1960-1969

‘Drugs. With America tearing itself apart, split down the middle about everything, everybody pointing a finger at everybody else, there was no way anyone in the counterculture was about to admit that drugs were a problem. Drugs were what first turned a lot of people on. The nightmare consequences of marijuana as conjured up by […]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqvSXc4WU8c&feature=youtube_gdata_player “Back in America, 1969. When the year began, the American troop strength in Vietnam was reaching its peak: 550,000 men. Thirty thousand Americans had been killed and more than 20,000 others would be. In the previous year, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy had both been assassinated. At the Chicago Democratic National Convention […]

For FULL SCREEN click on video bar controller. “In San Francisco on the radio they’re playing Honky Tonk Woman, with the distinctive cowbell beginning, the drum intro, with the guitar coming in chunk, chunk- chunk, low down and dirty, and I feel proud that I was involved. When I first hear this I am waiting […]

Mick, Keith, Charlie, Bill, and the new one, Mick Taylor, come out on stage. Brian’s death is on everyone’s mind. Mick pauses and asks for silence. He quotes Shelley: “Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep — He hath awakened from the dream of life.” So, Mick, no doubt unwittingly, adds to […]

http://youtu.be/iDXlgWoDKEU (Ethan Russell is in background of clip changing lenses.) “I scrambled madly about the rooftop, changing angles, for if I was focused on Paul I would, of course, be missing John (and George and Ringo) and vice versa. It was a typically high-overcast, gray London day. In terms of photographic light, it was quite […]

“Jim Morrison, seemed the perfect subject for the Granada show. He had a reputation as an angry young man, and some called him the “American Mick Jagger.” As the show began, Morrison came out dressed in his normal costume (WARDROBE) of black leather trousers and jacket and white shirt. He seemed to me somewhat puffy-faced. […]

For FULL SCREEN click in video bar. “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, […]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70tF-9Uf-Mk&feature=youtube_gdata_player “The next day the first thing we do is buy a stereo and a copy of Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? To be “experienced” – I am at the time certain about what this means – is to understand purple haze, amplified feedback, and the extension of time. From the album cover Hendrix, flanked […]

For FULL SCREEN click below “Some months earlier, Jon visited me in the flat I was then renting in Kensington Court. I’d shown him some of my writing, which he said was good. This was a great compliment to me. Before he left I’d also shown Jon some photographs I had taken in California. They […]

“Photograph Mick Jagger? Why, I remember in college, driving down the California highways in my VW bus, hair just beginning to grow over my collar, an Indian brass bell and hawk feather hanging off the rearview mirror, and the dashboard painted light purple polka dots, the color I was into then, singing at the very […]