TIMMY VULGAR

© Jamie Goodsell 

Links: HEARTLESS HEATHEN 12" • THIRD MAN RECORDS

          GET UP, GET OUT 7" • THIRD MAN RECORDS

PHOTOGRAPHY INTERVIEW • HENRY DILTZ • PART TWO

by Jamie Goodsell 

All images © Henry Diltz

www.morrisonhotelgallery.com

The next day, there were thousands. You couldn't even drive your car down the road, because cars were parked on each side of little country lanes, with not enough room to drive down. At that point, I had a rented station wagon and slept in the back of it behind the stage. That was fine because there was something going on all of the time. I spent most of the concert working right on the stage. 

What's one of your fondest memories from Woodstock? 

I remember the night Crosby, Stills and Nash played, I was way up at the top of the hill with 400,000 people in front of me, and I heard Chip's voice coming out of the big speakers, "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome with us, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young." I thought, "There's my pals!" and it took me a couple of songs to make my way down. There were so many people. I was stepping over blankets, bodies, pushing my way down and finally got back on stage for half of their set. After that, I pretty much stayed on stage, because I didn't want to miss anything. I didn't shoot every single group - I actually missed The Grateful Dead. I missed Santana, I was probably off at the hog farm that afternoon.

      

"I STILL FEEL LIKE A KID WITH A CAMERA"

What were you shooting with back then? 
After that secondhand camera, I got a Pentax. I had two, (one for color and one for black and white). I got a job shooting on The Monkees TV show, and found that the Pentax just wasn't holding up. After about a week, the number counter would break, and then the thumb advance would get real loose and fall off. Somebody stole my camera bag out of the backseat of my Volkswagen one day in Hollywood, when I ran into the cleaners for a couple of minutes. A friend of mine (who was a professional photographer) loaned me an extra Nikon body and a lens. I started using that and found that it was much more sturdy than those Pentax were. The Pentax cameras were silver and black, this was an all black Nikon. It just looked like a tank. I started buying lenses and got another body - so for forty years I shot Nikon - the Nikon S, and then a Nikon FM. I never used the light meter in there. I never touched it, because if you have somebody in front of a dark background (vice versa), you couldn't tell how it was going to turn out. I had a Minolta spot meter tucked under my arm, and I would pull that out to read the person's cheek. You'd just read the skin tones, and then set the camera to exactly what that said. That was fine for many years and for many thousands of rolls of film. I think I have about 500,000 slides, and I'm sure there's an equal number of black and white, because there are thousands of proof sheets. 

Why did you switch to digital after all those years? 
Friends of mine started shooting digital, and at first I thought, "No way, I'm a film guy forever," and then I would pick them up and say, "This thing sets itself, it focuses itself" you pretty much hold it up in the air and push the button and it'll take a good picture. All of my friends had Canon, because they were kind of the best cameras in the early days of digital. Finally I thought, what the heck - I'm just gonna get one and try it out. The advantage of course is that you can see the picture right away, and it doesn't cost anything for film. 

So you shoot Canon now? 
I have a 5D Mark II, but I was going on the road with Garth Brooks and needed another body, so I bought a 60D - which was about half the price - and by gosh, I only use the 60D now! It's a lot simpler, it doesn't have so many bells and whistles. It's really easy to use and I can shoot video on it by just pushing a button. 

Do you feel like you take pictures the same way as you did with your film cameras? 
I'm probably a little looser, you know…because you don't have to think about, "Well gee I've only got 36 pictures here, I better make this count." When I first started, I remember going to the Newport Folk Festival (when we played there) and took a picture of Judy Collins onstage, and I took a picture of Howlin' Wolf on stage, but I took one picture! I have one slide of Judy Collins and one slide of Howlin' Wolf. When I would see something, I would frame it all up, be very careful and just take one picture. Now with digital, I just click away! With the big Canon camera, (I say big as opposed to a little pocket one) you look through there just like a regular camera - it doesn't feel any different. You're pushing the button, you're framing it up exactly the same. You don't have to take the light reading. Back then, a minute could go by and you may have missed the photo you wanted. Then of course you have the advantage of looking to see whether you're right on or not, whether you got what you wanted…so that's always good. 

