Musicians

Holly Cole, Toronto, 1988

WITH THE END OF THIS BLOG IN SIGHT, I need to clean house a bit and post some photos that I've overlooked over the last four years. I've photographed a lot of musicians - they were very nearly my exclusive subject in my early years - so it makes sense that I have quite a few shots left over that, for some reason, didn't make it into previous posts or themed weeks of postings.

These shots span very nearly the whole of my career, starting with Nerve magazine in the mid-'80s and ending with the free weekly in the 2000s. Some of these musicians are famous; some are obscure. In at least one case, I couldn't tell you who they are. With the passage of time, perhaps some of these shots are of historical interest. The only thread tying them all together is that I shot them.

Tom Anselmi of Slow, RPM Club, Toronto, 1986

Vancouver's Slow have been, from pretty much the moment they broke up (not long after I took these photos) Canada's great lost band. Their brief career produced a single and an EP, both of which were incredible, and a string of live shows that became legendary for their reckless abandon and a complete lack of regard for consequences or career. They were an influence on the grunge scene south of the border in Seattle, and I'm fond of citing them as the band that did it right - one seminal record and out.

I shot the band on their only tour across the country, opening here for Soul Asylum. They were a compelling, glorious mess onstage, and after this gig ended up living in the apartment of the promoter, Elliot Lefko, for a month before heading back to Vancouver and breaking up. Somehow Elliot - still a fan despite the experience - managed to persuade them to reform and tour again this year. These are technically pretty iffy shots - I'd barely owned a camera for a year when I took them - but I've cherished them for years as an artifact of a moment that I witnessed, part of a small group of people who had the privilege.

A Neon Rome, Toronto, 1986

A Neon Rome, Toronto, 1987

A Neon Rome were one of my favorite local bands, a psychedelic post-punk outfit that put on unpredictable shows, at least one of which I remember involving Kevin, their former guitarist, throwing beer bottles at the lead singer. They managed to put out one record and record another (still unreleased) before breaking up, but not before Neal, the lead singer, had shaved his head and taken a vow of silence. Somehow it all made sense at the time.

I remembered photographing the whole group by the cenotaph next to St. James Cathedral one sunny summer afternoon, but had no memory at all of shooting three-fifths of the band in a park near Sherbourne Street with a roll of infrared film a year earlier. Everybody loved shooting with infrared film back then, and I shot just enough to figure out that it was a pain in the ass to work with, and rarely worth the trouble.

Brownie McGhee, Toronto, 1987

I was acutely aware that, as a music fan and a photographer, I had picked up a camera just past the moment when it would have been possible to capture countless music legends while they were still alive and touring. With that in mind, I tried whenever I could to get anyone who'd say yes in front of my camera. That's how Chris Buck and I ended up crouching shoulder to shoulder shooting John Lee Hooker backstage before a show, and how I got these photos of singer and guitarist Brownie McGhee in the alleyway behind the Horseshoe Tavern.

McGhee was famous for playing alongside harmonica player Sonny Terry during the blues revival of the '60s, but when I took these photos Terry had died and McGhee was touring on his own when he wasn't working at his alternate career as an actor in films like Angel Heart and TV shows like Matlock. His brother was Stick McGhee and his mentor had been Blind Boy Fuller and I approached him with obvious awe - one of the few living links to a blues tradition that disappeared in my lifetime.

David Lee Roth, Toronto, 1988

Back when he'd just left Van Halen, my buddy Tim Powis and I developed a weird affection for David Lee Roth and his Vegas-bound high camp version of '80s hair metal. For some perverse reason, Nerve editor Dave MacIntosh not only played along with our little obsession but decided to put Roth on the cover of his painfully hip alternative rock magazine. Roth's record company - probably for perfectly sane reasons - declined to give Tim and I alone time with the singer, so our cover story comprised a tape I made during Roth's Toronto press conference and these shots I took from the floor at his feet.

It's worth pointing out that I don't have a single frame on the whole contact sheet where Roth's mouth is closed. He sat down and began a non-stop spiel that barely took a break for questions from the assembled press. I'm aware now (and probably could have figured out then) that Roth was in the thick of his cocaine period. Years later I became a huge fan of the adult cartoon series Metalocalypse, and it wasn't a challenge to figure out that Dr. Rockso, the Rock and Roll Clown ("I do cocaine!") was based on the late '80s Roth.

