Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back the Bob Left Sets podcast. My guest today is a photographer, Goel Burnstein. Joel, how did you get started?
Probably when my parents gave me a little brownie Hawkeye camera like a kid as a kid and started and being interesting and it interested in it. I started playing ukulele at five or six, and then guitar, so I actually was really into music before I picked up a camera, and that informed I. Don't I guess how I my subjects.
I was like.
The first pictures that I developed and printed by myself for the then unknown young Joni Mitchell in a coffeehouse where she was doing three sets a night for about Let's load on.
Let's load up. How'd you pick up the ukulele at age five?
Well, I just was. I went to. Here's what I realized later, unbeknownst to me, I was part of the second American folk music revival that started in nineteen fifty seven with the Kingston Trio having a number one hit with the folk song Hanging Down Your Head Tom Dooley, and that started the American folk music craze that you know, took off from nineteen seven, went, you know, all the
way till Bob Noe went electric basically till nineteen sixty five. Okay, so I was part of that growing up, and I just had I had lessons, guitar lessons.
Wait a little bit, So it's nineteen fifty seven, you're a student of the game. How do you become aware of the folk revival?
Oh? Not until well, at the time, we had what were called wing ding, which were home little parties that were about bringing your guitar or you're ukulele in and people would sit in a circle and you'd have like hot cider or snacks, and you would play people what you just learned, and they would pass the guitar around in a circle, or if you brought your own guitar. And that's something I did when I was like five or six. You know.
Okay, no one likes to talk about age, but what year were you born?
Nineteen fifty two. I'm eleven months older than you, Bob.
I was just going to say that we have a lot in I remember listening to Rough and Ready records at age five. I remember, you know, wing Bang Wuil Walla bing Bang. But for me, I found out about most of these folk songs at summer camp. But sure in terms of five, that's very early. What was going on. I mean it was early.
I was just interested in it. I don't let's see, it was not that uncommon. Honestly. When I started, I was in like a group class with five or six kids learning to play ukulele, and at some point the guitar teacher telling us to close our eyes and tell us what chord he was playing on the guitar, and I was the only kid who could do it, which really surprised me, Like it was obvious to me, like, of course, that's a g chord because I can hear
the high notes up at the top or whatever. I had clues, audio clues in my head, so I got into that started me off on. Then when hearing things on the radio, I wanted to know what chords they were, so I would sit with Beatle records. You'll remember that some of the early records had the vocals on one
side and the band on the other side. So if you had a friend who had a whose parents had a stereo, you could move the balance control and just hear the vocals so you could learn the harmonies, or you could just hear the guitar part on the other side and figure out the guitar chords. So I started doing that when I was really young.
Okay, you started with ukulele, nice Jewish boy. Didn't your parents say you had to take piano lessons? No?
They I think they probably tried, actually to get me to play piano at some point. It wasn't for me. I folks, learning folk guitar was really easy to me, and I gosh, I think I played on a local TV station. I played Puff the Magic Dragon when I was maybe six or seven something like that, as I remember. But I never wanted to be a performer any.
Okay, but you were pretty good at it. You had a natural ability. Yeah, yes, okay, So the folk revival happens. Ultimately, there's a TV show Who Nanny Long you know, into this. But when Bob Dylan's first album comes out Joan Baiez before that, phil Oaks. Is that stuff you're aware of?
Yes, but I like only peripherally because I'm learning actual folk songs and unbeknown I actually was given Let's say, my guitar teacher said, could you send one of your students? Were doing a thing at the y MHA of what is a folk song, so we'd like you, you know, just pick a student to be there. So I went and I wasn't thinking about it too much. I was going to play a song, and I played Blowing in
the Wind for this panel of adults. And it turns out that the lead person was a major figure in the folk music scene I know now named doctor Kenneth Goldstein, who gently, you know, let me know that that actually wasn't a folk song and explained to me the difference between you know, I I didn't distinguish at the time. Now I'm very deeply into the distinguishing one from the other,
the singer songwriters. But that's how I got into the from folk music, and you know, learning those guitar chords and then figuring out how to play them, that's how.
I okay, how did you segue from ukulele to guitar?
So the guitar is just two more strings. The chords are the first four strings are the same on a guitar as the four strings of a ukulele. So if you learn the ukulele and then you learn to play a guitar, you only have two more strings to learn. So I think that's something that was kind of common at the time, And there's a picture of me asleep my mom took with my ukulele resting by my head at like I've played it till I've fallen asleep in my bed at nine years old. So it's kind of a funny thing.
When was the last time you played a ukulele?
Probably around then. I didn't go back after I learned to play guitars, very exciting to learn to play the much fuller notes of the and of course, like many other folkies, including David Crosby, when when I heard the Beatles, I was like, I know those chords. I know all of those chords.
Right.
That takes your head and puts it in a different direction than folk music like it did his.
You know. Okay, So where do you grow up.
Suburban Philadelphia? I was in Teltenham Township.
And how far is that from downtown from the action?
Oh, it's still like eight or nine miles. It's a near suburb, just over the city line of Philadelphia.
How'd your family end up in the Philadelphia area?
You know, they were from there, from a big family in New York. My grandparents were I came from the area around Poland and Russia. And settled in the Lower East Side, and my grandparents, Uh, they had a tragic two tragic accidents with in which their first two children, their eldest children, were killed in different accidents in New York City, and they were so distraught that they left everyone they knew and there to go to come to Philadelphia.
In there, they just couldn't bear to be on the streets of New York anymore because both of their children died on the streets of New York. So that's so they they left to go to Philadelphia and founded the Philadelphia Wing of This is a very very poor family, eleven kids in the poorest part of town.
So what did your parents do for a living.
My dad was a truck driver and in the Depression, and he met my mom after World where he became a sol He enlisted for World War Two and he became a sergeant and he was in the D Day invasion on Omaha Beach in Normandy on the second wave. And I always try to imagine what that experience would have been like for anybody and how it was. I don't see how anybody could walk off that beach. It was such a murderous place. I wouldn't be here if
he hadn't made it. But he survived that and walked through Europe till v day to the end of the war, and I met my mom after he came home. I think it's a pretty typical story. I was thinking about Billy Joel's song Allentown where he talks about our fathers fought the Second World War. Am was like one of those kids.
Okay, Traditionally men from that generation didn't talk about being in the war. Did your father No.
He did not. He did not at all, and we had to kind of pull it out of him. And there would there would be reunions and he would get notices like, hey, we're we're having a reunion of our division of our company. And he never went and he felt like he told me. I asked him one time why he didn't go, and he he just said, you know, these people act like like this is the biggest thing
that ever happened to them. You know, you got to just keep looking forward and like keep doing what you're doing and not like be looking back at what you did. So but later I will say that he later my brother I'm the oldest of five and my brother Stephen took my dad to see Saving Private Private Ryan. So the invasion sequence at Normandy, my dad was there there.
In the film, they're depicting the first wave of the same company, so you have the same divisional at the Blue and Gray in a circle in the movie that that he experienced. And my dad started crying in the theater and he like, broke up, broke, you know, it broke his h It broke It opened him up emotionally to relive that. And my brother asked him, was was the movie? Was that was the movie like his experience? And he said it was just like that, only much worse.
So it's the late sixties, you're protests against the war. What does your father say about that?
That's a really interesting question. I at some point point right before in nineteen sixty three, I think I was very I was a very introverted kid. I liked to read and I like to hunch, like play my guitar by myself, hunched over. I think they my parents were worried that I was being that I was too shy.
And they had a friend who sent his son to a military academy for the summer session and said it was the greatest thing that ever happened to him and it really turned him around, and so my parents decided to do the same for me. This was Valley Forge Military Academy. This is where Norman Schwartzkoff went to school later, much later, and that so I was very excited about it because I because I was so proud of my dad.
I studied World War Two a lot. I knew a lot about I made models, I knew a lot about the maps and who did what and all of that, and so I was excited to go to this military academy. And uh, it was really a difficult, uh summer for me. Sorry to get so deep into the details here, but I'm just trying to answer your question. I uh I I came away with it, h with a Instead of thinking war was really great and cool, I had it
just a glimpse of like, no, it's not. And the discipline involved in going this is our Our teachers were ex army guys, and so the the you know, like waking you up at two or three in the morning to do calisthenics or bouncing a quarter on your sheets when you major bed, and for inspection, you know, and how how shine can we see your can the officers see his reflection in your belt buckle, your brass belt
buckle when you've polished it. And do you eat if you can imagine eating what we're called square meals, where you do this, that's how you're supposed to.
Well, this is audio only he's moving his.
Arm in a I'm sorry, it's like a square meal. Imagine a right angle, lifting your your fork with your hands straight up and then straight to your mouth and then back, you know, in a right in a right angle. It is like the craziest thing. So just as a as a memory anyway. So I went through that, and then I got to hear a lecture of a senator US senator named Wayne Morse who was talking about how wrong the war in Vietnam was and there was a lot of literature there. I saw the first pin that
had the peace symbol on it. That was the first time I saw that, and I was I think I was really prepped, like from my experience at the military academy to be like, yeah, this is wrong. Like I was really just a young naive kid, but I really felt like, yes, this is wrong. So I became a very early when it was very uncool to protest the war.
Maybe it was in sixty four that I started doing that, and I was really a big part of my life too, to protest against the war and to work for the Eugene McCarthy presidential campaign and things like that.
And what did your father, as a experienced soldier have to say about your protests?
A good question. He thought I was right. He thought that Vietnam was wrong, was just going to be a quagmire, and that he had no illusions about the glory of war, and he thought it was a an empire building, economically driven move that we shouldn't have gotten involved in.
So when your father came back from the war, what did you do for a living?
So he had been a truck driver. It was a family business. It was run by his oldest brother. Again he's one of who is the tenth of eleven kids.
And.
So he was put in charge of a division called the export packaging division to ship things to Europe because we now had a lot, We're doing a lot of business there. And so he the family grew a storage business and then a separate moving business, and he did the export packaging business and designed crate for industry. Like all of he shipped all of the Boeing helicopters that
were shipped aroun the world. Each individual crates for example, like you got to put the fuselage here, and you got to put the propellers up, you know, you got to fold them and put them in a separate crate. So we got to see how he made those and how they were shipped and things like that. That's what my dad did.
Hey, did any of your brothers go in the business? Be what happened to the business?
Good question, good questions. Let's see the family. But it eventually went to cousins of ours to run the business, and a combination of factors that included deregulation where the moving business at that time had been federally regulated and you had to be licensed and meet certain requirements to be able to ship people across interstate want to ship their goods. At some point they we sended those regulations.
At the same time, there was I'm trying to think there was some other economic thing that was going on that caused the moving business as they were doing it to collapse. I was already gone by that point, so I don't know the details of it. But my brothers did go into that business and in fact what happened just as a segue in nineteen seventy four, not to
skip ahead here, Well, I am skipping ahead. In nineteen seventy four, I was on tour with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young as a tour photographer, and we were doing our last show at Roosevelt Raceway in Long Island, a large, really large show, and we had one more show to do in England, and I overheard a stage manager talking to the tour manager saying, I think when we're doing this gig in England, we can't just use the paperwork that we had going into Canada for that one gig.
I think there's something else we need. And I just happened to hear that, and I walked over and I said, well, you know what you're talking about. You do need different paperwork, and this is what my dad does for a living, And if you haven't arranged this yet, I suggest you call him, like right now, because these things like you're going to be doing need to do a lot of
paperwork to get all of our stuff. There was forty thousand pounds of gear that was being shipped over to England for this one show and to make a long story short, my dad got the gig and my brother came to the show, and I guess, let's see, I would have been twenty two, so he was seventeen. This is my brother's name is David, David Bernstein, and he found it fascinating that, like, wow, everybody who's here backstage, like all these people are making money on this, not
just the band this like this is fascinating. So he went on from the that experience to found a company called Rocket Cargo, which became the prime shipper in the world for musical tours around the world, not just of American bands but all bands. So he for many many years had the lion's share of the shipments going whoever the band was, whether it was the Rolling Stones or hip hop groups, or whoever it was. That's so he became much more wealthy and more famous than me.
