2: was actually on vinyl with my pictures that I'm talking
Speaker 2: about that I took as a cover and the inside
Speaker 2: which when I saw that, it was like a dream
Speaker 2: come true. That it's something that I'd imagined back then.
Speaker 2: I should say. I have to tell you this one story,
Speaker 2: which is when I was fifteen, the summer of Sergeant
Speaker 2: Pepper's I was in a in a summer camp that
Speaker 2: was on wheels, that is, we had two army trucks
Speaker 2: and about twenty kids, and we camped at a different
Speaker 2: state park or national park every night, and one night
Speaker 2: in the Dakota's, I was there my sleeping bag, staring
Speaker 2: up at the stars, thinking about.
Speaker 1: What am I going to do?
Speaker 2: Like this, You're fifteen, You're starting you have a you know,
Speaker 2: your guidance counselor starts talking about, so, what career are
Speaker 2: you thinking about? So I was thinking about that, and
Speaker 2: as I looked at the stars, I remembered the picture
Speaker 2: that the first picture that I took, not the next one,
Speaker 2: which was really good. But I was looking at that
Speaker 2: first picture. This I hadn't taken that second picture yet,
Speaker 2: this is still sixty seven, pardon me. And I saw
Speaker 2: that picture cropped into a square as an album cover
Speaker 2: with her name handwritten across it across the top, Joni
Speaker 2: Mitchell and the epiphany. I had an epiphany that that's
Speaker 2: what I wanted to do. I wanted to do album
Speaker 2: covers for musicians. I wanted to blend the two things
Speaker 2: that I did together, and I wanted to do photographs
Speaker 2: of musicians.
Speaker 1: So that's what was my.
Speaker 2: Motivation from when I was fifteen, and I've just been
Speaker 2: continuing to do that.
Speaker 1: Okay, most people have that idea at fifteen, and it's
Speaker 1: purely a dream. You'd already had some success. So what
Speaker 1: was the next step after the Carnegie Hall shows?
Speaker 2: Well, let's see. The next week, I was asked to
Speaker 2: photograph Neil Young and Crazy Horse at their first East
Speaker 2: Coast show at the Bitter End, and then I was
Speaker 2: asked to photo David geff Elliet said, I have a friend,
Speaker 2: David Geffen who's managing a career of a singer named
Speaker 2: Laura Nero, And I was like, I know, Laura, I love.
Speaker 2: I had ELI in the fifteenth Thirteenth Confession album, which
Speaker 2: I just flipped out about. I just thought I was
Speaker 2: listening to the post Dylan singer songwriters a lot by then,
Speaker 2: and she was a big I loved her records. And
Speaker 2: she said, so could you come to New York again
Speaker 2: and photograph Laura? Meet Laura and take some photos of her.
Speaker 2: So that was my next two weekends, after Carnegie Hall,
Speaker 2: Neil and Crazy Horse at the Binner End, and then
Speaker 2: Laura Nero at David Geffen's apartment during a blizzard overlooking
Speaker 2: Central Park as she played the grand piano in David's
Speaker 2: apartment doing not only songs from the ELI and the
Speaker 2: Thirteenth Confession album that I knew, but songs that she
Speaker 2: was writing for her next album, New York Tenderbury. After
Speaker 2: those three weeks, the whole issue about likes, college preparation
Speaker 2: and what all of that like sort of receded like
Speaker 2: in importance for me because it was like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'll get to that whatever. This is like so much
Speaker 2: more interesting to me. So that's how that worked. That
Speaker 2: would have been like starting in nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're a teenager. As they say, Lauren Nero became
Speaker 1: bigger with the New York tend to Berry, but she
Speaker 1: was pretty big already. She was yeh, how did you
Speaker 1: cope emotionally? David Geffen was not of the stature that
Speaker 1: he used today. But you're in these environments you had
Speaker 1: teenagers twenty six. Are you anxious or are you saying?
Speaker 1: You know? This is my good question, you know, because.
Speaker 2: Because Joni was so accepting of me and didn't just
Speaker 2: be like get out of here, kid.
Speaker 1: Uh. That was.
Speaker 2: And so imagine if you're meeting Jonie and her new boyfriend,
Speaker 2: Graham Nash, who's just come from the Hollies, who's left
Speaker 2: the Hollies, whose voice I know really well from listening
Speaker 2: to the radio. So I'm meeting him, and who says,
Speaker 2: can you teach me how to take pictures like you
Speaker 2: do and like to print make prints like this? Sure, Graham,
Speaker 2: I'd love to. And meanwhile, out in the hallways is
Speaker 2: his friend David Crosby, Toni's ex boyfriend who had been
Speaker 2: her boyfriend previously, who's who's in the hallway, And the
Speaker 2: two of them are going to be starting a group
Speaker 2: together that they're going to be going into the studio
Speaker 2: in about a week to start the recording of So
Speaker 2: by the way, after the Carnegie Honk concert, we go
Speaker 2: to Levenhal, the promoter's apartment, who is managing all the
Speaker 2: folkies up to that point and was still Judy Collins manager.
Speaker 2: And I was talking to Joni when she at the
Speaker 2: party when she looks over my shoulder and says, oh, Leonard,
Speaker 2: you must meet my friend Joel. He's really a genius.
Speaker 2: And I turn around and it's Leonard Cohen. I have
Speaker 2: just finished reading his book of poetry. I think he
Speaker 2: walks on water. When she says, you know, he's really
Speaker 2: a genius, I want to shrink to the size of
Speaker 2: the head of a pin because I'm actually in the
Speaker 2: presence of two actual geniuses, and I just feel like
Speaker 2: this kid, this little kid who's like, I'm going to school.
Speaker 2: I don't even what No, I'm not, You're the geniuses here.
Speaker 2: So that was quite an amazing thing. And then I
Speaker 2: didn't even like in New York, of course we have
Speaker 2: to have an after show. Not only do I have
Speaker 2: to have the party after the show, we have to
Speaker 2: have a party after that party. So everybody gets up
Speaker 2: and we all go down to the Bitter End where
Speaker 2: the Everly Brothers are playing, and in the audience, I'm
Speaker 2: introduced to Bob Dylan, who has brought like a couple
Speaker 2: songs to play for the Everly Brothers. Unbeknows to me,
Speaker 2: but in other words, by the time I get back
Speaker 2: to home room, like after I leave New York and
Speaker 2: take the three am Trailways bus after all of this
Speaker 2: on the Sunday night, to like get back after this
Speaker 2: heady experience, I finally, you know, take take the I
Speaker 2: take actually a bus back and then I get the
Speaker 2: subway out to the suburbs. And then I've got to
Speaker 2: run to get my books for the school and then
Speaker 2: I got to run for the school bus and collapse
Speaker 2: on the school bus. And I get to the home room,
Speaker 2: I'm like, I've like had like a couple hours sleep.
Speaker 2: The kid next to me says, so what did you
Speaker 2: do this weekend? I said, you wouldn't believe me if
Speaker 2: I told you so, that sets me up, and that
Speaker 2: leads me into my adult life.
Speaker 1: Well, okay, you're in high school, you're doing this. Most
Speaker 1: of the connections seemed to come from Joni Mitchell, Elliott Roberts,
Speaker 1: David Geffen.
Speaker 2: Neil Young.
Speaker 1: This point in time, especially at this point in time,
Speaker 1: it was not seen as a lucrative career shooting rock photos.
Speaker 2: Oh no, no it was. It was in fact, my
Speaker 2: guidance counselor wanted to persuade me from pursuing the career,
Speaker 2: not even as forget the rock part of it, that
Speaker 2: would be absolutely life forgetting Well, there's no money there
Speaker 2: for sure. But if you just want to be a
Speaker 2: professional photographer and stead up a studio and take portraits
Speaker 2: of you know, of high school kids, or you know,
Speaker 2: be an actual professional photographer, Like, how's that looking for you?
Speaker 1: How much?
Speaker 2: You know, it's like that's not really you really don't
Speaker 2: want to do that. You could be your sat score,
Speaker 2: You could be a lawyer, you could be a doctor,
Speaker 2: you could be whatever you literally, you could be whatever
Speaker 2: you want to be. So don't get hung up on this.
Speaker 2: Photography is a nice hobby kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Okay, so these first Crosbie Stills in Nash album comes
Speaker 1: out in sixty nine, after the gold Rush comes in
Speaker 1: fall of seventy seventy. You graduate from high school in
Speaker 1: seventy in May or June of seventy.
Speaker 2: In June or seven, first week of June.
Speaker 1: What happens for you the following fall.
Speaker 2: Well before the fall. What happens is the day after
Speaker 2: I graduate high school, and that first week of June,
Speaker 2: on the Monday night, I get on a train to
Speaker 2: go to New York to photograph Crosby Stills Nashing Young
Speaker 2: at the Filmore East. They're doing like a residency at
Speaker 2: the Filmore East. I have never seen them before. They
Speaker 2: had been there in nineteen six September of sixty nine,
Speaker 2: I wasn't there. This is the first time that I
Speaker 2: got to see them.
Speaker 1: That was very Let's see.
Speaker 2: I was so impressed by their musicianship and that they
Speaker 2: could be so fluent on acoustic and electric guitars really
Speaker 2: kind of blew my mind. How good Stephen and Neil,
Speaker 2: all of them, and Crosby doing triad and winevere on guitar.
Speaker 2: You're like, what, So all of it was really remarkable,
Speaker 2: and I stayed there for that week to photograph them,
Speaker 2: and during the first couple of days, I took a
Speaker 2: walk with Neil. We were going to sound check at
Speaker 2: the film Wore and Graham and I with Neil were
Speaker 2: walking down the streets in We were actually on Thompson
Speaker 2: Street and I looked down the sidewalk and saw a small,
Speaker 2: older woman with very bright eyes. It really struck me
Speaker 2: coming towards us on the sidewalk, and I just for
Speaker 2: some reason, I stepped back and I wanted to get
Speaker 2: the moment that she crossed Neil. I don't know why,
Speaker 2: but I did. Boom click, I got the moment that
Speaker 2: they passed. After photographing all those shows, I didn't think
Speaker 2: about it twice. I was thinking more about the performance
Speaker 2: shots I was doing, and it was a very shot,
Speaker 2: so many pictures ever in my life. And when I
Speaker 2: got in the dark room and was got to that shot,
Speaker 2: I was looking forward to seeing if I'd gotten the
Speaker 2: moment that they passed. It was a little bit out
Speaker 2: of focus. I was focused more on the lady than
Speaker 2: I was Neil, which I see things very crisply, and
Speaker 2: it bothered me. So I applied a strange technique called
Speaker 2: pseudo solarization which you turn in what you turn on
Speaker 2: a bright white light just for an instant while the
Speaker 2: print is developing. This is the thing you're never supposed
Speaker 2: to do in a dark room. Of course, when you
Speaker 2: have white light in a dark room, you'll ruin the
Speaker 2: print if you leave it on long enough. But if
Speaker 2: you just put it on for a second, half the
Speaker 2: print days positive and half of its days negative, you'll
Speaker 2: never be able to duplicate what it does. And it
Speaker 2: turns into a very surreal kind of intense graphic and
Speaker 2: it sharpens things as it does that. So I did that,
Speaker 2: and I got the looked at the print of it again.
Speaker 2: It's called a solarized print, and I just thought that's
Speaker 2: way more intense than the shot looks on its own.
Speaker 2: I'm just going to put that in the stack of print.
Speaker 2: That's the one he should see. So when I after
Speaker 2: photographing them at the film More East, and then spending
Speaker 2: days developing the film, and then days proofing making contact sheets,
Speaker 2: and then looking at the contact sheets and making prints,
Speaker 2: so that when they came back to Philadelphia, I would
Speaker 2: have a box done of prints that I could show
Speaker 2: them all show the band like what I had done.
Speaker 1: So I I did that.
Speaker 2: It was kind of exhausting. I assumed I had a
Speaker 2: I had a vision of the band very much like
Speaker 2: in my mind's eye. It was like, Oh, these guys
Speaker 2: are on tour, so they must like what do they do?
Speaker 2: Like they get like a big, big suite or something,
Speaker 2: and they all like it. It's like the Beatles in Help,
Speaker 2: where they just have like a row houses or something
Speaker 2: like that. No, they're each in their own hotel room separately,
Speaker 2: and I've got to go from one room to the
Speaker 2: next with my photos to show them this thing.
Speaker 1: And so when I.