Aswad, Toronto, 1988

I don't have a lot of worthwhile photos from my time working for Graffiti magazine, the glossy monthly that rolled into Toronto from Montreal in the late '80s and hired most of Nerve before flaming out after the market crash. Most of the acts I shot for the magazine were pretty forgettable (Hipsway, Faster Pussycat, Balaam & The Angel,Teenage Head without Frankie Venom) or marred by being promo ads featuring the subjects reading a copy of the magazine.

A rare exception is this shoot with British reggae band Aswad. They were, by this point, down to a trio and years past their prime as the group who made their first dub-heavy albums for Mango Records, but they had a great look with their hats, dreads and blousey black leather jackets and I managed to shoot at least one or two technically acceptable frames of them in the closest thing I could manage like high key lighting in the lobby of the magazine's offices.

Holly Cole, Toronto, 1988

Holly Cole is a bit of a legend here in Canada, but when I took these photos she was barely known outside of Toronto's clubs, where she'd been singing with avant garde jazz outfits like Whitenoise and her trio with bassist David Piltch and pianist Aaron Davis. This shoot was the first entry in the Big Ledger - an assignment from former Nerve editor Nancy Lanthier after she moved on to edit Music Scene, a trade magazine.

This is the precise point where my apprenticeship had ended and I began thinking that I might make a living taking photos. (Two entries later is a gig taking photos of a Chrysler dealership.) I don't know if I shot this in my Parkdale studio or if I went to where Cole was, but I managed to find a clean, blank white wall behind her, with my single flash head bounced into an umbrella. This is one of my earliest attempts at an Irving Penn photo, and it's not bad considering what a neophyte I was. It's also one of my earliest "eyes closed" portraits.

The Unsane rehearsing, NYC, 1990

I met New York's Unsane when the band came through town with Boss Hog, the band Cristina Martinez formed with her husband Jon Spencer after she left Pussy Galore. Two-thirds of the Unsane were Cristina's rhythm section, and after the whole touring package crashed at my loft, I put up Pete, Charlie and Chris again when they passed through town on their own; my salient memory of that night is Charlie and some girl screwing on my kitchen floor.

We became friends and when I passed through New York on a trip visiting my then-girlfriend, I asked the band if I could shoot them rehearsing in the Lower East Side basement space they shared with Boss Hog and the self-destructing Pussy Galore. The light was dim but I didn't care, since I was experimenting with long exposures and blurs at the time. It's a nice snapshot of the first lineup of the band; Charlie would die of an overdose two years later.

Alex Patterson of The Orb, Parkdale, 1991

Just as I once documented quite a few early hip hop legends, I also surprise myself sometimes with reminders that I was a big fan of the sometimes trippy, sometimes noisy techno coming out of the UK at the beginning of the '90s. My lifelong aversion to crowds and dislike of communal drug use - there was no way I was going to take anything called "the love drug" - meant that I listened to my 808 State, Orbital and Guy Called Gerald records alone, at home.

I was a particular fan of The Orb, the leading light of the chill out scene, centred around former Killing Joke roadie Alex Patterson. His records were daft and full of prog rock references and when I learned that he was going to be in town promoting a new record, I begged someone - it might have been my friend Tim, working for HMV magazine - to let me do a shoot with Patterson. I took this photo in my Parkdale studio, lighting him with a soft box from below and shooting cross-processed film.

Renegade Soundwave, Parkdale, 1991

I used cross-processed film again - this time colour negative through slide chemistry - to shoot another British techno outfit, Renegade Soundwave. They're a pretty obscure name today, but the band were huge in the clubs at the time with tracks like "Biting My Nails" and "Cocaine Sex." I saw them play live at The Opera House, a small hall in the east end, and vividly recall that the bass bins were so loud that my sternum ached at the end of the night.

More lighting from below, and another scanned file that needed hours of adjustments to look halfway decent. I probably should have saved my experiments for test subjects, but I wanted to keep the learning curve going for as long as possible at this point in my career, while I desperately searched for some way into something like a personal style.

