almost famous
i’m sure cameron was at at least one of these events…
this is my own almost famous period, around 1978 or 1979. i was running a record store by day and dj’ing 3-4 nights a week at KLBJ. not a care in the world, college was done and i had finished in first place in the race for people with no sense of direction. access to the front and back of the stage was mine for the asking. the era was one of a quiet revolution in the music industry as it emerged from its heyday of “saturday night fever” and a seemingly endless ability to essentially print money.
albums arrived in my hands with an enclosed envelope of all things nasal in hopes of guaranteeing their heavy rotation or placement & pitch within the store i ran and every girl i met was named penny lane. like the rest of my photography, i don’t know why these events beckoned me to pick up a camera but i did and i soon found my images in rolling stone and other related music media. i’ve since lost a lions share of the images, akin to my similar loss of grey matter associated with the period.
what’s missing in the form of photography are my images of the B-52′s, Devo, The Ramones, Richard Hell & The Voidoids, The New York Dolls and The Police. i recall every night in livid and vivid detail and hold dear to my heart the encore performance of the first tour of The Police — they had no other material and simply replayed the first three songs of their set.
it was a time when punk was dying or dead by some definition, new wave was on the upswing and rock was looking for itself. the genre struggled and found some life in the likes of tom petty but for the most part rock as we knew it was dead. and remains so as i write this. one morning in the fall of 1979 (i recall this moment as the woman sleeping next to me woke me for a lumberjack’s session of sawing on my wood…) i found blood on my pillow and in a crusty crust in the space where my mother had told me the angels had kissed me (that little dimple/valley between your upper lip and center of your snout). so i reinvented myself in the form of a display advertising salesman for the number two paper in a one paper town.
