Live: Metallica

James Hetfield, Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto, Dec. 1986

I HAVE NEVER REALLY ENJOYED CONCERT PHOTOGRAPHY. Which is a shame because I've done so much of it. While I'd love to exclusively feature my portraits and landscapes and still-life work on this blog, there are hundreds of live music shoots in my files that it would be unfair to ignore, if only because of the record they make of my technical progress over the years.

I've written about my portrait session with Metallica before, but I'd encountered the band a few years previous, when an assignment to interview Lars Ulrich for Graffiti magazine got me a pass to the pit at the Maple Leaf Gardens stop on the Master of Puppets tour.

Kirk Hammett, Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto, Dec. 1986

I had only owned a camera for about a year when I took these photos, and if I was somewhat pleased with the results at the time, it was mostly because they'd turned out at all. They were shot with my trusty Pentax Spotmatic and whatever cheap telephoto lens I owned at the time. Thankfully we were still allowed into the space at the front of the stage to shoot back in the '80s, and I might have had more than three songs to get the job done.

The meter on the Spotmatic was hardly state of the art, and whatever lens I had probably didn't have a maximum aperture of less than 4.0 or even 5.6. But the real miracle of these shots is that they were shot on rolls of expired Kodachrome that I'd been storing in my fridge, a gift from my cousin Terry who worked at Kodak.

Jason Newstead, Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto, Dec. 1986

I was poor and colour film was expensive and I'd been told that pros shot on slide film so I naturally used whatever cost me the least, but nobody would ever tell you to show up to shoot a concert with film rated at just 64 ASA. So of course the majority of my shots are either blurry or dim or both; the frames you see here are the best of the lot, miles from anyone's standard of technical perfection and the result of long sessions in Photoshop.

Thankfully no client was expecting to use these shots, though I did try vainly to interest Graffiti in running them with my piece. Luckily for them there were a wide range of photos of the band to choose from, taken by photographers who knew that fast film, lenses and shutter speeds are what you need to shoot live music.

But years later and with a couple of hundred shows behind me I'd be struggling to capture the loose, spontaneous feel of these pictures, using every ounce of hard-won technical knowledge to get something a bit better than just another sharp shot of a guy with his guitar on a stage.

 

David

David Lynch, Toronto, Sept. 1986

THIS PORTRAIT OF DAVID LYNCH HAS BEEN IN AND OUT OF MY PORTFOLIO since I shot it, almost thirty years ago. I took it at the Toronto film festival where Lynch was premiering Blue Velvet, the film that would ensure he'd be in the business of making David Lynch films for the rest of his career.

It was the first Festival of Festivals I covered as both photographer and writer, and a landmark of sorts for me - the first shooting I'd do outside of the world of indie rock bands and my own friends and family. Working for Nerve magazine, I was probably near to the bottom of the media ladder, but in the early days of the film festival access was easier to get, but even then Lynch had been a hot item ever since Blue Velvet was a critical hit at the Montreal film festival a month before.

Access at the festival was still controlled almost entirely by festival publicists - a room full of mostly young women who were worked into exhaustion for the ten days of the festival. I was lucky, though, that Lynch was being handled by a particularly pretty publicist whose good side I'd contrived to land on when she told me she collected Godzilla memorabilia. I was working in a wind-up toy store at the time, so I came in the next day with one of each from our range of walking, rolling and spark-spitting Godzillas.

I had been a fan of Lynch since high school, when I'd drag only occasionally grateful friends to see rep cinema screenings of Eraserhead. A photo and interview with Lynch would be my festival prize, so I put in my request early and hoped that whatever charm I had - and a handful of cheap toys - would get me a slot.

Lynch's schedule had filled up fast, but the pretty publicist said that if I was willing to do the interview in a limo on the way from the Park Plaza to the Windsor Arms - a distance of about two short city blocks - she'd see what could be arranged. I was happy to get anything, and agreed.

I met Lynch in the press office where introductions were made, and we got in the elevator to the lobby where he got into an animated discussion with what I remember as an elderly British lady dressed in what looked like gardening clothes. After he said goodbye to her and we walked through the lobby, he told me that he couldn't believe who he'd just met. "Don't you know who that was? " he asked. I confessed that I didn't have a clue.

"That was Julie Christie."

I squeezed into the back of the limo with him and his manager and stumbled through an interview comprising all of two or three questions when we pulled up in front of the Windsor Arms. I remember him being friendly, and in a great mood. He had a hit film on his hands, after all, and this wasn't an Elephant Man or a Dune - it was his own movie, and after years as an outsider he had arrived.