Angelo from Fishbone & Maynard from Tool, Lollapalooza, Chicago, 1993

Back when NOW magazine had a generous travel budget to send photographers all over North America for shoots, I was put on a plane to Chicago to shoot two of the bands on the bill at Lollapalooza, a sensation at the time, and in its third year as a touring festival. It was my first time in Chicago, and I was flown in a day early, spending a night in the city before catching a cab the next day to the World Music Theater (now the Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre) in Tinley Park, Illinois.

Out of all the bands on the bill - the headliners that year were Primus and Alice in Chains - the editors at the paper had chosen to showcase Fishbone and Tool. I'd been a fan of Fishbone since Nerve days and had shot them countless times, though never to my satisfaction, but I'd only just heard of Tool. I photographed the lead singers for both bands, Angelo Moore and Maynard James Keenan, in the tour bus parking lot; this shot was meant for the inside of the paper, and for fans of either (or both) bands, might be something of a rarity. (As I write this, Keenan is having his #MeToo moment, which probably tarnishes my photo's value.)

Mystery band, Parkdale, 1996

These photos are a mystery. I can clearly remember the circumstances of the shoot: Someone - I'm not sure who - phoned me at the last minute to tell me that they wanted to send a band over to my studio. They sounded desperate and it was a bit of a favour, so I was able to exact a promise that I'd be allowed to shoot them exactly the way I wanted. In this case, I insisted on shooting each member of the band individually, with a proviso that the shots would run in a grid.

I had a series of set-ups I'd sketched out in a notepad that had never been tried, so I inserted each member of the group into them, using a white backdrop, my favorite barn board tabletop and a few props I had sitting around the studio. I shot precisely six frames of each setup over two rolls, tweaking each frame slightly. Everything went off pretty much as I hoped, but I never wrote the name of the band on the sleeves where I filed the slides and there's no note at all about the job in the Big Ledger. If anyone out there recognizes this very Weezer-esque mid-'90s alt-rock outfit, please drop me a line.

Kevin Moon, Moonstarr, Toronto, 1997

The Toronto music scene was actually pretty interesting in the late '90s, when technology was just starting to make major record labels pointless. Kevin Moon was a DJ who made records under the name Moonstarr, and ran a record label, Public Transit Recordings. The name of the label was inspired by his love of the city's transit system, which is actually a pretty fucking Toronto thing.

I photographed Moon for NOW magazine in his apartment near the university, surrounded by his recording gear. Things were looking pretty plain until he reached for a Chinese throwing star, which I asked him to hold up close to my wide angle lens. It was just about the best sort of portrait of a DJ that I could imagine at the time. Moon moved to Montreal in the 2000s, where he still does shows and remixes.

Raggadeath, Toronto, 1997

Another interesting band in the city at the time was Raggadeath - a mash-up group that featured members from Toronto's industrial, rock and hip hop scenes, including rapper Michie Mee, who I'd photographed years earlier when the city's hip hop artists finally managed to break into the mainstream. They got their records released in Canada, Europe and Australia but never the U.S., so they always seemed to be playing overseas more than here.

I met the band at the Beverly Tavern on Queen West, a venerable hangout for local musicians, now long gone. In the throes of my collage period, I took them out to the alleyway next to the bar and shot the band in segments, putting the final shots together with tape on a sheet of typewriter paper for Irene at NOW. I still think this was the best way to shoot a large band, as the law of averages dictates that, with more frames to choose from, you're more likely to catch everyone with their eyes open.

Foo Fighters, Toronto, 2005

I didn't shoot a lot of music for the free daily. Apart from a few big concerts like Madonna and Coldplay, I can only remember a handful of band portraits, including this one of the Foo Fighters, sadly during the period when former Germs member Pat Smear wasn't in the group. (I'm not the world's biggest Foo Fighters fan, but I loved the Germs.)

My vague memory is that I shot the band at their record company's offices, somewhere in Liberty Village. This old loading dock door was the best backdrop I could find, and I simply placed the band in front of it and shot until I thought I likely had at least one usable frame. It's a competent but rather dull band photo - sort of like the Foo Fighters.

