About three years ago, I started rifling through my rock and roll prints from the early 80s, and I ended up approaching a local business to show them on Milwaukee's Gallery Night. While I do believe that a picture tells a thousand words, I also thought there were some stories around the pictures that the pictures didn't necessarily tell. So in addition to the mounted photographs, I wrote a little booklet to go along with the prints, so that people could indeed know the stories. Surprisingly, it went over well, and people actually read the stories. So this blog is a sort of online version of that show, except that I'm putting it up slowly, and will add to it as I shoot more shows.
Here was the introductory page to that booklet, modified a bit to suit the fact that this is now a blog, not a static show.
Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I did the stadium rock thing in high school. It was a big to-do, getting the tickets, begging for the family car, venturing to a crappy part of the city to see Yes or Ted Nugent or Rush from some nosebleed seats in a stadium where they used to show livestock. And part of it wasn’t even the show, it was buying the T-shirt so you could show up in school the next Monday to prove you were there. When I arrived on the campus of the University of Illinois, I saw ads for bands I barely had heard of playing at venues that held, at most, 250 people. Out of curiosity, I went to see some local act whose name I can’t remember. But there they were. People who were making the kind of music that was saving my life not twenty feet away from me. Push harder, get closer to the stage, and I could see the sweat on their face, the cake of their makeup, their split ends. They actually took into account how we reacted to them and there was that exchange of energy, that give and take between artist and audience we’d before only read about in Creem. I was hooked.
In the meantime, I was working in the campus media, trying to decide whether I wanted to be in radio news or print news. I was a straight news reporter, but sometimes I wanted to be on the music desk. Those people were so much hipper than I was, and I never felt like I fit in with that side of the newsroom. I bought a camera, and started shooting shows anyway. A few times they let me write about bands, and once they actually published one of my shots. But I never wanted rock and roll to be my writing job. I was perfectly happy covering city council meetings, school board controversies, fires and protest marches. Something about journalistic objectivity, which I could never have about music, got in the way of any aspirations of being the next Dave Marsh. I was also perfectly happy just getting into the clubs, using my camera as an excuse to push my way to the front of the stage, and making these keepsakes for myself, which savored the moment better than a t-shirt. When I left the UI, and let the news reporter idea slip out of the way in favor of changing the world by community organizing (and eventually giving up and working in IT), I still kept my habit of bringing my camera and “working” the many club shows I saw since.
Every picture in this blog has a story of its own which I hope the picture will tell itself, like that old thousand words axiom says it’s supposed to. The blog postings are about various things surrounding shot itself: How I got that particular shot, what happened to me at this particular show, why this artist’s music is important to me. Maybe we’ll have some common experiences, maybe we’ll connect, just like I connected with those hundreds of bands I saw in clubs trying to connect with me as I stared wondrously at their guitars, amps, and drums. Maybe you’ll see my picture of Exene, and that will remind you of a happy memory you had of John Doe or Billy Zoom. Or maybe you’ll read my story about camping out for tickets for U2, and it will bring to mind the time you partied all night, waiting for tickets for the Ramones. If you have a story, please comment it: my success here is not measured in how many people see the pictures, but in how many stories it inspires you to tell as well.
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