1970-1979

The music business had moved west, as some said civilization had, to settle in Los Angeles. I returned to L.A. quite simply because I had run short of money. From Los Angeles came the “new music,” the singer-songwriters, all American. They had been young men and women when The Beatles first appeared. Now, with The […]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWo6Fti8Tdc&feature=youtube_gdata_player Meanwhile Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s Vice-president and mouthpiece for political attack (with his atrocious alliterations, ”nattering nabobs of negativism”) became the first Vice-president in American history forced to resign for criminal charges while in office. Nixon resigned in disgrace as well. Surely the cynicism and hypocrisy was obvious, even to the ”moral majority.” FROM AN […]

For two years I continued. I photographed Deniece Williams. I photographed the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Every picture had its story, didn’t it? For Earth, Wind & Fire truckloads of sand were spread across a sound stage floor. Forty thousand watts of light were used, arcing and firing mysteriously. I pretended I was Field Marshal Rommel. […]

The importance of this ability for an album to deliver a crafted, dramatic experience cannot be overemphasized. Music was the platform, the glue that held my generation together, that spoke to us, inspired us. Even when the promise within the music, whatever it really was, seemed to fall apart, and some distanced themselves and others […]

In 1971 I went briefly on the road with Carlos Santana and his band. It was an almost schizophrenic experience. For one, the thing that most often connected me directly to the music – the output of the singer songwriter – was not a factor. Santana the group was more overtly just about the music, […]

“With Pete Townshend at the wheel, the six-liter Mercedes was traveling up the Ml north of London at speeds approaching 130 miles per hour and never, it seemed to me, below 110. I watched from the rear seat as we overtook cars driving on the motorway as if they were parked. Townshend was talking animatedly […]

http://youtu.be/5_swaxOidGU Soon I take a plane into the heartland of the United States, joining friends who are crossing America in a battered ’62 Buick, their possessions filling every spare-nook, the dog’s nose hanging out the open window. We drive through blizzards in a deserted Yellowstone, fish for trout by yellowing aspen in the Colorado Rockies, […]

The “big package,” it turned out, was the Ode Records production of Tommy. Indeed, as a product it was a bit like the rock equivalent of Ben Hur with an all-star cast. The original Tommy, the brain child of Pete Townshend and The Who, was the self-proclaimed first rock opera. It was The Who’s first […]

In February 1973, the Vietnam War — the longest war in American history to that point — is drawing to an end. More than any war before it (except the Civil War), it confused and divided the American people, forced many to disavow their government, become cynical of its intentions. It led to the beatings […]