Nerve portraits: Bands

Gibby Haynes, Butthole Surfers, Toronto, Dec 8, 1987

THE WORST PART OF LEARNING ON THE JOB is that when things work, you're often at a loss to know why. I'm cleaning up the last of the Nerve work now, and these three shoots, running from roughly at the beginning to very near the end of my time at Nerve magazine, sum up the best and the worst parts of growing up, so to speak, in public.

My portraits of individual members of the Butthole Surfers, shot during their soundcheck for a gig at the cavernous RPM club in the docklands, were a notable success for me. Which would have been nicer if they'd actually been the result of a plan, but they weren't.

Jeffrey "King" Coffey, Butthole Surfers, Toronto, Dec. 8, 1987

My shoot with the Buttholes was very ad hoc - I desperately wanted to get a photo of the band, but knew ahead of time that they weren't uncooperative or difficult as much as they regarded photo shoots as just another way of cementing their reputation for anarchic, batshit behaviour. I set up my single light in a corner of the room and tried to corral them together for a group shot, which invited the sort of mugging and gurning I expected.

But after we finished I tried to salvage the shoot by asking them to troop in front of the camera one by one. I couldn't do another set-up, so I had just enough time to do a quick light reading just a couple of feet away from my flash and umbrella. They trooped through and stood still just long enough for me to get two frames of each of them.

Butthole Surfers, RPM Club, Toronto, Dec. 8, 1987

I was sure that I'd walked away with nothing much, but when the contact sheet hit the developer a day later, I was surprised at how striking these rapid-fire portraits were. What I learned at that moment is how a single light, diffused or bounced, produces an even more flattering or dramatic when placed right next to the subject - a Rembrandt kind of light. I suppose a teacher in a portrait course could have told me that but I was, as I said, on my own.

We loved the Butthole Surfers at Nerve. The drugs might have helped, but the combination of potty humour, noise and malevolent psychedelia was practically tailored for our little group of critics and photographers. They're technically still a going concern, though they haven't put out a record in nearly fifteen years. Drummer Jeffrey "King" Coffey's front garden was voted "yard of the month" in his local Austin community paper last year.

Bob Mould, Husker Du, Columbia University, NYC, Feb. 6, 1986

At the beginning of my career at Nerve, I wasn't learning lessons about lighting as much as I was fighting with my camera to get something printable. I had no time to worry about influences or lighting schemes; it was enough just hoping that I had the right lens and that there was enough light in whatever room I shared with my subject to get something sharp and detailed on the film.

In the fall of 1985 I'd flown to New York to visit a girl. A few months later I went back, ignoring my instincts, desperate for something like a girlfriend. Husker Du were playing two gigs back to back at Columbia University and Irving Plaza while I was there, with Soul Asylum opening both shows. I was able to arrange an interview backstage through their new label, Warner Bros., and brought along the girl.

Grant Hart, Husker Du, Columbia University, NYC, Feb. 6, 1986

Things were going badly. Whatever chemistry I'd had with the girl had evaporated, and I could tell that the same thing was likely going on with my favorite band. Bob Mould and Grant Hart circled each other warily in the big room backstage at Columbia while bassist Greg Norton absented himself completely.

I put on a long lens and caught several pensive frames of Mould and Hart, which turned out to be far more representative of the band at the time than the awkwardly posed shots I caught of them together. The new record (Candy Apple Grey) was a bit disappointing, and the one after that (Warehouse: Songs and Stories) would be even worse. The band broke up not long after that, but the girl gave me my walking papers on my last day in New York.

Die Kreuzen, Silver Dollar, Toronto, Jan. 15, 1988

In the last months of Nerve's existence, an impromptu roadshow of bands on the Touch & Go label passed through town, playing the Silver Dollar club. T&G was the sort of label that would become legendary a few years later as the home of a dozen very disparate bands that would, in hindsight, be dubbed proto-grunge. They were, at the time, the sorts of bands that we loved at Nerve - loud and weird and wholly unlikely to end up on WEA or Polygram.

My favorite at the time was Die Kreuzen, a Wisconsin band whose October File LP - taped from my friend Tim's copy - was one of my favorite records. They played a soaring, sharp-elbowed kind of take on heavy metal that the music snob in me was far more likely to embrace than the appalling hair metal on the charts. I have revised my opinion on a lot of things I believed then, but I have not changed my position on this at all.

Killdozer, Silver Dollar, Toronto, Jan. 15, 1988

I set up my studio-in-a-bag - the Metz flash, light stand, umbrella bounce and white painter's drop cloth - in a corner of the club's big downstairs room. As each band finished their soundcheck I invited them to stand between the light and the backdrop for about half a roll of film. The results - at the time and now - were disappointing.

