Jerry Garcia, Emily Post, and me

Grateful Dead publicist Dennis McNally and raconteur Legs McNeil joined in the jam for about my favorite gig like, ever.

My first professional photo job was for SPIN Magazine. I was assigned to photograph the Grateful Dead playing live, but also to cover the lively parking lot scene. I knew all about the “lively parking lot scene” since I had seen probably forty Dead shows by that point in time. I would go on to work at SPIN for several years, but of course could not know that at the time. 

I was instructed to rendez-vous with the writer on the story. I called him up, smugly announcing I’d be easy to find, as I was a white guy with dreadlocks, rather unusual at the time. “Oh, no big,” he calmly replied, “I’ll be the one armed guy wearing tie-dye.” He had me there. We walked around the parking lot together for a while, photographing various interesting and colorful people while he scribbled copious notes. 

As the afternoon wore on it was time to head inside. We met up with our contact with the Grateful Dead organization, a rather frenetic publicist named Dennis McNally. Like everyone in the Dead’s orbit, McNally had been with them seemingly forever. The writer and I were given “Backstage Passes” of the stick-on variety. We were informed, particularly  me with my camera, that though they were called Backstage Passes and indeed said “All Access” right there on the front, they were nothing of the kind. Hanging with Jerry, maybe seeing what Phil’s up to, checking out the interplay of the drummers. Yeah, turns out that was all a fantasy. 

Dennis McNally set me straight but good: “You can shoot from the pit (the blocked off no man’s land in front of the stage), but no more than a song or two. Oh, the most important thing, do not stare at Jerry. You can grab a few shots then move on. Do not let him see you standing there taking shot after shot. Jerry gets totally freaked out by photographers hovering, shooting, shooting, shooting, don’t be that guy, ‘K?” Uhhh, OK? Forget hanging out with Jerry, now I was told that my very presence (well, the reason I was there) was upsetting to him. SO not what I had planned. 

So I hung out, wandered around a lot, shot crowd shots, not really making any use at all of that All Access pass, so freaked out was I by McNally’s admonitions. What if I distracted Jerry and ruined the show? That would suck. 

During the break I made my way down to the front, insouciantly flashed my pass, and slipped up into the pit, then sat down with my back against the barricade between crowd and stage. House lights came down, band tuned up for the usual six hours (probably more like several minutes) and kicked into a ripping Scarlet Begonias. 

I began by focussing on the drummers, then swung my lens over to Jerry. I saw him make me, gave me a little nod and I began clicking the shutter. On the third frame, Jerry stops playing, glares at me, and the rest of the band peters out, wondering what’s wrong. The place is silent, you could hear a pin drop, everyone following Jerry’s gaze and realizes I am the reason for the disruption. “Fucker.” The two syllables linger in the air, and I break out in hives and flop sweat, as I was slowly crushed beneath the monstrous weight of approbation from 20,000 Deadheads’ interrupted groove. As I crumpled to the ground, self esteem shattered for life, McNally’s insufficiently dire words echoed in my mind.

Of course, none of that happened. I focussed on Jerry for a while, then moved over, covered Phil, Bob, the drummers, Brent the new keyboard guy, then back to Jerry for a while. He never even glanced at me (and though at the edge of the stage I was still probably twenty five feet from him.) After getting my shots I skipped back out the lawn, put down my cameras, and danced and grooved under the stars in the balmy Maryland evening.

Afterwards, like the good WASP I’d been raised as, I sent Dennis a thank you note, as despite the limitations, it had been a terrifically lovely day and I was grateful for the opportunity and assistance McNally provided.

II

Six months after that Dead show, I moved to New York, began working for SPIN, and transitioned from enthusiastic amateur to professional celebrity rock photographer.As the years passed, I encountered many famous and notorious personalities, suffered all the slings and arrows of dealing with human beings (the famous are, of course, no different than the rest of us shlubs) and in fact when my acquaintance the writer Legs McNeil invited me to photograph Jerry Garcia for the cover of High Times I was ambivalent. 

I still enjoyed listening to Dead music, but didn’t really get to many live shows and in fact was quite sick of Deadheads (even though I was one of them). Jerry must be like the biggest Deadhead of all, a total inarticulate stoner. And I had enough close encounters with artists I really liked until they were fuckheads in person (looking at you De La Soul) that I was chary of having yet another hero ruined forever.