Speaker 2: Showed the Prince to Neil, each of them, I was
Speaker 2: only showing prints of themselves nobody. I figured even then,
Speaker 2: like David doesn't need to see pictures of Stephen. Yes,
Speaker 2: he can see the group shots and stuff, but on
Speaker 2: the individual stuff, I'm just going to show each guy
Speaker 2: their own things. So here's the shot of Neil passing
Speaker 2: the woman with a little print this big, and he
Speaker 2: stares at it for a few seconds and then he
Speaker 2: looks up at me and says, that's my album cover.
Speaker 2: And I thought, okay, Joel, don't get too excited, because
Speaker 2: these guys changed their mind all the time and he
Speaker 2: might think that now so it's really cool and he
Speaker 2: said that, but don't go nuts about it, okay, But
Speaker 2: it turned out that it was and that was my
Speaker 2: first album cover. So back to my first week of
Speaker 2: classes of going to Madison, Wisconsin, because I was had
Speaker 2: been convinced that like, no, I can't just I'm still
Speaker 2: going to have to go to college. I can't just
Speaker 2: do this photography thing, like you know, that's no, no, no,
Speaker 2: You're just not going to make any money. And even
Speaker 2: though it's lots of fun and wouldn't it be great
Speaker 2: if you could do it, but no. So there I
Speaker 2: am at school and after the gold Rush album comes
Speaker 2: out that week, I go down to the record store.
Speaker 2: There's like fifty of them on the floor with my
Speaker 2: picture on the front and on the back and on
Speaker 2: the inside, and I'm like shocked. It was like I
Speaker 2: just took that picture like months ago. That was I
Speaker 2: did that, and now it's in shrink wrap with all
Speaker 2: the other albums on the floor of this record store.
Speaker 2: And then I look up and there's a poster of
Speaker 2: another shot of Neil that Warner's is put out as
Speaker 2: a promotional thing. Anyway, I call Elliott up and I'm like, Elliott,
Speaker 2: I just saw the It's like, can I send them
Speaker 2: a bill for this short jowel? Of course. Just let's see.
Speaker 2: You have the front and the back and the inside.
Speaker 2: Each one of those should be five hundred dollars. Joel,
Speaker 2: you send Warner Brothers a bill for fifteen hundred dollars.
Speaker 2: Now fifteen hundred dollars in nineteen seventy when you're a
Speaker 2: freshman in college and you're like, am I going to
Speaker 2: buy something for two dollars and twenty five cents or
Speaker 2: two dollars in a day? You know what I mean,
Speaker 2: It's insane. You might as well say like, I'm giving
Speaker 2: you like two million dollars or something. It was really
Speaker 2: quite crazy.
Speaker 1: And that.
Speaker 2: Combined with that this was this it's it's now there.
Speaker 2: It's like, wait a second, this is going to look
Speaker 2: like this around the world. They're going to have this
Speaker 2: album in France, in England was really like whoa, whoa, whoa.
Speaker 2: And then Joni called in my dorm room. If you
Speaker 2: can imagine the phone ringing, ye, Joni called and said, hey,
Speaker 2: could you I need some photos done? Could you come
Speaker 2: out like next weekend to do some photos of me
Speaker 2: at my house. Well, Joned, I mean, you know, I
Speaker 2: just I just started college. Okay, but you know what
Speaker 2: if if I leave on Friday, if I leave Friday
Speaker 2: night and then like I can shoot, I'll get there
Speaker 2: on Friday and then we can maybe shoot Saturday Sunday.
Speaker 2: But I've got to leave like early Monday morning because
Speaker 2: i got class to go back to like on Monday. Sure,
Speaker 2: sure that sounds great.
Speaker 1: So I did.
Speaker 2: I you know, it's like around October, first end of September,
Speaker 2: snow flurries in Madison, Wisconsin. I'm in a dorm room,
Speaker 2: like one of a series of dorms. I'm a dorm complex,
Speaker 2: five different dormitories. I was told that we were being
Speaker 2: fed by the second largest kitchen in North America after
Speaker 2: the one at the Pentagon. Forty thousand undergraduates. Forty thousand undergraduates. Okay,
Speaker 2: the floor of my dorm is filled with Wisconsin beer
Speaker 2: drinking jocks with perhaps blue ribbon posters on their doors
Speaker 2: kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Right, And.
Speaker 2: I leave to you know, for the weekend to go
Speaker 2: to Los Angeles. It's Santa Anna wins. It's eighty five
Speaker 2: degrees breezy, and now you're going to go to Laurel
Speaker 2: Canyon and meet Gary Burden, the art director, and Henry Gilts,
Speaker 2: the photographer who's also going to be shooting at her
Speaker 2: at the same session. And these are the pictures of Joni,
Speaker 2: like leaning out the window that you see with our
Speaker 2: house in the green paint that Henry's came out much
Speaker 2: much before minded. But anyway, that was my intro to that.
Speaker 2: And to make a long story short, Jonie asked me
Speaker 2: to stay. My parents dropped me off on a to
Speaker 2: go on an around the world trip. They got me,
Speaker 2: they were like, okay, we're going to take you to Madison.
Speaker 2: Here's your stuff everything. Okay, see you later. We're going
Speaker 2: to be off. We'll talk to you in a few weeks.
Speaker 2: And all of this happened during that time, so there
Speaker 2: was nobody to call nobody.
Speaker 1: I just did it.
Speaker 2: And and then Joni said, hey, could you could you
Speaker 2: house in my place? Like while I'm in Europe with
Speaker 2: James Taylor. She was James Taylor was her boyfriend at
Speaker 2: the time, and she was writing the Blue Album when
Speaker 2: I was when I was there, and then they both left,
Speaker 2: she and they went to England where you have those
Speaker 2: beautiful recordings that you and I would have heard first
Speaker 2: on that bootleg of Joni and James right. And so
Speaker 2: I wound up being able to rent a house into
Speaker 2: Panga and work for the art director as his assistant.
Speaker 2: And that began my I never went back. I only
Speaker 2: went back to I only went back. I forfeited the tuition,
Speaker 2: and I went back and picked up all my stuff
Speaker 2: and moved out to California.
Speaker 1: And what did your parents say when they found out? Right?
Speaker 2: Well, so my parents where like, You've got to come
Speaker 2: back here right now, like they came back to Philadelphia.
Speaker 2: So I had to explain to them what okay, okay.
Speaker 2: Now most parents would be like, you get your ass
Speaker 2: back in that school, and now you can go and
Speaker 2: get a job since you forfeited your tuition, you know
Speaker 2: what I mean. It was the big kind of thing
Speaker 2: to have done. And they just said, okay, I can't
Speaker 2: believe you did this. But we know these guys and
Speaker 2: they're real Like they had met Elliott and they'd met Jonie.
Speaker 2: They were like they were they were okay with me
Speaker 2: hanging out with you. They weren't. I was not in
Speaker 2: a crash pad in the hate Ashbury okay, like things
Speaker 2: were better than that, but you know, you got to
Speaker 2: go to college, so we want you to go. Well,
Speaker 2: I just want to learn photography, Okay, well I want
Speaker 2: you to go to all you go to the art schools,
Speaker 2: like go to the places that have photography courses in
Speaker 2: Los Angeles and like figure out which one you can
Speaker 2: go to, because we want you to be back in school.
Speaker 2: So I went to four different colleges, including the new
Speaker 2: cal Arts which had just opened, and I just what
Speaker 2: I for me. I just said, you know, I really
Speaker 2: don't need these people to teach me how to do this.
Speaker 2: I can do this already, and they're concentrating on technical,
Speaker 2: on technique. But their stuff is like it has no soul,
Speaker 2: it's not they're not doing what I want to do.
Speaker 2: I can't learn from these people. That's how I felt.
Speaker 2: And they let me move to Tipanga and I got
Speaker 2: a job working as an assistant for the art director
Speaker 2: and that then then just kept doing more photographs, like oh,
Speaker 2: we're starting asylum records, you do photograph Judy cell or whatever.
Speaker 2: That was how I just started working as a photographer.
Speaker 1: Then was it you know the crossby stools Nashy Nung tour.
Speaker 1: The reference at the time was seventy four. You start
Speaker 1: going to LA in October seventy Is it pretty steady
Speaker 1: for that period of time or they're ups and downs.
Speaker 2: Well, if you're a freelance of anything, it's going to
Speaker 2: be up and down and it's going to be unpredictable.
Speaker 1: But I.
Speaker 2: Enjoyed it, and I didn't need to. I wasn't paying
Speaker 2: a whole lot of rent and everyone I hitchhiked everywhere.
Speaker 2: I didn't have a car, but I was able to.
Speaker 2: Let's see, so early seventy one, for example, just after
Speaker 2: I was a house sitting at Jones and then came
Speaker 2: back to California. I'm with Graham Nash. He's about to
Speaker 2: do his first solo album. We're at Wally Hiders studio.
Speaker 2: He's with the engineer playing back a playback of a
Speaker 2: song that he recorded a few months ago at Crosby's
Speaker 2: sessions for his solo album in San Francisco. And this
Speaker 2: is when I start learning about like the repetition, how
Speaker 2: much repetition is involved in recordings in studios and playback
Speaker 2: and all of that. So they play the same thing
Speaker 2: back and back, and I finally get bored and I
Speaker 2: walk into the studio itself, where no one is there.
Speaker 2: There's a piano. I don't know how to play piano,
Speaker 2: but I'm bored. So I sit at the piano and
Speaker 2: I through the glass I can hear the tape they're playing,
Speaker 2: which is the song Military Madness, and I just start
Speaker 2: playing along with it on the piano. I can't play
Speaker 2: piano at all. I'm playing like a chopsticks kind of piano,
Speaker 2: literally one finger on the loft, two fingers right. And
Speaker 2: suddenly Graham's voice comes out loud over the speakers in
Speaker 2: the studio, Joel, what do you do? And I'm like, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm so sorry. I figured I was interrupting their hearing
Speaker 2: and they could hear me for some reason. No, no, no,
Speaker 2: it's just what are you doing? Like, what are you playing? Nothing, Graham,
Speaker 2: I'm just just playing along with it. Go back, he says,
Speaker 2: the engineer. Take the tape back to the head of
Speaker 2: the thing, and just start at the beginning, so and
Speaker 2: just play what you were doing. So I start playing,
Speaker 2: and I play all the way through, and Graham says,
Speaker 2: you're on the session tomorrow. So I'm not yet nineteen.
Speaker 2: Get to the session. This is like John Barbada, Chris Ethridge,
Speaker 2: Rita Coolidge. I'm thinking, you know, if I was playing guitar,
Speaker 2: I wouldn't be very nervous because I can play guitar.
Speaker 2: I'm like good, I'm good enough that if I needed
Speaker 2: to play a rhythm guitar part on this thing, I
Speaker 2: could do it fine. But I don't know how to
Speaker 2: play piano for shit, like at all. These people are
Speaker 2: the major guys. I'm like kind of sweating bullets thinking about.
Speaker 2: The door of the studio opens, Dave Mason walks in.
Speaker 2: I'm a huge traffic fan. He fucking Dave Mason walks
Speaker 2: in with a plugs this strat into an amp, sits
Speaker 2: down next to me on the piano bench.
Speaker 1: Now, I'm.
Speaker 2: Oh, and we do a live take of it. It's
Speaker 2: I think like the second take or something like that.
Speaker 2: And I'm on the record. It was the first time
Speaker 2: I ever played on a record. It was a big
Speaker 2: heady experience.
Speaker 1: Well, how many records have you played on?
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a good question. I don't know totally how
Speaker 2: many recordings I did. I was a member of the
Speaker 2: became a member of the LA Musicians Union because I
Speaker 2: played on enough things I let's see how my records
Speaker 2: that I ever play on. I don't know, not many,
Speaker 2: eight ten. I played on Graham Nash, David Crosby, Crosby
Speaker 2: and Nash Crosby Stills in Nash. I played with Joni
Speaker 2: Mitchell on stage, played with Neil on stage. In terms
Speaker 2: of playing on on records, I played on Terry Reid's
Speaker 2: Seed of Memory, a great, great album that Graham Nash produced.
Speaker 2: I played on that. I was really thrilled about that.
Speaker 2: I played on his Wild Tales album, his second album
Speaker 2: as well. And I played on Wasted on the Way
Speaker 2: When Crosby Stills Nash. Anyway, So I never became a
Speaker 2: real session player at all, No, but I did. I
Speaker 2: liked accompany and I was a thrilled to do all
Speaker 2: of those.
