Jim Jarmusch

Jim Jarmusch, Toronto, Sept. 1997

BACK WHEN I WAS A SOPHOMORE IN UNIVERSITY, BEFORE I OWNED A CAMERA, my best friend - a film student - told me that he had tickets to an advance preview of an interesting little low-budget film from New York City. His professor had told him it was exactly the sort of thing film students should look at when trying to make their films. We went to a private screening room set up in some mid-rise office tower downtown and saw Stranger Than Paradise, the second feature by director Jim Jarmusch.

I'd read about Jarmusch in magazines like the New York Rocker a couple of years before, when he was part of a wave of so-called punk cinema coming out of Manhattan. It would be years before I saw Permanent Vacation, his first film, which was probably a good thing; if I'd seen it first, I doubt if I'd have had an open mind going into that screening of Stranger Than Paradise.

Jim Jarmusch, Toronto, Sept. 1997

We loved it. It wasn't just the kind of small, intimate, awkward film that a novice should try to make - it reflected something of our own aimless, wheel-spinning lives at a time when the future looked far too intimidating, so we sought solace in the nearly-worn-out relics of the recent past that were still everywhere. Jarmusch seemed like a kindred spirit, and I did my best to keep up with him over the years.

I finally met and photographed Jim Jarmusch over fifteen years after that screening, when he was at the film festival promoting a concert film he'd just done with Neil Young. While I hadn't been a big fan of everything he'd done since Stranger Than Paradise, I was more than a bit in awe, and took photos that reflected my apparent unwillingness to push my subject - a series of headshots that look like a cross between mug shots and studies for a sculpture.

Jim Jarmusch, Toronto, Sept. 1997

I originally printed these shots at the highest contrast filter my Ilford Multigrade paper would allow, aiming for something that evoked the grainy, low-budget aesthetic of his earliest films. That was as much editorializing as I allowed myself with this shoot, and with a subject that seemed to ooze an effortless cool that was more than a little intimidating.

In retrospect, I was at a fork in the road with my celebrity portraiture. Shoot times were getting shorter and shorter, and if I wasn't willing or able to push a subject during my brief sessions with them, it was imperative that I fall back on the basics - some decent light, an iconic pose, and perhaps a hint of engagement when their eyes looked down the lens. I would have just two more film festivals to shoot before a brief recess, after which I'd return to find constraints on portrait shoots even tighter.

Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth, Montreal, February 1991 

I WAS NERVOUS AS I BEGAN SETTING UP MY LIGHTS to shoot Sonic Youth in their Montreal hotel room. Guitarist Lee Ranaldo almost leapt across the room when I opened my camera case, and began inspecting my gear.

"What do you have in there?" he asked. "Is that a Rolleiflex?"

Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore seemed to be eyeing me warily from the bed by the far wall. We'd met before, and I was going to see if they remembered, but before I could say anything they had a question for me.

"Hey, you're from Toronto," said Thurston. "Do you know this guy Chris Buck? He keeps wanting to take our picture. He's pretty weird."

Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, 84 Eldridge Street, NYC, October 1985

The last time I'd been in a room with Kim and Thurston was over five years previous, when I went to New York City for the first time. Dave from Nerve magazine told me that I should try to set up an interview with this band, Sonic Youth, while I was down there.

"I don't like them, but I think they could be important," he said. He arranged for me to borrow a copy of their latest record, Bad Moon Rising, from CKLN, the college radio station at Ryerson, and I took it home for a listen. There was all this stuff about Charles Manson and a guest vocal by Lydia Lunch, who always made me uncomfortable. It was droney and noisy and dark. I though it was sort of scary.

An interview somehow got arranged with their record company, and I met half the band - Kim and Thurston - at their apartment on Eldridge Street in the Bowery. I have a vague memory of Thurston's impressive record collection, and none whatsoever of my interview with them, but when it came time for the photos, Kim and Thurston suggested we go to the roof of the building.

It was a pretty mediocre shoot. This is the best frame. I must have been intimidated by them because this is the closest I ever got. At one point they jokingly posed like Run-DMC, so I suppose they were trying to get me to loosen up, but I was probably still spooked by the whole Manson thing.

Sonic Youth live, Diamond Club, Toronto, Nov. 1988

The next time I saw Kim and Thurston again their band had become one of my favorites, thanks to the release of Evol and Sister, which are still among my favorite records of the '80s. The Manson thing still go to me, but I'd come to tentatively embrace the whole culture of morbidity that was a big part of indie rock at the time.

They played the Diamond Club (now the Phoenix Concert Theatre) and I shot the show for Nerve. I've been over the whole roll and a bit I shot of the show and for some reason I have a lot of shots of Lee and Kim, a few of drummer Steve Shelley, but none of Thurston. I don't know why. Perhaps I was already feeling put off by his rather relentless hipper-than-thou persona. Maybe I was just stuck on the wrong side of the stage.