So expectations were low going in. We were to shoot in a swank hotel, the Parker-Meridien, which maybe should have been my first clue that La Jer might be have a little more to him than merely being the world’s biggest Deadhead. Actually, my first clue would have been the involvement of Legs, one of my more colorful coworkers at SPIN. He had founded Punk Magazine, later co-wrote Please Kill Me, and went on to become Editor in Chief of Nerve, a pioneering online sex magazine.  We worked together on a number of often hilarious stories for SPIN like sending him undercover to a country club in Greenwich to try to seduce the tennis moms. We shared a number of adventures such as a madcap limo ride with me, Legs, Bobcat Goldthwait, and Emo Phillips on the way to some SPIN party. I remember him routinely ordering cabs to pull over so one of us could run in to the Korean for a six pack (never mind that it was illegal to drink in any vehicle, even if you weren’t driving, so along with the six, there was always a full volume argument with the cab driver about how the paper bag made it ok and he was a professional and don’t worry about it.) Legs McNeil was basically Mr. Punk Rock.

Needless to say, Legs’ call, something along the lines of “You’re a big stinking hippie, you want to shoot that fat fuck Jerry?” was surprising in the extreme. But hey, pennies from heaven, why not meet Jerry? I was in like Flynn. 

I packed an abbreviated camera kit I could carry myself as I had neither budget nor permission for an assistant. We were to shoot in Jerry’s hotel room. This was a common occurrence in those days, and I wasn’t thrown by it. I could sometimes take my subjects outside, but they were worried about Jerry being mobbed (this was in the days of Touch of Grey, their improbable hit). So the trick was to shoot in such a way as to not look like you’re sitting in a hotel room. I think my main move was to shoot tight. I shot on 35mm equipment, which looking back is a strange and unusual choice. I loved my medium format, pretty much only used 35mm for live concert shooting in those days (which I was doing precious little of anyway, as you couldn’t really control anything so it was just documentation rather than portraiture) so I must have heeded Legs’ entreaties to travel light. 

One concession to art, perhaps how I justified not lugging my beloved (and enormously weighty) Mamiyas, was to shoot this Polaroid black and white 35mm film. You shot it normally, then instead of sending it to the lab, ran it through this machine that turned it into developed (positive!) chromes. The only catch was it scratched by being looked at. So fragile, sometimes it didn’t even survive the processing. And the act of slipping it into a plastic slide sleeve often scratched it irreparably. So I would cross my fingers, be careful as I could in processing, then send it to my lab to mount in glass protectors. Once it survived all that, it produced truly beautiful images, with lustrous silver highlights and deep beautiful blacks. 

Legs and I met up and headed up to the Parker Meridien on 59th Street. This was Legs’ deal, I was just tagging along as the photographer. So it was not surprising that Dennis McNally didn’t recognize me. I recognized him though, and mentioned the time I’d photographed the Dead at Merriweather Post, several years and many roads prior.

“Oh my God!” as he grabs me in a big bear hug, “Chris Carroll? Guy, nobody’s EVER sent me a thank you note! Dude, that was so sweet, I still have it on my bulletin board, so great to see you, you’re here for Jer? Excellent, excellent, come on in!”

Legs may have been a punk rock wildman, but he was also a journalist, and got right to work with the journalisming. This interview was to publicize something to do with the rainforest (hey SHUT UP, I was trying to take pictures not really listening), which led to Jerry imitating a tree sloth for us. Let me tell you, of all the artists and famous folks I’ve met, Jerry was the most charming, disarming, and delightful conversationalist I’ve ever encountered. The very opposite of a stoner deadhead. He was terrifically engaging, animated, funny, amusing, just an absolute ball to hang out with. I photographed both during the interview and while having his complete attention. When he gets going, you just kind of go, “oh, so that’s that a tree sloth looks like, huh…”

I think one of my main concerns was making it look like he wasn’t in a hotel room, which in hindsight seems silly to me: so he was in a swank hotel, so what? But nonetheless, I remember taking great care to try to disguise that fact so I used long lenses and tight crops to deemphasize the background. My glass nowadays opens up to f/1.2 which is about five stops more of that creamy bokeh I would have killed for back then. I think between the Polaroid slide film and the tight crops I did a good job under tough circumstances. Also, when shooting a cover, it is good to have a nice big clear headshot so that was probably another reason I went in tight. 

Maybe it was my surprise, at Jerry being so swell and McNally being so happy to see me, or just Jerry himself, but I left that shoot thinking how lucky I was to have gotten to experience Jerry Garcia up close, as a human being. I’m still a Deadhead, though the spark went out for me when Jerry died three or four years later. But it really caused me to remember to check my expectations at the door, allow people to tell you their own story. Jerry the man was so different from Jerry the artist (rather, the artist presented by media or viewed from a distance as in concert). I found his voracious intellect, wild sense of humor, and exuberant delivery an inspiration and resolved to model my own demeanor on his. Not bad for a shoot with a “fat fucking hippie” and Mr. Punk Rock stuck in a swanky-ass midtown hotel. Oh, and always remember to write a thank you note: couldn’t hurt, might help.