Speaker 1: Okay, you go. You know we talk about that show
Speaker 1: at the beginning, you know, in England on the seventy
Speaker 1: Forard tour, and then ultimately you shoot the Running on
Speaker 1: Empty Stuff, which is nineteen yes, seventy eighty seven, seventy seven,
Speaker 1: seventy eight, whenever it comes out right right right? Are
Speaker 1: you continuously working through that period?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was working mostly as a photographer, so I
Speaker 2: did the Wind on the Water album cover and the
Speaker 2: shots of CSN on the boat for example, Right, that
Speaker 2: would have been earlier that year, in seventy seven. I
Speaker 2: let's see after it was just going back I had
Speaker 2: done after the gold Rush cover. I did the inside
Speaker 2: and back cover, the inside and back cover for the
Speaker 2: Harvest album the group in the barn there that was
Speaker 2: September seventy one. I did the photos of Jony for
Speaker 2: the Four of the Roses album that I did those
Speaker 2: in September of seventy two. And did the Time Fades
Speaker 2: Away cover for Neil Young of the Kid in the
Speaker 2: audience at the Spectrum giving a peace sign. Right, that
Speaker 2: was then. So I just kept going forward doing those.
Speaker 1: Okay, A couple of questions. First, got to stop on
Speaker 1: Four of the Roses that famously had a picture of
Speaker 1: Joni in Canada with no clothes on. I didn't see
Speaker 1: it is that much of a limit tester, but the
Speaker 1: press it was depicted that way. How much of there
Speaker 1: was a discussion of a shooting it and b using it.
Speaker 2: There was no discussion about shooting it. I was just
Speaker 2: walking with Joni and she just took her clothes off
Speaker 2: and walked out onto the rocks. It looks like she's
Speaker 2: way out to see, but she's really only about twenty
Speaker 2: feet away from me. I'm using a wide angle lens
Speaker 2: on that shot, and knew that I had gotten a
Speaker 2: really good series there, and I did the later I
Speaker 2: did the photo of her on the cover, of her
Speaker 2: in the forest, nearly in the forest. I'm sorry, I
Speaker 2: think I forgot which her question.
Speaker 1: Was when the album was being put together and that
Speaker 1: photo was used, was anybody thinking twice of the fact
Speaker 1: she was naked?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yes, No, what happened was I remember that we
Speaker 2: Janie and I had a meeting with David Geffen about
Speaker 2: that her choice of that picture on the cover. I
Speaker 2: originally she wanted to put it on the cover. And
Speaker 2: she said, Jony, do you know three of us at
Speaker 2: a meeting And he said, Johnny, did you know that
Speaker 2: Sears sells something like sixty percent of the LPs in America?
Speaker 2: And she said, no, I didn't know that. Yeah, well
Speaker 2: they do. And they have a very strict kind of
Speaker 2: a rule at Sears about like the kinds of there's
Speaker 2: like all kinds of album covers that they will not
Speaker 2: stock based on the artwork. So this would be like
Speaker 2: no this, which would mean you would you would be
Speaker 2: losing that many that percent of like your sales because
Speaker 2: it's not being represented. So we've got it. So that's over, Like,
Speaker 2: we can't do that.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 2: Okay, well can I put it on the inside. Well
Speaker 2: we could try. So that's how we wound up taking
Speaker 2: the picture of her that was going to be on
Speaker 2: the inside, and that became the cover and the the
Speaker 2: the inside shot you talked about, but it was it
Speaker 2: was talked about.
Speaker 1: Okay, you talked about being Okay, let's just talk about
Speaker 1: this period. You're in Los Angeles, You've got the whole
Speaker 1: Geffen Roberts Asylum camp covered. Are you going to record labels?
Speaker 1: Are you trying to network with other racks to do
Speaker 1: their work.
Speaker 2: That's a really good question. I was not at all
Speaker 2: business oriented at the time. I sort of let things
Speaker 2: happen as they did because so much just the things
Speaker 2: I've related to you happened without my doing them. That is,
Speaker 2: they all came to me. These were like there was
Speaker 2: a certain organic flow to things that happened to me,
Speaker 2: and it didn't seem like I was going to be
Speaker 2: helping it. If I had a particular goal in mind
Speaker 2: that I wanted to do it seemed like at the time,
Speaker 2: it seemed like a better thing was just to see
Speaker 2: what happened. So I didn't pound the pavement, and I
Speaker 2: probably should have or could have, or maybe would have
Speaker 2: if we have to just say this happened in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy three when I was on tour with Neil and
Speaker 2: taking some photos of him backstage as the tour photographer.
Speaker 2: He looked over to me and he goes, wait a minute,
Speaker 2: and he remembered this moment. When I went to photograph
Speaker 2: him in Crazy Horse at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia,
Speaker 2: it was I'd seen them at the Bitter End and
Speaker 2: then they were coming to Philadelphia. This would be in
Speaker 2: the end of February beginning of March nineteen seventy still
Speaker 2: I'm still in twelfth grade. And I took the photos
Speaker 2: that became the inside of After the Gold Rush of
Speaker 2: Neil on the couch, sprawled on the couch with the
Speaker 2: guitars all around, and his wife Susan on the fore
Speaker 2: end lighting a cigarette. I also took the picture of
Speaker 2: the close up at the back of his jeans because
Speaker 2: I'd never seen patches like that before. I just I
Speaker 2: had patches. You had patches here, right, you fall, you,
Speaker 2: you rip your jeans, your mom puts a patch on it, right,
Speaker 2: But those were the kind of patches I knew. I
Speaker 2: didn't this was now art right, Like, he had this
Speaker 2: beautiful embroidery going on on the pack there. So I
Speaker 2: knelt down to take a picture of it. Click, I
Speaker 2: take the picture. No, right before the click, Billy Talbot
Speaker 2: the bass players says to Neil, hey Man, that guy's
Speaker 2: taking a picture of your ass man. That becomes the
Speaker 2: back cover. Still the back cover. It's very funny. So, yes,
Speaker 2: what was I going to say? There was some.
Speaker 1: He was saying something to you in the nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: three tours.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, thank you, thank you very much for the
Speaker 2: breadcrumbs there. So what happened is before I took the
Speaker 2: before or after, pardon me, after I took the pictures
Speaker 2: of him on the couch. They are back at the
Speaker 2: Electric Factory in nineteen seventy his D forty five, which
Speaker 2: you can see in the picture leaning up against a wall.
Speaker 2: That's the top of the line Martin guitar. I never
Speaker 2: seen one before, never seen anything close to that nice
Speaker 2: of a guitar, I said, is there any way I
Speaker 2: could just play that guitar for just a minute, Like
Speaker 2: he's like, yeah, sure, go ahead and pick it up,
Speaker 2: a brand new white faced guitar. I pick it up.
Speaker 2: I start playing, and it's like the best guitar by
Speaker 2: far I've ever played. It's about many thousands of dollars guitar.
Speaker 2: And as I'm playing it, somebody from the promoter sticks
Speaker 2: their head in the dressing room door and says, Neil,
Speaker 2: you're on. So Neil looks at me and he says,
Speaker 2: I need the guitar. So I quickly touch up the guitar,
Speaker 2: meaning I tuned it very quickly by ear using harmonics,
Speaker 2: and I hand it to him and he's standing in
Speaker 2: the doorway of the room and he plays three different
Speaker 2: chords on it, and he looks at me quizzically like
Speaker 2: and says that's perfect, Like how could you? What's with you?
Speaker 3: Like? How could you do that?
Speaker 2: Because it's hard to tune a guitar really well, like
Speaker 2: and to do it by ear. But I've been I
Speaker 2: was good enough that by then I gave him the
Speaker 2: guitar back perfectly. So three years later we're in a
Speaker 2: dressing room together and it's just the two of us,
Speaker 2: and he's spending forty minutes before every show tuning his
Speaker 2: own guitars with a throbba tuner. Write a little device.
Speaker 2: I'll spare you what it is, but it's like that
Speaker 2: you used to help tune your guitar. And he looks
Speaker 2: at me and says, wait a minute, you're that kid
Speaker 2: who tuned that D forty five perfectly. What am I
Speaker 2: doing here? You should be doing this here. Let me
Speaker 2: show you how to work this Strova tuner. And so
Speaker 2: he teaches me how to do that, and then I
Speaker 2: become his guitar tech for his shows for the rest
Speaker 2: of the tour on that tour, and that launches me
Speaker 2: into a career of me a guitar technician. After that,
Speaker 2: my first thing is with Crosby and Nash. That becomes
Speaker 2: that's thirty five different instruments, Danny Cooch, David Linley, David
Speaker 2: has ten lap slides, guitar, you know, guitars, banjo, pedal,
Speaker 2: steel guitar, A total of thirty five guitars that I
Speaker 2: have to then tune and restring for the Crosby Nash show.
Speaker 2: And right after I had finished that tour, which was
Speaker 2: our big challenge, which I was able to do. And
Speaker 2: it's a pleasure to like, you know, when when things
Speaker 2: are tuned well, it's like a big thrill. So I
Speaker 2: then ran into the previous tour managers for the CSNY
Speaker 2: tour in nineteen seventy four at Dantanna's on Santa Monica. Joel,
Speaker 2: what are you doing here? I don't know I'm here?
Speaker 2: They said, I said, didn't you just finish the Uh?
Speaker 2: You finished that Rolling Thunder tour with Bob Dylan, didn't you?
Speaker 2: The two of you? You just I so wanted to
Speaker 2: be on that. I was on the Crosby Nash tour
Speaker 2: working on that. But you guys were kicking ass on
Speaker 2: that first Rolling Thunder tour.
Speaker 1: I got.
Speaker 2: I wish I could have been on that. They said, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: we did that. So so what have you been doing?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: I was a guitar tech for Crosby and Nasha had
Speaker 2: these thirty five guitars and they look at each other
Speaker 2: like and one of them says, so like, just leave
Speaker 2: the spring open for us. Okay, don't book anything for
Speaker 2: the spring. We can't tell you what it's about.
Speaker 1: Just leave it open.
Speaker 2: Later they call me and say, Okay, what it's about
Speaker 2: is like, it's the Bob Dylan the second Rolling Thunder
Speaker 2: Review tour. We're doing it this spring, and we're doing
Speaker 2: it along the Gulf Coast and we want you to
Speaker 2: start at the Clearwater. We're doing rehearsals at the Bellevue
Speaker 2: buildmore in Clearwater, Florida.
Speaker 1: Be there.
Speaker 2: And that was another tour with thirty five guitars and
Speaker 2: a huge thrill. And of course, you know, dropping into
Speaker 2: each of these worlds, it's it's a bit like your
Speaker 2: Many of these scenes have people in them who have
Speaker 2: been there for years. And going from let's say Neil
Speaker 2: Young's world into Joni Mitchell's world into Bob Dylan's world
Speaker 2: or Prince's world, each one of those is like a
Speaker 2: different kingdom ruled by a different monarch with a totally
Speaker 2: different style, and the rules are different and will the
Speaker 2: priorities are different and whatever. And most of the people
Speaker 2: who work in those places only know that place. They
Speaker 2: don't travel, they're just in that one place. So it's
Speaker 2: wild in what I was doing as a photographer and
Speaker 2: a guitar tech to go from one of those scenes,
Speaker 2: you know, into a whole other thing. And so I
Speaker 2: learned a lot from working for Bob, and it was,
Speaker 2: you know, a big challenge and a big thrill.
Speaker 1: Okay, you so you learned a lot, would you learn? Well?
Speaker 2: I learned like Bob, for example, is a man of
Speaker 2: few words. He's not going to tell you what the
Speaker 2: issue is. He's going to look like something's wrong and
Speaker 2: you have to figure it out. So that was a
Speaker 2: big lesson for me. But the nonverbal communication thing, because
Speaker 2: Bob is just not going to tell you a lot,
Speaker 2: you really do have to figure out what it is,
Speaker 2: and sometimes it's something serious and you've got to deal
Speaker 2: with it like right then.
Speaker 1: So that stood me in.
Speaker 2: Goodstead many many years later when I went to work
Speaker 2: for Prince, because they're both so intense. I mean, Bob
Speaker 2: could give you a look that could kill and you
Speaker 2: could be dead. His looks are so intense.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Prince was incredibly it was an intense person, but he
Speaker 2: was so focused on what it was he wanted to
Speaker 2: do that you really you wanted to help him, wanted
Speaker 2: to like it's like, okay, if I'm going to get
Speaker 2: on this bus, I'm going to do the best I
Speaker 2: can and and and do it. So all of my
Speaker 2: career as a a what became as a guitar technician
Speaker 2: occasionally with me playing on records or live was intermingled
Speaker 2: with my career as a photographer, so I got to
Speaker 2: do for many years, I got to do an alternate
Speaker 2: between between the two and got to go to Europe
Speaker 2: and Japan and be on many tours with great, great
Speaker 2: crews of people and see, you know how this amazing
Speaker 2: variety of performers and what moves them, like, like, what
Speaker 2: is motivating each of them and why are they doing it?