Beastie Boys, Toronto, July 2006

I photographed the Beastie Boys for the first time years ago - a shambolic encounter in a downtown nightclub during a promo tour for License To Ill where they felt obliged to act like idiots (though even then their heart obviously wasn't in it.) I'd have included some of those shots here if I could find them, but since they've gone missing I can only post this shot, taken nearly twenty years later in the penthouse suite of a boutique hotel.

Their current record, To The Five Boroughs, had come out two years previous so I'm not sure what they were in town promoting. Adam "Ad-Rock" Horowitz still had a little mugging left in him but by then they were a group of men in the open fields of middle age, and very different from the gurning delinquents I could barely corral for a handful of photos. Six years later the group would finally break up after Adam "MCA" Yauch's death by cancer. I had to work hard to get this halfway workable frame from the shoot, which suffered from difficult lighting, at the very least.

Sebadoh

Sebadoh, Parkdale, Toronto, Sept. 1994

SHOOTING BANDS CAN BE A PAIN IN THE ASS. Even when it isn't, it's always a challenge, for a lot of reasons, but it's probably best expressed in a mathematical formula that states that photographing two people is roughly twice as hard as shooting one, and that every extra person added to the equation makes the difficulty increase exponentially.

I have a bunch of band photos waiting to be scanned, but I thought that before I start barreling down the home stretch of the '90s (and the effective zenith of my professional career,) I should get them out of the way. For no particular reason I thought I'd start with Lou Barlow, who I photographed twice - once when he was part of the original lineup of Dinosaur Jr., and again when his band Sebadoh were approaching their critical and commercial heyday.

Dinosaur Jr. Toronto, Sept. 1987

There's not much I can say about my Dinosaur Jr. shoot, done for Nerve magazine at very near the beginning of my career and the edge of my competence. The band were faves around the office thanks to Tim Powis' championing of You're Living All Over Me and "Little Fury Things" in particular. They were playing the back room of the Cameron House, and I showed up during soundcheck to get a portrait.

They weren't wildly enthusiastic about doing a photo shoot and neither was I, judging by the evidence. I found the only workable spot of light in the room, posed them around a stack of Marshall heads and banged off less than a dozen frames. In my defense, I was very poor at the time and economizing on film for John Lee Hooker's show later that night, on the off chance I might corner the blues legend for a portrait. Thirty years later, I stand by my decision.

Sebadoh, Parkdale, Toronto, Sept. 1994

Seven years later, and with the grunge tidal wave raising the boats for a lot of generally unrelated but interesting indie bands, Barlow's Sebadoh was getting a lot of press. I'm pretty certain I shot them for the Village Voice, but there's nothing in the big ledger so it's just a guess. (It definitely wasn't for NOW magazine.)

Sebadoh's reputation was for being contrarians - aggressively independent but bitterly sarcastic about the indie rock scene. Their proud unwillingness to make themselves palatable to major labels or a broader audience gave them enormous credibility, and their latest record, Bakesale, was a big favorite with the critics. (Writer RJ Smith wrote about the band for the Voice that year, so perhaps this shoot was meant to accompany that story.)

Sebadoh, Parkdale, Toronto, Sept. 1994

The assignment was a big enough deal that they were persuaded to go to my Parkdale studio for the shoot. I fully expected them to be wary and even distracted in front of the camera, so I didn't bother with careful lighting or an elaborate composition, but crammed the three of them onto the art deco love seat I'd recently bought on credit and parked in my studio.

Barlow and Jason Loewenstein mostly regarded me and my camera dubiously for most of the four rolls I shot, when they weren't cracking each other up. Drummer Bob Fay was the exception, fidgeting and acting up like the kid with ADHD in your middle school, so he ended up being a focal point of sorts. Today, the bottom shot comes across like my "yacht rock" take on the band.

It's an alright shoot - a brute simple exercise in problem solving with a difficult subject. I can't help but look at it fondly nowadays; the love seat is in our basement today, covered in junk and cat scratches, and I moved out of my Parkdale studio nearly twenty years ago. The rented backdrop of painted clouds was my favorite - I wish I'd bought it when Vistek cleared it out of their rental inventory.

