The entrancing show is taking place at The Music Photo Gallery all through March.
“My philosophy is that rock ‘n’ roll is about the freedom to express your feelings very loudly in public. It’s all about that moment when everybody is screaming ‘Yay!’ and nobody is thinking about anything else. That’s what I try to capture in my pictures,” explains the legendary rock photographer Bob Gruen. And boy, does he succeed! When I stepped into his breathtaking show of vintage prints made between 1971 and 1982 at the Music Photo Gallery in Soho, New York, I couldn’t think of anything else but the pictures. I was entranced.
It’s unlike any photo show you’ve seen before. Like paintings, you really should see the photos in person. Reproduction doesn’t do them justice. They transcend rock photography and sit properly in the realm of art. Not only are all the images of these rock ‘n’ roll icons—Tina Turner, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Led Zeppelin, The Sex Pistols, Debbie Harry, even Alice Cooper with Salvador Dali— knockouts (and many that will be familiar to you), there is something unusual about the prints—each one unique— themselves. They are all black and white but have a soft, almost golden hue. The surface appears matte, but when you get close, you notice that in fact, it glitters faintly, seductively, almost like a perfectly powdered face, which gives the pictures an understated touch of glamour. The elegance is unexpected in this raw, visceral and popular art form.
John Paul Jones, John Bonham, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin in front of plane in NY. July 24, 1973. By Bob Gruen.
Each 30 x 40-inch silver gelatin print is unique. Printed on oversized paper, they were processed normally, but while still wet, they were wrapped around a Masonite board, glued and taped down on the back. The very first of these special prints, six to eight shots of Tina Turner, were shown at the lobby of the Beacon Theatre, in 1971, when Ike and Tina Turner performed for four days. Then came a group show at Westbeth Artists Housing (the only federal government subsidized artists’ housing in the country, which Gruen had managed to get into in 1970), resulting in his first New York Times review: “Gruen is one of those privileged intermediaries between the gods and heroes of the counterculture and us. He has actually been in the presence, camera in hand, and has come back with pictures to prove to us that John and Yoko exist…” And then finally, in 1982, more photos were added to create a big show at Studio 54 before the photo lab closed. (A casualty when the owner who produced these prints ran away with the salesclerk, and his wife, who hated him, shut down the lab.) “I’ve never seen anybody else with them—I assume I wasn’t the only one, but I never saw any other prints made like that,” explained Gruen. Since then, these photos have been in storage without budging until now. “The fact that they are not all faded is a testament to how well made they are,” he noted.
When I spoke to him, he told me the wonderful story of how it all started with the amazing photo of Tina Turner in this show, in 1971:
A friend of ours said I had to go see them [Ike and Tina Turner]. So we went to see them at the Felt Forum… and I thought that Tina Turner was the most amazing performer I’d ever seen in my life. I was mesmerized. She danced off the stage at the end of the show while the strobe lights were flashing so you’d just see figures of her in all different strobe moments, in different places. I was totally struck. I remember when [the following act] came on… I was still looking at the curtain where Tina disappeared. I was just so taken.
Lucky for me, they played in a few shows in the New York area that week. A couple of days later, they played at the Honca Monca room in Queens. “Honca Monca,” that’s two words—you can’t make that up— an old funky club, [with] a linoleum floor, [and] a stage about a foot and half high, and I was sitting on the floor taking pictures.
It was the first time I took a camera to somebody I didn’t know and just took pictures of somebody I thought fascinating. I knew at the end of the show, the strobe light [would] start flashing. I only had four or five frames left in the camera and I had no idea if it would work or…not, but I thought if I had a one second exposure [during the strobe], maybe I could get several images of Tina in one picture. I had five exposures. The other four are useless because there is one image here and one image there…but that one in the middle, everything just lined up. [This picture with] five images of Tina has been compared to Duchamp’s “Nude Descending A Staircase.” Everything is going on. You’re not exactly sure what, but you know it’s exciting. And Tina is very clear. You see five clear individual faces. I remember it coming up in the development room, when I first made a print of it. I remember seeing the negative, but it was kind of dark. I thought, this might be good. Then I made a print, and I thought, wow, I think this is good. I developed it and I had it dried, and I thought, Wow, I really got a good picture! But that night I also got four or five other really good pictures.
Then the luck of my life happened because we went to see Ike and Tina two days later in Jersey where they played in a theatre in the round so the dressing rooms were outside. I had no contact with Ike and Tina, but as we were walking out of the theatre, my friend saw Ike walking from one trailer to the other and she literally pushed me in front of Ike and said, Show Ike the pictures! and Ike stopped and said, What pictures? I handed him the pictures and he said, These are really good pictures. I’ve got to show this to Tina. He took me into the dressing room. Tina liked the pictures. They even started looking at the contacts and liking everything. I was having trouble breathing. He said, Meet me Monday in New York and I’ll introduce you to the publicist.
And it’s funny how connections come together, because two days later, they played at the Newport Jazz Festival. We drove up there to see it. I actually have pictures of them on stage that day in Newport. Driving home in my little VW (we were like four or five people stuffed in a Volkswagon) as we were driving out of Newport, my friends fell asleep. We were about to get onto the highway and I stopped in the first place to get a cup of coffee—it’s a four hour drive back to NY. So, I pull into the parking lot, I step out of the car and two limousines pull into the two spaces next to me. I’m standing there, and Ike and Tina step out of those limos. Ike said to me, Didn’t I see you last night? Yeah, I came up to see the show, I answered. He said, Come here, have breakfast! That’s how I started meeting the band. And then on Monday I went to see him. He didn’t actually take me, but he sent me to a guy named Marv Greifinger, who was the publicist at Universal Music. He said, Okay, Ike told me to buy some pictures from you. These are really great pictures, but we don’t have a budget to buy pictures. Maybe once in a while, we hire someone to take a publicity photo, but we don’t need publicity photos. We have photos of Ike and Tina. I said, But Ike said I should bring them here! He said, OK, I’ll give you $75 for these ten pictures. And that was my first deal to a record company.
Better than that, Marv was literally my neighbor around the corner, on Bank Street. He invited me to a party of a guy named Lenny Baron, a designer, a very flamboyant kind of guy on Elizabeth Street, and I met Jane Freedman of the Howl Gallery, who managed Patti Smith for years, and I met a guy named Billy Smith. Billy Smith was a kind of wild, mad publicist and he brought me to MCA records and convinced somebody that I had to take pictures of this new up and coming piano player from England and I remember the record company thought nobody needed to. Nobody knew who he was. Billy said, But if you take some pictures, he’ll probably get big. If he doesn’t, who cares? It’s not a lot of money. So they hired me to shoot Elton John. That was my first big gig. Billy brought me to meet Alice Cooper and I started working with Alice. So that one picture, meeting Ike Turner, really started my career.
Go see the show! It’s by appointment only through March: info@musicphoto.net.
The Music Photo Gallery @Hoax Studios, 96 Greene Street, NYC 10012.