Okay, you talked about being introverted. Yes, A. Were you a good student? B? Did you have any friends?
Good question. I had friends, but I was sort of shy. I loved to sit with my guitar and figure out how to play songs. I was okay to play them for other people, like at campfires, or you know, for fun. I didn't want I did never think about being a musician. I just loved playing it. I didn't think I was good enough to to do it professionally, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. And once I got a camera, I loved doing that. So now I split my time between playing guitar and taking photos and learning how to
develop film. And the first pictures that I took that I developed and printed by myself were of the then unknown Joni Mitchell in a coffeehouse. This would have been in maybe January sixty seven.
Okay, before we get to that specific event.
Yes, yes, hey, were.
You a good student? Not a good student?
Oh, yes, I'm sorry you asked me that I was a good student. Yes, I was good.
Okay, So you got involved at a royalty level of rock and roll very young. Did you go to college?
So what briefly happened is that so I took these pictures of Joni Mitchell. I brought two prints. I was very excited to make these prints at my friend's house in the dark room. I remember going to the laundry room in my parents' house and taking my mom's iron and put ironing the print onto the mountboard. You took this sheet of paper that turned into glue under no kidding, under the heat of the iron, and then you wound
up with a mounted print. And I made two of them and took them down to the coffee house she was playing at where I had just taken the pictures and asked her to I wanted to give her one and would she sign one for me? And she wrote the Circle Game Forever Joni Mitchell the one that she gave me. And then about a year so I kept photograph. I was the photographer of my newspaper.
Let me stop you here because I want to ask some questions before we get into your actual career. Sure, of course, so your parents give your parents give you a brownie camera, When does it click in your brain? And when do you get a reflex camera or whatever bitter camera?
You get, very good question. What happens is my dad gets a really good German single lens reflex camera called an Exacta, and you know it's it's from my viewpoint, of course, it's like it's much fancier than the camera I have. But that's he's I'm a kid and he's, you know, an adult, and so he's got this cool camera. And at some point I get pretty good at I have a By that point, I have a rangefinder camera, maybe a Konica rangefinder. That is, you're not looking through
the lens with his camera. You actually could look through the lens. And he had two or three lenses that you could change. You could have a normal lens, you could have a slightly telephoto lens, or a slightly wide lens. And I love that. I just thought that was amazing, and he lent me to his credit, Unlike many dads, maybe even me like that. If I were him, I probably would have said, hey, son, look here's a camera for you. It is better than your Hawkeye, But why
don't you just use that? Don't touch my camera, right, But he didn't, And so I learned with a single lens reflex, and that's when you get into that. Then what you're looking at is very similar to the photo you're going to be seeing. You see how what's in focus and what's not in focus. It's a very different experience. And so I was able to do that. I want to say maybe when I was thirteen fourteen, and that shooting with that kind of camera really made a difference.
For me, and at some point he went on a business trip to Japan and got me an Asahi Pentax Spot Mattic, the camera that Ringo was using in Hard Day's Night, and that became my main camera. And I just and then I'll just say briefly, I was the yearbook photographer and the newspaper photographer in my junior high school. And I learned right away that like, you can't use a flash in a class. It's way too distracting to just set off a flashing class. But there's not enough
light in there to use a regular speed film. And I went to the camera store where the guy was very helpful to me and said, oh, what you need is this thing, this film by code I called Triax. You need to use this. The ASA is a four hundred,
not one hundred or fifty or sixty four. It's four hundred, really, yes, which means it's just very sensitive to light, which meant that I could without a flash take people's photos in class at school, and when I was in like eighth grade or you know, I could use it to take football practice photos outdoors. But I could shoot, finally for
the first time, indoors. And that's how I learned to shoot with what referred to in photography as available light, meaning you're not bringing in any supplemental light, you're just using what's available.
Okay, so I got very good at that. Hey, did you go to public school? Yes, b you know there was a photography boom around the turn of the decade of sixties into seventies, but you were in early yes, so it wasn't like schools had dark rooms. How did you learn by trial and error? What?
Amazingly, I will say, I'm sorry to interrupt, No interrupt, how I learned? Okay, how my school actually was the township, the tax base of it as a suburb was good enough that they actually did have a dark room. They had just put in a dark room a couple of years before I was there. But I learned at the dark room of friends of mine who had set up an enlarger and a dark room at their parents' home, and they showed me how to develop film, how to
put how to develop the negative. So I had several friends who did that, and it just became a home thing. Like it was amazing to me that you could actually it was very, very exciting to know that you could get a roll of film loaded in your camera, go around after school and take pictures of whatever you wanted to come back into the dark room, develop the film, and then there would be the negatives of the picture the pictures you just took, like hanging wet in the
dark room. After you finally processed it, and then after it dried, you could put it in the enlarger and actually make a print of it. This process to me was like magic. You know, this could happen and you could do it in a matter of hours and it wasn't that complicated. So I really latched onto it. And I think I still was playing guitar and probably played every day, but it became my second love of things
to be doing. And then, like I was saying, when my first You'll probably remember this first time I went to with my parents to look at records and it was at a newly newly made EJ. Corvette's department store that didn't.
A lot of records at Corvette.
Okay, So there I was with my parents the first time and they're there after seeing Okay, we have to go back and say, this would be after seeing the Beatles perform on Ed Sullivan, like one of the seminal moments you probably discussed with ninety percent of your guests, where like, what was that like? So as a folky like I said, as a folk student of folk music, I was like, that's a scene, that's a name. I'm like, I know what they're doing. It's like, this isn't magic,
this is so Literally. When I went to my next folk music lesson, the guitar teacher and her daughters were like, no folk music today, I forget that. We are going to like can you did you figure out that thing? And I want to hold your hand? Right?
Did?
We were like, we were all into it and that just set us off onto that whole new trajectory.
Okay, now you talk about shooting Joni Mitchell before we talk about that actual event. So were you an avid club goer concert goer? How did you end up with the.
No, I wasn't at all. I never went to clubs and I didn't go to concerts. I never didn't occur to me to go. I had friends who would go to who went to see the Beatles like a packed sports stadium. A couple friends I knew who did that, who told me they could not hear like a single note of the Beatles for the screaming I don't know. I was a shy kid and I didn't So I learned to play songs from books from my guitar teacher. Occasionally, like at those hooton nannies or wing dings, you would
learn some thing. Let's say, somebody would play a song that you knew how to play, but they they knew another verse, Like what is that verse? I never played? Where did you learn that verse? What do you mean? Why are you using an A minor there?
Like that?
That's an E minor?
What you know?
So you was really a good, good uh lesson in learning songs. And then like I said, uh, like you, I'm imagining your ear is you know, glued to AM radio. You're I was like vaguely aware of it. I was not, you know, like Elvis was already in the past. It was like it was like that's for my older cousins. Not doesn't do much for me. Uh, you know, the first Beatle things were electrifying to me. And also I have to go back and just say I think there
was a major, a major slingshot effect. I think that happened when the death of John Kennedy was so shocking to people, to kids my age, who I was a Kennedy kid in terms of my outlook and in terms of America and being patriotic and what could you do for your country? And his youth and his humor we as kids like really identified with and to have him assassinated like that in a way that previously you only heard about things like that going on in third world countries.
This did not this kind of thing didn't happen in our country. It was so disheartening, so sad, tragic the day of and sad for so long, which only happened a matter of months before the Beatles played on at Sullivan.
And I feel that wherever the Beatles themselves were coming from, in terms of their career at the time, how exciting it was for them to come to America, they probably at the time didn't quite realize that there was a nation of young kids who were really hurting and were so needing the kind of up energy and fun and
positive energy that they were putting out there. That it, like I said, it was like a slingshot effect of going from being feeling so sad and heartbroken and what happened to our country to this very happy, exuberant kind of energy. And I think that that, you know, began in America, a lot of what the sixties became starting right there.
Okay, so the Joney photographs were the main point.
No, there was before I photographed her at the main point, Thank you for asking. This was at a place called the Second Fret.
Okay, the Second Fret. When you went the night Jonie was there and you took the photographs. How many times have been to that club previously? None?
Okay, I only I only went there because I knew her name from from hearing Tom Rutt. What happened is you'll appreciate this briefly. Of course, you had to have a transistor radio. When you know, at a certain age, when transistor radios come in as a as a kid, they're just like taking you into a whole other world. I was given at some point a transistor radio with a large whip antenna, not the kind of pocket size that you would take to school, but a larger one
that you could have at home. And I was shooting baskets one day in the driveway and I had the radio on and I realized, wait a sec, I can hear it's sunset and now I I can hear New York like clear as day, I can hear Boston, I
can hear WLS in Chicago. So that whole thing really was another big eye opening thing because instead of only being able to hear the records played by your local DJs, you could pick up you could hear what the DJ's were playing in New York and what their pattern was, and what their names were and their personas, and so, I,
you know, really love that. And my favorite station was the one called WBZ in Boston that clearly the daytime manager when you know, after five o'clock when he left, didn't care what the night shift the like, just just didn't put it on, didn't turn his radio on because they were doing really crazy stuff on the radio. Was the first time I heard screaming Jay Hawkins, I put a spell on you like on AM radio if you can imagine, right, they would do Stan Freberg ads and
things like that. So it was a very exciting experience. And one day I was listening to it, as I said, playing basketball, and and it was a I didn't know it was a tape at the time. I thought he was live in the studio. Tom Rush, who I knew was a folk singer and whose album one of his albums I had came on and said, this is a song I just learned from my friend Joni Mitchell. It's called the Urge for Going and played this song and I thought, oh my god, what a great song that is, Like, Wow,
Joni Mitchell, the Urge for That's just fantastic. And that was the first time I heard of her. And then she and her husband were playing at the Second Frat and they were going to appear at a folk music weekly.
Folk music show hosted by someone who's who's went under the name Geene Shay Ivan Shane his name was, but he was called Gene Shay had a show called Folklore every Sunday and who played folk music and would also UH folk acts that would play at the Second Fret or the main point would then go to his show if they were playing over a weekend, and then play be interviewed and then play posician audio or TV audio. This is all all all on radio and it was a mono FM uh, And so I.
Got to.
I was too young to get into this club. Either I had homework or I was too young, I don't remember which. I couldn't go to the show, but they were going to be playing at this radio station, so I tuned in the radio. My dad had just brought home a little micro cassette recorder to replace his dictaphone and had showed me like how it worked, so I
he let's see. I took the micro cassette recorder and put it next to the speaker of the radio and recorded Jony and her husband, Chuck Mitchell doing their set and their interview. And the last thing they did was a song called the Circle Game, which was new to her, which was which I'd never heard, and I by the time the song was over, I was like, I have to learn how to play that song right now. That is the greatest thing I've ever heard. I didn't know about.
So there's things called tunings and guitar So ninety five or more percent of the guitar work in the world is played in what's called standard tuning, with a strings tune in a particular way, and the chords that you're taught as a guitarist are based on your tuning the strings. In that tuning, she was taking the guitar and tuning it to a chord like a g chord and then playing different chords than any of the ones I knew
in that tuning. And so let's see, briefly, I'd been studying cryptanalysis, which was code breaking at the time, and the logic that you need to figure out how somebody's playing something in a tuning is what are all the open strings? First? Are what notes is? Each string? Is what I need to figure out. And then once I figure that out, how what chords is she playing? So I taped that performance and I just stayed up till dawn. I would have been fourteen to figure out how she
played it. And I did figure it out, like by six in the morning. Took me that long, but I did figure it out. And so that started me off in a lifetime of figuring out how to play Joni Mitchell songs. And later later when she would forget an older song, I would go actually and teach it back to her. Back in the seventies, I would do that seventies and eighties.
So how long after that was the gig where you took the photos?
Good question. I think that was about that would have been about well, she was there with her husband. She broke up with him right after that, and left where they were living in Detroit and moved to New York
and I saw her. It was really just about now that I'm thinking of It would have been only about two or three months later that I started that She's played at the second Fret and I was able to get into to literally three sets a night, four of maybe you know, twenty five minutes each and about a dozen people listening.