West

Train Station, Banff, Alberta

CROSSING THE CANADIAN ROCKIES FOR THE FIRST TIME was probably a bigger deal than it should have been. Nonetheless, I was over fifty when I finally managed it earlier this month, on a travel junket to take the Rocky Mountaineer luxury train from Vancouver to Banff. It's a trip that it seems most Canadian have wanted to take, and I was lucky to do it for work.

I love trains. They're the perfect balance between a car and a plane - you get to cover distances and see the sights while someone else does the driving and navigating. Taking a train with a gourmet kitchen and a glass-domed roof enhances this comparative advantage, of course, and it goes without saying that I took a lot of pictures.

Vancouver, BC

As a city, Vancouver is often described by Canadians as the anti-Toronto - coastal and laid-back instead of lakeside and work-obsessed. That might have been true at one point, but both cities have been experiencing real estate booms for so long that their differences have been minimized; making the money to afford to live there has become enough of a common endeavor that I imagine Vancouverites need to get a glimpse of the mountains every now and then to remember where they are.

I didn't get to see a lot of the town apart from a couple of walks down to the water from my hotel, but my travel media status did get me out onto the roof of the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver to photograph the skyline from behind the magnificent carved gargoyles that have been brooding over the town for over seventy years.

Nancy Lanthier, Vancouver Art Gallery

If you've read this blog regularly, you'll know that I got my start as a photographer thanks to Nerve magazine, a ragged little music monthly published by the couple I usually referred to as the aggregate "Dave and Nancy." The end of Dave and Nancy also meant the end of Nerve, and Nancy eventually made her way to Vancouver. I hadn't seen her for years so when I knew I'd be passing through town I had to get together with her again.

While I feel older, grayer and fatter, Nancy didn't seem to have changed at all - still lovely, and full of the same enthusiasm and curiosity that have always made her so charming. We met in the hotel lobby and drank beer on the patio of the Vancouver Art Gallery next door, where I took a quick portrait of Nancy amidst the columns and umbrellas.

Alex Waterhouse-Hayward in his Kitsilano studio

An afternoon free also gave me a chance to meet someone whose work has been inspiring not only to my photography but to this blog in particular. When I started scanning my old photos and putting them online almost three years ago, Alex Waterhouse-Hayward's long-running website was the best model for this kind of thing I'd ever seen, so I had to ask if he had an hour or two free when I passed through his (adopted) hometown.

Alex began working as a professional over a decade before I did, and got to experience ten more years of what was probably editorial photography's last golden era. We talked about that, among other things, at his home in Kitsilano, where he and his wife Rosemary were kind enough to invite me for coffee and pastry. At the end of my visit he took me out to his studio, where I asked him if he'd sit for a quick portrait; I shot him looking back through the door of his shooting space to the filing cabinets where he keeps his work meticulously archived.

Rocky Mountains, British Columbia

Shooting from a moving train requires a steep learning curve; a steady hand isn't as important as timing - getting your camera out and ready when a new vista sweeps into view, and keeping one eye open for the break in the trees to get an unobstructed frame. There was a lot to shoot, and I had to suppress my street photographer's aversion to the scenic with the justification that I rarely get to photograph anything really spectacular, so it was time to relax into the picture postcard majesty of it all.

Railyard workshop, Kamloops, BC

Lake Louise, Banff National Park, Alberta

I felt much more at home in the Kamloops railyard where the Rocky Mountaineer services their trains - a step off the beaten tourist path that I'd requested to see as part of my story on the effort and logistics that go into a luxury train. We also made a quick trip to Lake Louise after reaching Banff - one of the most iconic locations in Canada, and one that I perversely responded to with this photo of a stone wall buried in late winter snow.

Fenland Trail, Banff, Alberta

After two days on a crowded train I had an urge to escape crowds, so with an afternoon free I took a short hike on the Fenland Trail just outside Banff. Our host in the town helpfully told me that the recent grizzly warning for the trail had been taken down, so I got to enjoy the crisp, pine-scented air with only the slightest terror of predatory wildlife. We ended the evening of our final day in the mountains overlooking the town; I shot some scenic vistas, to be sure, but inevitably my eye was drawn to something a bit more man-made.

