After leaving SPIN, I went on to shoot celebrities and rock stars for various publications, record companies, and ad agencies. I had gotten used to traveling to meet bands wherever on the road they were, be it Miami, Pittsburgh or some weird interstitial locale located equidistant from an enormo-dome or airport. We would travel for hours, wait around for the band to arrive, then get five minutes (or less: Red Hot Chili Peppers have entered the chat) to create some brilliant artwork to sell yet another magazine cover.
Definitely no naked swimming, jamming with the artists or really anything even remotely smacking of that halcyon weekend back in Athens with my boys in REM. In fact, when the call came to fly to LA (I know, not like they couldn’t find anyone to shoot there!) to shoot REM for a second time, I knew not only wouldn’t we hang out, they probably wouldn’t even recognize me as I’d shaved my dreadlocks and traded the full beard for a soul patch.
REM had grown over the ensuing years since I’d photographed them in their clubhouse in Athens. No longer the best kept secret band that your college roommate turned you onto, no, REM had gotten big. Big sound, big business, big touring, big publicity. But they were smart, creative, and knew what they had to do to promote their newly expanded operation. And that was pose for photo shoots and talk to writers to give magazines material to use to promote REM. I suspect that SPIN shoot with me and George Dubose in Athens was the last of the genre for them as well. No longer could they spend an entire weekend driving around getting shots for one mere magazine article. Now they were expected to sit for Rolling Stone, New Music Express, Le Monde, the New York Times Magazine, Tokyo Today, basically everybody with ink to print a magazine. And man, nothing REM hated more than “doing media,” both the photo shoots and talking to writers. Their solution was nothing short of genius.
REM would have their management rent fifteen rooms in the not-inexpensive Chateau Marmont hotel in West Hollywood. Each media client (in my case the in-house magazine of some record store chain in the midwest) would set up in a different room. REM would commit to a few hours total then shuttle between rooms, granting fifteen or perhaps thirty minutes to each client. It was enormously expensive to the record company, but the value of the media they got in return dwarfed the cost of fifteen rooms at a high-end Hollywood hotel.
This was in fact a genius arrangement for a notoriously difficult band that fucking hated doing photo shoots, no matter how much they knew they had to. The arrangement gave them control, as there was always another client right down the hall so if you’re bored of one shoot you can move on , just by marching down to the next room. The publicists were pretty sure to be able to service all their outlets as once all the band members were on scene they were fairly easy to wrangle. As a photographer, I loved it, because it was the Chateau Marmont, the ultimate hip rock and roll hotel and we got to stay there the night before the shoot. But the best part was that the Chateau had been created from some sort of converted something, no two rooms were alike and most of them were architecturally spectacular. So much easier to make an interesting picture with a band playing off interesting location details than to try to prettify yet another concrete alley outside a dressing room in a hockey arena.
I still had my hilariously autographed record cover but had no illusions about REM having found that shoot as memorable as I did. And they were ushered in to begin my allotted fifteen minutes, I uttered a terse, “Hello,” and got right to work. We would bang out ten shots in rapid succession, then pause briefly as my assistant and I traded film backs and I would resume shooting. Throughout my photo career, I was always cognizant of getting the client (who had often spent a lot of money to arrange transportation and other expenses for me and my crew) their shots. Thus, my entire trip to LA, including multiple rooms at a chi chi Hollywood hotel, airfare, and expenses, boiled down to the fifteen minutes I was allowed to work with the band.
Tense and harried both begin to explain the atmosphere on the set that day. Well, my people, REM don’t care. They were cool as cucumbers; having invented this process, they knew they’d only have to endure this shit for fifteen minutes before traipsing down the hall to see if the snacks were any better on Rolling Stone’s set. Mike Mills didn’t even set down his coffee cup. We were somewhere in the middle of my second setup, when singer Michael Stipe held up his hand. Frenetic or not, when my star subject holds up a hand we stop shooting. “Fuck! What now?” I’m thinking, frantically. When you’re promised fifteen minutes and your subject walks after eight, that’s not good. When the lead singer, Mr. Incomprehensible Artistic Rock Star himself Michael Stipe held up shooting with a hand gesture I thought I was going to piss my pants. Well, not quite literally but figuratively you bet. Was he announcing he was done, looking for better vegan snacks, needing a refill on coffee, what?
Almost all of my pre-digital photography was accomplished through the use of a Mamiya RZ67 medium format camera system. Each press of the shutter button initiated a complex series of whirs, clicks, clanks and a final clunk as the film wound to the next frame, the shutter reset, and the mirror came back down after the shot was exposed to film.
“Do that again,” he asked, gesturing at my camera.
“What? This?” I hesitated, uncertain on what he was asking me. Again I clicked the shutter: clunk-whir-click-click-click-whir-CLUNK.
“THAT! Do it again!” a glazed look comes over his eyes. I don’t even bother to look through or even aim the camera. I just try to do what he wants, mesmerized while I activate the shutter, evidently for him to hear.
Dead silence except for the clunk-whir-click-click-click-whir-CLUNK. The three other band members have neutral expressions, perhaps they’ve seen this act before? Definitely not a movie I’m familiar with. I’m really kind of at a loss and let the artist drive the bus.
“You’ve shot us before?” exclaims Stipe, with an accusatory tone.
“Yeah,” I stammered, “with George Dubose, back in Athens.”
Silence.
“Oh, right, I had dreadlocks…” the words aren’t even out of my mouth when all four of them break up laughing and exclaim, loudly, “Naked at the quarry!” and we’re all like best friends who haven’t seen each other in years. The fifteen minutes goes to hell while the publicists freak out about the schedule and we all spend what seemed like an hour just reminiscing about back then, now, how different it all is, where’s George, what happened to the dreads? You know, like best buddies. The whole photographer/artist conflict just vanished, to yield a bunch of guys sitting around on the Group W. Bench, waxing nostalgic.
Stipe’s feat just beggars the imagination, if I hadn’t seen it with my own lying eyes I’d never believe it. How extraordinary it was that Michael Stipe recognized my camera merely by its sound. He had last heard that (admittedly long and clunky, almost like a melody) camera sound some four years before. That Mamiya model RZ was used by probably half the magazine photographers working then. And REM had done doubtless scores if not a hundred photo shoots in the ensuing years, including like fifteen that very day. The Marines talk about, “This is my rifle, this is my gun. There are many like it, but this one is mine.” That’s how I feel about my axe, and I suppose it must have its own sonic fingerprint (for lack of a better word). Maybe Stipe recognized me, even without beard and dreadlocks, and decided to mount an elaborate prank/art performance. But man, I was there, and if that wasn’t real I’ll eat my hat. To this day I believe Michael Stipe recognized the sound of my Mamiya RZ, when it was virtually impossible for him to have done so. Maybe not impossible: my dogs know the sound of my wife’s Prius above all other Prii. And my neighbor, the principle cellist for the Met, tells me he can recognize the tone of his old cello in one note. If not impossible, certainly uncanny. But I suppose that’s why we love artists. They’re existing on a different plane than you and me.
The world is full of people with strange and magical superpowers. “Be kind, for everyone around you is fighting a hard battle,” wasn’t said by Plato or Aristotle,apparently some guy named Ian McLaren. This seems a bit like the reverse, “Be kind for everyone around you is harboring astonishing secret powers that you can only imagine…”
What an awesome story! Recognizing the rhythm of your camera makes sense to me as a former musician. I was able to recognize which one of my band mates was playing based on their individual sound without looking.