Okay, things changed over your career. We're bringing a camera to a gig would be an issue. People would stop whatever you're going. At age fourteen fifteen, you're bringing your camera not thinking twice. No one stopped you.
No, there was no nobody cared. I mean, it's like it's too it's too low level. There's not It's not like later. If let's say, if I am going to the first rock show that I went and photographed, I knew the opening act. They were friends of mine and they were opening for I'm Not Kidding Cream at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. Later, Ariic Clapton was quoted as saying, this was the great single, greatest Cream concert of all time by.
Far this shell.
It was on a rotator stage in the middle of the arena, and I can remember photographing them as the stage is going around waiting for our Clapton, Jack Bruce Ginger Baker. It was amazing and I can still remember as the stage turned, the huge marshal stack that our Claptain was playing through would every thirty seconds or so like beam like a like a huge heat ray into my ear. It was so loud, like the loudest thing I'd ever heard in my life as I was lifting
my camera up trying to take the pictures. So that was very exciting to do that.
Okay, so you give the photos to Jonie, Yes, and she signs one. Obviously that's a thrilling moment. Do you say, oh, that was a thrilling moment. You say, I did it once, I'll do it again.
I just thought, well it was I was. We got along, and so she was fine for me to come, and I saw her again at the second Fret, and then the next year, I still meant going to high school. I'm in tenth grade. What happened was that she when her first album came out, which would have been like March of sixty eight, she then could get kicked upstairs to the next level of club, which was the main point that you mentioned out on the main Line, a nicer club, more seats, and the main Point had only
only had people there who had a record deal. So Joni Mitchell back in the day was not going to be They wouldn't have taken her at the at the main Point. But because she had her first album out, she could get booked into the main Point. And while I was there and so so her fan base was growing. I could see, Wow, there's a lot more like this is. There's like three times more to it. Wow, and people are into it, they're paying attention. This is like what
had been this very little thing that you know. And of course back when she was playing the Second Fret, nobody had heard of her. I was raving about this person to all all of my friends and anyone else who would listen, and I could see that this was like taking off. And there were college kids from Bryn Marr, which is where the Main Point is, right And anyway, what happened is in the interim that year, I spent
a lot of time. A friend of mine had a tape recorder and he would every time Joni would go to that folk music show I talked about with geene Jay, she'd play a few songs and we'd record those and then I would stay up and figure out how to play those songs. So my whole poppy that was like my biggest thrill. I didn't collect baseball cards by then. I didn't like I just what I you know. The thing I wanted to do was to figure out how
Joni Mitchell played her songs. So I did that, and she was writing her songs in different tunings by then, so it was very it was it was an exciting thing for me to do. So by the time I went to see her at the main point, after she now had her first album come out and she had fans from from that album being played after. At first I took a picture of her that I remember thinking, God, if I got that thing that I just saw, it's
really going to be good. It's going to be the best picture I ever took of her, for sure, And and I did get it. And so that that happened first, and then later a few minutes later, I took out a list that i'd of her songs and she said, oh, she's very nice.
Again.
Let's see, I'm sixteen by that point and she is nine years older than me, so she's twenty five. Very few twenty five year olds have much to say to six that there's not much going on there. But she was very nice, and she says, oh, is that a list of songs of mine you've heard? And I said, no, those are the ones I can play. And her eyes blazed, and she took her guitar by the neck and thrust it at me and said show me. So I took the guitar. I retuned it. I was pretty nervous, I'm
sure I started playing one of her songs. She just stared at my hands, like he figured this out. Like it blew her mind that this kid, this nature, had figured out her professional secrets, the things that she was doing on stage, because she had these very breezy stories and stuff she would be talking about as she's retuning the guitar to another tuning. Nobody in the audience is noticing what she's doing kind of thing. And so the fact that I had figured these out, she said, play
play another one when I got done. So I played her a second song. She says, Okay, we are fast friends now. And then a few weeks later, a letter came from California in my parents' mailbox. Dear Joel, would you please come to I'm writing you. Thank you so much for sending the Prince. I really love this one. I'm writing to ask you, would you please come to Carnegie Hall my first concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City on February first. So imagine this is February
of eleventh grade. Getting this letter, which by the way, has a beautiful multi colored pen drawing on construction paper, Joni Mitchell drawing on the first part. She folds it in half and makes it into a reading card, and there's the letter from Joni. Pardon me, a letter from her inviting me to Carnegie Hall. So you can imagine how exciting that was. I took the train to New York. I can remember standing outside the stage store of Carnegie Hall, which is still in the same place, and each time
I've walked by it since then. I remember standing there and how nervous I was with my camera bag. And I went there and I met her, and her parents were there, and her manager, Elliott Roberts, was there, and he said, I hope you brought a lot of film tonight, because we're recording the show and you're going to do the album coverew. So that was very intense and I did the best I could shooting her backstage and on stage, and it was like a big throne. She did a great, great,
great job, like she really rose to the occasion. It was nothing like her, folks, like seeing her at a little coffee house. The audience went crazy. You can now hear pardon me, you can now hear that performance of hers live at Carnegie Hall. It's been released with I was actually on vinyl with my pictures that I'm talking about that I took as a cover and the inside which when I saw that, it was like a dream come true. That it's something that I'd imagined back then.
I should say. I have to tell you this one story, which is when I was fifteen, the summer of Sergeant Pepper's I was in a in a summer camp that was on wheels, that is, we had two army trucks and about twenty kids, and we camped at a different state park or national park every night, and one night in the Dakota's, I was there my sleeping bag, staring up at the stars, thinking about.
What am I going to do?
Like this, You're fifteen, You're starting you have a you know, your guidance counselor starts talking about, so, what career are you thinking about? So I was thinking about that, and as I looked at the stars, I remembered the picture that the first picture that I took, not the next one, which was really good. But I was looking at that first picture. This I hadn't taken that second picture yet,
this is still sixty seven, pardon me. And I saw that picture cropped into a square as an album cover with her name handwritten across it across the top, Joni Mitchell and the epiphany. I had an epiphany that that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to do album covers for musicians. I wanted to blend the two things that I did together, and I wanted to do photographs of musicians.
So that's what was my.
Motivation from when I was fifteen, and I've just been continuing to do that.
Okay, most people have that idea at fifteen, and it's purely a dream. You'd already had some success. So what was the next step after the Carnegie Hall shows?
Well, let's see. The next week, I was asked to photograph Neil Young and Crazy Horse at their first East Coast show at the Bitter End, and then I was asked to photo David geff Elliet said, I have a friend, David Geffen who's managing a career of a singer named Laura Nero, And I was like, I know, Laura, I love. I had ELI in the fifteenth Thirteenth Confession album, which I just flipped out about. I just thought I was listening to the post Dylan singer songwriters a lot by then,
and she was a big I loved her records. And she said, so could you come to New York again and photograph Laura? Meet Laura and take some photos of her. So that was my next two weekends, after Carnegie Hall, Neil and Crazy Horse at the Binner End, and then Laura Nero at David Geffen's apartment during a blizzard overlooking Central Park as she played the grand piano in David's apartment doing not only songs from the ELI and the Thirteenth Confession album that I knew, but songs that she
was writing for her next album, New York Tenderbury. After those three weeks, the whole issue about likes, college preparation and what all of that like sort of receded like in importance for me because it was like, yeah, yeah, I'll get to that whatever. This is like so much more interesting to me. So that's how that worked. That would have been like starting in nineteen sixty nine.
Okay, you're a teenager. As they say, Lauren Nero became bigger with the New York tend to Berry, but she was pretty big already. She was yeh, how did you cope emotionally? David Geffen was not of the stature that he used today. But you're in these environments you had teenagers twenty six. Are you anxious or are you saying? You know? This is my good question, you know, because.
Because Joni was so accepting of me and didn't just be like get out of here, kid.
Uh. That was.
And so imagine if you're meeting Jonie and her new boyfriend, Graham Nash, who's just come from the Hollies, who's left the Hollies, whose voice I know really well from listening to the radio. So I'm meeting him, and who says, can you teach me how to take pictures like you do and like to print make prints like this? Sure, Graham,
I'd love to. And meanwhile, out in the hallways is his friend David Crosby, Toni's ex boyfriend who had been her boyfriend previously, who's who's in the hallway, And the two of them are going to be starting a group together that they're going to be going into the studio in about a week to start the recording of So by the way, after the Carnegie Honk concert, we go to Levenhal, the promoter's apartment, who is managing all the folkies up to that point and was still Judy Collins manager.
And I was talking to Joni when she at the party when she looks over my shoulder and says, oh, Leonard, you must meet my friend Joel. He's really a genius. And I turn around and it's Leonard Cohen. I have just finished reading his book of poetry. I think he
walks on water. When she says, you know, he's really a genius, I want to shrink to the size of the head of a pin because I'm actually in the presence of two actual geniuses, and I just feel like this kid, this little kid who's like, I'm going to school. I don't even what No, I'm not, You're the geniuses here. So that was quite an amazing thing. And then I didn't even like in New York, of course we have to have an after show. Not only do I have to have the party after the show, we have to
have a party after that party. So everybody gets up and we all go down to the Bitter End where the Everly Brothers are playing, and in the audience, I'm introduced to Bob Dylan, who has brought like a couple
songs to play for the Everly Brothers. Unbeknows to me, but in other words, by the time I get back to home room, like after I leave New York and take the three am Trailways bus after all of this on the Sunday night, to like get back after this heady experience, I finally, you know, take take the I take actually a bus back and then I get the subway out to the suburbs. And then I've got to run to get my books for the school and then I got to run for the school bus and collapse
on the school bus. And I get to the home room, I'm like, I've like had like a couple hours sleep. The kid next to me says, so what did you do this weekend? I said, you wouldn't believe me if I told you so, that sets me up, and that leads me into my adult life.
Well, okay, you're in high school, you're doing this. Most of the connections seemed to come from Joni Mitchell, Elliott Roberts, David Geffen.
Neil Young.
This point in time, especially at this point in time, it was not seen as a lucrative career shooting rock photos.
Oh no, no it was. It was in fact, my guidance counselor wanted to persuade me from pursuing the career, not even as forget the rock part of it, that would be absolutely life forgetting Well, there's no money there for sure. But if you just want to be a professional photographer and stead up a studio and take portraits of you know, of high school kids, or you know, be an actual professional photographer, Like, how's that looking for you?
How much?
You know, it's like that's not really you really don't want to do that. You could be your sat score, You could be a lawyer, you could be a doctor, you could be whatever you literally, you could be whatever you want to be. So don't get hung up on this. Photography is a nice hobby kind of thing.
Okay, so these first Crosbie Stills in Nash album comes out in sixty nine, after the gold Rush comes in fall of seventy seventy. You graduate from high school in seventy in May or June of seventy.
In June or seven, first week of June.
What happens for you the following fall.
Well before the fall. What happens is the day after I graduate high school, and that first week of June, on the Monday night, I get on a train to go to New York to photograph Crosby Stills Nashing Young at the Filmore East. They're doing like a residency at the Filmore East. I have never seen them before. They had been there in nineteen six September of sixty nine, I wasn't there. This is the first time that I got to see them.
That was very Let's see.
I was so impressed by their musicianship and that they could be so fluent on acoustic and electric guitars really kind of blew my mind. How good Stephen and Neil, all of them, and Crosby doing triad and winevere on guitar. You're like, what, So all of it was really remarkable, and I stayed there for that week to photograph them, and during the first couple of days, I took a
walk with Neil. We were going to sound check at the film Wore and Graham and I with Neil were walking down the streets in We were actually on Thompson Street and I looked down the sidewalk and saw a small, older woman with very bright eyes. It really struck me coming towards us on the sidewalk, and I just for some reason, I stepped back and I wanted to get the moment that she crossed Neil. I don't know why, but I did. Boom click, I got the moment that
they passed. After photographing all those shows, I didn't think about it twice. I was thinking more about the performance shots I was doing, and it was a very shot, so many pictures ever in my life. And when I got in the dark room and was got to that shot, I was looking forward to seeing if I'd gotten the moment that they passed. It was a little bit out of focus. I was focused more on the lady than I was Neil, which I see things very crisply, and
it bothered me. So I applied a strange technique called pseudo solarization which you turn in what you turn on a bright white light just for an instant while the print is developing. This is the thing you're never supposed to do in a dark room. Of course, when you have white light in a dark room, you'll ruin the print if you leave it on long enough. But if you just put it on for a second, half the print days positive and half of its days negative, you'll
never be able to duplicate what it does. And it turns into a very surreal kind of intense graphic and it sharpens things as it does that. So I did that, and I got the looked at the print of it again. It's called a solarized print, and I just thought that's way more intense than the shot looks on its own. I'm just going to put that in the stack of print.