Sulfur Mountain, Banff, Alberta

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.

   

Live: Red Hot Chili Peppers, 1986

Flea, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lee's Palace, Toronto, Dec. 3, 1986

I HAVE OFTEN WONDERED IF THE EMBRACE OF FUNK BY PUNK BANDS in the '80s was as much a matter of demographic survival as a mere musical trend. By the time third generation punk rock turned into hardcore and began policing itself with movements like Straight Edge, the sarcastic rejection of sex as lyrical subject, marketing tool and a stage persona by first wave punk bands (John Lydon: "Love is 2 minutes and 52 seconds of squelching noises.") had turned into a dour, anhedonic sausage party in the scene dominated by Minor Threat and Maximum Rocknroll magazine.

Rediscovering funk - awkwardly at first with bands like the Gang of Four, the Pop Group, the Bush Tetras, more joyously with the Big Boys, the Minutemen and the Chili Peppers - gave all those self-consciously intense boys and the girls lingering at the fringes an excuse to turn a mosh pit back into a dance floor again. So we have the Red Hot Chili Peppers to thank for letting all those college rock fans find their ass and figure out what to do with it.

If nothing else, it probably put them in a frame of mind that led to breeding, and guaranteed that a further generation would be born to parents who would forever roll their eyes at whatever "noise" their precious offspring brought home and mutter to each other that Generic by Flipper was still way more radical.

I shot the Red Hot Chili Peppers the first time they passed through Toronto, after they'd already released two records, and a year and a half after I'd bought my first camera. I would never have imagined that they'd still be a going concern thirty years later.

Antony Kiedis, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lee's Palace, Toronto, Dec. 3, 1986

Hillel Slovak, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lee's Palace, Toronto, Dec. 3, 1986

While I barely knew how to use my camera for this Nerve assignment, I was still ambitious enough that I was using "flash and burn" to try to get some impression of the energy and movement of a gig on film. I don't know where I first saw examples of the technique, but it was embraced by people documenting music scenes all over the place, from Glen Friedman in Los Angeles to Charles Peterson in Seattle.

"I wanted people to experience what it was like being there; the sweat, the noise, being pushed against each other," as Charles Peterson recalled. There was nothing new about the look of letting ambient light burn onto the film after the flash caught a bit of action, but in dimly lit, overheated clubs it was both appropriate and forgiving, filling in black space with streaks and tails of light. If I couldn't be sure that I could produce a sharp, well-framed concert photo, at least I knew a way I could leave the gig with photos that hinted at the rude energy of the bands.

Flea. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lee's Palace, Toronto, Dec. 3, 1986

I shot a single roll from the front of the stage, and in the video of the show shot that night, you can catch a shadowy glimpse of me with my camera off to the left, just in front of Flea. Unfortunately I'd run out of film and retreated to the bar and my friends by the time the band came out for an encore with tube socks on their junk - a trademark bit of stage business that I should have anticipated.

Not great photos by any means; I was still a novice with my equipment and timid about getting a good place between the band and the crowd. The framing is rudimentary, and the negatives thick and kludgy - I had a lot to learn about both composition and developing. It is, however, an OK document of the first, "classic" lineup of the Chili Peppers. Guitarist Hillel Slovak would be dead of an overdose a year and a half later.

  

Richard

Richard Kern, Toronto, April 2,1988

THIS WAS THE LAST PHOTO SHOOT I DID FOR NERVE MAGAZINE. I posed Richard Kern in front of the cinema screen on the stage in the backroom at the Rivoli, placed my flash in an umbrella just behind my right shoulder and shot a couple of rolls with my Mamiya C330. My friend Tim had done the interview with Kern, just after a screening of his short films, including Fingered, which showed me more of Lydia Lunch than I was probably prepared to see at that point.

I was rather proud of the results. Even the slight blur - the result of opening the shutter long enough to let some of the ambient stage light bleed into the frame - was actually intentional this time, an effect I hoped would give an uneasy edge to a rather simple, formally composed shot. One of these frames was made into a halftone and laid out on the flats with Tim's story, but that issue of Nerve never hit the presses, and this is the first time anyone has seen these shots.