Speaker 1: But well, go a little deeper there, what is motivating
Speaker 1: these artists and why are they doing it?
Speaker 2: It's a really good question. I think there are artists
Speaker 2: like Jonie or James Taylor who are not there to
Speaker 2: begin with. They're not picking up the guitar like I
Speaker 2: was at the time. They're not like looking for the
Speaker 2: for applause. They're not looking for you to tell them
Speaker 2: how great they are. They just have to do this.
Speaker 2: And if they could stay in their room and slip
Speaker 2: the cassette they just finished under the door to to
Speaker 2: the world and stay in their room, that would be
Speaker 2: great for them. Their their motivation is about what they
Speaker 2: have to say and what they have to do and
Speaker 2: the hours that are going to spend making it just
Speaker 2: so for them. Other people are the the roar of
Speaker 2: the crowd, the the emotion of that coming to them
Speaker 2: made me seeing that so many times made me feel
Speaker 2: that for some performing artists it's a matter of attention
Speaker 2: in the sense of did your parents pay you enough
Speaker 2: attention as a kid. Maybe they paid you too much attention, right,
Speaker 2: so that as an adult you need that extra attention,
Speaker 2: or maybe they paid you too little attention, and that's
Speaker 2: what you need now from the audience. When you're the
Speaker 2: person on stage and all of those people give you
Speaker 2: that roar of approval, that's what is, you know, moving
Speaker 2: you right. So I think it's a big that's just
Speaker 2: a couple of polls, a couple of ways people are moved.
Speaker 2: But it is really interesting to just see how also
Speaker 2: in one scene music itself might be king the music
Speaker 2: right and in another style might be right or are
Speaker 2: artfully making a show right? Are making a performance? How
Speaker 2: well do you artfully do that? As opposed to I
Speaker 2: think because I was working with the post Dylan singer songwriters,
Speaker 2: that was that's the main world that I lived in,
Speaker 2: so that most most of the people I was photographing,
Speaker 2: were composing the things they were performing right, really different
Speaker 2: from you know, Bob, Bob Dylan says in the biograph
Speaker 2: notes to Cameron Crow, I didn't know it as a kid,
Speaker 2: he says, growing up. But there were on the one
Speaker 2: there were singers and then there were songwriters, and there
Speaker 2: were for almost nobody did both things. I think about it,
Speaker 2: there really was. There's the professional singers, right, and then
Speaker 2: there's the professional performers, and very few, like you could
Speaker 2: count them on one hand, almost like right, Chuck Burry,
Speaker 2: Jerry Lee Lewis, like people who wrote their own material
Speaker 2: and performed it.
Speaker 1: Not a lot.
Speaker 2: So it was wonderful for me to get to see
Speaker 2: I was on tour, I guess starting with I don't know,
Speaker 2: Neil in seventy ors Crosby Nash seventy one, going all
Speaker 2: the way up to probably Neil in ninety three, something
Speaker 2: like that, and the unplugged period. So you know, I
Speaker 2: loved the opportunity to it, to to see that up close.
Speaker 1: Now, when you were tuning guitars, when you were a
Speaker 1: guitar technician, were you also shooting photos on those same gigs?
Speaker 2: Good question. I usually if I was hired as a
Speaker 2: guitar tech. That was all I could do. And the
Speaker 2: Bob Dylan world, they specifically said Joel, like, we know
Speaker 2: you know because I was the guitar the tour photographer
Speaker 2: for the seventy four tour for the same producers. They
Speaker 2: said to me, listen on this Bob Dylan tour, just
Speaker 2: don't even bring your cameras. Okay, he doesn't want you
Speaker 2: to take in pictures. We know what you do all
Speaker 2: of that. Just leave them at home. You're going to
Speaker 2: be the guitar tech. Fine, So I did that, and
Speaker 2: then one night Bob's assistant runs to me and goes, Joe,
Speaker 2: Bob wants you to photograph the show tonight, And I said,
Speaker 2: wasn't that you who called me on the phone and said, like,
Speaker 2: leave your cameras at home because they're at home. They
Speaker 2: really are home. So I'd love to do it, but
Speaker 2: I can't. So I had my all my cameras shipped,
Speaker 2: and then I did photograph like the next few shows
Speaker 2: of Bob's. But again, you're responsible for thirty five guitars.
Speaker 2: They all have to be in tune. If somebody breaks
Speaker 2: the string, you gotta deal with.
Speaker 1: It, Okay. On these shows where you're the guitar tick. Yes,
Speaker 1: how many of them have their own separate tour photographer.
Speaker 2: Who wasn't me? Let's see, that's a good question. Very
Speaker 2: few of them.
Speaker 1: I was.
Speaker 2: I mean, I wasn't paying attention. Who was photography?
Speaker 1: I let me ask a different Let me ask you
Speaker 1: a different question. You know, anybody on the road who's
Speaker 1: doing anything that has to think is being pretty well compensated,
Speaker 1: although you're working around the clock. However, shooting photos is different.
Speaker 2: From tuning guitars, really different. Ye.
Speaker 1: Is there part of you saying, well, this is kind
Speaker 1: of okay, and I'm getting paid, but it's not as
Speaker 1: fulfilling as shooting photos. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. If I had it all to do again, I
Speaker 2: would do no. I would not be a guitar tech
Speaker 2: and I would not have done any of that. I
Speaker 2: realized when I went to a couple award shows for
Speaker 2: photographers or lifetime achievement awards, that everyone who was being
Speaker 2: presented with an award on stage got to be a
Speaker 2: photographer early on, and they just stayed with it. There
Speaker 2: was no second career. They were not. None of them
Speaker 2: were doing photography and something else. So I think that
Speaker 2: I'd have to say that my photography suffered that in
Speaker 2: the sense of not taking all of those hours and
Speaker 2: weeks and years that I put into being a guitar
Speaker 2: tech that could have been used to become a better photographer.
Speaker 2: So in hindsight, as much because I had a lot
Speaker 2: of great fun and I lot did, I'm proud of
Speaker 2: a lot of the stuff I did. I was the
Speaker 2: guitar tech for the Last Waltz, the band's last concert
Speaker 2: with Bob Dylan and Jony and Neil and all of that,
Speaker 2: and that was a big thrill for me. And I
Speaker 2: can still listen to that concert and say, I did
Speaker 2: a good job. It's not a train wreck. It's in tune, right,
Speaker 2: that kind of thing. So if there's something you know,
Speaker 2: but it's not the same as Tom Petty or someone
Speaker 2: or Bruce Springsteen using a photo of yours for an
Speaker 2: album cover or a single sleeve or something like that's
Speaker 2: a whole other kind of excitement.
Speaker 1: Okay, you have this start when you're in high school,
Speaker 1: wet behind the years. Joni Mitchell sort of plucks you
Speaker 1: from obscurity. Once you're in LA you dropped out of
Speaker 1: college and the years that did n't suit Okay, are
Speaker 1: you a member of a group or you an exterearior character.
Speaker 1: Are they saying, oh, we're having a party where so
Speaker 1: and so called Joel.
Speaker 2: It's a good question. I think when I lived in
Speaker 2: La I think I was considered part of an part
Speaker 2: of the extended family, and did get to do lots
Speaker 2: of things with some of the artists. I when I
Speaker 2: moved here in seventy three, Neil had just bought his
Speaker 2: ranch right, so it'd be.
Speaker 1: Well, just to be clear, not everybody's up to speed.
Speaker 1: Where is here?
Speaker 2: Oh, I'm sorry. I moved to San Francisco from Tipanga
Speaker 2: in April of nineteen seventy three, after doing the Time
Speaker 2: Fades Away tour, after doing all those photos.
Speaker 1: I lived.
Speaker 2: Graham Nash lived at a Victorian three story home on
Speaker 2: Buenavista Park in San Francisco in the city and had
Speaker 2: an apartment that he'd been renting next door that came
Speaker 2: up for rent, and he invited me to move there
Speaker 2: from Topanga. And I think that rent was one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty nine dollars a month at the time, so
Speaker 2: it was not hard to do. And I loved San Francisco, so.
Speaker 1: I really.
Speaker 2: Enjoyed that, But I think I just lost my train
Speaker 2: of thought about what question I was answering.
Speaker 1: Well, you were saying, you know, when you moved up north,
Speaker 1: being a member of the group, being included.
Speaker 2: Oh, yes, so I would again. In the fall, right after,
Speaker 2: well before I moved up there, I came up to
Speaker 2: photograph Neil in the Harvest for the Harvest album. So
Speaker 2: the picture of him of the giant doorknob that's reflected
Speaker 2: on the inside there, that's you can see me taking
Speaker 2: the picture in the doorknob and Meil standing there with
Speaker 2: his hands on his lips looking at me. I felt
Speaker 2: welcome by all of these people. They were all considering
Speaker 2: I was always the youngest one around. They were always
Speaker 2: I felt welcome, and I didn't feel like.
Speaker 1: I didn't.
Speaker 2: I didn't feel part of the group, except when occasionally
Speaker 2: I would get asked to play, like Graham asked me
Speaker 2: to play on song wind on the Water, for example,
Speaker 2: when Crosby, Stills and Nash would play that song and
Speaker 2: we would actually have a film of from the Acousto
Speaker 2: Society of Whales behind us, and I would get to
Speaker 2: play an acoustic guitar part on that song. And a
Speaker 2: couple other songs sometimes for CSN. So I enjoyed that,
Speaker 2: and you know, I certainly, Yeah, I did not feel
Speaker 2: exterior to them at all. I felt like I was
Speaker 2: We were, we were good friends. And I did things
Speaker 2: like I transcribed all of David Crosby's songs for guitar
Speaker 2: back when I was nineteen for uh SO that so
Speaker 2: the guitarist could play all of those songs tune in
Speaker 2: the tunings that they were that he wrote them in.
Speaker 2: That was a big accomplishment for me. And I did
Speaker 2: the same thing for Jonie for the for the Roses album.
Speaker 2: So there are all kinds of like other little less
Speaker 2: things that I could do. I felt very at home.
Speaker 1: Uh it was.
Speaker 2: It was, uh, you know, compared especially if I compared
Speaker 2: my my career path to other friends of mine who
Speaker 2: I knew in high school or just friends or neighbors
Speaker 2: and what they were doing. I was not doing any
Speaker 2: kind of nine to five anything, you know ever.
Speaker 1: Okay, a couple of questions. The seventy three tour that
Speaker 1: came after Harvest. The Yeah album that was released was
Speaker 1: Time Fades Away, which was a live album cover, very rocking,
Speaker 1: very different from Harvest. You were a different at those shows.
Speaker 1: He was playing arenas because of the success of Heart
Speaker 1: of Gold. You hear that the people did not enjoy
Speaker 1: that you were there?
Speaker 2: What was absolutely okay, that's very really good astute question there, Bob.
Speaker 2: So yes, the people were expecting to hear the Harvest album. This,
Speaker 2: by the way, happens on the Tonight's the Night tour
Speaker 2: later that year, also in late fall of seventy three,
Speaker 2: especially when Neil is touring colleges at the beginning of
Speaker 2: that tour, people were puzzled and the way that Neil looked,
Speaker 2: his look combined with how chaotic it was, and he
Speaker 2: had never on a show, he had never done a
Speaker 2: show of arenas and large theaters like that before ever, and.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 2: I think that his his his putting the band together
Speaker 2: was like, who did I have the most fun playing with?
Speaker 2: So I want to have It was, you know, quite
Speaker 2: a great band. He had Kenny Buttery on drums, who
Speaker 2: he'd hired, who was a Nashville A list player then
Speaker 2: and who Neil had to match what his salary would
Speaker 2: have been had he'd stayed in Nashville. If you can imagine, right,
Speaker 2: if Kenny's Buttery stays at home in Nashville does X
Speaker 2: number of sessions per week. What is that number? It's
Speaker 2: a large number. So most people are not hiring Kenny
Speaker 2: to go on their tour. They can't afford to. But
Speaker 2: Neil could, so he did. And so you've got and
Speaker 2: Jack Nietzschee for God's sake, Phil Spector's arranger, among other things.
Speaker 2: You know, the great Jack Nietzschee a part of his
Speaker 2: band as well.
