Behind the Scenes with CHRIS STEIN for WHO SHOT ROCK & ROLL
August 31, 2009
Chris Stein, guitarist and songwriter, was born in Brooklyn. In the early 70s, Stein joined the glam-rock group the Stilettos, which featured Deborah Harry as its lead singer. After the Stilettos fell apart, Stein and Harry formed the hugely popular and successful punk/New Wave band Blondie. Stein wrote the hit song “Sunday Girl,” and co-wrote, with his onetime-girlfriend Harry, Blondie hit songs including “Heart of Glass,” “Dreaming,” “Rapture,” “Picture This,” “Rip Her to Shreds,” and “Island of Lost Souls.” He ran the label Animal Records from 1982 to 1984, and also did the album cover for “Exposure,” Robert Fripp’s solo album, the first record cover done will all color Xeroxes. Stein not only composed the scores for the films “Union City” and “Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story,” but also was a co-composer on the scores for the movie “Wild Style” and the TV special “When Disco Ruled the World.” In the late 90s Chris and Harry relaunched Blondie; since then the group has recorded two albums and continues to perform in concert all over the world. Stein, also a longtime photographer, has done album artwork for Lydia Lunch and Dramarama.
Stein discusses his works collaborations with John Holmstrom for PUNK magazine, Richard Hell and Debbie Harry, Seventeenth Street, New York City, “The Legend of Nick Detroit,” and Anya Phillips and Debbie Harry, Staten Island ferry, New York City, “The Legend of Nick Detroit,” selected for publication in Who Shot Rock & Roll by Gail Buckland (Knopf, October 2009, $40).
You are a musician as well as a photographer, which gives you a unique insight into the relationship between photography and music. How do you feel the image impacts the listener’s understanding of the music?
Chris Stein: I have never figured out or decided if image was a plus or a minus when it comes to defining one’s musical style. I often say in interviews that when I was a teenager “most of my heroes were 60 year old black men.” This of course is a reference to trends that embrace only youth and fancy fashion as the mark of success. Recently much was made of the dowdy matron who appeared on some TV talent show and was endowed with a terrific singing voice. But there the context was all about her unattractiveness, which then became her selling point thereby negating the whole argument. Very weird!
Your photographs in Who Shot Rock & Roll feature the distinctive graphics of John Holmstrom. They are unlike any other image in the book, as they show your willingness to collaborate with yet another artist in the creation of the image. How did you come to create these images—clearly they were staged, but did you have the end product in mind when you set out to shoot, or was this something that came about through the process of creation itself?
Going into the various PUNK magazine projects with John, I was already familiar with the form: that of the Fumetti, a photo story that was laid out like a comic strip, often with speech balloons for the characters. Fumettis began, I think, in the early 60s and are currently more popular in Latin America and Europe than in the U.S. John Holmstrom was a source of many terrific ideas and working with a large number of our peers from the rock scene in NYC was great fun! In many of the photos I left room for the speech balloons when composing the shot.
What advantages do you see in shooting your own band and artistic coterie instead of having someone from the outside doing it?
Just the familiarity between us makes it easier to shoot candid moments.
In the days before the Internet and digital photography, when content was seemingly limited to those with access, the creation of images played a massive role in the music. How does your work contribute to this archive?
Because Debbie was so photogenic and appealing in pictures it was easy to disseminate shots of her to the media early on. Many people saw her image before hearing the bands music. During the 70s in the UK the weekly national music press didn’t have an equivalent in the U.S. and because of this many bands were visually available to British music fans prior to those bands music being heard or played on radio. This phenomenon certainly contributed to the popularity of “punk,” which relied heavily on elements of fashion to define itself.
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About the book:
From Elton John to Led Zeppelin, Björk to Janis Joplin, James Brown to John Lennon, Who Shot Rock & Roll is the first book to explore the extraordinary work of the photographers who captured the energy, intoxication, rebellion, and magic of rock & roll with images that have become icons unto themselves.
Featuring more than 250 photos, including many rare and never-before-seen images, Who Shot Rock & Roll is an unparalleled compendium of our shared cultural history. Author and photo historian Gail Buckland provides a compelling collection of portraits, live concert shots, behind-the-scenes snaps, and studio work selected for their aesthetic quality and power. The extended captions tell stories from the photographers that reveal their roll as both creative collaborators and tireless journalists.
As Buckland writes, “Rock and roll is not a musical genre; it is a communal spirit.” Her book reveals the very essence of rock photography- these mythical rock gods could not exist without artists to document their gifts. “Who Shot Rock & Roll is a silent window into a world of sound,” Buckland continues. “There are photographs of crowds and fans reminiscent of the great historical paintings of battle scenes where bodies blend and bend and faces radiate with what can only be described as transcendence. Snapshots reveal the passion, ambition, and insecurity of aspiring young musicians. There are portraits of godheads, objects of mass adoration; the best could hang next to paintings of Renaissance princes, so similar are these royals with their finery, wealth, and power.”
