Where Are We And How Did We Get Here?

Days of whine and roses

Photo ©Chris X Carroll. Chris and Jerry hanging out, as one does.

This is not an actual post. I recently rewrote my About page here on Substack and thought you might enjoy reading about how we got here. An actual post coming soon, enjoy this in the meantime.

Sarah Lawrence College doesn't believe in majors—everyone graduates with a Liberal Arts degree, regardless of what they actually studied. The theory? You "learn how to learn," so the subject shouldn't matter. Whether this is brilliant pedagogy or academic hand-waving is debatable, but it definitely makes that first job hunt a special kind of hell.

So there I was, back in Washington, riding a scooter as a motorcycle messenger. (Yes, a scooter. Think less Mad Max, more Wicked Witch of the West with theme music.)

The courier gig gave me a front-row seat to some seriously sketchy D.C. dealings. Thin envelopes from Teamsters headquarters to the Hart Senate Building. Obvious bottles of booze from K Street lobbyists to the White House loading dock. (We scruffy messenger types weren't allowed near the actual slave-built mansion, naturally.) These transactions were like a real-life preview of House of Cards—decades before that show existed.

The pay structure was pure chaos: more packages meant more money, which meant riding like a lunatic paid better than playing it safe. Even my indestructible 22-year-old self could see this was unsustainable. No health insurance, obviously.

One night, watching Tom Snyder's late-night show, I saw this young English guy with questionable teeth and worse hair: Bob Guccione Jr., son of the Penthouse empire. He was launching a new music magazine called SPIN, going on about how young, innovative, and disruptive it would be.

I thought: I'll have what he's having.

I sat down at my Corona typewriter and banged out a letter: "I'm young, disruptive, and innovative—not to mention unemployed. Can I come work for SPIN?"

Bob didn't call back personally, but his photo editor George DuBose did. And just like that, I landed the coolest job ever. I tell that story in more detail here.

Working at SPIN let me build a portfolio packed with rock stars—really the only way to get more of that work. The magazine's credibility opened doors that would've stayed locked otherwise. When I left, that portfolio would have to do the talking. It was very much a "how famous was the last person you shot?" game.

Right before leaving SPIN, I met some Rolling Stone staffers at a softball game. Turns out the secret to landing work at prestigious places like Rolling Stone isn't submitting portfolios or promo materials—it's meeting the photo editor over softball.

I kept the celebrity photography thing going for about a decade, working between SPIN and Rolling Stone during what I now recognize were halcyon days indeed.

This newsletter is where those stories live. The pictures, the chaos, the absurdity, and the sheer dumb luck that defined music photography in the late '80s and early '90s. Subscribe and I'll take you behind the scenes of a world that doesn't exist anymore—when rock stars were still gods, film was king, and a scruffy kid with a camera could talk his way into anything.

Ready for some stories? Hit that subscribe button and let's relive the madness together.