Speaker 1: So but.
Speaker 2: His right before the tour begins, in rehearsals, Neil's guitarist
Speaker 2: from Crazy Horse, Danny Whitten, Neil decides he wants to
Speaker 2: have him in the band. He knows that Danny is
Speaker 2: a heroin addict and had written Needle and the Damage
Speaker 2: Done about him, and he knows the dangers of that,
Speaker 2: but he really wants to have him in a rhythm
Speaker 2: guitar position. It just gives him the freedom to play,
Speaker 2: you know, to take off when Danny's there. And in rehearsal,
Speaker 2: Danny is too messed up from drugs to be able
Speaker 2: to actually do the part, and Neil has to send
Speaker 2: him home and he.
Speaker 1: Danny.
Speaker 2: He flies home to Los Angeles, goes right to his
Speaker 2: heroin dealers and buys enough heroin and he overdoses that night,
Speaker 2: and Neil gets woken up at four in the morning
Speaker 2: by the La County Sheriff's department because because Danny had
Speaker 2: put Neil's phone number in a crumpled piece of paper
Speaker 2: in his pocket, so they call that number when he's
Speaker 2: dead and it's Neil. So that's how Neil learns that that,
Speaker 2: like Danny is dead, and that puts.
Speaker 1: A really.
Speaker 2: Black, you know, cloak over the whole enterprise of what's
Speaker 2: supposed to be his first, you know, huge national tour
Speaker 2: because because of the shock of that, So there's a
Speaker 2: there's a that combined with trying to deal with like
Speaker 2: monitors and sound levels. Right, it's an electric band. He's
Speaker 2: used to being a solo acoustic act. Of course, he's
Speaker 2: played with Buffalo Springfield, but they're playing in small places mostly, right,
Speaker 2: and the main volume issu who has to do between
Speaker 2: him and Steven there here it is on his own
Speaker 2: young tour, and I have a photo of him with
Speaker 2: a with a flying V guitar at one of the
Speaker 2: sound checks on this tour with a huge wall of
Speaker 2: amplifiers that he's staring out trying to get his guitar
Speaker 2: sound right, and he's looking at these amps with great intensity,
Speaker 2: trying to like get his guitar sound dialed in, and
Speaker 2: he never does for the whole tour. So there's a
Speaker 2: discomfort for him about the size of the arenas, the
Speaker 2: mm hmm. He becomes unhappy with Kenny Butterer's playing because
Speaker 2: Kenny's not playing loud enough. Now, Kenny's playing as hard
Speaker 2: as he can play, and he's like one of the
Speaker 2: great drummers of our time, and yet he's it's not
Speaker 2: enough for Neil. Like Neil actually fires him halfway through
Speaker 2: the tour and yes, John Barbado to cover it. So
Speaker 2: it was not a happy tour for Neil, like you said.
Speaker 2: And the next album, Tonight's the Night, is like is
Speaker 2: his tribute to Danny Whitten. Basically it's the he and
Speaker 2: the band he puts together record really late at night
Speaker 2: with having taken a lot of tequila, and you know,
Speaker 2: come up with the very dark but brilliant Tonight's the
Speaker 2: Night album. So I was there for that part.
Speaker 1: Also, Okay, you know you mentioned Petty who's managed by
Speaker 1: Tony Dimitriotis, who's part of Elliott Roberts Lookout Management. But
Speaker 1: you ultimately worked with Springsteen. How does that come about?
Speaker 2: Yes, you know, I think it was. It came about.
Speaker 2: I don't remember how it was that I was. I
Speaker 2: must have met John Landau through Jackson. I was on
Speaker 2: the Running on Empty tour in nineteen seventy seven. Jackson
Speaker 2: originally asked me to be one of the harmony singers,
Speaker 2: so the first time anyone asked to hire me as
Speaker 2: a singer. I'm a huge fan of Jackson's music from
Speaker 2: his first album Onward and Learn, and rehearsed with Jackson
Speaker 2: with his two existing harmony singers. So I was to
Speaker 2: sing a third harmony, which means you're doing four part vocals,
Speaker 2: which is very complicated, not easy to do. I learned
Speaker 2: all the songs and before. I don't want to get
Speaker 2: too lost in all of this, but briefly, I was
Speaker 2: very thrilled to be able to be a singer. And
Speaker 2: the night before the tour started, Jackson called and said, Hey, Jeaul,
Speaker 2: I've been listening to the tape of our production rehearsal
Speaker 2: and you sound great and you're getting your pitch is perfect.
Speaker 2: You've got everything right. But you know, and listening to
Speaker 2: this the tape, I think three harmony singers is just
Speaker 2: one harmony too much, So I've got to ask you
Speaker 2: to just stay home, which was really like like I was,
Speaker 2: and I said, well, Jackson, you know I've been looking
Speaker 2: for it's like two in the morning. This conversation's happening
Speaker 2: the two in the morning of the night I'm packing
Speaker 2: to go there. I said, could it? Could I come
Speaker 2: out on the tour for like a week or something
Speaker 2: and just do some photos so at least I will
Speaker 2: have done something because this I've been looking forward to
Speaker 2: this now for months and to singing, so it's a
Speaker 2: big disappointment to me to not be able to do that.
Speaker 2: But I'd like to come out there anyway and just
Speaker 2: do some photos. And I did, and I wound up
Speaker 2: shooting the whole tour, and I wound up singing on
Speaker 2: the song Rosie on that album, which it's not as
Speaker 2: great as being able to sing all the songs. I
Speaker 2: loved being able to work out all those harmonies. So
Speaker 2: it was a big disappointment, my biggest disappointment actually professionally
Speaker 2: up to that point, to have the expectations of being
Speaker 2: a singer and then not being able to do it.
Speaker 2: But I did get some really good photos, and I
Speaker 2: did the running on Empty cover and all the many
Speaker 2: of the photos that most of the photos that you
Speaker 2: see on that package, all of which were lost by
Speaker 2: the art director.
Speaker 1: But ultimately you were telling this story connecting to Springsteen.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, pardon me. I believe that that Jackson introduced
Speaker 2: me to John Landau because John had produced the Pretender album,
Speaker 2: and somehow the subject of Bruce's new album cover came up,
Speaker 2: which was Darkness on the Edge of Town, and John
Speaker 2: asked me what I thought of it, and I felt
Speaker 2: I said, you know, it's a good photo on its own, right,
Speaker 2: but it has nothing to do with the title or
Speaker 2: the feel of the song.
Speaker 1: To me.
Speaker 2: The phrase darkness on the edge of town, to me,
Speaker 2: conjures up a very vibe kind of thing, almost like
Speaker 2: I don't know, you probably know the photo of Bruce
Speaker 2: sitting on a stoop, like at a outside of a
Speaker 2: gas station. I think it is, or maybe it's like
Speaker 2: a store at night in New Jersey somewhere. In other words,
Speaker 2: I was thinking more of a more moody kind of thing,
Speaker 2: where this is like actually studio lighting set up in
Speaker 2: Bruce's home. It just didn't I just said I was
Speaker 2: trying to be honest with him. I just said, I
Speaker 2: don't think it has the right feel. And then he
Speaker 2: called and said, would you come in photograph Bruce like
Speaker 2: you know, in the next couple of weeks he's recording
Speaker 2: some new songs. So I went to New York after
Speaker 2: having just photographed Tom petty In working on the Dan
Speaker 2: the Torpedo sessions, and I went to New York and
Speaker 2: met Bruce and he was working on an album. His
Speaker 2: next album was going to be called The Ties That Bind,
Speaker 2: and it was a single album that he'd written. Uh,
Speaker 2: and he invited me to the session, which was amazing
Speaker 2: because apparently people he never did that. But so I
Speaker 2: got to be there when he taught the band the
Speaker 2: song the River, and then be there for when they
Speaker 2: got the master tape, which is quite amazing. And he
Speaker 2: was just a few days before the muse concerts that
Speaker 2: Bruce played at the multi artist anti nuclear benefit concerts
Speaker 2: of multiple days in Madison Square Garden that I photographed. So, uh,
Speaker 2: that's how I met Bruce. He he I got to
Speaker 2: spend time with him at his home. I took pictures
Speaker 2: of him on the boardwalk, and you know, he took
Speaker 2: me around to his favorite places in New Jersey. I
Speaker 2: learned later when I when the album finally came out
Speaker 2: as a double album, the River Album, and I was
Speaker 2: looking at which pictures were mine and which weren't. There
Speaker 2: was only a few pictures of mine on there that
Speaker 2: he used at the time. But I could see that
Speaker 2: he had taken David Garr and Annie Leebowitz to the
Speaker 2: same places that he had taken me too. It was
Speaker 2: like right and not just as there was one other
Speaker 2: the person who did the picture of him with the corvette,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, his name is escaping me. Great photographer, Frank
Speaker 2: Frank Stefanco. So four of us he had us go.
Speaker 2: You know, it's like this is the house, this is
Speaker 2: a block I grew up on, and you know here
Speaker 2: here we are in Holme Dell. It was a really
Speaker 2: kind of an interesting thing and it was I love
Speaker 2: I really enjoyed him. He was very understated. He was
Speaker 2: the king of New Jersey.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I went with him to the Stone Pony. He was
Speaker 2: like God, you know, he wasn't not from his viewpoint,
Speaker 2: from the point of view of the fans and how
Speaker 2: he was regarded. But I got to, for example, drive
Speaker 2: under the full moonlight in the black Corvette with you know,
Speaker 2: in the passenger seat, with the full moon overhead in
Speaker 2: the trees while we had the listening to a Sun
Speaker 2: Records compilation cassette he had made in the corvette on
Speaker 2: our way to the Stone Pony, and it was another
Speaker 2: like in the realm of dropping into these worlds. That
Speaker 2: was an amazing world to drop into. The Bruce Springsteen
Speaker 2: New Jersey world.
Speaker 1: Okay, you know you're not a rock store. So there
Speaker 1: was all this rock scene in San Francisco in the sixties.
Speaker 1: Then there was a scene in La But as we
Speaker 1: hit the seventies and eighties, it's more and more lay.
Speaker 1: You're living in San Francisco, you feel like you're missing out.
Speaker 2: And a very good question. Interestingly, as the seventies went on,
Speaker 2: you know, as you say, in the beginning of the seventies,
Speaker 2: late sixties, early seventies, San Francisco was a big music scene.
Speaker 2: When Neil played in Buffalo Springfield in sixty seven and
Speaker 2: they were coming up here to do their first shows.
Speaker 2: There's an amazing interview with him by a DJ named
Speaker 2: Tony Pigg where Neil talks about like how intimidating it
Speaker 2: was to be from La and come up in nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty seven and come up to San Francisco with the
Speaker 2: bands that he said, well, are you kidding? You guys
Speaker 2: have the Airplane and the Dead, but you have and Quicksilver,
Speaker 2: right but really but like you have Moby Graate. Okay,
Speaker 2: So the biggest in fluences for Neil and Buffalo Springfield
Speaker 2: are Moby Grape and love seriously right Forever changes And
Speaker 2: so to him it was like very intimidating to come
Speaker 2: to northern California. So anyway, that scene did go on,
Speaker 2: and here's you know, Crosby does his solo album the
Speaker 2: same month that Jerry Garcia does his solo album, and
Speaker 2: right they're next to each other in the same studio.
Speaker 2: So you get this great bleed through with all of
Speaker 2: you know, these people playing together. You get members of
Speaker 2: the Airplane and the Dead together playing on both Jerry's
Speaker 2: album and in Crosby's album. To me, I would say
Speaker 2: there's something especially about David's album there that is almost
Speaker 2: like the pinnacle in some ways in terms of execution
Speaker 2: and really doing something fantastically well of Crosby's If I
Speaker 2: could only remember my name album, and I think that
Speaker 2: was a great, uh, you know, work of art for him,
Speaker 2: and and and showed you what that scene was was
Speaker 2: capable of. But as you say, it gradually went away
Speaker 2: until by the late seventies things had definitely shifted for La.
Speaker 2: I didn't feel having lived there, I was not going
Speaker 2: to move back to La. I didn't care for it.
Speaker 2: I really didn't.
Speaker 1: I was.
Speaker 2: I liked the green of northern California more. I liked
Speaker 2: that it was more urbane and not so sprawled and diffuse.
