"Hey kid, do you have to stand so close?"

Merle Haggard knew three chords and the truth.

Merle Haggard was hung over that spring morning in 1986. Poor dear. Photo by Chris X Carroll

One of the hallmarks of the rock and roll photography beat is you have to go where the artists are. A good portion of the time said artists, with an album, tour, film or project to promote are in the worst photographic venue possible. Thus the disproportionate amount of time one spends lurking about in liminal spaces such as stadiums and hotel parking lots. My first of these was for SPIN. We needed to photograph country legend Merle Haggard, on Thursday morning at 8 am in the parking lot of the Capitol Centre in Landover Maryland. Weird venue in the middle of nowhere, check. Parking lot, uh, yeah, sure, check. 8 AM? That would turn out to be a common thing too, as often the tour buses left from the venue the morning after the show. It ended up often being easier, as the place had cleared out, all but the most hardcore fans had given up and gone home. But damn, dude, how were we to shoot this in a parking lot, in winter, at oh-dark-thirty, with a giant country star in the fifteen minutes I’d been allotted?

I grew up in DC, saw my first Dead show and many others at the Cap. Centre and knew it well. I was a fan of country in general and Merle in particular so assigned myself the job and drove down to DC to stay at my dad’s house. Later in life I began to understand the joys of early mornings, but at the time it seemed unusually cruel that I had to awake and be in my car just about the time I roll every day to my teaching job nowadays. It seemed a lot earlier then. I also didn’t know then, or didn’t have the budget, to get people to help me. Helpful having someone else shlep the cases of equipment and set it up, but also nice to have a team so as to get some numbers on your side in the likely event of difference of opinion with your subject’s team. 

So I showed up by myself to the even more enormous when empty at seven o’clock in the morning Capitol Centre. I found my contact, who informed me we were still aiming to shoot at eight, but Mr. Haggard was extremely hung-over and might or not be on time. When you’re a young up and coming photographer suffering from a very real case of imposter syndrome you do your best to put on a brave face. The art and skill of celebrity portraiture consists of an odd dance between the photographer, the subject, and the machine that put the two together. 

Looking back on all these shoots from the vantage point of ripe middle age, young twenties me seems awfully young. None more so than this shoot with Merle Haggard. At the time I felt like a babe in the woods: first time doing something like this, working with a fairly huge star (he had played the enormous Capitol Centre the night before, no small feat). I had even stayed at my dad’s house in my old not-so-recently-moved-out-of room, making me feel all the more like a kid playing at being a photographer. Haggard was ten years younger than my dad, putting him squarely in my parents’ generation.  I was twenty five at the time, while Haggard was the ripe old age of forty nine. Shoot, I’m older than that now. And don’t have nearly as many wrinkles as the Hag there. 

He had not only been around the block, he had rode long and hard enough to live up to his name. And he was hungover as promised. An instinctive move that day, taking time to shoot (and process) a Polaroid so I could show him exactly what I was doing. Even then I realized the power inherent in a good (or, God forbid, bad) photograph to sell records or put butts in concert seats. Merle himself had never heard of SPIN, but trusted his people to know that it was worth the risk for the benefit of exposing their artist to a new audience. 

Merle Haggard surveys the kingdom of the Capitol Centre parking lot in Landover Maryland ‘round about 1986. Photo by Chris X Carroll.

He may have been hurting a bit that day, but kept it professional. I tried to return the favor, while making sure to do all the technical things to make sure the pictures “came out,” all the while chatting with this guy I pretty much had nothing in common with. Taking time to explain and show him was taking valuable time out of my extremely brief session but getting my subjects on my side was something I worked hard at, that day and for years afterward. 

 It really is an amazing balancing act, like spinning plates atop two sticks whilst riding a bicycle. The technical aspects, will the pictures be usable or will all this be for naught, superceded all. Oh to be shooting these sorts of jobs with an iPhone!

 Photographic film itself is fragile (and light and heat sensitive of course), and you don’t know if you succeeded or failed, possibly hard, until hours or days later. We shot Polaroids, which developed for ninety seconds, at the shoot to get an idea of whether our lighting was close, and to show to the subject to reassure them we knew what we were doing. But then we had to change all our settings, sometimes radically in the case of cross processing and reset or add filters to lights. Oh, and slow ISO speeds of film meant we had to light everything. No spontaneous runs through the sprinkler outside in our underwear. For that you had to live in LA. No, we had to light everything, in the dark, barefoot, uphill both ways motherfucker. All the while ignoring the tech entirely and putting all your attention on your subject. Cake.

And being a moron, there I sat, trying to light, flatter and collaborate with a giant music star my dad’s age. All by myself. No wonder I couldn’t sleep the night before. Hadn’t really been drinking, but felt like maybe I could relate to ol’ Merle, just a little bit. And I think I did. That tight headshot, with a 180mm lens so I was in his face, but not too much so, is compelling enough that we used it on the cover of Liz Mechem Carroll and my country music book ten years later. But I’m even more delighted that I backed up for those full body length outdoor shots. One repeated and regretted reaction of mine to the odd places I was forced to photograph in is a tightening up and softening or abstracting of the background. I remember once doing an edit of my portfolio with my rep and she said, admiringly, “you make the scungiest places look like a photo studio.” At the time I took it as a compliment, but looking back I wish I’d backed up and captured some of those places a little more.

I did promise, and deliver, to get my man on and off set as quickly as possible. One peccadillo of mine reared its ugly head for the first time on this shoot: on this shoot, which is saying, totally sincerely, “Last roll, almost done!” My medium format Mamiya camera allowed ten shots per roll. This last invariably followed by, “Oh, shoot, no, wait, one more roll. Please?” Oh, and the other inconceivable to this digital generation is the concept of: You could only shoot the film you had with you, it had to be fresh, it was expensive, and each type of film gave you one look. Black and white was black and white forever, no deciding later you wish it was in color. Same with the weird cross processing or unusual exposure techniques, it was one and done. In the scheme of things, whether a photographer made his editors happy by creating amazing imagery was of little importance. But to a young artist with an eye on making a living the stakes couldn’t be higher. You bet I was hungover in solidarity with Merle that mild winter morning. And we rocked it. God bless him, he could have magnified and aggravated all those problems but he didn’t, “What do you need, kid?” and we were off to the races. 

I also learned that morning about another thing I would come to find common: the more successful and longer lasting the star the more cooperative and professional and solicitous of your help they are. If they ask, tell them, in fact tell them anyway, preferably show them as you’re doing it. “What do you need, kid?” indeed.