We got out of the car and I pulled out my Spotmatic; Lynch rooted himself on the pavement between the car and the front door of the hotel and I knew that I had to work fast.

I shot a total of six frames of David Lynch, in the middle of a roll that also contains the whole of my portrait shoots with director Jean-Jacques Beineix and screenwriter Horton Foote. I was parsimonious with my film back then. The portrait at the top - the one I've featured for years - is the first frame of Lynch I took. The next five photos are the balance of the shoot, printed for the first time since I took them.

I began with some vertical frames, crouching below Lynch as he stood next to the limo...

David Lynch, Toronto, Sept. 1986

...and then I turned the camera around and shot some horizontal frames, from one side of his face, and then the other...

David Lynch, Toronto, Sept. 1986

...and I was done. I thanked Lynch for his time, he walked into the Windsor Arms and I never saw him again. Except for that photo which I printed over and over again, trying to get the best possible version. I'd sell it a few times, and since his celebrity has never really waned, it was always being considered for some iteration of my portfolio.

My instincts were sound - get up close, concentrate on the face - but my technical shortcomings, understandable but undeniable barely a year since I'd bought my first camera, have forced me to struggle with a troublesome negative since then. It's a given that the lens on the Spotmatic wasn't the best, but I made the mistake of shooting Tri-X outside on a cloudy day, with my subject silhouetted against the cloudy sky.

The result was a negative that's both thin and flat, and pulling detail and contrast out of it was an ongoing test of my darkroom skills. The shot at the top of this post is the last, best version I could make in the darkroom, as full of detail and good, rich blacks as I could summon from that lucky first frame. Of course I wish I'd pushed my luck a little and moved Lynch just a few feet away from the car and shot him with a dark wall behind him and the light behind me.

David Lynch, Toronto, Sept. 1986

The shot above is the latest version - produced with a flatbed scanner, Vuescan and Photoshop. It's the first time I've put light through this negative in over a decade, and it helps make a great case - one I'm hesitant to endorse - that something is being lost as we shut down our darkrooms and toss our enlargers away.

But I still have a lot to learn about digital printing, so maybe one day my learning curve and digital technology will meet up and unlock whatever it is I've been trying to dig out of this photo for so long.

 

London, Christmas 1997

Volvo Amazon, Hampstead, London 1997

SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO I FINALLY CROSSED AN OCEAN. An old friend was living in London with his girlfriend and wanted me to spend Christmas with them. I was 33 and single and desperate for something to knock me out of what seemed like a rut so I packed a bag and a camera and crossed the Atlantic for the first time.

My first few nights were spent experiencing something wholly new to me - jet lag. I'd sit up at night in my room in their top floor flat in Notting Hill and look over the rooftops toward the Westway and wonder: What next? My life had reached what seemed to me a crucial point; I was in my mid-thirties and single and watching my career contract perceptibly every year. I made enough money to get by but luxuries - like vacations - were beyond my means. I wouldn't even be in London if my friend hadn't paid for my ticket.

Most of all I felt terribly alone, but I had felt this way for long enough that it had begun to feel relatively normal, like a chronic illness that could be controlled but would never go away. I'd forget about it most of the time, but then came the days - like the ones where a slippage of time zones had deprived me of sleep - where it would pull me up short and make me feel unmoored and adrift.

Victoria & Albert Museum, London 1997

There was a whole new city to explore but for some reason - timidity, lack of funds, the immense gravitational pull of a pregnant woman close by - I stuck close to Elgin Crescent. We visited the Victoria & Albert and the British Museum (a Hogarth exhibition I was dying to see) and strolled around Soho and Knightsbridge. I made Christmas dinner - ham and turkey - which meant visiting London's superb butchers and fishmongers and living in the shadow of their impossibly high standards afterwards.

Even at the time I knew I was missing an opportunity. A quick trip on the Tube would have taken me to the Imperial War Museum or a walk around Whitehall or Greenwich or Oxford Street. I'd brought my last Spotmatic with me - the Pentax SV with the helpful lighting guide in surgical tape on the body - and sparingly shot my way through three or four rolls.

Highgate Cemetery, London 1997

One drizzly day Paul and I made a trip to Highgate Cemetery, one of the London sights I knew I wanted to see - and photograph. Shooting in Highgate is, frankly, a bit of a cheat; it's one of those places where you'll get a decent shot no matter where you point your lens - acres and acres of picturesque ruin that looks like a Hammer Pictures theme park.