Speaker 2: And I think that Hollywood, that the film business, which
Speaker 2: you know, really came to precedence way over you know,
Speaker 2: became the uh I'm sure always been, but at least
Speaker 2: what I could see, you know, the music business was
Speaker 2: the whole of it was considered like a little step
Speaker 2: child compared to film in Hollywood. Right, it was just like, oh,
Speaker 2: you're in Oh you're in music. Oh that's so pat
Speaker 2: on the head, you know, that's so nice. How interesting
Speaker 2: for you is that?
Speaker 1: Do you like that?
Speaker 2: You like being making records? That kind of thing. So
Speaker 2: also you had this other thing going on, which was
Speaker 2: the ascension of cocaine and what that did you know,
Speaker 2: among groups that previously had smoked pot, and what the
Speaker 2: difference in that vibe was going on in the same
Speaker 2: in that same sweep of time right through the seventies.
Speaker 1: Okay, you end up running mew Young's archives for a while.
Speaker 1: How did that come to be? In what was that? Like?
Speaker 2: What happened was Let's see, I had been asked in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty four when I was on a Neil Young tour,
Speaker 2: could I could I stop what I was doing and
Speaker 2: become Prince's guitar tech They just fired the guitar technician
Speaker 2: on the Purple Rain tour. Could I come and finish
Speaker 2: the tour? Well, I have five shows left with my
Speaker 2: Neil Young tour, which is like a country the country
Speaker 2: bands that he was doing. But I could I could
Speaker 2: be there like in you know, eight or nine days, No,
Speaker 2: we need you somebody here tomorrow. I just said, well,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, I got to finish this tour and can't
Speaker 2: you just leave? And I said, you wouldn't want to
Speaker 2: hire me and then have me, you know, flake out
Speaker 2: on you in the last eight days of the tour,
Speaker 2: would you right? So No, I can't. I can't do that.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, Like if you can, if it just if
Speaker 2: in a week or two weeks. You need still need somebody,
Speaker 2: let me give me a call. Never heard from them again.
Speaker 2: Three years later I get a call, Joel, could you
Speaker 2: be in Minneapolis like on January tewod Prince needs get
Speaker 2: a new guitar and technician. He needs to figure out
Speaker 2: something about his guitar soundup. He's not happy with his
Speaker 2: guitar sound So I thought it was like, Okay, this
Speaker 2: will be like a little consultant kind of thing and
Speaker 2: I'll figure it out what it is will be a
Speaker 2: few days. And instead I did work with one of
Speaker 2: his technicians to fix the problem he was having. It
Speaker 2: was completely different than any other scene that I had
Speaker 2: been at. It was quite wild, and he was Mozartian
Speaker 2: and his genius.
Speaker 1: Okay, but you're telling me about how you end up
Speaker 1: working for the Archives.
Speaker 2: After I worked for Prince, which was a wonderful life
Speaker 2: changing thing to do, I got a call from Neil
Speaker 2: that he was working on his what was going to
Speaker 2: be Decade two. He had the Decade album from nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy six. He was originally going to do It's starting
Speaker 2: in eighty six, but it kept going on and it
Speaker 2: wasn't being It wasn't finished he was still working on it.
Speaker 2: Could I come and oh, could I come with him
Speaker 2: and help him with that?
Speaker 1: So I I did.
Speaker 2: This was now nineteen ninety and I started in January
Speaker 2: and originally was just going to do the artwork and
Speaker 2: the photographs. And also I got his chronology together. He
Speaker 2: didn't have a sense of like what happened when, so
Speaker 2: he had a sense, but he wasn't correct for a
Speaker 2: lot of it. So I did a database in which
Speaker 2: we could see the total chronology of Neil Young from
Speaker 2: before Buffalo Springfield, from when he was in the Squire's's
Speaker 2: Band in Canada all the way to the present day.
Speaker 2: And then I became the me to do the He said, well,
Speaker 2: here's a list of the things I'm interested in putting
Speaker 2: out and I said, yeah, but you skipped over this
Speaker 2: and this and this and this. So he said, you know,
Speaker 2: why don't you do this part too, Like you you
Speaker 2: can be the archivist for the music stuff too, because
Speaker 2: I want to know what you know a lot of
Speaker 2: stuff I've forgotten. So that's how all of that became.
Speaker 2: And I was his archivist for about twenty years.
Speaker 1: And was that essentially a full time job?
Speaker 2: Yes, it was so that what was that that job
Speaker 2: was So imagine if you're Neil Young and you want
Speaker 2: to put out I asked him one day, like, so, Neil,
Speaker 2: are you do you have a sense of like, uh
Speaker 2: in this in this box set you want to do,
Speaker 2: is it going? Do you have a sense of the
Speaker 2: relationship of release material versus unreleased material? He thought for
Speaker 2: a second. He said, no, it's not whether it's released
Speaker 2: or not. I just want the best. So I said,
Speaker 2: so you're looking for the best performances of the best songs.
Speaker 2: He said, That's exactly what I'm looking for. So I
Speaker 2: took it upon myself to go and do that listening
Speaker 2: for him, so I could say, okay, Neil, of all
Speaker 2: of the versions of calgaryl and the Sand you've ever done,
Speaker 2: these are the only three you need to listen to
Speaker 2: to figure out the best one. Because if it's already
Speaker 2: come out on it as an album, whatever the best
Speaker 2: is has to be better than that master better than
Speaker 2: the released album, whether it's a demo or a live
Speaker 2: version or whatever. So I did that for years and
Speaker 2: listened to all as much music as I could, studio
Speaker 2: and live of his to pick what was the very
Speaker 2: best Neil Young music.
Speaker 1: We're in this story. Do you meet your wife and
Speaker 1: have children?
Speaker 2: I don't. I don't get married and I don't have children.
Speaker 2: That they're not in the story.
Speaker 1: Okay, well you know the same. You know, my research
Speaker 1: is kind of funny. Just as an aside, I wanted
Speaker 1: to know what year you were born in and it
Speaker 1: said you were dead AI, and it was definitely Joel Bernstein,
Speaker 1: the photographer.
Speaker 2: Okay, so check this out. This is you're reminding me
Speaker 2: of a moment I have to which is this. I'm
Speaker 2: I'm rarely ill, but at this point I'm at my
Speaker 2: apartment in San Francisco next door to Grams. I have
Speaker 2: a really high fever and feeling terrible. And the phone
Speaker 2: starts ringing off the hook and it's people I know,
Speaker 2: and they're going, oh, oh you're there.
Speaker 3: I knew you were there, Thank God.
Speaker 2: The next call is like they're crying on the phone.
Speaker 1: What what is this? Okay.
Speaker 2: It turns out that it's the night of the Grammys
Speaker 2: and they're doing the memorial section in the Grammys and
Speaker 2: the you know, the narrow and saying and you know,
Speaker 2: with this person passed away in sadly and this next
Speaker 2: person and Rock photographer Joel Brodsky passed away. So it
Speaker 2: turns out that the guy on the desk, the entertainment
Speaker 2: guy who's watching the Grammys, hears rock photographer Joel and
Speaker 2: he just immediately thinks it's me because I'm from Philadelphia.
Speaker 2: He's the Philadelphia paper. He writes up in the paper
Speaker 2: and online that Joel Bernstein has died. Unfortunately, right Rock
Speaker 2: after his successful career with Crosby Stoleson Nash and Joni
Speaker 2: Mitchell and Neili yelling yourself, apparently he's dead and that's
Speaker 2: why everybody was calling me.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, that's probably part of what's going on
Speaker 1: in AI, which is also I did you know, because
Speaker 1: obviously Joel Bernstein, You're not the only Joel Bernstein, but
Speaker 1: in terms of Joel Bernstein, rock photographer, and you look
Speaker 1: and it says two children's name whatever.
Speaker 2: It's like, Okay, I wonder, see I wonder if you
Speaker 2: put parentheses around the Joel bost Believe me, you said.
Speaker 1: Believe me. Okay, I'm an expert googler.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, got it, I get it. That's really funny.
Speaker 1: Okay. A couple of questions here. You talked about the
Speaker 1: album cover after the ghuld Rush and Elliott told you.
Speaker 2: What to charge?
Speaker 1: How did you decide what to charge your I mean
Speaker 1: some things like guitar tick, there's an at there's a
Speaker 1: range of real.
Speaker 2: Right, there's going to be you're going to get a
Speaker 2: weekly salary in per diem.
Speaker 1: Right, But if you're shooting a photo that is used
Speaker 1: for certain purpose, right, you know it could be anything
Speaker 1: from zero to you know, fifty thousand dollars, Right, how
Speaker 1: do you decide what the price is?
Speaker 2: I guess you learn more at the time, like what
Speaker 2: could what could you charge? When he suggested that, I
Speaker 2: charged them fifteen hundred dollars, you know, for the front,
Speaker 2: back and inside of that. Then when I saw the poster,
Speaker 2: I called them back and said, so there's a poster
Speaker 2: also a different shot. Send them another bill for five
Speaker 2: hundred dollars. So that was like my basis.
Speaker 1: I guess.
Speaker 2: Those are just numbers he came up with. I don't
Speaker 2: know whether they were commensurate with what the figures were
Speaker 2: at the time, honestly, but you know, over time, when
Speaker 2: you're starting, you know, you every one who's paying you
Speaker 2: wants to pay as little as possible, and it takes
Speaker 2: time for you two years to say, well, somebody you
Speaker 2: know paid me this much for that same usage, so
Speaker 2: that that's what I'm going to charge you for that
Speaker 2: cover or for that the inside of your songbook or
Speaker 2: you know, whatever the thing is. Right, So, all through
Speaker 2: my whole career, I've had to make those decisions about
Speaker 2: like what to charge. You know, I'm not a great
Speaker 2: business person. I probably could have if I had been
Speaker 2: more when you asked, like was I pounding the pavement
Speaker 2: and taking my portfolio, for example, to Columbia Records in
Speaker 2: LA when like in the early seven mid seventies or
Speaker 2: something when I could have been doing that, I didn't.
Speaker 2: I think I was more let's just let it happen,
Speaker 2: like let's just see. You know. I think if I
Speaker 2: was not making enough money to pay my rent and
Speaker 2: buy groceries, that I would have would have done those
Speaker 2: things and like pounded the pavement more.
Speaker 1: Okay. Another big issue now more than ever is ownership. Yes,
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff today is licensed yet and now
Speaker 1: I'm cover a license license in perpetuity for this use
Speaker 1: if you want to use it for something. Right, So
Speaker 1: all of this legendary stuff that you did, do you
Speaker 1: own in it? Or did you all the rights.
Speaker 2: I own the copyright to everything, and I the rights
Speaker 2: I sold would be as you say, would be license,
Speaker 2: would be a one time use license for whatever it
Speaker 2: was for Rolling Stone Magazine, for Columbia Records, for you know,
Speaker 2: mainly for the use in a documentary film. For example,
Speaker 2: I'm currently working on a documentary of I've had a
Speaker 2: lot of photos used in documents, documentary films, uh for
Speaker 2: that I used that used a lot of my photos,
Speaker 2: including for Tom Petty, The Heartbreakers, for Bruce Springsteen, for Jonie,
Speaker 2: for Neil and I'm currently working on a documentary film
Speaker 2: on Crosby, Stills and Nash and their history. So you know,
Speaker 2: in the end of the the to the what I
Speaker 2: get paid will be a function of how many images
Speaker 2: are they using and what rate do we negotiate at
Speaker 2: those for those hundred those those usages. The more usages
Speaker 2: you have, the less the rate goes down. If you
Speaker 2: use like fifty of something instead of ten, right, or
Speaker 2: if you use one hundred instead of twenty, right, those
Speaker 2: kinds of things. So and you just have to become
Speaker 2: familiar with what is the going rate that my peers,
Speaker 2: for example, are getting charged for the same kind of usages.
Speaker 1: Okay, if you're a musician, as one ages irrelevant of
Speaker 1: playing live, all the money is in the publishing as
Speaker 1: opposed to the record royalties at dis laid date owning
Speaker 1: these iconic images. Yes, there's one time events like these movies.
Speaker 1: But if you annualize it, is this like cab a
Speaker 1: pension or is it not that loose?
Speaker 2: That's a good question. I would say it's never risen
Speaker 2: to the to the level of it being maybe there
Speaker 2: have been some years where it could it could be
Speaker 2: a significant part of my income. It's it's not like
Speaker 2: especially as a photography Let's see, I have to back up.
Speaker 2: I started selling prints of my photographs starting with Neil
Speaker 2: Young Prince in twenty eleven. So I've had a business
Speaker 2: doing that where my prints are sold at galleries. They
Speaker 2: are also now sold online in my website Joel Bernstein
Speaker 2: dot com.
