| |
 |
|
| Ethan Russell's new book, Let It Bleed: The Rolling Stones 1969 U.S. Tour (available through rhino.com), is a tour de force of images of the band onstage and off, as well as a trove of commentary from their inner circle. Click photo to launch slideshow. |
At first glance, Ethan A. Russell's career in music photography seems like Chauncey Gardiner's lucky journey in the film Being There. As a 23-year-old expatriate in London in 1968, Russell was tapped to photograph Mick Jagger by a new publication called Rolling Stone. That gig eventually led to working friendships with many members of 1960s rock 'n' roll royalty. Russell is, in fact, the only person to have shot album covers of the Rolling Stones (Through the Past Darkly); the Beatles (Let It Be, Hey Jude); and the Who (Who's Next). "It was very serendipitous," Russell says of his photo career. "It's funny how a lot of this stuff happens."
Russell went on to photograph many music stars through the 1970s, then branched out into video directing, writing and, in recent years, Web interface design. But his historic still photography is now enjoying a renaissance: A major exhibition of Russell's large-scale prints, Let It Bleed: The Rolling Stones 1969 U.S. Tour, runs at the San Francisco Art Exchange through April 4, and then travels to Rotterdam's VIP's International Art Galleries in April and later to London.
Front and center is Russell's extensive trove of images from the Rolling Stones '69 tour of America -- a groundbreaking series of concerts (immortalized on the Get Your Ya-Ya's Out! album) during which Russell was given unprecedented access to the group's activities, both onstage and off. "It's important that this work finally gets to be seen," says Annie Leibovitz, one of Russell's music-photo peers. "Ethan was doing something that no other photographer was doing at the time."
The variety and sheer scale of Russell's work with the Stones can be seen in a mammoth new book, also called Let It Bleed, available through www.rhino.com. With 420 pages and more than 500 photographs (many never seen), measuring 15x12x4 inches, and selling for $650, it's a stunning coffee-table volume designed for Stones fanatics who now have some cash on hand. (Lots of fans are buying those high-dollar tickets that made the Stones' most recent tour the highest-grossing concert series ever.) Russell's Let It Bleed is more than just a visual document: It includes interviews with many key players in the Stones' entourage, from band members Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor to tour manager Sam Cutler to record producer Glyn Johns. "I knew that this had the opportunity to be a serious book," Russell says, "because of its historical uniqueness."
 |
| © Ethan Russell |
| Keith Richards catches a nap backstage, with Mick Taylor and Charlie Watts in the background. "A point that's often missed," recalls Ethan Russell, "is that these people worked very hard." |
Adding to that seriousness is a significant section on the Stones' infamous free concert at the Altamont Speedway at the tour's end -- a traumatic event that marked not only the nadir of the group's concert history but, by many accounts, served as the unofficial end of the peace-and-love 1960s ethos. The bare facts -- including the murder of concertgoer Merideth Hunter at the hands of Hells Angels in front of the stage, as documented in the film Gimme Shelter -- fail to convey that day's lingering impact, Russell says. "The feeling of devastation was total, both while you were there and afterwards -- as if everything had collapsed," he recalls. "Call it what you will." (According to recent reports, Mick Jagger was even targeted for assassination by Hells Angels members in the event's bitter aftermath.)
All of which makes the Let It Bleed book and exhibition resonate with cultural lessons nearly 40 years later. We recently caught up with Russell when he visited New York for a gallery show of his work, and he shared thoughts about his photo career, the legacy of the 1960s, and his experiences with the World's Greatest Rock Band. (He didn't opine whether that's the Beatles or Stones.)
Jack Crager: Why did you decide to put out such a big book -- and why now?
Ethan Russell: The book has been in the works for awhile. I ended up publishing it with Rhino, which is a first for them, and it just grew to be this scale. And it had a discovery component to it, especially the part about Altamont. For anyone who was near the stage, you might as well have been at war. When I talk to people who were on the [Rolling Stones 1969] tour, some may not remember the middle of the tour well -- but eveybody remembered Altamont like it was yesterday. They knew where they were, they knew how they felt, they remember being scared. It brought back all these stories. And that show, of course, was not really part of the U.S. tour because the Stones had finished it by then.
JC: Altamont was like an afterthought -- it had been promised as a free concert, and they had to move the location...
ER: "That's correct. The Stones and the other bands were motivated to do it for perfectly good, innocent reasons. But this event got totally out of control. When I started this book, I didn't know what all was here, but I knew that Altamont occurred, and it was phenomenal, and the rest of the tour was spectacular, and nobody knew about it like those of us who were there.
JC: Was there a sense that you had put this in the past -- and then wanted to go back to it?
ER: Well, it's definitely a platform. A lot of this stuff is very funny. It didn't all come out of me -- I had characters telling the story. And it gave me the opportunity to say, "How did we do?" Altamont was like getting a big shock: There was a disavowal of a lot of the stuff that the '60s were about. And all these years later, you have to look back and ask how we turned out. I didn't get the same answer from everyone, which I really liked. And my own personal take is, at best, a mixed review. As somebody said, life is not a rehearsal. You've got to hold yourself responsible.