That's the one he should see. So when I after photographing them at the film More East, and then spending days developing the film, and then days proofing making contact sheets, and then looking at the contact sheets and making prints, so that when they came back to Philadelphia, I would have a box done of prints that I could show them all show the band like what I had done.
So I I did that.
It was kind of exhausting. I assumed I had a I had a vision of the band very much like in my mind's eye. It was like, Oh, these guys are on tour, so they must like what do they do? Like they get like a big, big suite or something, and they all like it. It's like the Beatles in Help, where they just have like a row houses or something like that. No, they're each in their own hotel room separately, and I've got to go from one room to the next with my photos to show them this thing.
And so when I.
Showed the Prince to Neil, each of them, I was only showing prints of themselves nobody. I figured even then, like David doesn't need to see pictures of Stephen. Yes, he can see the group shots and stuff, but on the individual stuff, I'm just going to show each guy their own things. So here's the shot of Neil passing the woman with a little print this big, and he stares at it for a few seconds and then he looks up at me and says, that's my album cover.
And I thought, okay, Joel, don't get too excited, because these guys changed their mind all the time and he might think that now so it's really cool and he said that, but don't go nuts about it, okay, But it turned out that it was and that was my first album cover. So back to my first week of classes of going to Madison, Wisconsin, because I was had been convinced that like, no, I can't just I'm still
going to have to go to college. I can't just do this photography thing, like you know, that's no, no, no, You're just not going to make any money. And even though it's lots of fun and wouldn't it be great if you could do it, but no. So there I am at school and after the gold Rush album comes out that week, I go down to the record store. There's like fifty of them on the floor with my picture on the front and on the back and on the inside, and I'm like shocked. It was like I
just took that picture like months ago. That was I did that, and now it's in shrink wrap with all the other albums on the floor of this record store. And then I look up and there's a poster of another shot of Neil that Warner's is put out as a promotional thing. Anyway, I call Elliott up and I'm like, Elliott, I just saw the It's like, can I send them a bill for this short jowel? Of course. Just let's see. You have the front and the back and the inside.
Each one of those should be five hundred dollars. Joel, you send Warner Brothers a bill for fifteen hundred dollars. Now fifteen hundred dollars in nineteen seventy when you're a freshman in college and you're like, am I going to buy something for two dollars and twenty five cents or two dollars in a day? You know what I mean, It's insane. You might as well say like, I'm giving you like two million dollars or something. It was really quite crazy.
And that.
Combined with that this was this it's it's now there. It's like, wait a second, this is going to look like this around the world. They're going to have this album in France, in England was really like whoa, whoa, whoa. And then Joni called in my dorm room. If you can imagine the phone ringing, ye, Joni called and said, hey, could you I need some photos done? Could you come out like next weekend to do some photos of me at my house. Well, Joned, I mean, you know, I
just I just started college. Okay, but you know what if if I leave on Friday, if I leave Friday night and then like I can shoot, I'll get there on Friday and then we can maybe shoot Saturday Sunday. But I've got to leave like early Monday morning because i got class to go back to like on Monday. Sure, sure that sounds great.
So I did.
I you know, it's like around October, first end of September, snow flurries in Madison, Wisconsin. I'm in a dorm room, like one of a series of dorms. I'm a dorm complex, five different dormitories. I was told that we were being fed by the second largest kitchen in North America after
the one at the Pentagon. Forty thousand undergraduates. Forty thousand undergraduates. Okay, the floor of my dorm is filled with Wisconsin beer drinking jocks with perhaps blue ribbon posters on their doors kind of thing.
Right, And.
I leave to you know, for the weekend to go to Los Angeles. It's Santa Anna wins. It's eighty five degrees breezy, and now you're going to go to Laurel Canyon and meet Gary Burden, the art director, and Henry Gilts, the photographer who's also going to be shooting at her at the same session. And these are the pictures of Joni, like leaning out the window that you see with our house in the green paint that Henry's came out much much before minded. But anyway, that was my intro to that.
And to make a long story short, Jonie asked me to stay. My parents dropped me off on a to go on an around the world trip. They got me, they were like, okay, we're going to take you to Madison. Here's your stuff everything. Okay, see you later. We're going to be off. We'll talk to you in a few weeks. And all of this happened during that time, so there was nobody to call nobody.
I just did it.
And and then Joni said, hey, could you could you house in my place? Like while I'm in Europe with James Taylor. She was James Taylor was her boyfriend at the time, and she was writing the Blue Album when I was when I was there, and then they both left, she and they went to England where you have those beautiful recordings that you and I would have heard first
on that bootleg of Joni and James right. And so I wound up being able to rent a house into Panga and work for the art director as his assistant. And that began my I never went back. I only went back to I only went back. I forfeited the tuition, and I went back and picked up all my stuff and moved out to California.
And what did your parents say when they found out? Right?
Well, so my parents where like, You've got to come back here right now, like they came back to Philadelphia. So I had to explain to them what okay, okay. Now most parents would be like, you get your ass back in that school, and now you can go and get a job since you forfeited your tuition, you know what I mean. It was the big kind of thing to have done. And they just said, okay, I can't believe you did this. But we know these guys and they're real Like they had met Elliott and they'd met Jonie.
They were like they were they were okay with me hanging out with you. They weren't. I was not in a crash pad in the hate Ashbury okay, like things were better than that, but you know, you got to go to college, so we want you to go. Well, I just want to learn photography, Okay, well I want you to go to all you go to the art schools, like go to the places that have photography courses in Los Angeles and like figure out which one you can go to, because we want you to be back in school.
So I went to four different colleges, including the new cal Arts which had just opened, and I just what I for me. I just said, you know, I really don't need these people to teach me how to do this. I can do this already, and they're concentrating on technical, on technique. But their stuff is like it has no soul, it's not they're not doing what I want to do. I can't learn from these people. That's how I felt.
And they let me move to Tipanga and I got a job working as an assistant for the art director and that then then just kept doing more photographs, like oh, we're starting asylum records, you do photograph Judy cell or whatever. That was how I just started working as a photographer.
Then was it you know the crossby stools Nashy Nung tour. The reference at the time was seventy four. You start going to LA in October seventy Is it pretty steady for that period of time or they're ups and downs.
Well, if you're a freelance of anything, it's going to be up and down and it's going to be unpredictable.
But I.
Enjoyed it, and I didn't need to. I wasn't paying a whole lot of rent and everyone I hitchhiked everywhere. I didn't have a car, but I was able to. Let's see, so early seventy one, for example, just after I was a house sitting at Jones and then came back to California. I'm with Graham Nash. He's about to do his first solo album. We're at Wally Hiders studio. He's with the engineer playing back a playback of a song that he recorded a few months ago at Crosby's
sessions for his solo album in San Francisco. And this is when I start learning about like the repetition, how much repetition is involved in recordings in studios and playback and all of that. So they play the same thing back and back, and I finally get bored and I walk into the studio itself, where no one is there. There's a piano. I don't know how to play piano,
but I'm bored. So I sit at the piano and I through the glass I can hear the tape they're playing, which is the song Military Madness, and I just start playing along with it on the piano. I can't play piano at all. I'm playing like a chopsticks kind of piano, literally one finger on the loft, two fingers right. And suddenly Graham's voice comes out loud over the speakers in the studio, Joel, what do you do? And I'm like, oh, I'm so sorry. I figured I was interrupting their hearing
and they could hear me for some reason. No, no, no, it's just what are you doing? Like, what are you playing? Nothing, Graham, I'm just just playing along with it. Go back, he says, the engineer. Take the tape back to the head of the thing, and just start at the beginning, so and just play what you were doing. So I start playing, and I play all the way through, and Graham says, you're on the session tomorrow. So I'm not yet nineteen. Get to the session. This is like John Barbada, Chris Ethridge,
Rita Coolidge. I'm thinking, you know, if I was playing guitar, I wouldn't be very nervous because I can play guitar. I'm like good, I'm good enough that if I needed to play a rhythm guitar part on this thing, I could do it fine. But I don't know how to play piano for shit, like at all. These people are the major guys. I'm like kind of sweating bullets thinking about. The door of the studio opens, Dave Mason walks in.
I'm a huge traffic fan. He fucking Dave Mason walks in with a plugs this strat into an amp, sits down next to me on the piano bench.
Now, I'm.
Oh, and we do a live take of it. It's I think like the second take or something like that. And I'm on the record. It was the first time I ever played on a record. It was a big heady experience.
Well, how many records have you played on?
Oh, that's a good question. I don't know totally how many recordings I did. I was a member of the became a member of the LA Musicians Union because I played on enough things I let's see how my records that I ever play on. I don't know, not many, eight ten. I played on Graham Nash, David Crosby, Crosby and Nash Crosby Stills in Nash. I played with Joni
Mitchell on stage, played with Neil on stage. In terms of playing on on records, I played on Terry Reid's Seed of Memory, a great, great album that Graham Nash produced. I played on that. I was really thrilled about that. I played on his Wild Tales album, his second album as well. And I played on Wasted on the Way When Crosby Stills Nash. Anyway, So I never became a real session player at all, No, but I did. I liked accompany and I was a thrilled to do all of those.
Okay, you go. You know we talk about that show at the beginning, you know, in England on the seventy Forard tour, and then ultimately you shoot the Running on Empty Stuff, which is nineteen yes, seventy eighty seven, seventy seven, seventy eight, whenever it comes out right right right? Are you continuously working through that period?
Yeah, I was working mostly as a photographer, so I did the Wind on the Water album cover and the shots of CSN on the boat for example, Right, that would have been earlier that year, in seventy seven. I let's see after it was just going back I had done after the gold Rush cover. I did the inside and back cover, the inside and back cover for the Harvest album the group in the barn there that was September seventy one. I did the photos of Jony for the Four of the Roses album that I did those
in September of seventy two. And did the Time Fades Away cover for Neil Young of the Kid in the audience at the Spectrum giving a peace sign. Right, that was then. So I just kept going forward doing those.
Okay, A couple of questions. First, got to stop on Four of the Roses that famously had a picture of Joni in Canada with no clothes on. I didn't see it is that much of a limit tester, but the press it was depicted that way. How much of there was a discussion of a shooting it and b using it.
There was no discussion about shooting it. I was just walking with Joni and she just took her clothes off and walked out onto the rocks. It looks like she's way out to see, but she's really only about twenty feet away from me. I'm using a wide angle lens on that shot, and knew that I had gotten a really good series there, and I did the later I did the photo of her on the cover, of her in the forest, nearly in the forest. I'm sorry, I think I forgot which her question.
Was when the album was being put together and that photo was used, was anybody thinking twice of the fact she was naked?
Oh? Yes, No, what happened was I remember that we Janie and I had a meeting with David Geffen about that her choice of that picture on the cover. I originally she wanted to put it on the cover. And she said, Jony, do you know three of us at a meeting And he said, Johnny, did you know that Sears sells something like sixty percent of the LPs in America? And she said, no, I didn't know that. Yeah, well
they do. And they have a very strict kind of a rule at Sears about like the kinds of there's like all kinds of album covers that they will not stock based on the artwork. So this would be like no this, which would mean you would you would be losing that many that percent of like your sales because it's not being represented. So we've got it. So that's over, Like, we can't do that.
So.
Okay, well can I put it on the inside. Well we could try. So that's how we wound up taking the picture of her that was going to be on the inside, and that became the cover and the the the inside shot you talked about, but it was it was talked about.
Okay, you talked about being Okay, let's just talk about this period. You're in Los Angeles, You've got the whole Geffen Roberts Asylum camp covered. Are you going to record labels? Are you trying to network with other racks to do their work.