What do you like to photograph besides musicians, Henry? 
I use the 60D when I'm doing photos for someone who needs photos, but all day long I use a Canon PowerShot. I just bought a new one last week - a 710. I was using a 420, (I've had about six or eight different ones). Every year or two I buy a new one because they get better and better. I take a hundred pictures a day, wherever I am, whatever I see. I'm known as a music photographer - I've done all these magazine covers, album covers (a lot of them by accident), but in my slideshows for my friends, I would start showing series of things. I would get three or four pictures of my friends, maybe reading…and when I was sorting them out, I would put them together as a reading series. I would do that with different things - like eating or sleeping - put a series of different friends doing that, and do a slideshow. One of my friends napped all the time - he'd be reading and fall asleep - then I'd take a picture of him napping. Pretty soon I had a napping series. Then I started doing repetitive categories like: hearts, stars, tattoos, peace signs, people giving the finger. Then it was trucks, old cars, flowers, nudes, babies, animals, cows - I love to shoot cows. I love old barns. 

You just love to take photographs. 
I gotta tell you, these are all categories that I see. I would do numbers, 1-100. Whenever I'd see a number anywhere, I would take a picture of it - not just the number itself - it had to be a scene with a number in it somewhere. One day, an ambulance pulled up to the sidewalk as someone had fainted. The guy ran out and put his medical box down, opened it up, and there was a big 27 on it. So I took a picture of him lying there and had the 27 in the shot. For a long time I had a paper in my wallet that would tell me what numbers I needed. Eventually, I got 1-100. Even today now, fifty years later…I still take numbers when I see them, and now I have twenty or thirty of every single number. 

Do you think you'll ever do anything with them? 
I'm eventually going to make books out of them. It's like hunting. If I go to a new city, there are new signs and new kinds of graffiti. When I was on the road with The Lovin' Spoonful in '66, every little town in the midwest would have a different colored fire hydrant; they'd be red, green, purple, blue, and every damn color. I'd run out and take a picture of it, and that was my first kind of big series outside of my friends sleeping or reading. I think I have about 300,000 little pocket camera photos. I haven't even looked through all of them, they're just compiling on my computer. 

So you're kind of like an image-hoarder?  
Haha! It's true! I've got a huge hard drive that I want to go through and make different books.

Was this photograph taken on The Rolling Stones tour in '79? 

Actually, Ron Wood was touring for his next solo record, and a friend of mine who did publicity for Columbia asked me to do the tour photography. Keith Richards was in the band (because it was in-between Rolling Stones concerts), Ian McLagan from Small Faces played keyboards, Bobby Keys played saxophone, and they had a reggae drummer named Zigaboo who was just amazing! It was supposed to be a week, and that turned into three weeks flying around with these guys, riding in their limos, and just documenting everything I could. I never thought of it as a job, it was just fun to observe and document. People used to ask me, "You're a photographer, are you a professional?" I would say, "No, I'm not a professional." I've made a living for fifty years and put a couple of kids through school, but I still feel like a kid with a camera, you know? 

How did the Richard Pryor album cover happen?

He was a young comedian on the circuit here in L.A. in the '60s, and his manager happened to be the same guy that managed The Mamas and the Papas. I went down and took photos of him during one of his sets, and a few days later his manager asked me and Gary Burden to go to his house and do an album cover. That's literally all he said to me, "Just go take a picture for an album cover." 

What was it like working with him? 

Firstly, I remember that he did not want to get out of bed. His wife said, "He won't get out of bed, you go try and get him up." So we went to his bedroom and he says, "Just take the picture of me lying in bed and that'll be the cover." We talked him into sitting up and talking about it, and he said, "If I do anything, I want it to be rootsy." Gary knew about this antique shop nearby with authentic aborigine weapons and jewelry, so he left to get that stuff. Richard then took us to this little cave in a vacant lot near his house, and we staged the campfire and everything. He started getting into character, threatening us when we got too close and pretending like he was a real native. Gary had the uncanny ability of looking through hundreds of slides and picking out that one special image for the cover. 