Highgate Cemetery, London 1997

What I remember most is the weather during this mostly snowless holiday season. The vast variety and constancy of English rain is a cliche, but as soon as we left the Tube at Hampstead station I was struck by the dampness in the air - a kind of particulate fog that meant I had to wipe dry my camera lens every time I took a shot; it wasn't rain as much as a light fog with raindrops suspended in the cool, humid air. I wondered that the whole country wasn't thick with moss and mold.

Pierre and I smoke outside Waterloo Station. Photo by Paul Sarossy.

Just after Christmas our friend Pierre came over for a visit from Paris on the Eurostar. A plan to spend New Year's Eve in Paris came and went and we ended up ushering in 1998 in Notting Hill. Paul and Geraldine called it an early night so Pierre and I wandered the streets south toward Kensington and back again searching fruitlessly for a pub or a party. We burned through a pack of his cigarettes and mostly talked about our troubles with women.

Hampstead, London 1997

I came back with a few good photos and an overwhelming sense that things couldn't go on the way they were going. My life needed shaking up or else I'd end up everyone's hapless third wheel, a friend whose simmering life crisis made them an object of pity and, occasionally, a source of irritation.

I would meet the woman who became my wife two weeks later.

 

Trimmings

THIS MONTH'S LUCKY DIP into the box of film trimmings is a streetscape, but it's certainly not anywhere in Canada or the United States. If you're from the UK, however, you'll recognize it as a classic middle class Victorian terraced street.

It's Elgin Crescent in Notting Hill, where I stayed over the Christmas of 1997 with an old friend and his pregnant girlfriend (now wife.) It was my first time in the UK - my first time overseas, in fact - and I spent the first few days on the ground suffering from something I'd never encountered before: Jet lag.

I remember staying up late at night staring out over the rooftops, sleepless and fascinated by urban features like the gasometers I could glimpse in the distance, confounded at how they would be different heights whenever I looked at them. London was terribly expensive - more than I anticipated, and even though my friend paid for my meals, the £200 I managed to scrape together for the trip evaporated from my wallet just buying a pint or a newspaper or a magazine.

It's also a frame from the last film I would ever shoot with my Pentax SV, taken along in the interest of being as portable as possible. It was fun to use a camera with a single prime lens and no meter - a challenge to my skills at a point in my life when I would have described myself as a photographer and nothing else.

NYC, 1985

NYC, MOMA, October 1985

WHAT HAPPENED WAS THERE WAS A GIRL. That's probably the only thing that could have made me get on a plane for the first time and fly across a border to a strange city at 21, so excited and afraid that I thought I'd be sick. As the jet banked long and low over Manhattan - it used to do that in those days - I'm sure I was shivering; I was having an adventure.

We had met the previous Christmas, working together at Simpsons Toytown; there was a thrilling date just before she went home for the holidays and a promise to see each other again when she got back. Months passed, then one day my boss at Toytown remembered a letter in her desk, sent to me care of the store: There had been a family tragedy and the girl had to stay in Fredericton but she was moving to New York to take acting classes. There was an address and a phone number.

She was living with roommates way out in some place called Throg's Neck in the Bronx but they were cool if I slept on the couch. I packed the Spotmatic I'd bought a few months before and a tape recorder: I'd arranged to interview a band, The Minutemen, before their gig at Irving Plaza. I was a rock journalist now, I told her. She'd never heard of them.

NYC, MOMA, October 1985

I took the subway into Manhattan with her every morning to her job as a receptionist in the same building as MTV. I had time to kill all day so I saw the sights: the Village, Times Square, the Frick and the Met; MOMA and Rockefeller Center. I brought my camera and a couple of rolls of Plus-X and pretended I was Robert Frank.

New Yorkers were more extroverted than people in Toronto. They looked at art with casual intensity and moved with more purpose than anyone I'd ever seen. Rich women wore furs and hats and wandered the galleries during the day. The city had a sound and a smell I'd never imagined - a din that cut through a dozen empty city blocks and an odor like charcoal and old clothes.

NYC, Rockefeller Center, October 1985

It was a cold autumn. She got cross at me one day as we were walking. "Stop looking up all the time," she said. "You look like a tourist." Hard as I tried we could never find that brief spark from months ago that had brought me all the way out there.

 
I wasn't the brash, confident college journalist that she'd met at Christmas any more, but a lonely and anxious young man who'd just dropped out of school and didn't know what was next. I suppose I might have been a bit disappointed with her as well. After all, she'd cut her hair.