From Ryan McGinley’s Morrissey crowds to Bob Gruen’s John Lennon, Maripol’s Madonna to Richard Avedon’s Everly Brothers, David LaChapelle’s Lil Kim to Henry Diltz’s Tina Turner, Who Shot Rock & Roll presents our idols at their most divine, as captured by some of the greatest artists—most of whom are yet to be recognized—to work in photography.
Featured subjects include:
The B-52s, The Beatles, Chuck Berry, Bjork, Blondie, David Bowie, Bow Wow Wow, James Brown, Johnny Cash, Nick Cave, Exene Cervenka, Eric Clapton, The Clash, Kurt Cobain, Elvis Costello, The Cramps, The Dead Boys, P. Diddy, The Doors, Bob Dylan, Marianne Faithful, Aretha Franklin, Alan Freed, Fugazi, Jerry Garcia, Bill Haley, Debbie Harry, Richard Hell, Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Holly, Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, Jay-Z, Brian Jones, Grace Jones, Janis Joplin, Joy Division, KISS, Gladys Knight, Led Zep, John Lennon, Little Richard, LL Cool J, Madonna, The Mamas and the Papas, Marilyn Manson, Bob Marley, Paul McCartney, Freddy Mercury, Metallica, Method Man, Morrissey, Jim Morrison, New York Dolls, Notorious B.I.G., Oasis, Wilson Pickett, Pink Floyd, The Police, Iggy Pop, Elvis Presley, The Pretenders, Prince, The Prodigy, Radiohead, The Ramones, Red Hot Chili Peppers, R.E.M., Keith Richards, The Ronettes, Rolling Stones, Henry Rollins, Axl Rose, Run-DMC, Salt n Pepa, Sex Pistols, Tupac Shakur, Sid & Nancy, Patti Smith, Sonic Youth, The Specials, Buffalo Springfield, Bruce Springsteen, Sly Stone, Joe Strummer, Talking Heads, Pete Townsend, Ike & Tina Turner, U2, Velvet Underground, Bunny Wailer, The White Stripes, The Who, Amy Winehouse, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, and Frank Zappa.
Featured photographers include:
Amy Arbus, Richard Avedon, Ray Avery, David Bailey, Roberta Bayley, Peter Beste, Adrian Boot, Justin Borucki, Patti Boyd, Ed Caraeff, Stephanie Chernikowski, Danny Clinch, Anton Corbijn, David Corio, Kevin Cummins, Henry Diltz, Alain Dister, George DuBose, Andy Earl, Barry Feinstein, Danny Fields, Nat Finkelstein, Glen E. Friedman, Jill Furmanovsky, David Gahr, Godlis, Lynn Goldsmith, Harry Goodwin, Julia Gorton, Jean-Paul Goude, Bob Gruen, Andreas Gursky, Ross Halfin, Hipgnosis, Dennis Hopper, Don Hunstein, Marvin Israel, Art Kane, Richard Kern, Daniel Kramer, David LaChapelle, Elliott Landy, Michael Lavine, Lisa Law, Annie Leibowitz, Jean-Pierre Leloir, , Laura Levine, Ari Marcopoulos, Maripol, Jim Marshall, Elaine Mayes, Linda McCartney, Ryan McGinley, Dennis Morris, Shawn Mortensen, Terry O’Neill, Jean-Marie Perier, Charles Peterson, Ricky Powell, Michael Putland, William “Popsie” Randolph, Marcia Resnick, Ebet Roberts, Mick Rock, Ethan Russell, Jerry Schatzberg, Hannes Schmid, Stephane Sednaoui, Bob Seidemann, Mark Seliger, Stephen Shames, Lloyd Shearer, Kate Simon, Hedi Slimane, Pennie Smith, Gloria Stavers, Chris Stein, Ray Stevenson, Mayayoshi Sukita, Allan Tannenbaum, Edmund Teske, Storm Thorgerson, Ian Tilton, Philip Townsend, Albert Watson, Guy Webster, Barrie Wentzell, Alfred Wertheimer, Kevin Westenberg, Robert Whitaker, Timothy White, Ernest C. Withers, and Baron Wolman.
An exhibition of work from the book will launch at the Brooklyn Museum on October 30 and tour the United States through 2011. The schedule follows:
Brooklyn Museum
October 30th 2009 – January 31st 2010
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/
Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts
March 5th – May 30th 2010
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Tennessee
June 26th – September 26th 2010
Akron Art Museum, Ohio
October 23rd 2010 – January 23rd 2011
http://www.akronartmuseum.org/
Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina
February 24th – May 22nd 2011
http://www.columbiamuseum.org/
Gail Buckland has written and collaborated on eleven books of photographic history, including Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography, The Magic Image (with Cecil Beaton), and The American Century (by Harold Evans). She is former curator of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, professor of the history of photography at The Cooper Union, and guest curator at many American museums. She lives in Warwick, New York, and New York City.