Wasn't there was an issue with National Geographic? 
Gary got Rick Griffin (the San Francisco artist) to draw oak leaves, imitating the National Geographic covers at the time, and we added the iconic yellow border also. We quickly got a cease and desist letter from their lawyer, and we also got a second letter from The Grammy's, nominating us for album cover of the year. The record company had to do the second printing without those little oak leaves. They replaced it with little statues of liberties, so if you find one from the first printing - those are much more rare. Well, vinyl is making a comeback and people collect them, you know? CDs were handy, but they really lost that art form of the twelve inch square. That was the main thing, you put the record on and you stared at the artwork! English musicians would tell me, "We stared at Crosby, Stills, and Nash on that couch, trying to imagine what it was like to be there, to be them." People got their whole image of the group from the album cover, it was a very important thing and then it disappeared. The groups today want their stuff on vinyl again, so that art form is luckily coming back. 

Do you have any of your album covers on display? 
My little studio-bungalow has got shelves all over the place with boxes of slides, wooden filing cabinets full of proof sheets and negatives. I don't have any wall space for anything really. All of the records are kind of sideways on the shelves, I don't tend to put up a lot of my own art. I have one photograph of CSN in my office on the wall. Nowadays, I've been doing this thing called The Morrison Hotel Gallery, and that's allowed me to display a lot of my work in a public setting. 

The Morrison Hotel Gallery got named kind of accidentally. We had a giant blow-up of the Morrison Hotel picture in the storefront. People would see that picture and walk right in. We liked the lettering in the photo and got someone to hand-paint it on the window (just as a PR thing), and then very quickly we became known as "The Morrison Hotel Gallery." The name is good, because it says "music photographs" without saying "legends of rock photography," which I always hated because it's not all rock & roll, it's also singer-songwriters. I wouldn't call Joni Mitchell rock & roll, you know? 

How do you select the photographers for Morrison Hotel Gallery? 
We'd select photographers we liked, and in many cases they'd come to us for representation. I'd say we add a new photographer every month or two that come out of the woodworks with photographs that no one has seen. 

What does the gallery provide for the photographers it represents? 
For a while, we'd always have a big opening. We'd print up invitations, mail them out to all of our buyers and we'd try to publicize. Very often at an opening, you get a few hundred people crammed in there (drinking wine out of plastic cups) and they don't really buy. Sometimes it's so crowded you can't even walk around and pick one out. It's not a good time to sell. They come back on the following week and usually pick something up they can't stop thinking about. It usually happens that way. Eventually we realized we were spending a couple thousand dollars for every opening, doing the invitations, cards, mailing, etc. If we didn't sell a couple of photos, that was just money out of our pockets, so nowadays it's all digtial. We'll send an e-blast to all of our buyers, we have a PR company that gets us magazine interviews as well. So we still have openings for new photographers, but we don't spend all that money on the openings, and you know…we can't have an opening for everybody, but we make an announcement. Now we have many photographers and only room for about forty pictures on the wall. I'm lucky if I have two up there these days. We now have about 125 photographers. 

So when we get a new person, they get to have a page on our website with all their pictures on it - we'll maybe have an opening where we hang one of their pictures - and we'll keep a couple up, but mainly we sell on our website. Someone will walk into our store and say, "Do you have any Rolling Stones photos?" There might be one on the wall, but we have twelve people who shot The Rolling Stones and we can show them on the computer which ones we've got. 

Do you see the gallery expanding outside of New York City? 
We recently opened a space in the lobby of the Sunset Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles. 
We'd love to open in Paris. We wanted to open in London. We tried to open one in Tokyo, but we found that they don't really hang things up on their walls - most of the homes there are made of delicate materials - so we had to sell 8x10's instead. In each case you've got to find a really great spot where people walk by. Rent is quite high. It isn't a gold mine, you know? More like a copper mine - or a silver gelatin mine, haha.

What have you been listening to these days? 
I still love CSN, I love The Eagles, and Jackson Browne. It's songwriters I really love, like Jimmy Webb - I love his music. If I put on something in the house, it's usually The Beatles or Brazilian music. I live in Laguna Beach one part of the week, and there I listen to classical music. When I wake up, it's nice to have something pleasant on. Music is such a large part of our lives. Seeing and hearing are the ones that occupy our attention all day long, so to be a musician and a photographer is a good thing. 