NYC, midtown, October 1985

This was Koch-era New York, the Manhattan of Bright Lights, Big City and Bonfire of the Vanities. This was the New York that got up after Gerald Ford told it to drop dead and said "Fuck You," then marshaled its wealthy and its talented and reminded them that they lived in a palace with a thousand towers and suddenly everyone wanted to be there again to paint and write and act and play music. I'd just read Winter's Tale and New York felt like magic was hidden there, not in plain sight but just at the edge of my eye.

NYC, midtown, October 1985

Looking at these for the first time in almost thirty years, that probably explains why I didn't shoot the skyscrapers or the subway trains still covered in graffiti. I might have been - annoyingly - goggling at the endless canyon-like streets but I photographed the people, and while these shots won't win any awards, they succeed for me as stills captured from my memories, still vivid three decades later, mostly because, even in spite of a little heartbreak, I was giddy with the sensation that life was finally underway.

NYC, midtown, October 1985

Amazingly, I'd go back to see the girl a few months later. There was a February blizzard where I saw boys surf the snow-packed Bronx streets hanging on to the rear bumpers of MTA buses, and another show - Husker Du at Columbia University. A long year had nonetheless doused the spark and the girl told me that she'd sort of met someone back home over the holidays. But I'd be back in New York sooner than I imagined, following another girl.

(2023 UPDATE: I was never crazy about the scans I did for this post so I've gone back and updated them, adding an extra photo or two from the original shoot.)

   

Sweets

Harry "Sweets" Edison, Toronto, Dec. 1988

HARRY "SWEETS" EDISON LIVED UP TO HIS NICKNAME. He was a terribly sweet man, happy to indulge a very inexperienced young photographer as I sweated through an assignment that would change my career.

At the end of 1988 I had been taking photos for three years, and wanted to do it full time. At that time, the steadiest source of employment for freelancers was NOW magazine, a free weekly founded in the mold of the Village Voice - very local, very lefty, and at that point very profitable. My then-girlfriend had a job there as a music critic (a job I'd applied for but failed to get) and she pulled some strings with the photo editor, Irene Grainger, to get me a try-out.

My first assignment was a live shoot - Harry "Sweets" Edison playing at (long-defunct downtown jazz club) East 85th. I had been shooting jazz for a couple of years by this point, mostly avant-garde stuff like Cecil Taylor, Charlie Haden or the World Saxophone Quartet, and while I didn't know much about Sweets, I knew that he'd played with Count Basie, and that he'd been around back when jazz was pop music.

Harry "Sweets" Edison, Toronto, Dec. 1988

I'd done a lot of live shooting, but I wasn't comfortable with it at all, and struggled to get printable negatives from my Pentax Spotmatic and its very general light meter. The other photographers at NOW - people like Laurence Acland, Chris Nicholls, David Laurence, Anne Levenston and Paul Till - had experience I lacked by at least a decade, and had set a pretty high standard for a newsprint publication, especially with concert photography.

I'd shot enough jazz, though, to know that using a flash wasn't generally appreciated by club owners, patrons or (especially) musicians, so I shot my roll that night knowing that the dim club light would result in some pretty dark negatives, even with 3200 ASA Kodak film in my camera. The shot above hasn't seen the light of day since the night I took it, and there's no way that I could have produced a workable image back then without a further quarter century of experience - and a full version of Photoshop.

I panicked a bit, and during a break asked the manager if I could get a minute or so with Harry to shoot a quick portrait. A few minutes in the manager's cramped office were arranged, where I did my best with the more abundant but far less flattering overhead fluorescent lighting.

I was much more comfortable with my portrait work, and hoped that, as long as the shot was made in the club where he played, on the night he was on stage, readers would be cool.

Harry "Sweets" Edison, Toronto, Dec. 1988

Irene didn't agree. The live shots I handed in were pretty dim; newsprint technology was still unforgiving at that point, and she knew that an excess of black would look like mud on their pages. The portraits, while much better, didn't fit the brief: She wanted live photos.

The shoot ran - I don't remember whether it was the live shots or a portrait - but while I continued to sell photos on spec to NOW (sales brokered by my girlfriend, I'm sure,) I didn't get another real assignment for almost eight months.

I ended up working steadily for NOW for over a decade. The last photos I handed in to Irene were portraits of Tobey Maquire, at which point I was chafing against the paper's politics and went off to work for their competition, where the newsroom was full of friends, including the best man at my wedding.

NOW made it possible for me to make a living, build a studio and a reputation, but by the time I left I'd relied on it so much that when it came time to find other clients when I lost that steady paycheck, I didn't know what to do. I never got the same steady work from NOW's competition, no matter how many friends I knew there. A lesson learned.