My backdrop had, by this point, become a wrinkly mess from living in its bag. It wasn't such a problem when I shot a portrait with one or two people, where I could use a longer lens and put some distance between them and the drop cloth, where the wrinkles would be out of focus and some judicious dodging in the darkroom could make the background look almost like a studio seamless.

But in a cramped space with a wide angle lens the effect was far less polished. Of the three bands I shot that afternoon only the Killdozer shots look halfway worth the effort, which is ironic since they're the band I find least interesting - now or then. A trick of the light and the band's own wry persona - they were more a joke band than anyone else on T&G - has some humour and personality, while the other two bands are reduced to merely glaring, leering, or passively staring down my lens.

A better photographer might have overcome these obstacles. I wasn't that photographer at this moment, and these shots are little artifacts of me bumping my head against the ceiling of my technical and stylistic shortcomings.

Laughing Hyenas, Silver Dollar, Toronto, Jan. 15, 1988

Years later, Michigan's Laughing Hyenas are the group I still enjoy hearing. Treating the blues much the way Die Kreuzen mutated heavy metal, they had the benefit of a front man (John Brannon) whose intensity was undeniable as he howled and bellowed out the group's hard luck stories. Guitarist Larissa Strickland was also an unsung hero in a scene both full of interesting guitar stylists and groups destined to toil in cult status obscurity.

A few years later grunge would be a kind of vindication of the musical tastes Nerve's staffers tried to foist on the world, unsuccessfully, as people like Kurt Cobain would name check all the bands and labels we promoted at Nerve. I'm a bitter old codger now, and so whenever I hear someone describe some pewling, overproduced outfit of tantruming milk babies as "monstrous" or "intense," I hit the shuffle button in my mind and call up Laughing Hyena tracks like "That Girl," "Just Can't Win" or "Let It Burn" and wonder that anyone could say something so stupid. Yes, I'm that kind of sour old punk.

I just wish I'd taken better pictures of them.

Larissa Strickland died of a drug overdose in 2006.

   

 

Live: Borbetomagus

Borbetomagus, The Music Gallery, Toronto, 1989

WHEN I POSTED MY LAST WEEK OF LIVE MUSIC PHOTOGRAPHY, I noted that I didn't enjoy shooting bands in concert. I have a lot of this stuff, though, and it seemed appropriate somehow that I find a way to share my pain with you. And so we have Borbetomagus, the avant garde jazz noise trio, playing at the Music Gallery as the '80s drew to a close

My years at Nerve had left me with a condition that my friend Alan Zweig has called "neophilia" - an insatiable appetite for new music. Years pursuing ever louder and faster sounds had pushed my taste into the realm of what might charitably be called "ungodly noise," and it was with Borbetomagus that I pushed out to the furthest edge of that proclivity.

The band had formed a decade earlier, but it was Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth who had lately drawn them to the attention of record geeks and music perverts, which is probably one reason why they showed up in Toronto, playing at the Music Gallery, which was then in what was once the basement swimming pool of a Victorian YMCA building.

My friend and musical magus Tim Powis browbeat me into going, and for some reason I brought along a camera and plenty of film, though I can't imagine who I thought would buy the pictures. Which makes this shoot a true rarity - a live music shoot I did purely for fun.

Borbetomagus, The Music Gallery, Toronto, 1989

"Fun" is, of course, a subjective term. Most people wouldn't consider an evening spent with Borbetomagus much fun, but rather a kind of weaponized harrowing. And for the first five or ten minutes of their show, I might have thought the same.

The band's sound is simple enough; while guitarist Donald Miller attacked his instrument with various tools arrayed on a piano bench in front of him, saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich chose from among their array of horns to blow a cacophony of sounds ranging from guttural to piercing. Their big showpiece, however, was something known as "bells together," which involved holding the bells of their instruments an inch or two apart to use each other's horns as resonators.

At the Music Hall show, all three of them were plugged into a single big speaker cabinet in the centre of the stage, which must have been an exceptionally fine one since it could handle the freight train of sound they were forcing through it and fill the room without adding harshness or distortion beyond what the musicians were producing at the source.

Borbetomagus, The Music Gallery, Toronto, 1989

What started as an assault began, as the minutes passed, to turn into something awesome in the strictest meaning of the word; a huge, breathing monolith of sound that - through some acoustic principle I'm not quite able to understand - used the room to produce extra harmonies that you could feel in your bones. As I moved around the group with my camera, you could feel it change in tone and intensity in different parts of the hall.