How do you stay inspired, Henry? 
I love music and I love photos. I'll go to the all-night newsstand and spend a hundred bucks on magazines. I buy music magazines and photo magazines. Anything from, MOJO, Vogue, Elle, etc. I don't even read them all - I've got piles of them all over - and every time I pick one up, it's a mind-blowing trip! 

There's a lot of content in the world, that's for sure. 
You've got to keep centered somehow and try to figure out the real meaning of life. For me it's reading the Indian guru's, like the Yogananda book, Autobiography of a Yogi. I read that in the '60s, and it sort of opened up a little doorway into the spiritual world for me. Eckhart Tolle wrote a book about the importance of being in the moment called, The Power of Now - that's an amazing book! I read The Golden Present by Sri Swami Satchidananda, and The Dali Lama has some great books out also - you read them and feel centered and grounded. Otherwise, you can kind of float away on sensual trips...you gotta stay grounded, figure out what all this is, and do the right thing. I'm probably more fascinated by life and the energy of life than I am by photos.

So what's next?
I'm doing a speaking tour with Patti Boyd, called Behind The Lens in the spring. Then I'm supposed to do a show in the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma - they want to do a Neil Young show. I've done several shows in Sweden; I think I'm going do another one there at the Swedish Museum of Photography in Stockholm in 2017. I really want to do more books! I've photographed so many people, (most of them have never been seen) and I've collected all of these categories of things over the years.

"HAVING A CAMERA IS LIKE HAVING A PASSPORT INTO PEOPLE'S LIVES."

Tell me about one of your philosophies on photography. 
I often say, having a camera is like having a passport into people's lives. Rolling Stone Magazine called me one day and asked me to go to Truman Capote's house and take a picture for the cover. I thought, "My god! Truman Capote, I read his stories in English class over in Munich, Germany. Holy shit! I get to go to his house and hang out with him!" And for what? Because I'm there to take his picture. 

What advice could you bestow on aspiring music photographers out there?
Well in the beginning, you're photographing people who aren't necessarily famous, but it's the people that are starting out that need the photos. I was photographing all of these people in Laurel Canyon, and then they got famous - that was a lucky break for me. I was in the right place at the right time, but any photographer anywhere that photographs their friends that play music, that's a great thing. It's a way of getting into it, and if you're good at it, your pictures get used. People will see them and ask you to take their pictures, or do their album covers, the word of your talent will spread. You know after about twenty years of taking photos, you're going to amass an archive - that was a surprise to me - I never once thought, "One day I will have all of this history." I never once thought about what this would all mean later on, or how it would grow…suddenly it was just there and that's when we opened the gallery. 

Also, after fifty years, I have an inadvertent business of licensing photos. Now that I have a historical archive, I get emails every single day from people doing books, compilation albums, videos, magazines - they're always asking for pictures. You can't imagine what's going to happen twenty years from now - I mean if we're all here on the planet still. If you keep on taking pictures and that becomes your main thing, you can sort of imagine that in twenty years you're gonna have an awful lot of pictures, you know? What are they gonna be? Are they gonna be mostly Nashville musicians? A lot of the people you're shooting now are gonna make it, you know? I mean they don't even know if they're gonna make it yet, but for sure some of them will and you'll have pictures of them before they were even known, and that's what happened to me. 






Please take the time to view more of Henry's work, along with hundreds of other talented music photographers here: www.morrisonhotelgallery.com

QUOTE • RICHARD AVEDON

"If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up."

- Richard Avedon

www.avedonfoundation.org

INSPIRATION • HUGH HOLLAND

© Hugh Holland

www.hughholland.com

SIDEWALK SURFIN' #13

SUN SEEKER • "GEORGIA DUST"

Sun Seeker 7" is out now with Third Man Records! Give it a chance, tell your friends, it's a seriously awesome single. Purchase here: Sun Seeker • "Georgia Dust"

Directed by Brad Holland

Produced by Harry Kagan

Assisted by Jamie Goodsell

© Jamie Goodsell

INSPIRATION • GREGORY CREWDSON

© Gregory Crewdson

www.gregorycrewdsonmovie.com

FOUND NEGATIVE

My good friend Noah found this negative in his attic. Now it's on the internet…that's all. 