That's a really good question. I was not at all business oriented at the time. I sort of let things happen as they did because so much just the things I've related to you happened without my doing them. That is, they all came to me. These were like there was a certain organic flow to things that happened to me, and it didn't seem like I was going to be helping it. If I had a particular goal in mind that I wanted to do it seemed like at the time, it seemed like a better thing was just to see
what happened. So I didn't pound the pavement, and I probably should have or could have, or maybe would have if we have to just say this happened in nineteen seventy three when I was on tour with Neil and taking some photos of him backstage as the tour photographer. He looked over to me and he goes, wait a minute, and he remembered this moment. When I went to photograph him in Crazy Horse at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, it was I'd seen them at the Bitter End and
then they were coming to Philadelphia. This would be in the end of February beginning of March nineteen seventy still I'm still in twelfth grade. And I took the photos that became the inside of After the Gold Rush of Neil on the couch, sprawled on the couch with the guitars all around, and his wife Susan on the fore end lighting a cigarette. I also took the picture of the close up at the back of his jeans because I'd never seen patches like that before. I just I
had patches. You had patches here, right, you fall, you, you rip your jeans, your mom puts a patch on it, right, But those were the kind of patches I knew. I didn't this was now art right, Like, he had this beautiful embroidery going on on the pack there. So I knelt down to take a picture of it. Click, I take the picture. No, right before the click, Billy Talbot the bass players says to Neil, hey Man, that guy's taking a picture of your ass man. That becomes the
back cover. Still the back cover. It's very funny. So, yes, what was I going to say? There was some.
He was saying something to you in the nineteen seventy three tours.
Oh yes, thank you, thank you very much for the breadcrumbs there. So what happened is before I took the before or after, pardon me, after I took the pictures of him on the couch. They are back at the Electric Factory in nineteen seventy his D forty five, which you can see in the picture leaning up against a wall.
That's the top of the line Martin guitar. I never seen one before, never seen anything close to that nice of a guitar, I said, is there any way I could just play that guitar for just a minute, Like he's like, yeah, sure, go ahead and pick it up, a brand new white faced guitar. I pick it up. I start playing, and it's like the best guitar by far I've ever played. It's about many thousands of dollars guitar.
And as I'm playing it, somebody from the promoter sticks their head in the dressing room door and says, Neil, you're on. So Neil looks at me and he says, I need the guitar. So I quickly touch up the guitar, meaning I tuned it very quickly by ear using harmonics, and I hand it to him and he's standing in the doorway of the room and he plays three different chords on it, and he looks at me quizzically like and says that's perfect, Like how could you? What's with you?
Like? How could you do that?
Because it's hard to tune a guitar really well, like and to do it by ear. But I've been I was good enough that by then I gave him the guitar back perfectly. So three years later we're in a dressing room together and it's just the two of us, and he's spending forty minutes before every show tuning his own guitars with a throbba tuner. Write a little device. I'll spare you what it is, but it's like that you used to help tune your guitar. And he looks at me and says, wait a minute, you're that kid
who tuned that D forty five perfectly. What am I doing here? You should be doing this here. Let me show you how to work this Strova tuner. And so he teaches me how to do that, and then I become his guitar tech for his shows for the rest of the tour on that tour, and that launches me into a career of me a guitar technician. After that,
my first thing is with Crosby and Nash. That becomes that's thirty five different instruments, Danny Cooch, David Linley, David has ten lap slides, guitar, you know, guitars, banjo, pedal, steel guitar, A total of thirty five guitars that I have to then tune and restring for the Crosby Nash show. And right after I had finished that tour, which was our big challenge, which I was able to do. And it's a pleasure to like, you know, when when things
are tuned well, it's like a big thrill. So I then ran into the previous tour managers for the CSNY tour in nineteen seventy four at Dantanna's on Santa Monica. Joel, what are you doing here? I don't know I'm here? They said, I said, didn't you just finish the Uh? You finished that Rolling Thunder tour with Bob Dylan, didn't you? The two of you? You just I so wanted to be on that. I was on the Crosby Nash tour working on that. But you guys were kicking ass on that first Rolling Thunder tour.
I got.
I wish I could have been on that. They said, yeah, yeah, we did that. So so what have you been doing?
Oh?
I was a guitar tech for Crosby and Nasha had these thirty five guitars and they look at each other like and one of them says, so like, just leave the spring open for us. Okay, don't book anything for the spring. We can't tell you what it's about.
Just leave it open.
Later they call me and say, Okay, what it's about is like, it's the Bob Dylan the second Rolling Thunder Review tour. We're doing it this spring, and we're doing it along the Gulf Coast and we want you to start at the Clearwater. We're doing rehearsals at the Bellevue buildmore in Clearwater, Florida.
Be there.
And that was another tour with thirty five guitars and a huge thrill. And of course, you know, dropping into each of these worlds, it's it's a bit like your Many of these scenes have people in them who have been there for years. And going from let's say Neil Young's world into Joni Mitchell's world into Bob Dylan's world or Prince's world, each one of those is like a different kingdom ruled by a different monarch with a totally different style, and the rules are different and will the
priorities are different and whatever. And most of the people who work in those places only know that place. They don't travel, they're just in that one place. So it's wild in what I was doing as a photographer and a guitar tech to go from one of those scenes, you know, into a whole other thing. And so I learned a lot from working for Bob, and it was, you know, a big challenge and a big thrill.
Okay, you so you learned a lot, would you learn? Well?
I learned like Bob, for example, is a man of few words. He's not going to tell you what the issue is. He's going to look like something's wrong and you have to figure it out. So that was a big lesson for me. But the nonverbal communication thing, because Bob is just not going to tell you a lot, you really do have to figure out what it is, and sometimes it's something serious and you've got to deal with it like right then.
So that stood me in.
Goodstead many many years later when I went to work for Prince, because they're both so intense. I mean, Bob could give you a look that could kill and you could be dead. His looks are so intense.
You know.
Prince was incredibly it was an intense person, but he was so focused on what it was he wanted to do that you really you wanted to help him, wanted to like it's like, okay, if I'm going to get on this bus, I'm going to do the best I
can and and and do it. So all of my career as a a what became as a guitar technician occasionally with me playing on records or live was intermingled with my career as a photographer, so I got to do for many years, I got to do an alternate between between the two and got to go to Europe and Japan and be on many tours with great, great crews of people and see, you know how this amazing variety of performers and what moves them, like, like, what
is motivating each of them and why are they doing it?
But well, go a little deeper there, what is motivating these artists and why are they doing it?
It's a really good question. I think there are artists like Jonie or James Taylor who are not there to begin with. They're not picking up the guitar like I was at the time. They're not like looking for the for applause. They're not looking for you to tell them how great they are. They just have to do this. And if they could stay in their room and slip the cassette they just finished under the door to to the world and stay in their room, that would be
great for them. Their their motivation is about what they have to say and what they have to do and the hours that are going to spend making it just so for them. Other people are the the roar of the crowd, the the emotion of that coming to them made me seeing that so many times made me feel that for some performing artists it's a matter of attention in the sense of did your parents pay you enough
attention as a kid. Maybe they paid you too much attention, right, so that as an adult you need that extra attention, or maybe they paid you too little attention, and that's what you need now from the audience. When you're the person on stage and all of those people give you that roar of approval, that's what is, you know, moving you right. So I think it's a big that's just a couple of polls, a couple of ways people are moved.
But it is really interesting to just see how also in one scene music itself might be king the music right and in another style might be right or are artfully making a show right? Are making a performance? How
well do you artfully do that? As opposed to I think because I was working with the post Dylan singer songwriters, that was that's the main world that I lived in, so that most most of the people I was photographing, were composing the things they were performing right, really different from you know, Bob, Bob Dylan says in the biograph notes to Cameron Crow, I didn't know it as a kid, he says, growing up. But there were on the one there were singers and then there were songwriters, and there
were for almost nobody did both things. I think about it, there really was. There's the professional singers, right, and then there's the professional performers, and very few, like you could count them on one hand, almost like right, Chuck Burry, Jerry Lee Lewis, like people who wrote their own material and performed it.
Not a lot.
So it was wonderful for me to get to see I was on tour, I guess starting with I don't know, Neil in seventy ors Crosby Nash seventy one, going all the way up to probably Neil in ninety three, something like that, and the unplugged period. So you know, I loved the opportunity to it, to to see that up close.
Now, when you were tuning guitars, when you were a guitar technician, were you also shooting photos on those same gigs?
Good question. I usually if I was hired as a guitar tech. That was all I could do. And the Bob Dylan world, they specifically said Joel, like, we know you know because I was the guitar the tour photographer for the seventy four tour for the same producers. They said to me, listen on this Bob Dylan tour, just don't even bring your cameras. Okay, he doesn't want you to take in pictures. We know what you do all of that. Just leave them at home. You're going to
be the guitar tech. Fine, So I did that, and then one night Bob's assistant runs to me and goes, Joe, Bob wants you to photograph the show tonight, And I said, wasn't that you who called me on the phone and said, like, leave your cameras at home because they're at home. They really are home. So I'd love to do it, but I can't. So I had my all my cameras shipped, and then I did photograph like the next few shows of Bob's. But again, you're responsible for thirty five guitars.
They all have to be in tune. If somebody breaks the string, you gotta deal with.
It, Okay. On these shows where you're the guitar tick. Yes, how many of them have their own separate tour photographer.
Who wasn't me? Let's see, that's a good question. Very few of them.
I was.
I mean, I wasn't paying attention. Who was photography?
I let me ask a different Let me ask you a different question. You know, anybody on the road who's doing anything that has to think is being pretty well compensated, although you're working around the clock. However, shooting photos is different.
From tuning guitars, really different. Ye.
Is there part of you saying, well, this is kind of okay, and I'm getting paid, but it's not as fulfilling as shooting photos. Yeah.
Absolutely. If I had it all to do again, I would do no. I would not be a guitar tech and I would not have done any of that. I realized when I went to a couple award shows for photographers or lifetime achievement awards, that everyone who was being presented with an award on stage got to be a photographer early on, and they just stayed with it. There was no second career. They were not. None of them
were doing photography and something else. So I think that I'd have to say that my photography suffered that in the sense of not taking all of those hours and weeks and years that I put into being a guitar tech that could have been used to become a better photographer. So in hindsight, as much because I had a lot of great fun and I lot did, I'm proud of a lot of the stuff I did. I was the guitar tech for the Last Waltz, the band's last concert with Bob Dylan and Jony and Neil and all of that,
and that was a big thrill for me. And I can still listen to that concert and say, I did a good job. It's not a train wreck. It's in tune, right, that kind of thing. So if there's something you know, but it's not the same as Tom Petty or someone or Bruce Springsteen using a photo of yours for an album cover or a single sleeve or something like that's a whole other kind of excitement.
Okay, you have this start when you're in high school, wet behind the years. Joni Mitchell sort of plucks you from obscurity. Once you're in LA you dropped out of college and the years that did n't suit Okay, are you a member of a group or you an exterearior character. Are they saying, oh, we're having a party where so and so called Joel.
It's a good question. I think when I lived in La I think I was considered part of an part of the extended family, and did get to do lots of things with some of the artists. I when I moved here in seventy three, Neil had just bought his ranch right, so it'd be.
Well, just to be clear, not everybody's up to speed. Where is here?
Oh, I'm sorry. I moved to San Francisco from Tipanga in April of nineteen seventy three, after doing the Time Fades Away tour, after doing all those photos.
I lived.
Graham Nash lived at a Victorian three story home on Buenavista Park in San Francisco in the city and had an apartment that he'd been renting next door that came up for rent, and he invited me to move there from Topanga. And I think that rent was one hundred and fifty nine dollars a month at the time, so it was not hard to do. And I loved San Francisco, so.
I really.
Enjoyed that, But I think I just lost my train of thought about what question I was answering.
Well, you were saying, you know, when you moved up north, being a member of the group, being included.