It remains, in my memory, one of the most indelible concert experiences I've ever witnessed - up there with Fela Kuti or Tackhead or Husker Du or the P-Funk All-Stars. I'm not sure my photos do it justice, but I've always cherished them as a document, though this the first time anyone has ever seen them. Another memory is that no one - neither the audience or the band - took any notice of me as I wandered the periphery of the stage shooting three rolls; it was as if everyone, onstage or off, was completely transfixed with the effort required to will that extra dimension of sound into the air.

I can't promise a recording will do justice to the experience, but see what you think - and don't say I didn't warn you.

 

Trimmings: Hands

THIS SERIES OF PHOTOS BEGAN WITH THE FACT THAT a regular roll of 35mm film has at least one or two more frames than fit comfortably into a standard negative storage sheet. For years that meant that, as a stingy young photographer, I'd save the extra, trimmed-off frames. After several years I became more relaxed with the penny-pinching, and would try to waste the first frame of every roll by taking a photo of my hand, held in front of my lens, to check that the auto focus was working.

The result was hundreds of photos of my left hand, either blurred or sharp, with perhaps a glimpse of grass or sidewalk or a corner of a hotel room behind it. I threw out most of them as I'd cut up rolls for sleeving, but near the end of the analog era, when I began letting photo lags process my negatives, I'd end up with a 4x6 machine print of my hand at the front of every set of proof prints.

This is a selection of just three of those proof prints, taken around a decade ago, with either my trusty Canon EOS Elan or the Elan 7e that replaced it. They're pictures of my hand, of course, but they're also relics from the last moments of film. It's not worth pointing out that I no longer take pictures of my hand.

It was actually part of a ritual: Squat down in front of the camera bag, unzip it, pull out the camera and mount the lens I thought I'd need; power up the camera, take off the lens cap, then hold my hand out and point the lens at it before squeezing off a quick frame. A precise sequence of actions that commenced every shoot I did for years.

You'll have to believe me that abandoning that ritual has made most of the work I've done since then feel less like a professional task and more ad hoc; more a hobby than a job. Which is probably true enough.

Because I'd usually hold my hand closer to the lens than the nearest focal distance, I'd hear the tiny servo motor in the autofocus lens rack in and out a couple of times, trying to find focus, before I'd press the shutter. It was like I was teasing the camera, frustrating it before letting the little machine I trusted so intimately do its job.

Mom

Agnes McGinnis née Murphy, Mount Dennis, early '40s

MY MOM LOVED BING CROSBY. Sure there might have been other singers, but for her it would always be Bing. When I was learning about jazz - thanks to a Benny Goodman sextet record I used to hear in a vintage clothing store - I asked her what she thought about Billie Holiday. She didn't like her, she told me. She had a lisp.

My mother and father were nearly sixty when they adopted me, so I never knew the woman in this photo, taken twenty years before, probably by my cousin Terry, the family photographer. She was stylish; she liked her clothes. She also liked dancing, and was a regular at places like the Maple Leaf and the Palais Royale, apparently. I would have liked to have met this woman.

Agnes and Marty McGinnis, Mount Dennis, 1946

I love this photo. It's from the trove of negatives I've been slowly scanning for the last few months. Judging from the expression in her eyes it was taken by my father, and like the photo at the top - and so many others - it was taken in the backyard of the house on Grandville. My brother still makes that face today.

My mother was nearly a senior citizen by the time my first real memories begin, so I never knew this woman - the young mother in her late thirties, newly married and finally starting the family that she and her husband had put off for years while they took care of their own ailing mothers. It's such a happy scene, and her pride in her baby and her husband radiates from the picture.

Agnes McGinnis, Mississauga, Christmas 1985

My own mother was ailing for most of my life - a misdiagnosed ailment that, in the end, was probably ALS. This was taken at my sister's house, on the second last Christmas she'd live to see, just a few months after I bought my first camera. A year later she'd be unable to leave her nursing home, and we'd drive from Caledon to visit her there. She was wrapped up in blankets on the couch in her room and barely spoke. A few weeks later she was gone.

I have a lot of regret, still, when I remember my mother. I wish I had been able to cope with the illness that gradually sapped her strength for years. I wish I had been a bit older, and able to see past my own chaotic life. I wish I'd had a chance to see her as the young, energetic woman in the old photos I've been scanning. She has a granddaughter now who carries her name. It was the least I could do.