SALEMTOWN BOARD CO.

Last year, Third Man Records teamed up with Salemtown Board Co. to make a very solid skateboard called, The Campus Cruiser. A lot of love and detail went into the making, and I wanted to share this video that goes a bit deeper into what Salemtown is all about. By supporting this company, you're supporting a positive impact on young men in the community and giving them a chance to obtain a strong work ethic early on in life. Please pass this information on to your friends, and tell the world about this amazing company. 

PAUL KANTNER

Paul Kantner • 1941-2016

© Herb Greene

www.herbgreenefoto.com

SIDEWALK SURFIN' #12

INSPIRATION • GREG GIRARD

© Greg Girard

www.greggirard.com

PHOTOGRAPHY INTERVIEW • HENRY DILTZ • PART ONE

All images © Henry Diltz

www.morrisonhotelgallery.com

     It was a beautiful day for the month of December, but there wasn't any place I'd rather be than in my office. I opened up the curtain and let some natural light emanate from the window, as I was about to speak with photographer Henry Diltz. The image above appears in the gatefold of the first album release by Crosby, Stills and Nash. It was taken in Big Bear, California in 1969 and has sold over 4 million copies to date. I had this image displayed in my room as a teenager, not even thinking about who took it. Many years later when I began studying photography, I thought to look for the photo credit on the album (something I wouldn't have done back then). What I found was a very thoughtful, organic approach to photography and it had a tremendous impact on me. Having the chance to talk to Henry was one of the highlights of my life. Our conversation lasted over two and a half hours that day and I can't thank him enough for taking the time to speak with me. It felt like I was just catching up with an old friend. He was humble, comical, and genuinely excited to talk about photography. Henry was the official photographer at the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock. He's photographed some of the most iconic musicians of all time. It's hard not to be in complete awe of the documentation and incredible collection of images that he's created over the past fifty years. It is my extreme pleasure to be able to share his thoughts, memories, and perspective with you all.

    

    

"ONE DAY THERE WAS ABOUT A HUNDRED PEOPLE SITTING OUT IN THAT FIELD AND I THOUGHT, 'WHAT THE HELL ARE THOSE PEOPLE DOING THERE? OH, I FORGOT...IT'S GOING TO BE A CONCERT.'"

What was your childhood like, Henry? 

I was an airline baby. My father was a TWA pilot and my mother was a stewardess. I was born in Kansas City, Missouri. It was in the middle of World War II and my father was in the Army Air Corps. He died in a plane crash and my mother was left with two little boys. I lived in three or four different places before I was three years old and then I lived in Long Island until I was about six or so. My mother later remarried a guy who was in the Navy and he started working as a civilian for the state department. We lived in Tokyo for a while and Bangkok, then moved back to New York where I graduated high school. 

What did you plan on studying after high school? 

I was actually all enrolled in the University of Montana and I was gonna be a Forest Ranger. I was very excited about it! I had my dorm room and everything and I was going to study Wildlife Management and Technology. Then my father was assigned to Bonn, Germany when I was entering college. My mom said, "You can go to Montana or you can come to Europe." I thought, well I can always go back to Montana and of course that changed my entire life. I ended up going to an American college in Munich, Germany. It was the University of Maryland (overseas branch) and it was for dependents, you know…Army brats. There was 100 guys and 100 girls and they were from all over the world. I got quite an education on people because we were so diverse and the kids there had all lived in many different places. 

What did you end up studying in Munich? 

I was studying psychology, but all my friends there were studying for the service academy exams. I was reading their handbook one night and it said, "Sons of deceased veterans can automatically take the test, you don't need a congressional appointment." So I had to fly to London to take a physical exam first and the one night I was out, there was a skiffle group playing (it was kind of like English folk music). I was quite impressed and to this day I wonder who it really was. Was it the beginnings of The Kinks or The Who? Anyways, I took the exam but I couldn't pass because my eyes weren't good enough. (I wore glasses)

So that summer we were all going to hitchhike up to Scandinavia to see what kind of trouble we could get into, see all of the girls and everything. I was awakened one morning in my dorm room with a telegram that said, "Congratulations, you've been accepted into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point" and I thought, "Oh hell no." I mean I wanted to go to Annapolis, but then the dean of the school and everyone would say, "Congratulations my boy, what a rare opportunity." After a while I thought what the hell, maybe I should go on this adventure, it's free you know? So I went to West Point kind of accidentally. It's an engineering school, it's math basically all of the time and that was my least favorite subject. I had been studying psychology in Munich, so I wasn't really sure I wanted to stay, but I did join the choir and the glee club which was fantastic! 