Oh, yes, so I would again. In the fall, right after, well before I moved up there, I came up to photograph Neil in the Harvest for the Harvest album. So the picture of him of the giant doorknob that's reflected on the inside there, that's you can see me taking the picture in the doorknob and Meil standing there with his hands on his lips looking at me. I felt welcome by all of these people. They were all considering
I was always the youngest one around. They were always I felt welcome, and I didn't feel like.
I didn't.
I didn't feel part of the group, except when occasionally I would get asked to play, like Graham asked me to play on song wind on the Water, for example, when Crosby, Stills and Nash would play that song and we would actually have a film of from the Acousto Society of Whales behind us, and I would get to play an acoustic guitar part on that song. And a couple other songs sometimes for CSN. So I enjoyed that, and you know, I certainly, Yeah, I did not feel
exterior to them at all. I felt like I was We were, we were good friends. And I did things like I transcribed all of David Crosby's songs for guitar back when I was nineteen for uh SO that so the guitarist could play all of those songs tune in the tunings that they were that he wrote them in. That was a big accomplishment for me. And I did the same thing for Jonie for the for the Roses album. So there are all kinds of like other little less things that I could do. I felt very at home.
Uh it was.
It was, uh, you know, compared especially if I compared my my career path to other friends of mine who I knew in high school or just friends or neighbors and what they were doing. I was not doing any kind of nine to five anything, you know ever.
Okay, a couple of questions. The seventy three tour that came after Harvest. The Yeah album that was released was Time Fades Away, which was a live album cover, very rocking, very different from Harvest. You were a different at those shows. He was playing arenas because of the success of Heart of Gold. You hear that the people did not enjoy that you were there?
What was absolutely okay, that's very really good astute question there, Bob.
So yes, the people were expecting to hear the Harvest album. This, by the way, happens on the Tonight's the Night tour later that year, also in late fall of seventy three, especially when Neil is touring colleges at the beginning of that tour, people were puzzled and the way that Neil looked, his look combined with how chaotic it was, and he had never on a show, he had never done a show of arenas and large theaters like that before ever, and.
It was.
I think that his his his putting the band together was like, who did I have the most fun playing with? So I want to have It was, you know, quite a great band. He had Kenny Buttery on drums, who he'd hired, who was a Nashville A list player then and who Neil had to match what his salary would have been had he'd stayed in Nashville. If you can imagine, right, if Kenny's Buttery stays at home in Nashville does X number of sessions per week. What is that number? It's
a large number. So most people are not hiring Kenny to go on their tour. They can't afford to. But Neil could, so he did. And so you've got and Jack Nietzschee for God's sake, Phil Spector's arranger, among other things. You know, the great Jack Nietzschee a part of his band as well.
So but.
His right before the tour begins, in rehearsals, Neil's guitarist from Crazy Horse, Danny Whitten, Neil decides he wants to have him in the band. He knows that Danny is a heroin addict and had written Needle and the Damage Done about him, and he knows the dangers of that, but he really wants to have him in a rhythm guitar position. It just gives him the freedom to play,
you know, to take off when Danny's there. And in rehearsal, Danny is too messed up from drugs to be able to actually do the part, and Neil has to send him home and he.
Danny.
He flies home to Los Angeles, goes right to his heroin dealers and buys enough heroin and he overdoses that night, and Neil gets woken up at four in the morning by the La County Sheriff's department because because Danny had put Neil's phone number in a crumpled piece of paper in his pocket, so they call that number when he's dead and it's Neil. So that's how Neil learns that that, like Danny is dead, and that puts.
A really.
Black, you know, cloak over the whole enterprise of what's supposed to be his first, you know, huge national tour because because of the shock of that, So there's a there's a that combined with trying to deal with like monitors and sound levels. Right, it's an electric band. He's
used to being a solo acoustic act. Of course, he's played with Buffalo Springfield, but they're playing in small places mostly, right, and the main volume issu who has to do between him and Steven there here it is on his own young tour, and I have a photo of him with a with a flying V guitar at one of the sound checks on this tour with a huge wall of amplifiers that he's staring out trying to get his guitar sound right, and he's looking at these amps with great intensity,
trying to like get his guitar sound dialed in, and he never does for the whole tour. So there's a discomfort for him about the size of the arenas, the mm hmm. He becomes unhappy with Kenny Butterer's playing because Kenny's not playing loud enough. Now, Kenny's playing as hard as he can play, and he's like one of the great drummers of our time, and yet he's it's not enough for Neil. Like Neil actually fires him halfway through
the tour and yes, John Barbado to cover it. So it was not a happy tour for Neil, like you said. And the next album, Tonight's the Night, is like is his tribute to Danny Whitten. Basically it's the he and the band he puts together record really late at night with having taken a lot of tequila, and you know, come up with the very dark but brilliant Tonight's the Night album. So I was there for that part.
Also, Okay, you know you mentioned Petty who's managed by Tony Dimitriotis, who's part of Elliott Roberts Lookout Management. But you ultimately worked with Springsteen. How does that come about?
Yes, you know, I think it was. It came about. I don't remember how it was that I was. I must have met John Landau through Jackson. I was on the Running on Empty tour in nineteen seventy seven. Jackson originally asked me to be one of the harmony singers, so the first time anyone asked to hire me as a singer. I'm a huge fan of Jackson's music from his first album Onward and Learn, and rehearsed with Jackson
with his two existing harmony singers. So I was to sing a third harmony, which means you're doing four part vocals, which is very complicated, not easy to do. I learned all the songs and before. I don't want to get too lost in all of this, but briefly, I was very thrilled to be able to be a singer. And the night before the tour started, Jackson called and said, Hey, Jeaul, I've been listening to the tape of our production rehearsal and you sound great and you're getting your pitch is perfect.
You've got everything right. But you know, and listening to this the tape, I think three harmony singers is just one harmony too much, So I've got to ask you to just stay home, which was really like like I was, and I said, well, Jackson, you know I've been looking for it's like two in the morning. This conversation's happening the two in the morning of the night I'm packing
to go there. I said, could it? Could I come out on the tour for like a week or something and just do some photos so at least I will have done something because this I've been looking forward to this now for months and to singing, so it's a big disappointment to me to not be able to do that. But I'd like to come out there anyway and just do some photos. And I did, and I wound up shooting the whole tour, and I wound up singing on the song Rosie on that album, which it's not as
great as being able to sing all the songs. I loved being able to work out all those harmonies. So it was a big disappointment, my biggest disappointment actually professionally up to that point, to have the expectations of being a singer and then not being able to do it. But I did get some really good photos, and I did the running on Empty cover and all the many of the photos that most of the photos that you see on that package, all of which were lost by the art director.
But ultimately you were telling this story connecting to Springsteen.
Oh yes, pardon me. I believe that that Jackson introduced me to John Landau because John had produced the Pretender album, and somehow the subject of Bruce's new album cover came up, which was Darkness on the Edge of Town, and John asked me what I thought of it, and I felt I said, you know, it's a good photo on its own, right, but it has nothing to do with the title or the feel of the song.
To me.
The phrase darkness on the edge of town, to me, conjures up a very vibe kind of thing, almost like I don't know, you probably know the photo of Bruce sitting on a stoop, like at a outside of a gas station. I think it is, or maybe it's like a store at night in New Jersey somewhere. In other words, I was thinking more of a more moody kind of thing, where this is like actually studio lighting set up in Bruce's home. It just didn't I just said I was trying to be honest with him. I just said, I
don't think it has the right feel. And then he called and said, would you come in photograph Bruce like you know, in the next couple of weeks he's recording some new songs. So I went to New York after having just photographed Tom petty In working on the Dan the Torpedo sessions, and I went to New York and met Bruce and he was working on an album. His next album was going to be called The Ties That Bind,
and it was a single album that he'd written. Uh, and he invited me to the session, which was amazing because apparently people he never did that. But so I got to be there when he taught the band the song the River, and then be there for when they got the master tape, which is quite amazing. And he was just a few days before the muse concerts that Bruce played at the multi artist anti nuclear benefit concerts of multiple days in Madison Square Garden that I photographed. So, uh,
that's how I met Bruce. He he I got to spend time with him at his home. I took pictures of him on the boardwalk, and you know, he took me around to his favorite places in New Jersey. I learned later when I when the album finally came out as a double album, the River Album, and I was looking at which pictures were mine and which weren't. There was only a few pictures of mine on there that he used at the time. But I could see that he had taken David Garr and Annie Leebowitz to the
same places that he had taken me too. It was like right and not just as there was one other the person who did the picture of him with the corvette, I'm sorry, his name is escaping me. Great photographer, Frank Frank Stefanco. So four of us he had us go. You know, it's like this is the house, this is a block I grew up on, and you know here here we are in Holme Dell. It was a really kind of an interesting thing and it was I love
I really enjoyed him. He was very understated. He was the king of New Jersey.
You know.
I went with him to the Stone Pony. He was like God, you know, he wasn't not from his viewpoint, from the point of view of the fans and how he was regarded. But I got to, for example, drive under the full moonlight in the black Corvette with you know, in the passenger seat, with the full moon overhead in the trees while we had the listening to a Sun Records compilation cassette he had made in the corvette on our way to the Stone Pony, and it was another
like in the realm of dropping into these worlds. That was an amazing world to drop into. The Bruce Springsteen New Jersey world.
Okay, you know you're not a rock store. So there was all this rock scene in San Francisco in the sixties. Then there was a scene in La But as we hit the seventies and eighties, it's more and more lay. You're living in San Francisco, you feel like you're missing out.
And a very good question. Interestingly, as the seventies went on, you know, as you say, in the beginning of the seventies, late sixties, early seventies, San Francisco was a big music scene. When Neil played in Buffalo Springfield in sixty seven and they were coming up here to do their first shows.
There's an amazing interview with him by a DJ named Tony Pigg where Neil talks about like how intimidating it was to be from La and come up in nineteen sixty seven and come up to San Francisco with the bands that he said, well, are you kidding? You guys have the Airplane and the Dead, but you have and Quicksilver,
right but really but like you have Moby Graate. Okay, So the biggest in fluences for Neil and Buffalo Springfield are Moby Grape and love seriously right Forever changes And so to him it was like very intimidating to come to northern California. So anyway, that scene did go on, and here's you know, Crosby does his solo album the same month that Jerry Garcia does his solo album, and right they're next to each other in the same studio. So you get this great bleed through with all of
you know, these people playing together. You get members of the Airplane and the Dead together playing on both Jerry's album and in Crosby's album. To me, I would say there's something especially about David's album there that is almost like the pinnacle in some ways in terms of execution and really doing something fantastically well of Crosby's If I could only remember my name album, and I think that was a great, uh, you know, work of art for him, and and and showed you what that scene was was
capable of. But as you say, it gradually went away until by the late seventies things had definitely shifted for La. I didn't feel having lived there, I was not going to move back to La. I didn't care for it. I really didn't.
I was.
I liked the green of northern California more. I liked that it was more urbane and not so sprawled and diffuse. And I think that Hollywood, that the film business, which you know, really came to precedence way over you know, became the uh I'm sure always been, but at least what I could see, you know, the music business was the whole of it was considered like a little step child compared to film in Hollywood. Right, it was just like, oh, you're in Oh you're in music. Oh that's so pat
on the head, you know, that's so nice. How interesting for you is that?
Do you like that?
You like being making records? That kind of thing. So also you had this other thing going on, which was the ascension of cocaine and what that did you know, among groups that previously had smoked pot, and what the difference in that vibe was going on in the same in that same sweep of time right through the seventies.
Okay, you end up running mew Young's archives for a while. How did that come to be? In what was that? Like?
What happened was Let's see, I had been asked in nineteen eighty four when I was on a Neil Young tour, could I could I stop what I was doing and become Prince's guitar tech They just fired the guitar technician on the Purple Rain tour. Could I come and finish the tour? Well, I have five shows left with my Neil Young tour, which is like a country the country bands that he was doing. But I could I could be there like in you know, eight or nine days, No,
we need you somebody here tomorrow. I just said, well, I'm sorry, I got to finish this tour and can't you just leave? And I said, you wouldn't want to hire me and then have me, you know, flake out on you in the last eight days of the tour, would you right? So No, I can't. I can't do that. I'm sorry, Like if you can, if it just if in a week or two weeks. You need still need somebody, let me give me a call. Never heard from them again.