Speaker 1: And so the.
Speaker 2: Figuring out which photos people want to buy and how
Speaker 2: you want to present those photos to them something I've
Speaker 2: been doing since since twenty eleven. So that's been a
Speaker 2: big thrill actually for me, and that helps. It's not
Speaker 2: again going to support me, but it's going to add
Speaker 2: to the income coming in.
Speaker 1: So what is supporting you.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm saying it's a combination of my selling prints,
Speaker 2: my having photos used for something like this Crosby Stills
Speaker 2: and Nash documentary. I also, for example, did a I
Speaker 2: was at Neil Young asked me would I redo the
Speaker 2: layout of his third volume of his archives, which is
Speaker 2: not something I normally is like sort of being an
Speaker 2: art director and editor, which I can do well by now,
Speaker 2: and so that's something I was paid for on an
Speaker 2: hourly basis. I'll be paid as a consultant to the
Speaker 2: CSN film and hopefully there'll be other projects I'm going
Speaker 2: to be working on. I'm hoping to work on a
Speaker 2: film by Cameron Crowe coming up. I'm helping him with
Speaker 2: the accuracy of the chronology of his memoir of Joni Mitchell,
Speaker 2: and I'm hoping that they'll be also a film having
Speaker 2: to do with her that I might be involved in.
Speaker 1: At this late date. How much contact do you have
Speaker 1: with these people like Jonie, Neil, Graham, Nash, etc.
Speaker 2: It varies. I speak to Graham often. We're still really
Speaker 2: good friends. I worked on Jony's archival. She has four
Speaker 2: volumes of archival projects that are all previously unreleased material
Speaker 2: going back to before she was signed, and I have
Speaker 2: a lot of photos in those, and I should say
Speaker 2: at some point that Joni was giving away her earthly possessions.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy one, when I was nineteen, and I
Speaker 2: came to her house and it was sort of in disarray,
Speaker 2: and I said, what's going on. She said, well, I've
Speaker 2: decided I've gotten too comfortable here and I'm going to
Speaker 2: give away my earthly possessions and move. I'm going to
Speaker 2: I bought some land in Canada and I'm going to
Speaker 2: buy a build a small house there, and I'm leaving
Speaker 2: this town. And she said, you can have anything you want.
Speaker 2: The Tiffany lamp, so and so I was taking the
Speaker 2: Tiffany lamp and the carousel pig, life sized carousel pig
Speaker 2: of wood that she had behind her couch, like, I'm
Speaker 2: taking that with me, but anything else, it's up. You
Speaker 2: can take what. Let's look around. And I don't know
Speaker 2: how I thought of this at nineteen, but I said, well,
Speaker 2: has anyone asked you for the tapes and acetates? And
Speaker 2: she said, no, you can have them all. So she
Speaker 2: gave me all of the tapes and acetates that she
Speaker 2: had taken home from the studio and live up to
Speaker 2: that point. And that started me a whole collection of
Speaker 2: those kinds of tapes because people didn't care about them.
Speaker 2: These are the tape copies that they take home to
Speaker 2: like here, how did I sound that night? Do we
Speaker 2: want to use take three or take eleven? Those kinds
Speaker 2: of tapes, rough mixtapes. So she gave me all of those,
Speaker 2: which included the tapes that Graham Nash had left behind
Speaker 2: when they had lived together. And so the rough mixes
Speaker 2: of the first CSN album and Deja Vu, for example,
Speaker 2: are there. And oh, her engineer was working on what
Speaker 2: the Flying Burrito Brothers first album at the same time,
Speaker 2: and here's rough mixes of that. So that was like
Speaker 2: another exciting kind of thing for me to be doing.
Speaker 2: And we've gotten to use those tapes over time. In
Speaker 2: so I got to produce, well or co produce the
Speaker 2: box set for David Crosby Stephen Still's in Graham Nash,
Speaker 2: which is like lifetime sets to sort of so you
Speaker 2: don't know who these people are here, let me show
Speaker 2: you who they are. So that's a big thing to
Speaker 2: be able to do. And I, you know, it's a big.
Speaker 2: It's a big responsibility to try to get it right
Speaker 2: and to decide which versions of things you're doing. You know, Bob,
Speaker 2: there's this whole thing of They say all comparisons are odious,
Speaker 2: and I sort of subscribe to that. There's right, it's
Speaker 2: not a good thing to be comparing this to that,
Speaker 2: and then what's your best album and what's the best
Speaker 2: which is a better song and all of that. But
Speaker 2: if you're doing my job, let's say, in the editing
Speaker 2: I was doing for Neil Young, I do have to
Speaker 2: make those decisions, right. I have to listen to like
Speaker 2: twenty or fifty versions of something and say, okay, Neil,
Speaker 2: you're only hearing these three or four. So I found
Speaker 2: that this is a great It's good to have that
Speaker 2: discern and to be able to figure out those things,
Speaker 2: especially because most people if you said, like, here's ten
Speaker 2: versions of the same song done by Neil Young on
Speaker 2: the same tour, which one do you think is the best?
Speaker 2: Even a really Neil Young fan who would think, oh,
Speaker 2: this is my dream job. I know all about Neil Young.
Speaker 2: I can tell you what the best Sugar Mountain is. No. Actually,
Speaker 2: your eyes are going to glaze over and you won't
Speaker 2: remember whether it was three or five or whatever it is.
Speaker 2: So all of that has been, you know, kind of
Speaker 2: a thrill for me to be able to do as
Speaker 2: well as the photography.
Speaker 1: Okay, from a very young age. To use the Hamilton quote,
Speaker 1: you were in the room where it happened. Anybody who
Speaker 1: knows who's been in those rooms knows that they're rules. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like private jet rules. You can get
Speaker 1: on the jet, but there are certain seats. You better
Speaker 1: not suiting those seats.
Speaker 2: It's so well said. I've watched that role be violated.
Speaker 1: Believe me, that's an ugly scene. But in any event,
Speaker 1: you're in the room where it happens, I have you know.
Speaker 1: There are a couple of basic rules when you're interacting
Speaker 1: with people like this. A you don't want to come
Speaker 1: across as a fan, and usually you don't want to
Speaker 1: talk about what they're famous for. You want to treat
Speaker 1: them as regular people. Because we both know their exceptions.
Speaker 1: I can tell you some hilarious of steps, and people
Speaker 1: love to talk about themselves. And of course, of course,
Speaker 1: then there are people they're in the room that it happens,
Speaker 1: they don't understand the rules. They're not a major player,
Speaker 1: they start to eat up a lot of air and
Speaker 1: everybody agrees they can never come right.
Speaker 2: Okay, somebody please say score that person out right now.
Speaker 2: I mean, I will say that many You can imagine
Speaker 2: there's a very very varying sensitivity of different artists, recording artists.
Speaker 2: Let's say, to who's in the studio, who's in the
Speaker 2: control room when they're making a record, for example, would
Speaker 2: be a really good one. Some people are like, let's
Speaker 2: have a party, bring bring your you're sure my girlfriend's
Speaker 2: coming in whatever. Fine. Other people are like so sensitive,
Speaker 2: people like Neil or Bob Dylan are so sensitive to
Speaker 2: who is in the room that there really needs to be.
Speaker 2: You only want to have the bare minimum of people.
Speaker 2: And if you're not there, like if you're there, you're
Speaker 2: not there for a reason, you really shouldn't be there
Speaker 2: kind of thing. Because they they're they're going to be
Speaker 2: very sensitive to every single person who is that they're
Speaker 2: why are they here right? Because they're they're working, they're
Speaker 2: trying to they're not hanging out. They're there to do
Speaker 2: their job.
Speaker 1: So you know, the the.
Speaker 2: Uh, the whole issue of not being not drawing attention
Speaker 2: to yourself. By the way, as a photographer. Also both
Speaker 2: as a crew member and as a photographer, you want
Speaker 2: to disappear, right, you really do you? You want to
Speaker 2: be more like a ninja. What how did he get
Speaker 2: that picture?
Speaker 1: Where?
Speaker 2: Where was he?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Don't I don't remember him doing that? That that sort
Speaker 2: of thing. You don't want to be like, hey, it's
Speaker 2: all about me and oh yeah, hey, hey, good to
Speaker 2: see you, you know, glad ending no, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: you know so And if you think about it, taking
Speaker 2: someone's photograph, even whoever it is a father to their daughter,
Speaker 2: you know, a friend to a friend, there's a dance,
Speaker 2: there's a social dance about photography about okay, are you posing?
Speaker 1: Are you not? Are you?
Speaker 2: You know, you don't know I'm taking the picture. So
Speaker 2: I'm getting this, you know, amazing, like you know, very
Speaker 2: person moment of who you are, but you don't even
Speaker 2: know that I'm doing it. There's you have to be
Speaker 2: very aware of that. And as a crew member, you know,
Speaker 2: let's say you can't be drawing attention to yourself. You
Speaker 2: have to really disappear. So it's an interesting combination of
Speaker 2: lessons to learn.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're an intelligent guy, you're a nice guy and
Speaker 1: you're articulate. I say that totally straightforward. Don't deny it. Whatever,
Speaker 1: you're nineteen, you're sitting in the room with Joni Mitchell,
Speaker 1: James Taylor, whatever do you say to yourself, I'd better
Speaker 1: shut up or you gauging how much you're talking like
Speaker 1: I'm privileged to be here, And are you judging how
Speaker 1: much comfort you achieve over time as to how much
Speaker 1: to participate?
Speaker 2: Yes, I think that you're just you just develop a
Speaker 2: sensitivity to vibe too in the room and and make sure,
Speaker 2: uh you know that whatever you're contributing is is to
Speaker 2: the better right uh, and that you're.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: I was very surprised that these people who were older
Speaker 2: than me were treating me so nicely and and and
Speaker 2: we're not like saying, hey, kid, get out of here
Speaker 2: kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: There was something. I think it partly had to do
Speaker 2: with the fact that I could play guitar. That I
Speaker 2: was that they were related to that and were like, oh,
Speaker 2: you understand me better. You're you you you your guitar
Speaker 2: is too, so you sort of understand like what this
Speaker 2: is about, but it is.
Speaker 1: I I.
Speaker 2: Would I would hope that if someone were to look
Speaker 2: at the best of my photos, and I'm hoping at
Speaker 2: some point to do a book of my best photos
Speaker 2: of musicians as a big goal of mine. I envision
Speaker 2: this like me taking you into these rooms you'll never
Speaker 2: be in yourself. I want to give you what it
Speaker 2: felt like to be in that room. I want to
Speaker 2: provide you that you don't have to be there yourself.
Speaker 2: If you probably won't be ever in a bistro at
Speaker 2: eleven at night with Joni Mitchell in Italy, but if
Speaker 2: you were, this is what it would look like across
Speaker 2: the table. This is how it would feel, not just look.
Speaker 2: That's a thing, right, you're trying to One of the
Speaker 2: things in photography is you could make it your goal
Speaker 2: to make someone as pretty or handsome as possible.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Many photographers do that. Many sitters of photos want that, right.
Speaker 2: I'm looking to get underneath the skin and reveal something
Speaker 2: of the inner, the interior world of that person. Some
Speaker 2: religions feel that what we see on the outside is
Speaker 2: an illusion, right, if that everything the beautiful woman, No,
Speaker 2: that's just an illusions. What's really going on? And I
Speaker 2: think that if you my goal has always been to
Speaker 2: like give you the viewer of the photograph some idea
Speaker 2: of what it's like to be in that room with
Speaker 2: that person. I'm not trying to make them better or
Speaker 2: make them laugh or whatever it is. I'm trying to
Speaker 2: give you an insight into them as a person.
Speaker 1: Well, Joel, thank you for giving us insight into your world.
Speaker 1: First and foremost. So many people you talk about what
Speaker 1: happened in the past, you have to remind them the
Speaker 1: fact that you knew exactly when these albums came out
Speaker 1: and said, I say okay, and I have a million
Speaker 1: more questions. And there's so many things. Reference the week
Speaker 1: of Crosby Stills in Nash and Young. I couldn't get
Speaker 1: tickets for that at the filmore recent June. There are
Speaker 1: other shows you mentioned. You know, I've been there. It's
Speaker 1: really I saw the CSNY seventy four to where I
Speaker 1: saw a Nassau Coli seat, even though I grew up
Speaker 1: in Connecticut.
Speaker 2: Once I got tickets, do you remember, I'm really curious, Oh,
Speaker 2: I remember exactly where I was.