JC: So part of this was an attempt to do that?
 |
| © Ethan Russell |
| Mick Taylor, Keith Richards, and tour manager Sam Cutler during the 1969 tour. Following Brian Jones's visa problems, drug addictions, and eventual death, Taylor joined the Stones as guitarist on the tour. |
ER: Yeah. One of the people in the book is Chip Monck, who was famous for being the voice of Woodstock and for being a penultimate stager. Chip said, "Somebody should have stood up and taken responsibility for Altamont, and nobody did." The Hells Angels blamed the Stones, the Stones blamed the Hells Angels, and even the people who showed up -- the ones in the front who were getting beat up by the Hells Angels -- some of them were so screwed up that they were falling down and knocking over their bikes. Well, they have to take some responsibility too. But nobody did. And for everyone it had this kind of traumatic component. But Altamont is just one part of this project -- I knew I had great pictures from throughout the tour. And I had a level of access that nobody else had ever had.
JC: At some level, you befriended the Stones -- they sort of took you into their inner circle, right?
ER: Well there were only 16 of us on tour, so it was hard not to be in the inner circle if you were a part of it. But by the same token, there was no question that the Stones were the stars. They demanded respect, but they were doing work that made it sensible to give it to them. They were doing seriously good work. They were already huge stars when I met them, in '68. The ethos of the 60s was sort of that you were all in it together -- but you weren't, really. Still, we were friendly. They visited my parents' house in northern California.
JC: You have pictures of Mick and Keith riding horses in the countryside...
ER: Yeah, they're English boys, and it was all new to them. But as a photographer, I never really was like, "I want to be your best friend." It wasn't just hanging out for the sake of hanging out. Partly I would have been too shy. But also, I believe that you don't want the photography to be about the photographer. You want it to be about what's going on. And if you're too buddy-buddy, they're going to wave at you and smile when you walk by. So I was like, Stay on the edge and watch. And I do think it paid off, in that nobody's looking at the camera.
JC: But they felt comfortable enough with you to give you total access on the tour.
ER: Yeah. I think on one level, I was this guy from America, and maybe I was intriguing; they couldn't type-cast me. And I tried to be a pleasant guy and didn't get in your face and took pretty good pictures and all that. So I think it added up.
JC: They probably wanted pictures for publicity reasons...
ER: I think that's right, but in that way, they were on drugs [laughs]. Because I didn't have the mechanism to distribute all this [photography] around. That's why so much of it hasn't been seen. I didn't have the syndication rights or anything. And then when this tour was over, I was off doing the Who's Next cover or some other stuff. So some of this was published periodically, but a lot of it will be seen for the first time in this book.
JC: What did you shoot all this with?
A Nikon, probably an F1 -- I don't even think I had a motor-drive yet -- and two or three lenses. I would've had a 24mm, a 105mm, those were my favorites. I don't think there was a 180 yet. There wasn't much in the way of long lenses, and there certainly wasn't autofocus. I used a Pentax spot meter.
JC: You were reeling off rolls and rolls?
ER: I've got five or six binders of 15 rolls, so 75 rolls. Not a huge amount by today's standards.
JC: You had first met Mick Jagger through an assignment for Rolling Stone, right?
ER: Right. I had gone to England to get out of America. I was against the Vietnam war, and I was of draft age, and while I didn't get out just to escape the draft, I sure as hell didn't want to go. And I went over to Europe with friends, and they all went back at the end of the summer but I stayed in London. I lived in a one-room flat -- I would walk and walk, and I loved it. And the movie Blow-Up was a big influence. Because Blow-Up was about being a photographer in the '60s.
JC: You had discovered photography by then?
ER: Yeah, it was very serendipitous. In college I had wanted to be a writer, but I had a friend who took pictures, had his own darkroom, and explained that stuff -- it was a slow, painful process [laughs]. And I bought a Pentax and started taking pictures. I later worked in a camera store, and when I left I bought a Nikon from them. So I'm living in a flat in London, and a friend came over, and he had a buddy who was writing for this new magazine -- in its third issue -- called Rolling Stone. And he asked if I wanted to photograph Mick Jagger. And the Stones saw those pictures and liked them. And they don't know I'm not anybody [laughs]. I mean, I interviewed Bill Wyman for this book, and Bill's been great, very nice over the years, but when I told him the story of how this happened, he was almost like pissed off! Like I had tricked them [laughs].
JC: They thought you were Somebody?
 |
| © Ethan Russell |
| Ecstatic fans reach toward the stage during the Rolling Stones 1972 tour, which Russell also photographed and included in the book's epilog. |
ER: Right. It's funny how a lot of this stuff happens. But once I did that, it's such a small world, and Apple [the Beatles' record company] of course is watching the Stones. And then I got the chance to shoot John Lennon, and Lennon was great. He was very approachable, took a liking to me, started calling me up and asking me to do stuff. And of course he was even more stratospheric for me -- the Beatles were the biggest! And Lennon was phenomenal, and nice to me, and I got a call from Apple asking I wanted to come in and see them. Because it was this little group of people. So then I was shooting for the Beatles.
|
