Eclectic Company: Music Images, Theatre Music

If you have any interest in the personalities of the artists who perform music you like, you’ll inevitably run into photographs and moving images depicting their live performances and the events and people that surround them. Some of the photographers are as well-known as their subjects, and you can find books and museum and gallery shows of works by Annie Liebowitz, Linda McCartney, Bob Gruen, Elliott Landy, Lynn Goldsmith, Timothy White, Anton Corbijn and too many others to name. New York and other music cities teemed with rock photojournalists over the fertile rock and pop music publications years of the 1960s – 1990s, when every week some magazine or newspaper would print an iconic photograph that defined for good or ill a musician’s personality. The photo editors of those periodicals were as important as the writers and editors to the tone and tempo of those times, and I have special memories of Fred McDarrah, longtime photo editor of The Village Voice, who had an incredible eye for a storytelling picture, and once honored me by publishing a performance shot I’d taken of Terre Roche to accompany my column on the Philadelphia Folk Festival.

I took that black and white 35mm photo of Ms. Roche onstage at night using only available light (no flash) under the tutelage of the master music photographer, David Gahr, who died in 2008 leaving a five-decade body of work that included some of the most famous depictions of American folk, blues, jazz, and rock musicians of the latter half of the 20th Century. Last night, he received a long-overdue celebration of his work in a pair of events in New York City — at the Apple Store on Prince Street, at which an illustrious panel discussed his larger-than-life personality and expressive body of iconic photographs, some of which were projected behind the panel as they lauded him, and at the Morrison Hotel Gallery in which a sampler of Gahr’s photos were hung in framed prints soon to be available for purchase.

Once you’ve seen his pictures of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Sonny Terry, Mississippi Fred MacDowell, Bonnie Raitt, Johnny Cash, John Lennon, Patti Smith, Emmylou Harris, Miles Davis, Richard Farina, Pete Seeger, and the like, you’ll always be able to recognize a David Gahr photograph, as he captured introspective, soulful sides of his subjects, showing musicians not only as they wanted to be seen, but as they really were, in unguarded moments both on and offstage. Foul-mouthed and funny, Gahr disarmed his subjects as he shot them, spewing strings of expletives and telling salacious jokes, including one favorite about Dolly Parton (whom he photographed beautifully) that was a surefire ice-breaker. As the artists roared or groaned their unexpected laughter, he caught something essential, clicking hundreds and even thousands of shots of each of his subjects, both before and after the digital era.

Gahr honed his craft at Time magazine, then focused on portraits of the musicians he loved, catching them on their way up and on their way down with equal warmth and generosity, as musician David Amram told us when the panelists gave way to audience participation, painting a portrait of the photographer as a sensitive chronicler and a sympathetic fan. Gahr was a master of available light black and white photography, developing and printing his images himself in a big brownstone in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, and then delivering them in person as he trusted no messenger service, no shipping company. In the later decades of his career, Gahr reluctantly switched to color and added a strobe to his arsenal of equipment that some lucky (hapless) friend/sidekick would get to lug around for him at this music festival or that concert. Often that friend was Joel Siegel, a blues guitarist, photographer, and now Gahr’s estate’s attorney.

Siegel pulled together last night’s standing-room only memorial at which we saw some famous pictures of some famous faces, reminisced about our late and truly lamented friend and mentor, and gave David Gahr just a little bit of the “kovoed” (Hebrew, pronounced in Yiddish, meaning honor) he so richly deserved. The archivist pulling together all of Gahr’s slides, prints, and the ephemera of a 50+ year career is paving the way for retrospective shows and books that I believe will finally place Gahr’s work rightfully alongside the photographs of such artists as Weegee, Diane Arbus, Ansel Adams, and other greats. At the memorial, one panelist expert on the images of popular music said, with some surprise in his voice, that the ubiquitous but almost unknown David Gahr is the best music photographer the field has ever known. I’ve always thought so, and cherish every meeting, every shared musical moment. His brief Wikipedia entry notes that dozens of the encyclopedia’s pages refer to Gahr’s photographs, so you won’t have trouble finding some of his famous images, or a picture of the man himself. It’s a little late to be saying it now, but better late than never: vaya con dios, my dear friend.

Since our first collaboration in 2001, I’ve been producing sound effects and music cues to play during the performances as well as selecting mood music to play before and between acts of Carolyn Woosley’s Louisiana Women plays, and if you come to see Itinerant Theatre’s and Imperial Calcasieu Museum’s November 9-10 production of Woosley’s The Writers ~ Maggie, Kate & Rosa, you’ll get a chance to hear what I’ve unearthed this time.

Woosley’s one-actor plays are set in many different decades are especially fun to work on, because my task is to find music appropriate to a character’s cultural background, the context of her times, and her personal tastes; that means some happy hours spent on research, during which I discover or re-discover songs and tunes from different genres that were known in the variety of eras in which the plays are set, and a final selection that I program as if I were a DJ building a set list for a party. The play scripts give some hints as to appropriate sounds, but Woosley herself is a multi-instrument musician and music fan; all her writing reflects an inner rhythm that lends itself well to lyrics and music, and she’s articulate on the subject of appropriate sounds to accompany yet not overwhelm her writing. For a music fan like me, this work is all play.

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