There are reasons I wanted to move here, and this is one of them.
I went to a gallery opening tonight, literally just down the road, about a mile and a half away. The occasion was an exhibit of portraits of counterculture heros and heroines from the world of rock & roll in the glory days called “The Backstage Exhibition,” featuring Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Steve Winwood, Steve Miller, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, and many more. The photographers are flat-out legendary: Jim “Godfather” Marshall, Michael Zagaris, and Baron Wolson. Google those suckers if you don’t know. Wolson, for example, was the staff photographer for Rolling Stone during the first three years of the magazine’s existence. The first two were actually going to be there, so I had to go, and what a scene it was…
You have to imagine if you can: a gallery in a 350-year-old adobe building, enough black leather to pave the highway south to Santa Fe, tall skinny women, musicians, everybody drilling each other in the eye as if to say, “Do I know you? Should I know you? Are you maybe somebody??” There was enough hair to braid a bridge to the moon. And the photographs! Holy shit… I was so high, just from taking it all in, that I gave an involuntary whoop when I saw the shot of Keith Richards taken during the recording of Exile on Main Street. I was pumped. This was my culture. MY CULTURE! Yours too, maybe. Goddamn, what a hoot.
I went right up to Jim Marshall and thanked him for his work. He was very personable and grateful, and though he didn’t know me from Adam, turned right around and dragged me into the next room to meet Michael Zagaris. Zagaris is supposed to be a fucking god, if you don’t know. TALL, too. I thanked him also for documenting the culture and told him I was blown away by all the pictures. He said that was “payment enough” for everything he’d done.
We even talked politics a little while. He said Bush wasn’t the cause of all our problems, just the expression of them, because he embodied the lies most Americans wanted to hear. (Damned if he wasn’t reading from old FarrFeed posts.) Returning to the photographs, I thanked him again for helping to make it all real. He said something like, “It was a renaissance, a true renaissance we were in from the ’60s through the early ’80s. We’re really fortunate to have experienced that.” Amen, brother.
If you didn’t live through it, I guess you just can’t know. That hurts a lot and makes me sad. There’s no way to convey the full sense of what it was like to wake up every morning feeling so excited just because of the times, because of what was happening every day, the CHANGE that was in the air. People’s expectations now are fairly suicidal, but the truth is that we WON, and that’s why it’s vital to remember…
I also really dug the show business scene. I was happy looking at the pictures and too old to be on the make, so I wasn’t the least bit nervous. In fact, I felt right at home. More than that, I felt this was my club and had been all my life. (So why hadn’t I ever gone to meetings, duh!) The really cool part was that I was perfectly dressed: black leather and long hair!
Oh, the irony. I love it.
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I grew up during a renaissance and didn’t know it! Maybe I did, but I was havin’ a real good time. To many lawyers and handlers now and very little talent. All manufactured “stars” (Britney springs to mind).
Would like to have been there for that show.
Frank, I’m sure each of us has seen many or most of those photos before, and these were just a sampling, but seeing them all on the wall, as printed photographs (for sale, of course) was a super treat. Jim Marshall has a book of rock and roll photos out — I don’t know if it’s new or not — and was signing them at the show.
Gave me a real buzz, I have to tell you that.
Very cool. Yes, it was a different era, then. I was lucky to experience not only that cultural renaissance, but the computing renaissance as well. I felt the change in the early 80s, when everything became about the money. It was a sad, sad feeling.
I hope our culture can recover and become about something more than money again. I really hope so. It says something that the prints were “for sale, of course”, yet to the artists, your thanks and appreciation was “all the payment they needed”.
John, we both went through that era. Having gone through it, how can you ever feel “Lyndon Johnson wasn’t really such a bad guy.”
The 70s – thats what it was all about! The 30,000 body bags! I feel the music was simply an accompaniment to the general dissatisfaction with war and race.