Three years later I get a call, Joel, could you be in Minneapolis like on January tewod Prince needs get a new guitar and technician. He needs to figure out something about his guitar soundup. He's not happy with his guitar sound So I thought it was like, Okay, this will be like a little consultant kind of thing and I'll figure it out what it is will be a few days. And instead I did work with one of
his technicians to fix the problem he was having. It was completely different than any other scene that I had been at. It was quite wild, and he was Mozartian and his genius.
Okay, but you're telling me about how you end up working for the Archives.
After I worked for Prince, which was a wonderful life changing thing to do, I got a call from Neil that he was working on his what was going to be Decade two. He had the Decade album from nineteen seventy six. He was originally going to do It's starting in eighty six, but it kept going on and it wasn't being It wasn't finished he was still working on it. Could I come and oh, could I come with him and help him with that?
So I I did.
This was now nineteen ninety and I started in January and originally was just going to do the artwork and the photographs. And also I got his chronology together. He didn't have a sense of like what happened when, so he had a sense, but he wasn't correct for a lot of it. So I did a database in which we could see the total chronology of Neil Young from before Buffalo Springfield, from when he was in the Squire's's Band in Canada all the way to the present day.
And then I became the me to do the He said, well, here's a list of the things I'm interested in putting out and I said, yeah, but you skipped over this and this and this and this. So he said, you know, why don't you do this part too, Like you you can be the archivist for the music stuff too, because I want to know what you know a lot of stuff I've forgotten. So that's how all of that became. And I was his archivist for about twenty years.
And was that essentially a full time job?
Yes, it was so that what was that that job was So imagine if you're Neil Young and you want to put out I asked him one day, like, so, Neil, are you do you have a sense of like, uh in this in this box set you want to do, is it going? Do you have a sense of the relationship of release material versus unreleased material? He thought for a second. He said, no, it's not whether it's released or not. I just want the best. So I said, so you're looking for the best performances of the best songs.
He said, That's exactly what I'm looking for. So I took it upon myself to go and do that listening for him, so I could say, okay, Neil, of all of the versions of calgaryl and the Sand you've ever done, these are the only three you need to listen to to figure out the best one. Because if it's already come out on it as an album, whatever the best is has to be better than that master better than the released album, whether it's a demo or a live
version or whatever. So I did that for years and listened to all as much music as I could, studio and live of his to pick what was the very best Neil Young music.
We're in this story. Do you meet your wife and have children?
I don't. I don't get married and I don't have children. That they're not in the story.
Okay, well you know the same. You know, my research is kind of funny. Just as an aside, I wanted to know what year you were born in and it said you were dead AI, and it was definitely Joel Bernstein, the photographer.
Okay, so check this out. This is you're reminding me of a moment I have to which is this. I'm I'm rarely ill, but at this point I'm at my apartment in San Francisco next door to Grams. I have a really high fever and feeling terrible. And the phone starts ringing off the hook and it's people I know, and they're going, oh, oh you're there.
I knew you were there, Thank God.
The next call is like they're crying on the phone.
What what is this? Okay.
It turns out that it's the night of the Grammys and they're doing the memorial section in the Grammys and the you know, the narrow and saying and you know, with this person passed away in sadly and this next person and Rock photographer Joel Brodsky passed away. So it turns out that the guy on the desk, the entertainment guy who's watching the Grammys, hears rock photographer Joel and he just immediately thinks it's me because I'm from Philadelphia.
He's the Philadelphia paper. He writes up in the paper and online that Joel Bernstein has died. Unfortunately, right Rock after his successful career with Crosby Stoleson Nash and Joni Mitchell and Neili yelling yourself, apparently he's dead and that's why everybody was calling me.
Well, you know, that's probably part of what's going on in AI, which is also I did you know, because obviously Joel Bernstein, You're not the only Joel Bernstein, but in terms of Joel Bernstein, rock photographer, and you look and it says two children's name whatever.
It's like, Okay, I wonder, see I wonder if you put parentheses around the Joel bost Believe me, you said.
Believe me. Okay, I'm an expert googler.
Oh okay, got it, I get it. That's really funny.
Okay. A couple of questions here. You talked about the album cover after the ghuld Rush and Elliott told you.
What to charge?
How did you decide what to charge your I mean some things like guitar tick, there's an at there's a range of real.
Right, there's going to be you're going to get a weekly salary in per diem.
Right, But if you're shooting a photo that is used for certain purpose, right, you know it could be anything from zero to you know, fifty thousand dollars, Right, how do you decide what the price is?
I guess you learn more at the time, like what could what could you charge? When he suggested that, I charged them fifteen hundred dollars, you know, for the front, back and inside of that. Then when I saw the poster, I called them back and said, so there's a poster also a different shot. Send them another bill for five hundred dollars. So that was like my basis.
I guess.
Those are just numbers he came up with. I don't know whether they were commensurate with what the figures were at the time, honestly, but you know, over time, when you're starting, you know, you every one who's paying you wants to pay as little as possible, and it takes time for you two years to say, well, somebody you know paid me this much for that same usage, so that that's what I'm going to charge you for that cover or for that the inside of your songbook or
you know, whatever the thing is. Right, So, all through my whole career, I've had to make those decisions about like what to charge. You know, I'm not a great business person. I probably could have if I had been more when you asked, like was I pounding the pavement and taking my portfolio, for example, to Columbia Records in LA when like in the early seven mid seventies or something when I could have been doing that, I didn't. I think I was more let's just let it happen,
like let's just see. You know. I think if I was not making enough money to pay my rent and buy groceries, that I would have would have done those things and like pounded the pavement more.
Okay. Another big issue now more than ever is ownership. Yes, a lot of stuff today is licensed yet and now I'm cover a license license in perpetuity for this use if you want to use it for something. Right, So all of this legendary stuff that you did, do you own in it? Or did you all the rights.
I own the copyright to everything, and I the rights I sold would be as you say, would be license, would be a one time use license for whatever it was for Rolling Stone Magazine, for Columbia Records, for you know,
mainly for the use in a documentary film. For example, I'm currently working on a documentary of I've had a lot of photos used in documents, documentary films, uh for that I used that used a lot of my photos, including for Tom Petty, The Heartbreakers, for Bruce Springsteen, for Jonie, for Neil and I'm currently working on a documentary film
on Crosby, Stills and Nash and their history. So you know, in the end of the the to the what I get paid will be a function of how many images are they using and what rate do we negotiate at those for those hundred those those usages. The more usages you have, the less the rate goes down. If you use like fifty of something instead of ten, right, or if you use one hundred instead of twenty, right, those
kinds of things. So and you just have to become familiar with what is the going rate that my peers, for example, are getting charged for the same kind of usages.
Okay, if you're a musician, as one ages irrelevant of playing live, all the money is in the publishing as opposed to the record royalties at dis laid date owning these iconic images. Yes, there's one time events like these movies. But if you annualize it, is this like cab a pension or is it not that loose?
That's a good question. I would say it's never risen to the to the level of it being maybe there have been some years where it could it could be a significant part of my income. It's it's not like especially as a photography Let's see, I have to back up. I started selling prints of my photographs starting with Neil Young Prince in twenty eleven. So I've had a business doing that where my prints are sold at galleries. They are also now sold online in my website Joel Bernstein dot com.
And so the.
Figuring out which photos people want to buy and how you want to present those photos to them something I've been doing since since twenty eleven. So that's been a big thrill actually for me, and that helps. It's not again going to support me, but it's going to add to the income coming in.
So what is supporting you.
Well, I'm saying it's a combination of my selling prints, my having photos used for something like this Crosby Stills and Nash documentary. I also, for example, did a I was at Neil Young asked me would I redo the layout of his third volume of his archives, which is not something I normally is like sort of being an art director and editor, which I can do well by now, and so that's something I was paid for on an
hourly basis. I'll be paid as a consultant to the CSN film and hopefully there'll be other projects I'm going to be working on. I'm hoping to work on a film by Cameron Crowe coming up. I'm helping him with the accuracy of the chronology of his memoir of Joni Mitchell, and I'm hoping that they'll be also a film having to do with her that I might be involved in.
At this late date. How much contact do you have with these people like Jonie, Neil, Graham, Nash, etc.
It varies. I speak to Graham often. We're still really good friends. I worked on Jony's archival. She has four volumes of archival projects that are all previously unreleased material going back to before she was signed, and I have a lot of photos in those, and I should say at some point that Joni was giving away her earthly possessions. In nineteen seventy one, when I was nineteen, and I came to her house and it was sort of in disarray,
and I said, what's going on. She said, well, I've decided I've gotten too comfortable here and I'm going to give away my earthly possessions and move. I'm going to I bought some land in Canada and I'm going to buy a build a small house there, and I'm leaving this town. And she said, you can have anything you want. The Tiffany lamp, so and so I was taking the Tiffany lamp and the carousel pig, life sized carousel pig of wood that she had behind her couch, like, I'm
taking that with me, but anything else, it's up. You can take what. Let's look around. And I don't know how I thought of this at nineteen, but I said, well, has anyone asked you for the tapes and acetates? And she said, no, you can have them all. So she gave me all of the tapes and acetates that she had taken home from the studio and live up to that point. And that started me a whole collection of those kinds of tapes because people didn't care about them.
These are the tape copies that they take home to like here, how did I sound that night? Do we want to use take three or take eleven? Those kinds of tapes, rough mixtapes. So she gave me all of those, which included the tapes that Graham Nash had left behind when they had lived together. And so the rough mixes of the first CSN album and Deja Vu, for example, are there. And oh, her engineer was working on what the Flying Burrito Brothers first album at the same time,
and here's rough mixes of that. So that was like another exciting kind of thing for me to be doing. And we've gotten to use those tapes over time. In so I got to produce, well or co produce the box set for David Crosby Stephen Still's in Graham Nash, which is like lifetime sets to sort of so you don't know who these people are here, let me show you who they are. So that's a big thing to be able to do. And I, you know, it's a big. It's a big responsibility to try to get it right
and to decide which versions of things you're doing. You know, Bob, there's this whole thing of They say all comparisons are odious, and I sort of subscribe to that. There's right, it's not a good thing to be comparing this to that, and then what's your best album and what's the best which is a better song and all of that. But if you're doing my job, let's say, in the editing I was doing for Neil Young, I do have to
make those decisions, right. I have to listen to like twenty or fifty versions of something and say, okay, Neil, you're only hearing these three or four. So I found that this is a great It's good to have that discern and to be able to figure out those things, especially because most people if you said, like, here's ten versions of the same song done by Neil Young on the same tour, which one do you think is the best? Even a really Neil Young fan who would think, oh,
this is my dream job. I know all about Neil Young. I can tell you what the best Sugar Mountain is. No. Actually, your eyes are going to glaze over and you won't remember whether it was three or five or whatever it is. So all of that has been, you know, kind of a thrill for me to be able to do as well as the photography.
Okay, from a very young age. To use the Hamilton quote, you were in the room where it happened. Anybody who knows who's been in those rooms knows that they're rules. Yes, it's kind of like private jet rules. You can get on the jet, but there are certain seats. You better not suiting those seats.
It's so well said. I've watched that role be violated.
Believe me, that's an ugly scene. But in any event, you're in the room where it happens, I have you know. There are a couple of basic rules when you're interacting with people like this. A you don't want to come across as a fan, and usually you don't want to talk about what they're famous for. You want to treat them as regular people. Because we both know their exceptions. I can tell you some hilarious of steps, and people
love to talk about themselves. And of course, of course, then there are people they're in the room that it happens, they don't understand the rules. They're not a major player, they start to eat up a lot of air and everybody agrees they can never come right.