Speaker 1: I could tell you where I went to the bathroom
Speaker 1: where I was seating. Listen. I'm one of the people
Speaker 1: who doesn't go with conventional wisdom. Four Way Street. I
Speaker 1: don't think the harmonies are excellent.
Speaker 2: There's several things, yes, I agree, okay.
Speaker 1: And in the interim from June to seventy to when
Speaker 1: Neil Young joined the band again and they went on
Speaker 1: the road in seventy four, there were a number of
Speaker 1: acts who could replicate the harmonies live, not only acoustic
Speaker 1: or you know country rock musicians who could do right well,
Speaker 1: bands like Yes, etc. So when I went to the show,
Speaker 1: I didn't expect the harmonies to be as good as
Speaker 1: they were. Ah, I was just saying, I'm gonna have
Speaker 1: the experience. And you know, certainly as the years went by,
Speaker 1: it was more of a privilege to have Neil on
Speaker 1: the road with the other three or to make music
Speaker 1: with the other three, whereas at this point I felt
Speaker 1: it was more equalized. Listen, as I say, I remember Vivid,
Speaker 1: I thought it was a great show, not because I'm
Speaker 1: talking to you, because I can tell you about other
Speaker 1: Crosby stills in that shows that weren't as good as that.
Speaker 1: Let's leave it right at It was.
Speaker 2: An amazing mix of songs. Also, like Neil's writing, in
Speaker 2: particular the things that he was the new songs he
Speaker 2: was writing that he pulled out in the acoustic set,
Speaker 2: plus things like pushed it over the end and on
Speaker 2: the beach on the are you kidding on the beach?
Speaker 2: Live with that band? Crazy? Like so good, so great.
Speaker 1: The other funny thing is you went to college in
Speaker 1: the fall of seventy yeah, and your parents went on
Speaker 1: around the world trip. I went to college in September
Speaker 1: of seventy. My parents immediately went to Europe and there
Speaker 1: was not a phone in the room, so there was
Speaker 1: that simbling. It's like, you know, first of all, it's
Speaker 1: so different from today where people connect with their parents.
Speaker 2: That part is so mild to me, Like like I
Speaker 2: have friends who is like they're always on the phone
Speaker 2: with their daughter at college. I'm like, at some point
Speaker 2: I have to go, excuse me. But like when I
Speaker 2: was growing up, like when you went to college, part
Speaker 2: of the thing was like you didn't call it when
Speaker 2: there was a problem. You didn't call your parents every
Speaker 2: time there was a problem. Like you seem to be
Speaker 2: calling your daughter, like she's calling you like two or
Speaker 2: three times a day, Like like, what's up with that?
Speaker 2: Are you sure that's a good thing?
Speaker 1: Well, it's like, you know, I know, people's kids call
Speaker 1: them how to do the laundry. I never did the
Speaker 1: laundry at home, but I'm went to college. I didn't
Speaker 1: think twice that I had to learn how to do
Speaker 1: the launch. You know, you went down to the I
Speaker 1: learned you had to do it in the middle of
Speaker 1: the night because otherwise couldn't get a massie right.
Speaker 3: But you learn how to.
Speaker 2: Also, you learned how to like clean your own dishes.
Speaker 2: You know the great sign in the dormitory, you know,
Speaker 2: like it would say there'd be a sign that says,
Speaker 2: like your mother does clean your dishes.
Speaker 1: Your mother doesn't, Yeah, exactly. The other thing is I
Speaker 1: went to I bought my records at EJ Corp.
Speaker 2: Sure cheap.
Speaker 1: I bought so many records. You remember those people just
Speaker 1: don't know people the vinyl fetishization. I have all my vinyl.
Speaker 1: If it was originally recorded the analog, I understand completely.
Speaker 1: But people have no idea how defective the vinyl was.
Speaker 1: They don't to get a record with nose skips, no
Speaker 1: surface noise, flat records impossible. I returned so many records
Speaker 1: at EJ corbat Well, don't buy any more records here.
Speaker 2: That's really funny. I can remember having records, what was it?
Speaker 2: Days of future pasted right by the moody blues, Like
Speaker 2: I couldn't get a decent pressing, Like I didn't know
Speaker 2: about pressings, and like why why do I put this on?
Speaker 2: And like my knee, I just hear scratches like right away,
Speaker 2: and then the voices sound like far away. That's not
Speaker 2: what it sounded like on the radio. It's so true.
Speaker 1: Well the thing I'm reaching. So I go to college
Speaker 1: in Vermont. This is the dark ages before cable TV,
Speaker 1: cell phones, whatever. And if you put an EJ corve vet,
Speaker 1: you realize things went on sales and you bought so
Speaker 1: many records you were not going to pay Certainly they
Speaker 1: were usually two dollars off this price. So I'm gonna
Speaker 1: I mean, living in Vermont and the store wants to
Speaker 1: charge you a dollar more than EJ coord Sure, but
Speaker 1: that damn after the gold Rutch album came out the
Speaker 1: first week college, right, Oh I paid for that? Sure?
Speaker 2: I was, well, yeah, you can imagine how I felt
Speaker 2: like as a kid. Just imagine you're like if it
Speaker 2: was your first week as a freshman in college and
Speaker 2: you see that, but you've taken the pictures and you
Speaker 2: walk into the record store and it's all fifty copies
Speaker 2: of it are in shrink wrap on the floor, in piles.
Speaker 1: And it was it was.
Speaker 2: That was a big moment in my life.
Speaker 1: I cannot even imagine it. That's beyond the story. Well,
Speaker 1: one thing, you know, at the second fret, there's another thing,
Speaker 1: going to David Geffen's apartment. Okay, but walking into the
Speaker 1: record store, it's not any record. That was the breakthrough.
Speaker 1: You know, everybody, if you were engh you owned everything.
Speaker 1: Everybody knows this is nowhere, but the average person still
Speaker 1: wasn't buying and you went that record. It was the
Speaker 1: soundtrack of the dorm.
Speaker 2: To go to the record store, I was going to say,
Speaker 2: it was, like I've said to people, you know, like
Speaker 2: that was the dorm record of that year. For sure,
Speaker 2: every kid wanted to play how to play? How does
Speaker 2: how do you play? Tell me?
Speaker 1: Why?
Speaker 2: How can I play? Southern Man? It was like the
Speaker 2: record to play.
Speaker 1: And believe me, I played along with my guitar. Not
Speaker 1: that I'm in the league of you, but right, but
Speaker 1: the fact that you, I mean, okay, you weren't there,
Speaker 1: You're in college, you're a lady back guy. How do
Speaker 1: you end up telling people and do they even believe
Speaker 1: you that you've shot them?
Speaker 2: It is funny you asked that. I can remember, well,
Speaker 2: I realized first of all later that so the picture
Speaker 2: of Neil that we were talking about with lying on
Speaker 2: the couch in this funky dressing room, that's the gatefold
Speaker 2: of the cover. And by the way, all the pictures
Speaker 2: on the cover of that album are very gritty and
Speaker 2: very urban. They're like very not like what the music
Speaker 2: is inside, right right, they really which like which at
Speaker 2: the time I didn't really quite understand why he chose
Speaker 2: those things. Now I have a better understanding of it.
Speaker 1: But uh, that that.
Speaker 2: That that became such a major album, And now I'm
Speaker 2: out of college. I was left. But all my friends
Speaker 2: are like playing that record. And I remember a friend
Speaker 2: of mine telling me about being in Paris that year
Speaker 2: and how the DJ in Paris was just was describing
Speaker 2: the album cover to his audience on the radio in Paris,
Speaker 2: and I was like, I just my head blew up.
Speaker 2: I was like, I you know, you're you know there
Speaker 2: you are walking down the street with these two guys
Speaker 2: who are older than you. You know who knows that? Like,
Speaker 2: so you know that it becomes a classic. It's you know,
Speaker 2: considered one of the top one hundred album covers.
Speaker 1: Like well they In addition, people have no idea you
Speaker 1: used you talked about the Beatles on it. It's all
Speaker 1: of them. People have no idea to have access when
Speaker 1: you're a high school student. One thing, if you live
Speaker 1: in La the people there possibly, but you're living in
Speaker 1: the suburbs game access to these people.
Speaker 2: It would be impossible, unheard of. I just have to
Speaker 2: say that after csny's show at the at the Spectrum
Speaker 2: in Philadelphia, where I took the picture that's Neil's Greatest
Speaker 2: Hits cover for example, that really intense shot of him
Speaker 2: looking down after having gone through the box of photos
Speaker 2: with him.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: After the show, they're looking for a pool hall. They
Speaker 2: can't find a pool hall that to now, how could
Speaker 2: there not be a pool hall open? But for some reason,
Speaker 2: the guy the promoter saying, yeah, well, like we can't
Speaker 2: find one that Steven's got like a portable like a
Speaker 2: pool queue that you you know, in two pieces with
Speaker 2: a carrying right right right, No, I really I really
Speaker 2: like one. I play and I go, well, you know,
Speaker 2: my parents have a pool table at my house. I
Speaker 2: mean I'm sure he could come over, and they go really, yeah,
Speaker 2: well we'll be there, and I'm like really, And so
Speaker 2: I go home. I take the train home, you know,
Speaker 2: and then like a limo pulls up and it's Stephen
Speaker 2: and Graham and a film crew at my parents' house.
Speaker 2: It's like now it's midnight, twelve thirty. My parents are
Speaker 2: asleep upstairs. Okay, guys, all right, come in. We're gonna
Speaker 2: go to the pool tables in the basement. Okay, so
Speaker 2: shita there we thing they like when they start smoking
Speaker 2: a joint in the basement. Okay, maybe they're doing some
Speaker 2: other drug in the basement as well. At some point,
Speaker 2: the intercom phone rings. It's from my parents' bedroom. It's
Speaker 2: my dad. We pick it up, son, what's going on
Speaker 2: down there? What's all that noise? Oh god, Dad? I'm sorry.
Speaker 2: Uh you know, remember I went to that show tonight
Speaker 2: to photograph that band, and they they wanted to they
Speaker 2: needed a place to play pool. So two of them
Speaker 2: are are here with me tonight. I'm gonna just make
Speaker 2: sure they'll be really cool. I'm really sorry, but they'll
Speaker 2: be quiet, you know, we'll just keep it down. I
Speaker 2: hang up. There is full of hash smoke. Five seconds later,
Speaker 2: my dad appears in his bathroom hand out Stanley Bernstein, Hi,
Speaker 2: how are you doing? Come to my house? That's hysticle,
Speaker 2: that really really happened.
Speaker 3: So my point is that he's totally cool with them.
Speaker 2: He doesn't say what is that? Nothing, He's like, Hey,
Speaker 2: how you doing? Can I get you something to drink?
Speaker 3: Totally amazing, right, So later they come.
Speaker 2: Up to my bedroom with the film crew. I have
Speaker 2: my pictures that I've been taking so far, So I
Speaker 2: have Joni Mitchell and Neil Young and Laura Nira up
Speaker 2: on the wall like this behind them, and they shoot
Speaker 2: this on film, and that footage becomes Cameron's inspiration for
Speaker 2: the whole idea of the band comes to visit the
Speaker 2: kid in almost famous and the poster is up on
Speaker 2: the wall right, that posters thee after the it's taken
Speaker 2: let's say, inspired by the after the gold Rush. Inside right,
Speaker 2: it's it's the band Sweetwater or whatever it is, you know,
Speaker 2: posed right up in the kids thing and the guy
Speaker 2: is actually visiting him in his bedroom. That whole scene
Speaker 2: comes from my actual experience to telling Cameron about that
Speaker 2: whole story. That's how that happens.
Speaker 1: Normally with the story like that, the emphasis is on, yeah,
Speaker 1: I influenced the movie. Okay, in this case, fuck the movie.
Speaker 1: The story itself is so fucking great.
Speaker 2: It doesn't matter about the movie.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you, it was. You can you can dive
Speaker 3: out of a story like that for a lifetime.
Speaker 2: Well, I think I should be doing more of that.
Speaker 2: I'm feeling a little a little package.
Speaker 4: Okay, So in any of that, I'm gonna leave it
Speaker 4: at that because I can't. I'm sure there might be
Speaker 4: a story better than that. But that's a ten out
Speaker 4: of ten Joel. Okay, Well, thank you, Bob. I wanted
Speaker 4: to thank me anytime.
Speaker 2: It's great. It's really great talking right, and we really
Speaker 2: have so much a coin right it.
Speaker 1: Literally same era really, so thanks for taking time talk
Speaker 1: to my audience. Till next time. This is Bob left
Speaker 1: Sex