Icon: Music Through the Lens, episode 4: “On the Cover” (Cheese Film and Video, Eagle Rock Film Productions, PBS, 2020)

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

Last night KPBS ran the fourth episode in the quirky six-part series Icon: Music Through the Lens, which was called “On the Cover.” Since part three, “On the Record,” had dealt mostly with shooting photos of rock stars for record album covers, I wondered how “On the Cover” would differ. It turned out that “cover” in the title of this one meant magazine covers in general and Rolling Stone in particular – though the show’s writers (uncredited on imdb.com, though Dick Carruthers is credited with direction and I’m relatively sure he wrote all or part of the shows as well) oddly didn’t mention the 1973 novelty song “The Cover of Rolling Stone” by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show (written for them by Shel Silverstein, who also wrote “A Boy Named Sue” for Johnny Cash), which hailed getting on the cover of Rolling Stone as the ultimate achievement and validation of rock stardom. There were interviews with some of the usual suspects, including Baron Wolman, Annie Liebowitz and other photographers who’ve appeared in previous episodes as well as some actual musicians (notably Alice Cooper, Art Alexakis of Everclear, and Julian Lennon, son of you-know-who), and one charming sequence in which a photographer remembered an assignment to shoot Paul McCartney for a British magazine cover (at one time Britain had five weekly music magazines, creating a huge demand for cover subjects and photos of them).

I suspected he probably dreaded the assignment – how do you photograph someone who’s been photographed as often as Paul McCartney and still bring something new to the game? – and he recalled that Paul took him into his home recording studio, showed him an instrument he said was Elvis Presley’s original bass, and sang and played “Heartbreak Hotel” on it as the photographer shot his pictures. What startled me about this was that the instrument was an upright bass (probably the one Elvis’s original bass player, Bill Black, used on his classic early records for Sun and RCA Victor), and I’d had no idea Paul knew how to play the upright bass. There are also some interesting anecdotes, including one about a band I have vague memories of called The 1975 whose photographer (a woman whose name escapes me) had the rather intriguing idea of putting them in a swimming pool and taking their photo under water. This proved unexpectedly complicated as she didn’t own a waterproof camera, so she had to rent a housing to use her normal camera underwater and most of the photos were unusable because of air bubbles coming out of the musicians’ mouths as they exhaled. (One wonders how she got anything given that they’d periodically need to come up for air; I joked, “She got a great photo. Unfortunately, she drowned the band members doing it.”)

Another fascinating segment came from the photographer who shot the pictures for the fabled Elton John interview with Rolling Stone in which he gingerly tiptoed out of the closet in 1976 and announced he was Bisexual. The photographer remembered Elton lamenting that he really wanted a knighthood from the Queen but felt he would never get it because "they don't give knighthoods to Gay people." He recalled that the main brief he had got from Rolling Stone for the session was to get a photo of Elton John after his hair transplant – which Elton refused for reasons the photographer understood when he removed his hat and "I could see he still needed 20 more plugs.” Instead they got the semi-revelation that Elton John was Bisexual – which, when Rolling Stone published the interview, led to a nose-dive in his record sales. Then he married a woman – his German sound engineer, Renate Müller – and his sales nosed up, though not to the stratospheric levels they had been before. In 1978, after two years when he released nothing, Elton John put out a single called “Ego” whose flip side, “Flinstone Boy” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttu9Psimn0E – the title is misspelled “Flintstone Boy” on that post) that had an explicitly Gay theme (and was an unusually personal song for Elton John since it’s one of the few he wrote entirely by himself, words as well as music), and eventually his career recovered, he divorced Müller and married a man (his current partner, filmmaker David Furnish) and got his knighthood after all.

There was also an intriguing segment on how magazines have handled musicians’ deaths and what they look for in a photo to grace the inevitable memorial issue, including a marvelously craggy photo of Johnny Cash in his later years and a quiet, pensive shot of David Bowie. This show has been intriguing, but the concept already had the potential for boredom and it’s starting to go over – there’s not much you can say anymore about rock-star excess (one photographer from the south of England recalled going up to the north to shoot the Happy Mondays, a band whose lead singer, Shaun Ryder, was notoriously eccentric; it turned out that there was shattered glass all over Shaun Ryder’s living room because he would regularly forget his keys and let himself back into his house by smashing the front window, and the band’s staff actually had a local glazier on speed-dial to come and replace it as needed) and photographers being in awe of getting on Led Zeppelin’s (or whoever’s) private tour plane and hang out with them for months. A more cynical approach to the show detailing the role of photography in creating the image of a band and marketing its music might have been more interesting and certainly more incisive; one of the things about capitalism, especially as applied to entertainment, is that the stars themselves become commodities and live at the center of an elaborate infrastructure of record executives, record producers, photographers, publishers, editors, publicists and others whose job it is to market them and keep audience members interested in them.

Much of the “bad-boy” (or “bad-girl”) behavior of the stars may be a conscious or unconscious rebellion against being commodified; the history of music in general and rock in particular is full of people rebelling against the images that have been created around them and suddenly striking out in new directions, and the businesspeople around them freaking out because they’re screwing with the formulas that made them popular. One of the things that made the Beatles unique is that they built up an audience so dedicated to them they were literally willing to follow wherever the Beatles led; other groups have run into trouble trying to get too far out in front of their audiences and push their creativity into new directors for which their listeners weren’t ready. There also was quite a lot about “hip-hop” (the euphemism for rap used by people who actually like it) and such personalities like Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. – who were both murdered as part of the ongoing Crips-Bloods gang war and the pointless revenge cycle that drives much of the “thug life” rap not only depicts but glamorizes. I tend to glaze over whenever this show starts covering rap artists, not only because I loathe the form (there have been a few attempts at positive rap, but mostly it’s a cesspool of glorifying crime, rape, Queer-bashing and acquiring huge amounts of physical possessions, includingi the nightmarishly tasteless jewelry known as “bling”; it speaks volumes about the essential immorality of “gangsta” rap that a lot of its practitioners embraced the 1980’s remake of Scarface and used Al Pacino’s character in that film as a role model) – but then here I go again, an old man kvetching about that God-awful music young people are listening to now. How stereotypical!