Icon: Music Through the Lens, part 2: “On the Road” (Cinefromage, Mercury Productions, PBS-TV, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Night World Charles and I watched the second episode of the awkwardly titled PBS-TV series (actually produced in Britain in 2020 and released in the U.S. now) Icon: Music Through the Lens, a six-part series of documentaries about rock photography. This episode was called “On the Road” and dealt more or less with the art of photographing rock ’n’ roll musicians in live performance. I say “more or less” because one of the most fascinating segments was about the legendary New York CBGB venue that (ironically, since the initials in the name stood for “Country, Bluegrass and Blues”) became the home base for American punk rock in the late 1970’s and hosted early performances by the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith (she and her original guitarist, former music critic Lenny Kaye, met there), Talking Heads and Blondie. But these weren’t in-performance shots because the photographer wasn’t using flash; instead he was shooting the bands outside the venue between sets because he was using short lenses and needed exposure times of ¼ second (compared to the normal 1/125 second of an average amateur camera and the even faster exposure times used by professional photographers shooting concerts, sporting events or other subjects with a lot of fast motion). That meant that both he and the subjects had to hold still for relatively long periods of time – and somehow he was able to get these presumably eternally rebellious, perpetually alienated punk rockers to hold still for him, literally and figuratively, and create utterly haunting images.

I was gratified that a couple of photographers who were quite famous, Baron Wolman (who got billing for his photos in Rolling Stone in type as big or bigger than the writers who wrote the articles with which his pictures appeared) and Henry Diltz, who hadn’t been mentioned in episode one were depicted (and, in Wolman’s case, interviewed) in this one. The people included in the show – among whom were some actual musicians, notably Lars Ulrich of Metallica and Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age – talked incessantly and rather annoying about the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, and about how – especially in the early days, from the mid-1960’s to the mid-1970’s – the photographers got to hang out with the musicians backstage, party with them after their gigs, and share in their alcohol and drugs. When I hear the words “alcohol” and “drugs” mentioned in connection with musicians, quite frankly the first things I think about are all the people whose lives were cut short because they indulged in them and all the great music that doesn’t exist because its practitioners offed themselves too early on various substances. I stopped drinking in 1978 and never did drugs (apart from two brief experiments with marijuana in 1969, which did nothing for me except make me very nauseous: I figured the universe was tapping me on my shoulder and saying, “Mark, drugs are not your path”), and by now not drinking or taking drugs have just become such basic aspects of how I define myself I’m not at all tempted to indulge in either (and my late sixties would be a weird time to pick up the bad habits of youth anyway). At least one photographer interviewed for the program admitted that he was a frustrated musician and shooting photos of rock bands was the closest he could come – especially since it got him on the tour buses hanging out with the musicians when they weren’t performing as well as giving him access when they were.

There was a lot of talk about how certain photos become “iconic” – including one of Jimi Hendrix grimacing at the microphone, his mouth so wide open it looks like he’s about to go down on it, that I consider one of the ugliest photos of him but for some reason was hailed in the narration and the recollection of the photographer himself as “iconic.” (Actually probably the most famous Hendrix photo was the solarized head shot used on the cover of the U.S. version of Electric Ladyland; it was taken by a young scenester named Linda Eastman, who later married one of the Beatles and became famous – or infamous – as Linda McCartney.) Though the interviewees were careful to maintain a distinction between themselves as artists and anyone who just shoots pictures of things and call themselves photographers, they also stressed that getting that concert shot that’s going to become iconic is sheer luck. One of the photographers said, “If you see it in the viewfinder, you’ve missed it,” and I could see what he meant: by the time you’ve noticed it the moment has gone by and you can only hope you clicked your shutter at the right moment to capture the fleeting image before the singer or musicians changed positions and that magic moment was lost.

A number of the photographers talked about how the rules for access tightened in the mid-1970’s and concert promoters issued a hard-and-fast rule that photographers could use flash for only the first three songs of a set. No one knows just how that rule came about or who first decreed it – though at least one legend is that it started with David Bowie, hyper-concerned about his appearance even by rock-star standards, and his desire not to be distracted by flashbulbs bursting in his eyes throughout a set. Other sources claim it was promoters who decided it because audience members were complaining about photographers getting in the way of their views of the band. One photographer said that when you photograph a concert it takes so long for you to accustom yourself to the movements of the musicians it takes almost a whole set to learn what you should be doing with that act, and therefore it would be a better rule to tell the photographers they could only shoot the last three songs of a concert. Ironically, now professional photographers as well as audience members have to deal with the rise of digital cameras and smartphones, to the point where just about everyone who attends a concert feels they have a right to photograph it and some audience members spend the whole night looking not at the actual performer in the flesh but the performer through the screen of their phones.

One modern photographer whose work seemed especially striking was Pooneh Ghana, who’s managed to navigate the intricacies of today’s music world and its hyper-concern with “intellectual property” and protecting copyrightable images to do work with today’s artists as good as anything Wolman, Diltz and their contemporaries were doing in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. There were also some interesting stories, including one from a photographer who was taking pictures of The Who in the 1970’s at San Francisco’s Winterland and noticed that Roger Daltrey was swinging his microphone ever closer at him. He was in the middle of photographing Daltrey as the killer mike came closer, assuming Daltrey didn’t know how close he was coming, when one of the band’s security people ushered him out of his vantage point and told him that Daltrey was being so intimidated by his presence he deliberately intended to hit him with the mike and just make it look like it was part of the show. So ne retreated to the upper balcony that ringed the Winterland auditorium (where I remember sitting the second time out of three I saw the Rolling Stones – Stevie Wonder was their opening act just before the succession of great albums he made in the mid-1970’s that relieved him of ever having to open for anybody again) and shot down at both the Who and the crowd for some surprisingly stunning shots.

There was also a famous photograph of Freddie Mercury performing with Queen at Wembley Stadium in 1986 – a gig for the whole band and not the Live Aid concert a year earlier (for some reason Queen’s set at Live Aid has become a touchstone of live rock, whereas I didn’t find it all that good – though Freddie Mercury did a quite beautiful song solo at Live Aid called “Is This the World We Created?” that fit the benefit purpose quite well; still, the band that really knocked me out at Live Aid was not Queen but U2!) – and a photographer saying across the shot, “If you couldn’t get a great picture of Freddie Mercury, you were in the wrong business.” I stumbled on this show and I’m finding it sometimes fascinating, sometimes annoying and sometimes frustrating. It’s still a bit hard for me to relate to the conceit that the photographers who take pictures of rock musicians are as great artists as the musicians themselves (I don’t think Richard Avedon probably thought of himself as being at the level of Maria Callas when he shot her album cover for the 1960 re-recording of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor), but there are enough great photos and interesting trivia about the musicians and the often chancy relationship they have with the people around them that I’ve found this show worth watching so far.