Kern was famous - infamous, probably - for a series of films starring luminaries of the American pre-grunge indie scene doing violent, often unspeakable things with each other. He was a favorite of bands like Sonic Youth and Pussy Galore, who either appeared in his films or used his photos on their record sleeves. Kern directed the video for Sonic Youth's "Death Valley '69."

He was, as far as I can tell, mostly an arty, conceptual pornographer. In the intervening years the arty and conceptual bits have mostly diminished and he's become a straight up pornographer that specializes in the sort of young women who can be cast out of any major city with a college or two and enough clubs to sustain a music scene. This has less to do with Kern changing what he does than pornography getting better at targeting its audiences, and that school of "sex-positive" feminism that's conditionally rehabilitated slightly arty porn.

Richard Kern, Toronto, April 2,1988

We were a morbid little subculture back in the '80s. The lionization of the cultural "dark shit" from the post-Beat era had lingered long enough to find avid fans in at least part of Generation X, and bookshelves I'd peruse at parties and band houses often contained the usual smattering of Burroughs, Selby and Jim Thompson novels, peppered with Harry Crews, J.G. Ballard and Kathy Acker for the more committed. (I would end up shooting portraits of four of these six writers.)

We liked to make a big show of believing the worst about authority figures, starting with Reagan and Thatcher and moving all the way down to priests, teachers, bus drivers and the local BIA. It was hardly a brave new roster of targets, but we loved to have it confirmed, and our favorite bands were happy to contribute to the theatrical cynicism.

Big Black's "Jordan, Minnesota" was about a small town where two dozen adults had been arrested as part of an organized ring of child abuse and murder - part of a rash of similar, wildly lurid cases of satanic child abuse networks in small towns and preschools that hit the headlines in the late '80s, the most famous of which was the McMartin Preschool case. They turned out to be almost wholly false - a classic example of a witch hunt encouraged by zealous prosecutors and an overeager media, but plea bargains led to convictions and innocent people served years, even decades, in jail despite their cases being revealed as hoaxes long ago.

I'm not sure if Steve Albini from Big Black has ever apologized for "Jordan, Minnesota," but there was something dismal and lazy about our assumption that these stories were true, mostly because they confirmed our worst - and most cherished - fantasies. In retrospect it made a lot of us seem a lot less intelligent - and certainly a lot more gullible - than we thought we were.

Richard Kern, Toronto, April 2, 1988

It would take a few years for this to become clear, and when I look back at the Nerve years, I wonder if my critical faculties might have been sharpened with something more like skepticism and less like mere cynicism. In any case, my time at Nerve - really barely three years - has come to contain the most vivid memories of being young. Which isn't to say that I was left more mature after the paper folded as much as Nerve provided me with a time, a place, the a group of people with whom I could make the sort of breakthroughs - and mistakes - that youth only lets you make once or twice.

I probably didn't know that Nerve was over when I took this shot. Dave carried around the flats for this issue of the paper for months, trying to get together the money to pay for the printers after he and Nancy had broken up and she'd moved on. Tim and I were proud of our work on the Kern piece, but by the summer of '88 we knew it would never come out, and I found myself without a venue or a place that let me learn so much, so fast. It was really like the college graduation I'd never had.

I have a few odds and ends from the Nerve years left to scan, but this is the effective end of my record of that period in my career. The next year or two would be a lot more insecure, as I had to step up as a freelancer, with an odd roster of clients like Graffiti, the Village Voice, Guitar World, the Financial Times and Toronto Life Fashion. At the end of it all was my first work for NOW magazine, the client that would dominate my career for nearly the whole of the '90s.

I was bitter about Nerve for quite a few years after it was over, mostly because it was my school and my soapbox and my first taste of an audience and a bit of local fame. I hate endings, and Nerve's rather abrupt end felt unfair. Now I feel nothing but gratitude for getting such a rare chance to develop what even I didn't imagine as a talent, in public, and with such an inspiring group of people. I wish every anxious young person with a camera could have their own Nerve, and I feel sorry for those who don't.