 

Bruce

Bruce Weber, Toronto, Sept. 1987

IT TOOK SOME WORK TO GET A SHOOT WITH BRUCE WEBER. The photographer was in the first major flush of fame, and had arrived at the film festival with a movie, Broken Noses, about a young boxer named Andy Minsker. Access was tight but I summoned up whatever youthful charm and persistence I had at 23 and persuaded a publicist to give me a few minutes.

I had no interest in producing the same sort of high-styled beefcake photographyWeber was producing in his advertising campaigns, but I responded to the retro element in his work strongly enough for me to have something to talk to him about for about as long as it took for me to get a few minutes of interview on tape and a handful of decent portraits.

I don't remember a lot about the shoot except for the entourage of attractive young people who filled Weber's suite and followed him around at the festival - a group that included Minsker, future Tim Burton muse Lisa Marie and (I think) Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Bruce Weber, Toronto, Sept. 1987

At 23 I was dazzled by the fact that there was such a thing as a superstar photographer, and I'd be lying if I said that I didn't hope that it might be possible to have a fraction of this sort of success. In my cockroach-plagued bachelor apartment near Boystown with the darkroom I'd set up on a bunch of garbage bags on my desk, a photographer like Weber looked to be having the career I wanted.

I wasn't big on the shirtless dudes, but after seeing Broken Noses I jumped at the chance to shoot boxers, if only to measure myself up against Weber's work. Just a couple of years after buying my first camera, everything I did was about serving an apprenticeship, and if I wasn't doing that in a school, I could try to learn a few things through simple imitation.

Bruce Weber, Toronto, Sept. 1987

He might have scowled for most of my roll or two of film, but the shot above is a lot more like Weber actually was - surprisingly friendly and gracious. After running the gauntlet of reluctant publicists, when I actually made it into Weber's suite I was enthusiastically met by Weber and his wife, agent and collaborator, Nan Bush, who treated me with a solicitude and dignity that surprised a kid with his cameras stuffed into a bag with a broken zipper who tended to break into a cold sweat while trying to find some decent light.

A year later his film on Chet Baker, Let's Get Lost, helped turn me into a jazz fan, so in addition to the kind treatment, I can thank him for that.

  

Barbet

Barbet Schroeder, Toronto, Sept 1987

BARBET SCHROEDER WAS AT THE FILM FESTIVAL PROMOTING BARFLY. Charles Bukowski used to be a big deal among literary Gen-X types back then. I'm still not sure why. Schroeder and his film were a big deal for the Nerve readership, needless to say, so I made him a priority.

I recall him being friendly, even slightly bemused, or maybe I was just imagining how a Tehran-born French Swiss raised in Colombia and educated in the Lycee system who was a key figure in the Nouvelle Vague would react to a film festival in an ambitious but still very provincial city. I'm pretty sure this was shot in a room at the old Park Plaza (now Park Hyatt) with my old Mamiya C330 and whatever window light I could harness and bounce to give some approximation of high-key lighting.

Barbet Schroeder, Toronto, Sept. 1987

I don't remember much about Barfly, and while I've seen several of Schroeder's films since then, none of them are as memorable as any random five minutes of General Idi Amin Dada, his documentary masterpiece from the '70s. Schroeder has had, by anybody's yardstick, an interesting career, producing at least a dozen important films, playing cameos in everything from Beverly Hills Cop II to Mars Attacks! to Darjeeling Unlimited.

He's a consummate insider with friends apparently everywhere, and despite his role in the French New Wave, his own work is almost wholly lacking a signature style. He's made films that take a sympathetic look at killers and terrorist lawyers and drug cartel assassins, and recently directed an episode of Mad Men. He has a new film out this year.

These are simple portraits, and while they're very far from my best work, they're graphic and straightforward, which was an accomplishment for me at the time.

 

Some old pictures I didn't take: Double exposure

EVERYBODY LOVES A GOOD DOUBLE EXPOSURE. Well, nearly every photographer I know does; you really have to try to get a digital camera to double expose an image, and even film cameras have been mechanically foolproof for so long that an accident like this is rare to the point of being virtually impossible.

The poetry of a double exposure is how it evokes memory itself. We don't remember discrete images from the past but an overlap of memories, each one tipping into the other with some large or small overlap. A shot like this brings back several minutes in a memorable day, moments glimpse through each other like movements caught in a strobe light.

A wedding, of course, probably during the war or shortly afterward, judging by the fashions. My brother and I have stared long and hard at this shot; we're both pretty certain it's the backyard of the house on Grandville, and while my brother thinks it might be my dad's brother, Uncle Tommy, marrying Aunt Matty, I have a funny feeling it might be his sister, Helen, and her husband Tommy LaRose.

Whoever they are, they look happy, which is only right and proper.