Dude does not look much like a lady.
Dude does not look much like a lady.
Wherein Steven Tyler of Aerosmith does vocal exercises while I take pictures.
When photographing the rock star beat, you have to go where the rock stars are. Quite often, this means meeting them wherever they happen to be that week while touring the country playing shows to goose album sales and sell merch. Usually the bowels of some anonymous enormodome on the outskirts of some mid-sized city in the American Heartland. Or an anonymous corporate residence hotel a half mile down the road from said enormodome in the case of Aerosmith. Or better than Aerosmith, the main guy solo, dude looks like a lady himself: Steven Tyler.
When shooting a magazine cover, one generally tried to cover up the ugly real-life spaces we were forced to shoot in and set up lights and background in such a way as to create the graphically simplified headshot that sells magazines. There is a reason those types of studios in New York or Los Angeles rent for thousands of dollars a day. Putting the unblinking eye of the camera in a tight shot on a performer’s face you’d better bring your A game for lighting. Trying to recreate that setup in some hotel room or concrete hallway beneath an arena is its own special kind of hell. With a white or grey background (which your graphic designers, editors, and publishers loved for cover lines) all the attention was right there on your subject. No amount of softening, diffusing, modifying, and controlling light was enough.
I found myself one late Wednesday night standing alone in a hotel room somewhere in the mid-Atlantic region awaiting the arrival of Steven Tyler. I was alone because, hello SPIN was so cheap. Later I’d be able to travel with assistants, maybe even beef up the team with some local talent, but for this gig it was me, my camera and a bunch of lights. I set up early in the day, then waited. And waited.
Hey, these people are rock stars, what do you expect? Though it was their “day off” from touring, nothing happens before dark. And nothing generally happens without a giant entourage of hangers-on either, which is why I was so surprised when I opened the door to find a diminutive and reticent Steven Tyler, accompanied only by his girlfriend. I feel like her name was Janine, but then I realize I am almost certainly picturing the girlfriend character from Spinal Tap. Tyler’s “Janine” was introduced as not only girlfriend and helpmeet, but also wardrobe designer. Whose main task seemed to be figuring how to tie seventy five scarves onto a mic stand while still allowing it to serve its intended purpose. Tyler had plenty of spandex, a whole wardrobe of outfits, which had been delivered to the suite prior to the shoot. But it was the scarves I was most fascinated by. Sheaves, layers, tons, piles, fields of cotton and silk had been decimated to create the plethora of scarves employed by Steven Tyler of Aerosmith.
And the other enormously powerful tool Steven Tyler has at his disposal is his big giant mouth. Sure, he has a big mouth as a loud voiced lead singer of a popular rock band. But I couldn't help but notice as I began to shoot, just how literally enormous his mouth is. I asked him to emote, out of context, with only his vocal chords for accompaniment. But emote he did, and we began that dance together I would learn to recognize as that which accompanied the creation of a great portrait. It is a pas de deux, made all the more extraordinary by my green naiveté. Who am I to stand four feet from a prominent and successful singer and ask them to perform vocal exercises? I suppose the imprimatur of SPIN is what got him there (well, probably instructions from his record company), but it never ceased to amaze me during this period of gallivanting around the country rendezvousing with touring rock stars that they would take a young white kid with dreadlocks down to his ass seriously. Not just seriously, but willing to actually do what I asked. Just like Iggy gave me the Tai Chi treatment, Steven (and that is what he likes to be called, SPIN’s “Steve” cover line notwithstanding) was perfectly happy to run through his vocal exercises for me.
Ever since befriending some opera singers in college, I’d marveled at the odd gestures and faces they make on the way to limbering up their bodies to produce those otherworldly sounds. Figuring an operatically inclined dude might be happy to run through his battery of vocal treatments and exercises while I clicked away happily. And indeed, that was a terrific idea, as it gave Tyler something to do while giving me space to concentrate on capturing the visual counterpart to those familiar yelps and shouts delivered with that enormous and expressive mouth.
As a portraitist, one wants more than anything to engage with one’s subjects. Talking is a natural way to do that. Most people love to talk about themselves, better still when they can explain something they love to you. But that, while keeping subjects interested and engaged, still leaves a lot of unusable shots with mouth agape. So one has to ask one’s subject to shut up and smile, which can also be non-optimal.
My operatic warm-up suggestion turned out to be genius. Of course he had an array of that sort of thing, did them every day now that I mentioned it. And happily demonstrated them seemingly as long as I liked. The pictures are much more interesting than if I’d just had him yell or fake sing. And for all the bombast and enormity a band like Aerosmith brings to the arena, Steven and I created what would be spectacular magazine covers in an intimate little corporate residence hotel in the middle of the night. It’s all about two people finding something to talk about, then doing it in an expressively lit location.
Sometimes I would get a personal performance (Run-DMC), others witness an ancient chinese martial art (Iggy Pop). This night illuminated a bunch of ridiculous bestial opera noises as Tyler gamely ran through his vocal exercises. And mugged, and looked at the camera, and gave and gave and gave. This shoot with Steven Tyler was one of my first with a serious professional. You might have guessed he would have a long career by how hard he worked, long into the night, merely to help out a young photographer and the nascent music magazine he was working for.
Aerosmith was pretty huge at the time, of course. But I was not prepared for the unprecedented (for me anyway) reaction of people to that SPIN cover. The mailroom kid, head of the local Aerosmith fan club, about had a conniption when I slipped him a copy. And then as I headed home down Broadway that night, I spied the local Hudson News, which had a grid of slots to display all the latest magazines. Except the actual kids stocking the stand were, you guessed it, Aerosmith fans and they had filled every slot in the window with my big animal-noise-making headshot of Mr. Tyler himself, never mind the typo.