How did you end up playing in the Modern Folk Quartet? 

When I was at West Point, I joined the Columbia Record Club and started getting all of these folk records. This was about the time of The Kingston Trio and The Everly Brothers. I would hear that music and I would think, "I can't stay here four years." I'd be in the military for five years and thirty years old before I could figure out what I wanna do next. I left after a year of West Point and I went to the University of Hawaii. I bought a banjo as soon as I left and continued to major in psychology - which I did for a couple of years. While I was there I found a coffee house called the Greensleeves Coffee House where they played folk music. I ended up going down there almost every night of my life for about four and a half years and played folk music. Inevitably, we formed a folk group and that folk group was called the Modern Folk Quartet. 

When did the band start to gain some momentum? 

We eventually came to California to seek our fortunes and we came and played at the Troubadour, which is a big folk club in L.A. No one had ever seen or heard of us and we really caused quite a ruckus the first night we took the stage. The crowd heard this four part harmony and this driving folk song called "The Ox Driver". We got to the chorus and the crowd rose on their feet applauding. It was almost scary, you know? We quickly signed with Warner Brothers and got a manager and all that. We spent the next four years up until '66 traveling back and forth across the country playing colleges. Folk music was huge in the early 60's. We played some clubs, tv shows, and we made a couple of records on Warner Brothers. We cut a single with Phil Spector called "This Could Be The Night" by Harry Nilsson. As we were waiting for this record to come out…we thought, "This will make our career." But he ended up never putting it out because we weren't his kind of music. He was reluctant to put out anything he wasn't sure would be number one. So while we were waiting, a couple of the guys went back to Hawaii and we kind of broke up. 

Is that how you started to get into photography? Were you looking for something else?

Well, on our last tour we stopped in a little second-hand shop in East Lansing Michigan. There was a table full of second hand cameras and a couple of the guys decided to buy one, so I kind of followed along. We stopped into the drug store to buy film and he gave us this yellow Kodak box. I asked him, "How do you work all of these numbers?" and he said, "Look on the box." So for instance, it said something like, Sunlight: 250th @ f.8. So that's how I learned about exposure and light. When we got back to L.A. and developed the film, it turned out to be slide film that I was shooting with. So we had all of our hippie friends gathered up at a friends house in the living room, put the music on and had a slideshow viewing. Of course we were all smoking pot so our eyes were very keen, you know? To me, it was absolute magic! These scenes that we had lived on the road were now glowing on the wall in front of all of our friends. I just thought at that moment, “I’m going to take more of these things so we can have more slideshows.” That was the whole thing that got me into it really.

You photographed so many musicians, really in one of the peak times in music history. Do you think being in the M.F.Q. helped you get more of that kind of work? How did you network back then?

Well exactly, because while I was on the road I met people like Stephen Stills, David Crosby, Mama Cass, etc. I mean we had done television shows with The Mamas & the Papas, The Animals, and many different groups. So I knew all of these people, these were all of my friends and we all lived in Laurel Canyon together. When I started taking more pictures to have more slide shows, I was shooting my friends. It was all of the guys in my group and their girlfriends or wives and you know, our own sort of karmic group of friends. I would photograph the hell out of them in a week or two and then we’d have another slideshow. It was always fun to hear someone say, “Oh my god, I didn’t even know you took that picture.” So I developed a kind of a fly on the wall style because I wanted to surprise them. 

What was the progression from doing your slideshows to shooting album covers? 