Okay, somebody please say score that person out right now. I mean, I will say that many You can imagine there's a very very varying sensitivity of different artists, recording artists. Let's say, to who's in the studio, who's in the control room when they're making a record, for example, would be a really good one. Some people are like, let's have a party, bring bring your you're sure my girlfriend's
coming in whatever. Fine. Other people are like so sensitive, people like Neil or Bob Dylan are so sensitive to who is in the room that there really needs to be. You only want to have the bare minimum of people. And if you're not there, like if you're there, you're not there for a reason, you really shouldn't be there kind of thing. Because they they're they're going to be very sensitive to every single person who is that they're why are they here right? Because they're they're working, they're
trying to they're not hanging out. They're there to do their job.
So you know, the the.
Uh, the whole issue of not being not drawing attention to yourself. By the way, as a photographer. Also both as a crew member and as a photographer, you want to disappear, right, you really do you? You want to be more like a ninja. What how did he get that picture?
Where?
Where was he?
Right?
Don't I don't remember him doing that? That that sort of thing. You don't want to be like, hey, it's all about me and oh yeah, hey, hey, good to see you, you know, glad ending no, no, no, no, you know so And if you think about it, taking someone's photograph, even whoever it is a father to their daughter, you know, a friend to a friend, there's a dance, there's a social dance about photography about okay, are you posing?
Are you not? Are you?
You know, you don't know I'm taking the picture. So I'm getting this, you know, amazing, like you know, very person moment of who you are, but you don't even know that I'm doing it. There's you have to be very aware of that. And as a crew member, you know, let's say you can't be drawing attention to yourself. You have to really disappear. So it's an interesting combination of lessons to learn.
Okay, you're an intelligent guy, you're a nice guy and you're articulate. I say that totally straightforward. Don't deny it. Whatever, you're nineteen, you're sitting in the room with Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, whatever do you say to yourself, I'd better shut up or you gauging how much you're talking like I'm privileged to be here, And are you judging how much comfort you achieve over time as to how much to participate?
Yes, I think that you're just you just develop a sensitivity to vibe too in the room and and make sure, uh you know that whatever you're contributing is is to the better right uh, and that you're.
Uh.
I was very surprised that these people who were older than me were treating me so nicely and and and we're not like saying, hey, kid, get out of here kind of thing.
Uh.
There was something. I think it partly had to do with the fact that I could play guitar. That I was that they were related to that and were like, oh, you understand me better. You're you you you your guitar is too, so you sort of understand like what this is about, but it is.
I I.
Would I would hope that if someone were to look at the best of my photos, and I'm hoping at some point to do a book of my best photos of musicians as a big goal of mine. I envision this like me taking you into these rooms you'll never be in yourself. I want to give you what it felt like to be in that room. I want to provide you that you don't have to be there yourself.
If you probably won't be ever in a bistro at eleven at night with Joni Mitchell in Italy, but if you were, this is what it would look like across the table. This is how it would feel, not just look. That's a thing, right, you're trying to One of the things in photography is you could make it your goal to make someone as pretty or handsome as possible.
Right.
Many photographers do that. Many sitters of photos want that, right. I'm looking to get underneath the skin and reveal something of the inner, the interior world of that person. Some religions feel that what we see on the outside is an illusion, right, if that everything the beautiful woman, No, that's just an illusions. What's really going on? And I think that if you my goal has always been to like give you the viewer of the photograph some idea of what it's like to be in that room with
that person. I'm not trying to make them better or make them laugh or whatever it is. I'm trying to give you an insight into them as a person.
Well, Joel, thank you for giving us insight into your world. First and foremost. So many people you talk about what happened in the past, you have to remind them the fact that you knew exactly when these albums came out and said, I say okay, and I have a million more questions. And there's so many things. Reference the week of Crosby Stills in Nash and Young. I couldn't get tickets for that at the filmore recent June. There are
other shows you mentioned. You know, I've been there. It's really I saw the CSNY seventy four to where I saw a Nassau Coli seat, even though I grew up in Connecticut.
Once I got tickets, do you remember, I'm really curious, Oh, I remember exactly where I was.
I could tell you where I went to the bathroom where I was seating. Listen. I'm one of the people who doesn't go with conventional wisdom. Four Way Street. I don't think the harmonies are excellent.
There's several things, yes, I agree, okay.
And in the interim from June to seventy to when Neil Young joined the band again and they went on the road in seventy four, there were a number of acts who could replicate the harmonies live, not only acoustic or you know country rock musicians who could do right well, bands like Yes, etc. So when I went to the show, I didn't expect the harmonies to be as good as they were. Ah, I was just saying, I'm gonna have
the experience. And you know, certainly as the years went by, it was more of a privilege to have Neil on the road with the other three or to make music with the other three, whereas at this point I felt it was more equalized. Listen, as I say, I remember Vivid, I thought it was a great show, not because I'm talking to you, because I can tell you about other Crosby stills in that shows that weren't as good as that. Let's leave it right at It was.
An amazing mix of songs. Also, like Neil's writing, in particular the things that he was the new songs he was writing that he pulled out in the acoustic set, plus things like pushed it over the end and on the beach on the are you kidding on the beach? Live with that band? Crazy? Like so good, so great.
The other funny thing is you went to college in the fall of seventy yeah, and your parents went on around the world trip. I went to college in September of seventy. My parents immediately went to Europe and there was not a phone in the room, so there was that simbling. It's like, you know, first of all, it's so different from today where people connect with their parents.
That part is so mild to me, Like like I have friends who is like they're always on the phone with their daughter at college. I'm like, at some point I have to go, excuse me. But like when I was growing up, like when you went to college, part of the thing was like you didn't call it when there was a problem. You didn't call your parents every time there was a problem. Like you seem to be calling your daughter, like she's calling you like two or three times a day, Like like, what's up with that?
Are you sure that's a good thing?
Well, it's like, you know, I know, people's kids call them how to do the laundry. I never did the laundry at home, but I'm went to college. I didn't think twice that I had to learn how to do the launch. You know, you went down to the I learned you had to do it in the middle of the night because otherwise couldn't get a massie right.
But you learn how to.
Also, you learned how to like clean your own dishes. You know the great sign in the dormitory, you know, like it would say there'd be a sign that says, like your mother does clean your dishes.
Your mother doesn't, Yeah, exactly. The other thing is I went to I bought my records at EJ Corp.
Sure cheap.
I bought so many records. You remember those people just don't know people the vinyl fetishization. I have all my vinyl. If it was originally recorded the analog, I understand completely. But people have no idea how defective the vinyl was. They don't to get a record with nose skips, no surface noise, flat records impossible. I returned so many records at EJ corbat Well, don't buy any more records here.
That's really funny. I can remember having records, what was it? Days of future pasted right by the moody blues, Like I couldn't get a decent pressing, Like I didn't know about pressings, and like why why do I put this on? And like my knee, I just hear scratches like right away, and then the voices sound like far away. That's not what it sounded like on the radio. It's so true.
Well the thing I'm reaching. So I go to college in Vermont. This is the dark ages before cable TV, cell phones, whatever. And if you put an EJ corve vet, you realize things went on sales and you bought so many records you were not going to pay Certainly they were usually two dollars off this price. So I'm gonna I mean, living in Vermont and the store wants to charge you a dollar more than EJ coord Sure, but that damn after the gold Rutch album came out the
first week college, right, Oh I paid for that? Sure?
I was, well, yeah, you can imagine how I felt like as a kid. Just imagine you're like if it was your first week as a freshman in college and you see that, but you've taken the pictures and you walk into the record store and it's all fifty copies of it are in shrink wrap on the floor, in piles.
And it was it was.
That was a big moment in my life.
I cannot even imagine it. That's beyond the story. Well, one thing, you know, at the second fret, there's another thing, going to David Geffen's apartment. Okay, but walking into the record store, it's not any record. That was the breakthrough. You know, everybody, if you were engh you owned everything. Everybody knows this is nowhere, but the average person still wasn't buying and you went that record. It was the soundtrack of the dorm.
To go to the record store, I was going to say, it was, like I've said to people, you know, like that was the dorm record of that year. For sure, every kid wanted to play how to play? How does how do you play? Tell me?
Why?
How can I play? Southern Man? It was like the record to play.
And believe me, I played along with my guitar. Not that I'm in the league of you, but right, but the fact that you, I mean, okay, you weren't there, You're in college, you're a lady back guy. How do you end up telling people and do they even believe you that you've shot them?
It is funny you asked that. I can remember, well, I realized first of all later that so the picture of Neil that we were talking about with lying on the couch in this funky dressing room, that's the gatefold of the cover. And by the way, all the pictures on the cover of that album are very gritty and very urban. They're like very not like what the music is inside, right right, they really which like which at the time I didn't really quite understand why he chose
those things. Now I have a better understanding of it.
But uh, that that.
That that became such a major album, And now I'm out of college. I was left. But all my friends are like playing that record. And I remember a friend of mine telling me about being in Paris that year and how the DJ in Paris was just was describing the album cover to his audience on the radio in Paris, and I was like, I just my head blew up. I was like, I you know, you're you know there you are walking down the street with these two guys who are older than you. You know who knows that? Like,
so you know that it becomes a classic. It's you know, considered one of the top one hundred album covers.
Like well they In addition, people have no idea you used you talked about the Beatles on it. It's all of them. People have no idea to have access when you're a high school student. One thing, if you live in La the people there possibly, but you're living in the suburbs game access to these people.
It would be impossible, unheard of. I just have to say that after csny's show at the at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, where I took the picture that's Neil's Greatest Hits cover for example, that really intense shot of him looking down after having gone through the box of photos with him.
Uh.
After the show, they're looking for a pool hall. They can't find a pool hall that to now, how could there not be a pool hall open? But for some reason, the guy the promoter saying, yeah, well, like we can't find one that Steven's got like a portable like a pool queue that you you know, in two pieces with a carrying right right right, No, I really I really like one. I play and I go, well, you know,
my parents have a pool table at my house. I mean I'm sure he could come over, and they go really, yeah, well we'll be there, and I'm like really, And so I go home. I take the train home, you know, and then like a limo pulls up and it's Stephen and Graham and a film crew at my parents' house. It's like now it's midnight, twelve thirty. My parents are asleep upstairs. Okay, guys, all right, come in. We're gonna
go to the pool tables in the basement. Okay, so shita there we thing they like when they start smoking a joint in the basement. Okay, maybe they're doing some other drug in the basement as well. At some point, the intercom phone rings. It's from my parents' bedroom. It's my dad. We pick it up, son, what's going on down there? What's all that noise? Oh god, Dad? I'm sorry. Uh you know, remember I went to that show tonight to photograph that band, and they they wanted to they
needed a place to play pool. So two of them are are here with me tonight. I'm gonna just make sure they'll be really cool. I'm really sorry, but they'll be quiet, you know, we'll just keep it down. I hang up. There is full of hash smoke. Five seconds later, my dad appears in his bathroom hand out Stanley Bernstein, Hi, how are you doing? Come to my house? That's hysticle, that really really happened.
So my point is that he's totally cool with them.
He doesn't say what is that? Nothing, He's like, Hey, how you doing? Can I get you something to drink?
Totally amazing, right, So later they come.
Up to my bedroom with the film crew. I have my pictures that I've been taking so far, So I have Joni Mitchell and Neil Young and Laura Nira up on the wall like this behind them, and they shoot this on film, and that footage becomes Cameron's inspiration for the whole idea of the band comes to visit the kid in almost famous and the poster is up on the wall right, that posters thee after the it's taken
let's say, inspired by the after the gold Rush. Inside right, it's it's the band Sweetwater or whatever it is, you know, posed right up in the kids thing and the guy is actually visiting him in his bedroom. That whole scene comes from my actual experience to telling Cameron about that whole story. That's how that happens.
Normally with the story like that, the emphasis is on, yeah, I influenced the movie. Okay, in this case, fuck the movie. The story itself is so fucking great.
It doesn't matter about the movie.
Well, thank you, it was. You can you can dive out of a story like that for a lifetime.
Well, I think I should be doing more of that. I'm feeling a little a little package.
Okay, So in any of that, I'm gonna leave it at that because I can't. I'm sure there might be a story better than that. But that's a ten out of ten Joel. Okay, Well, thank you, Bob. I wanted to thank me anytime.
It's great. It's really great talking right, and we really have so much a coin right it.
Literally same era really, so thanks for taking time talk to my audience. Till next time. This is Bob left Sex