For a couple of years in the mid-'90s I (secretly) wrote a column for the competition under a pseudonym - a regular feature reviewing old jazz and blues records, which were being reissued in a torrent by the major labels during their last period of prosperity. By this point I knew very well who Harry "Sweets" Edison was, and ended up owning countless records featuring him - with Basie, in the Jazz At The Philharmonic orchestra, and on his own, though one of my favorites is a record he made with Ben Webster for Columbia in the '50s.

I handed in my last photo to NOW in 1999. Harry "Sweets" Edison died the same year.

Pentax

I'M BAD AT THROWING THINGS OUT, especially if they have a sliver of usefulness left in them. Cameras are among the most useful things in the world to me, so it's no surprise that, more than two decades after I stopped using them, I still have a Pentax Spotmatic.

Asahi Pentax SV

Just after I dropped out of college I was given a small nest egg by my mother - my Baby Bonus, saved up for years with interest at the Our Lady of Victory Credit Union. An act of charity, I'm sure - I was out in the world without a degree but with a vague ambition to become a journalist, something no one in our family had ever been. I promptly bought an electric guitar - my priorities were sound, as you can tell - but there was still some money left over, so for reasons still obscure to me today I headed downtown to the camera stores near Pawn Shop Row on Church Street and purchased a 35mm camera.

We were a Kodak family. The Kodak Canada plant was just a few blocks from our house, and my mother worked there from the '20s till the late '40s. My sister had a job in the plant as a teenager, and my cousin Terry spent her whole working career at Kodak, retiring in the '90s, a few years before the plant closed. I'd been given Instamatics as gifts when I was a kid but I'd never been bitten by the photography bug, so I can't really tell you what made me think that I needed a camera. Nonetheless, here's a frame from the first roll I ever shot with my first Pentax Spotmatic - the view from the window of our living room out onto the corner of Gray and Outlook:

Gray Avenue at Outlook, Mount Dennis, spring 1985

A pretty terrible shot, but at least I'd developed it myself, in the basement kitchen. This isn't the first shot on the roll, however; that was actually a series of candid photos of my co-workers at Simpson's Toy Town, where I was head stock boy, so I probably bought the camera on my lunch break, loaded in a roll of Tri-X and started snapping, eager to see if the damned thing actually worked. This photo was probably taken the next morning, after I woke up and took another look at my new purchase and decided to finish the roll. There are no leaves on either the trees or the ground, so we're looking at a sunless spring morning in 1985. I don't want to sound too grand, but my life basically started here.

The Spotmatic was an obvious choice for a novice photographer, which is probably how the salesman at Henry's sold it to me - it was simple and cheap, with plenty of inexpensive used lenses made by Pentax or a half-dozen brands like Vivitar, Tamron and Soligor. Once the camera of choice for students, it had been supplanted by the Pentax K1000, which replaced the Spotmatic's screwmount lenses with bayonet mounts. If you watch old footage of the Beatles on their first tour of America, they're all carrying Spotmatics.

As my friend Jonathan Castellino pointed out to me recently, it was hardly a fine camera; almost Soviet in construction, it was rough and inelegant, with a crude in-camera meter. It didn't take motor drives, and changing the screwmount lenses was time-consuming and clumsy. My first Spotmatic had a nasty metal burr on the film advance lever that left a red mark on my thumb until I took a bit of sandpaper to it. It was all I could afford, however, and I quickly started buying lenses, then an extra body, as I'd noticed other photographers carrying around two or three, loaded with different film and lenses. The Spotmatic was my camera for the first four years of my career.

Sharp eyes will notice that the camera I still own today isn't a Spotmatic, but a Pentax SV - the immediate predecessor to the Spotmatic, launched the year I was born. It's purely mechanical, with no internal meter and no battery, which probably explains why my camera has this piece of surgical tape on the back, with a helpful list of f-stops for different lighting conditions:

This was the last Pentax I bought; black Spotmatics were rare, which was probably what caught my eye and extracted whatever money was burning a hole in my pocket that day. I liked the idea that it didn't have a meter, requiring me to trust my eye and my intuition - though obviously not so much that I didn't need the cheat sheet. I'd switched to Canon autofocus cameras by 1992 and sold off my Spotmatics and their lenses not long after, but I kept the SV, which I last used on a Christmas trip to visit a friend in London in 1997.

I can't tell you how grateful I am to this simple little camera, and it's appropriate that one of the first images I took with it was the view from the front window of my parents' house. There was a whole world out there, outside Mount Dennis, and I was desperate to see if I could find a place in it. That blurry, grainy photo reminds me of how eager I was to get started, and it was a cheap used camera that would pull me along.