I wanted love…something outside the love of my parents… something I saw in the movies… something I knew was coming. I heard it in my music. I felt it growing inside. It burst forth with the Beatles. I projected it onto Ringo, the cute one… Like a teddy bear. Sad eyes. I could relate.
I wanted to marry Ringo. Not Paul, John, or George. Ringo. But, then that same year, a darker force came through. “I’m a King Bee.” Biology hit under the covers. MICK. I wanted MICK. I was destined to know Mick, and I made it happen. Sneaking backstage at the TAMI show. There he was. And that was the beginning.
When I met Mick Jagger I was 13, barely 14. And bam, just like that, a parallel world opened for me, in me, around me. My path, at first only intuited by a barely conscious but forceful will in me, led me. With my privilege normalized by my growing upper-middle-class upbringing, and my slightly spoiled attitude of getting what I wanted, I believed I could achieve what I could barely articulate…some kind of life worth living, certainly so much better than the one I was steeped in, in the San Fernando Valley school I went to, with the popular girls whose only horizon was to cheerlead and get the captain of the football team. Not me, Not that life. My heart and soul and understanding of the world were coming through my ears — sounds that made sense, that replicated my feelings, words that had meaning, music that fed me. The early songs of Bob Dylan, really, give me a break… — Maggie’s Farm, Masters of War, Tangled Up in Blue… how could I not be moved by lyrics like “…I must admit I felt a little uneasy when she bent down to tie the lace of my shoes…”
That’s what I want, I thought at 15, barely 16. I want to feel that way — have that power — have that agency — have that love.
All the nascent desire I was growing at 13, barely 14, which translated into “All I want is to fall in love, get married, have children, and live happily together until we die. No wonder my first love, Jay, and my song was by the Turtles, Happy Together. I can see us now, me 16, him 18, it’s night, we’re in his car, he’s driving over Laurel Canyon, we’ve just passed the Country Store, coming up to Sunset Blvd, sitting close together, singing our love for each other, along with the radio at the top of our lungs…He was my rock star. He worked at the Troubadour; his best friend was Tim Buckley. He played guitar. He lived at the Gentle Soul House. He was my first love. He was my first making love. He was my first acid.
All that Rimbaud I’d soaked up, all those heart pangs of loneliness, all that never fitting in — we were creating a parallel generation. MY Generation, peace, love, meditation — eating brown rice with chopsticks — out of the box —the dividing line between me and my parents distinct -I was living outside the lines drawn for me by a culture I couldn’t abide by, a culture of war, sleeze, unconsciousness.
I write this with a sense of longing and some poetry running through this morning… the kind of feelings that come when I’ve woken up at 5 am, realizing… when lighting a candle as the darkness outside my kitchen window begins to allow forms of branches against the coming blue sky, and my black cat, Ivy, is roaming looking for a pet, and my tea water is cooling, awaiting the Earl Grey. All this while my beloveds sleep in the quiet of a house lulled by the sound of the heater and everything plugged in, all this while I try to keep my vibrations calm so as not to disturb their dreams.
It all started in 1963. Invisible push pins at the nodal points on my map of being. And now at 75, going on 76, so much becomes clear in retrospect. I was drawn to the music and the music makers. My young years spent as a valued tag-along, the photographer for the bands, capturing the source through the people making it, roaming rehearsal rooms like a hunter, and candle-lit houses where mostly boys & then men jammed in their bedrooms, living rooms, garages…going along with the band to recording studios, sitting in control booths, watching the engineers, listening to playback through great speakers, listening the sound of the reel to reel stopping, many takes and the tape being rolled back and forth, splicing — long before digital capture. I know those sounds. I was there. In Capital, A&M, Columbia. With Fanny, Jackson, the Band, the Doors, Sting, Rod Stewart, watching Henry Lewy, Richard Perry, Bruce Botnick on the board - thinking if I wasn’t a photographer, I’d have loved being a sound engineer. I felt the gravity and the uplifting forces of being on stage with the bands, given the freedom to do what I wanted, in front of large audiences, adjacent to the drums, sidelined on the stage, my camera pointing to find the light and shadow that best captured feel. I drew in the energy of the music, the musicians, the audience, all of us together as one aural resonation, thrumming, vibrating, gathering all this into my lens, through the glass, onto the silver film, making photography for my soul of what I so deeply longed for, what called me to be married to the ineffable.
I wrote this flowery write this morning out of a dream state — a dream of lovers swimming out to each other like sea birds. This is not the practical, rational, play by play of a girl, now an older woman, almost an old woman, my hair grey with so little brown left, who still feels like a young woman, who had a life not as a scientist, not as an astronaut, not as a biologist… but as all of them as a rock and roll photographer. Yet, that title doesn’t capture any of the reality of being an artist, which I am—that moniker which sums up my early professional years in elevator pitch style doesn’t even encompass what to call the world I was part of or the music. We call it R&R, but it was and is so much more. .
This substack, Behind the Seen, I set it up because all my life, no matter what else I did in photography, no matter if I was having my eyes examined by an ophthalmologist, or my rotator cuffs x-rayed by a surgeon offering to spin my blood and shoot it back into my shoulders to heal them, the top questions I get are always, “did you meet the Beatles?” The most important thing they want to discuss was what it was like being on the road with rock and roll bands. They’re as hungry to live through what I lived through as I was to live through those who were inside the music. Because inside the music — call it rock and roll, the blues, jazz, folk, opera, classical, world, hip hop, spoken word, dap, you name it — inside wherever the voice lives lives what we most desire, and what we most want... We want it so much. Love.