I developed my style among all of these friends. These were all people I knew as musicians and so, it was easy for me. I mean I was hanging out with them anyways, we were pretty much like a club here in L.A. All the folk and folk-rock singers met every night at the Troubadour. When The Byrds or Buffalo Springfield started, these were all friends of mine you know? They started using my pictures as publicity photos. I was taking pictures at a love-in one day - getting all the colorful clothes and everything - this guy came up to me and said, “Hey you’re a photographer, my name is Gary Burden and I’m an architect…I’m remodeling Mama Cass’ house and she wants me to do her album cover." He told her, “I’m not a graphic artist, I’m an architect” and she said, "Well it’s the same thing, you make a blue print or you make an album cover, and it's art." So, we did a Mama Cass album cover and then we went on to do many others. We did bands like Steppenwolf, The Turtles, and eventually that photo of Crosby, Stills and Nash on the couch (which was probably the first well known one we did). We did some America covers, The Doors - Morrison Hotel, and then in the 70’s we started doing Jackson Browne and The Eagles. He was a dear friend of Mama Cass', (who knew everybody) and between the two of us, we were a welcomed team...we were like friends to everybody. We probably did a hundred album covers over the course of three or four years. 



You did Stephen Stills first solo cover too, didn't you? 

I did the first two. Stephen said, “Hey I’m going up to Colorado to hang out in this cabin, you wanna come up?” I went up there to hang out and one morning there was snow on the ground. So I took a few shots of him in the snow and he said, “Wait a minute,” and ran into the cabin and came out with that pink giraffe. I took three or four photos of it and I said "Okay, we’re done with the giraffe, I got that…now lets get rid of the giraffe," because I didn’t like it you know? We spent about a half an hour clicking away and I probably used a couple rolls of film. Later that year when he finished his first album, he picked that out as the cover.

There are some great players on that record too: Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Booker T., Rita Coolidge and the list goes on and on. It was even engineered by Andy Johns who did almost every Led Zeppelin album. 
Yeah, there was so much talent there and I ended up going to England with him right after Colorado and spent three months living in his country manor. Then I did the second album cover there. A lot of my covers were just sort of hanging out with my friends, you know? 

What would you say goes into making a Henry Diltz picture? 

It involves being quiet and being interested in people, I was certainly interested in my friends. Framing is the fun part for me, looking through the little hole and framing up your friend, and getting that good angle. You move around quietly and move in until it fills the frame really nicely. It's about balance really, it’s kind of psychology and it feels good when the picture is framed nicely, you know? A lot of people will photograph their friends just standing there with a whole lot of stuff around them and I always say, "No, move in! Get them from the waste up or shoulders up." 

"WHAT I SEE IS WHAT I SHOOT AND I DON'T TRY AND MAKE IT UP. IT'S REAL LIFE I'M INTERESTED IN, REAL PEOPLE AND REAL SITUATIONS." 

Did you always use natural light back then? 

In the beginning, that's all I could do. When it got dark I couldn't take pictures anymore. Just natural light, what I see is what I shoot and I don't try to make it up. It's real life I'm interested in, real people and real situations. 

Could you talk about your thought process when shooting for an album cover? 

Firstly, I have to say that working with an amazing art director was a huge advantage. Gary and I developed a very interesting concept; when we would shoot these musicians, we would want to get them away from their regular lives, girlfriends, managers, telephones…so we would plan an adventure. A good example is The Eagles first album cover. Gary planned to leave the Troubadour when they closed at 2am and drive through the night into the desert, get there at dawn to spend the day shooting photos. He would always say to me, "Just shoot anything that happens, film's the cheapest part." The only direction he gave besides that would be to back up and get the whole thing. 

So you were all about getting closer and Gary was more about the environmental aspect?

Yeah, with the CSN cover for instance, I was framing up the couch with the three guys and that looked perfect to me; Gary would say, "Back up, get the whole house." So I finally ended up backing up all the way across the street, and I guess he had in mind maybe wrapping it around the whole back and making an album cover that way. Of course, I tell people to move in, but he's looking at the blueprint you know…he's looking at the graphics. 

What's your perspective of music photography today compared to the 60's and 70's? 

Well…so many people have cameras now and that's a good thing and there's so many young photographers doing it. I will say, an awful lot of it seems to be live. Groups got really squirrelly around the 80's. There started to be more and more photographers at shows and some of them (in order to make money on the side) would produce a poster or something. The groups didn't like that; they wanted to control the images more, so there started to be contracts. It started to be you could only shoot three songs and in some cases they might even own all of your photographs. It's very inhibitive now, really. 