Sonic Youth, Montreal, February 1991 

Just over two years later I was assigned by my friend Tim at HMV Magazine to shoot the band in Montreal while they were on tour supporting Neil Young. As recalled in Kim's recent autobiography, Girl in a Band, it was "grueling; the dead of winter, a frozen ocean of endless arena locker rooms."

Nineteen ninety-one would prove to be, as Sonic Youth would later dub it, "The Year Punk Broke," but just two months into that year, Kim didn't recall her band going over too well with either Neil's crew ("Throughout the tour, we were almost never allowed a sound check...") or Neil's fans:

"Neil always drew big crowds, including legions of hippies loyal to his music. Those same crowds were incredibly put off by us, to the degree that if fans sitting among them appreciated or applauded one of our songs they were aggressively shouted down."

After I told them that, yes, I knew Chris Buck and that he was a friend, we got down to the shoot, which I did with a combination of cross-processed 120 film - both slide and negative - and two rolls of black and white shot with my Nikon. I did nothing to disguise the hotel room location - it was where I did most of my shooting for so many years, and there were only so many white walls you could stick someone against.

Sonic Youth, Montreal, February 1991 

Two days later, for some reason, I found myself backstage at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto after their show with Neil. As Kim would remember in her book, the tour passed through Canada in the depth of winter, and Toronto had just been hit with a big snowstorm.

The band were only staying a half block away at the Westbury Hotel (now a Marriott Courtyard) and Kim and I were among the last people who left the Gardens. Both before and after that, I'd talked with Chris and his friend Dave about how Sonic Youth - and Kim in particular - seemed to be afflicted with a kind of Canuckophobia, based on frequent remarks they'd made about the place. Kim's aversion to Toronto seemed to go back to a year she spent here at York University. I spent a year at York; I can understand why you'd hate Toronto if it was your home base in the city.

With this in mind, I noticed that Kim wasn't particularly dressed to navigate the huge snow drifts between the arena and her hotel, so I made myself conspicuously helpful, gallantly holding her arm as we navigated the drifts. I figured that if she was going to have such a bleak take on my hometown and Canadians, I'd might as well do my best to provide a counterpart - the chivalrous Canadian lad, courtly and respectful of ladies who might be unprepared for our bitter climate. (Think Mountie Constable Benton Fraser from Due South.)

I remember getting an actual smile from Kim when I saw her to the door of her hotel. I might actually have bowed from the waist.

I suppose I was a shocked as anyone when Thurston's infidelity a few years back spelled the end of not just Kim and Thurston's marriage but Sonic Youth. Some of my generation seemed genuinely saddened, even disillusioned, by the news. I had always seen Thurston as a bit of a boy-man, so once I was past the shock it all made sense - or about as much sense as any divorce does.

My reaction felt a bit more personal than it would at just any bit of celebrity gossip, though, because of my long, if fleeting, acquaintance with the band, and the couple at its heart. It was like learning that some old college friends who seemed perfect for each other had busted up, with obvious acrimony. It felt very adult, but the second part of Sonic Youth's name had always been ironic, as their fans knew all too well, though it took something really grown up to make the joke finally stick in everyone's throats.

   

Neil

IT WAS EASIER BEING A NEIL YOUNG FAN when it was my little secret. Back in the early '80s, when post-punk was giving way to new romantic, I asked for a copy of Decade for my birthday, having fallen for Neil's weird, grizzled hippy contrarian thing through songs like "Campaigner" and "Cortez the Killer." It became a secret handshake later when I fell in with a group of musicians in my favorite local bands - a way of letting each other know that we weren't just into the shiny new sound or whatever passed for angsty noise at the time.

By 1993, however, everybody was into Neil, but that wasn't why I was in such a bad mood when I arrived at the CNE Grandstand on assignment from SPIN magazine. I hated stadium shows, hated being corralled in and out, hated getting just three songs or less. Limitations can be a creative amplifier, but this just felt punitive.

It didn't help that the lead media handler for the promoter was in such a surly mood, though she brightened when I told her I was shooting for a big deal New York rock magazine, and suddenly she was offering me a seat to watch the show when I was done. I politely declined; I couldn't wait to get out of there. The only thing that interested me was Neil's backing band: Stax/Volt studio band Booker T & the MGs. I remember being starstruck watching Steve Cropper and Donald "Duck" Dunn walk across the vast backstage area from their trailer to the stage while waiting for our brief spell in the pit to take our shots.