Shooting live music is fun, but it can get very monotonous. I won't put a live image in my portfolio unless it has all of the elements I'm looking for, regardless of who's in it. I always look for something special; something that stands out a bit, you know? 

Exactly. I always tell the younger generation that you don't just want to shoot them in the club on stage, because that's what everybody does. You want the one of a kind picture, something no one else has. One thing that worked really well for me was music videos. When someone does a video, hang out and take the still photos. It's a great opportunity to be there with them all day and you're the only one there. All groups need a group shot. 

You have a pretty extensive archive of Neil Young photographs, can you talk about your experience with him? 

Most of those were just incidental shots, it was just me hanging out with Neil. At the time, Gary and I would drive up from southern California to northern California and go to Neil's ranch. We'd go up there and hang out for a day or two; we would take a morning walk around the ranch and look at the cows, and we'd look at the barns, all the different things he had there. We'd be walking around just smoking a morning joint and I'd be taking pictures of the whole thing. They mainly got used for songbooks; in those days, songbooks came out partly because of Gary designing them. They might have ten or twelve photos in them, but eventually publishing companies got tired of paying for them and stopped putting photos in songbooks. A couple of those early Neil Young songbooks had a lot of my photos taken at the ranch. 

Can you tell me about the photo of Neil sitting in the woodie? I love that photograph. 

The one in the woodie was at Gary's house in Hollywood one day. Neil always loved old cars and he bought this old woody and drove it over to Gary's house. So while they were checking it out, I was photographing the whole thing. I happened to be at the rear of the car when he leaned over the seat to look at the back and I just took that picture (along with many others that day). 

How did you end up becoming the official photographer for Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock? 

John Phillips, who was in The Mamas & the Papas, was a friend of mine. He said, "Henry we’re having this big festival and I’m one of the producers…why don’t you come up and take photos?" So I became his photographer and of course I had to give them a lot of the pictures, which, unfortunately, I never saw again. I did hold on to some of them though. The same thing happened at Woodstock. About a month before Woodstock, Chip Monck called me and - he was the best stage and lighting manager in the business - he was the guy who had managed stages when we played concerts. I bumped into him all over the place and he called me that summer and said, "Henry, we’re having a huge music festival out here in a couple of weeks and you should come out." I said, "Well Chip…I don’t know those people, how am I gonna get a photo pass?" The next day Michael Lang called me and says, “Chip says we need you, so I’m sending you an airline ticket and 500 bucks.” That was it, I jumped on a plane and went out there. I spent two weeks photographing the building of the stages and campgrounds and then, suddenly, the festival happened. I was right there with an all access pass.

So where did these photos end up after you took them? 

The funny thing is, since I was the official photographer…I had to bring all of my pictures straight to LIFE magazine. They were going to do a special edition on Woodstock and the guy opened the boxes in the photo lab before I even looked in them, picked out about 200 photos he wanted to keep to consider for the magazine. They ended up using maybe half a dozen, but I never saw the rest again. I didn’t have my name stamped on them, so all of the best stuff I shot ended up being lost. I do have a lot; a couple of hundred slides and a bunch of proof sheets...negs, but not all of it...so.

Sorry to bring up such a painful memory for you, Henry. 

Haha! Hey you know, it's okay. I know they're somewhere and maybe someday they'll find their way back. 

Could you tell me a little bit about your experience at Woodstock? 

First of all, being there for two weeks when they built the stage…all the hippie carpenters on stage would have their shirts off getting a sun tan, sawing and hammering; and all the lovely hippie girls bringing lunch and drinks, working in the office...it was idyllic...it was summer camp. Looking out from the stage, you saw the waving green alfalfa field as far as your eyes could see…it was just beautiful. The Hog Farm was making the campground and they had tee-pee's set up, it was just a constant outdoor party. I just wandered around photographing all of that, you know? Then one day there was about a hundred people sitting out in that field and I thought, "What the hell are those people doing there? Oh, I forgot…it's going to be a concert." 

Stay tuned for part two of my interview with photographer, Henry Diltz. 

Thanks to, Kiva at The Press House and Morrison Hotel Gallery