I was experimenting with colour at the time - cross-processing wildly in both directions, and one day, with most of an hour left in the colour darkroom time I'd booked, I decided to print a black and white negative onto colour paper and experiment with changing the CMY settings while burning and dodging. The result looked like this:

Neil Young, Aug. 18, 1993, CNE Grandstand, Toronto

It wasn't all that revolutionary, but no one else was doing it, and since careers were being made on technical gimmicks at the time, I doubled down on the look. Today it would be a half hour's worth of Photoshop, but back then it meant hours in the darkroom and countless scrapped prints as you cycled through all the potential colour variations and burning schemes.

The pics apparently went down a corker when I sent them off to SPIN a couple of days later. The photo editor - name long forgotten, sorry whoever you were, but thanks for the gig - called me to say that Bob Guccione Jr., SPIN's publisher, had gone crazy for the shots, and told her that I should be given as much work as possible.

That never happened. I have no record of ever getting another job from SPIN. Maybe the photo editor left, or maybe it was just that I was in distant Toronto and not New York or L.A. or Chicago. Someone later told me that they'd seen the Neil shot used in a TV commercial for SPIN. In any case, Guccione sold the magazine a few years later, and the next time I'd have anything to do with SPIN would be just last year, when I was asked to write a newspaper feature about their last print edition before they slipped into a digital half-life.

I was hoping to include a photo of the layout where this shot appeared, but my copy of SPIN, carefully preserved in my clippings file from move to move over the years, is nowhere to be found now. Maybe I finally tossed it, a lingering memory of disappointment having attached itself to the dog-eared magazine until it finally turned toxic. The last few years have been like that, I'm sorry to say.

Eddie

I'M STILL SKIMMING THE TOP OF MY ARCHIVES at the moment, which means the handful of finished prints and decent second prints I kept after purging myself of boxes of 8x10s before a big move. And I'm finding things like this:

Pearl Jam, Aug. 18, 1993, Canadian National Exhibition Grandstand

Unlike my previous post on David Bowie, I actually do remember shooting this concert, mostly because it was an utter fucking pain in the colon. It was a big package tour, with Neil Young backed up by Booker T & The MGs, supported by Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Blues Traveler. I was on assignment for SPIN magazine. I have no memory at all of how I got the gig.

I hate shooting stadium shows. Always have, always will and God willing I'll never have to do it again. This one was particularly awful because of the sheer scale - the CNE Grandstand was the biggest venue in the city - and the incredible popularity of Young and his support acts at the time. As a result, the media handlers treated photographers with more than the usual disdain, and we found ourselves being penned and shoved all over the backstage area during our long waits to shoot the band for our allotted photo slot.

If you've never shot a major concert before, it's a treat. There was a time when a security "gutter" ranging from two or three to ten or twelve feet deep in front of the stage was where we shot - up over the lip of the stage anywhere from six to ten feet off the ground, past the sound monitors and up the nostrils of the lead singer. Once upon a time photographers had the liberty of this "pit" for the whole show, but that era was over by the time I started shooting arena and stadium shows, and the three song rule was in full effect - whittling down to two and even just one song over the years.

Since then, I think the pit has become off limits, and photographers are now assigned spots by the sound board or along the mezzanine level of the venues, where they get their scant three-or-less songs to shoot with long telephotos and monopods. Back in '93, however, we were still allowed into the pit. Except for Pearl Jam.

I gave Blues Traveler a miss - something about them sucking like a chest wound - and shot Soundgarden for three songs from the pit. I didn't feel cheated since I'd seen them before in clubs and was losing interest in the band in any case. For Pearl Jam, however, we were informed that we were only allowed to shoot from the far corners of the pit, on either end of the stage, which meant long lenses and, inevitably, poorer angles.

Tucked elbow-to-elbow into our spots, we waited for Pearl Jam to hit the stage when we noticed that three or four young women - the band's girlfriends, as it turned out, in their standard issue thrift store dresses, torn jeans and combat boots - had walked into the pit area directly in front of the band carrying an SLR or two and at least one old super 8 camera. We had been cleared from the spot where we'd best be able to do our jobs to make space for some proto-hipster tour document where the band would probably just get mocked.

"Oh my gawd - look at Stone. He's going all cock rock!"

"That's what you get for owning too many KISS records, right?"

"Like, totally!"

It felt like a final humiliation, and obviously I'm still smarting from it today. I didn't much like the band, and now I knew why; not merely spoiled rock stars, they were shameless beta male rock stars, happy to make some camera stiff's job harder to keep peace in the ad hoc domestic space of the tour bus. Shooting arena shows was bad enough, but being collateral damage in some assless wonder's attempt at making his girlfriend feel "included" on his "big rock star tour ego trip" made it feel worse.

But that's all so long ago now. In any case, Eddie Vedder is still a complete tool.