The Henry Diltz Interview
Amazing photographs (like this one of a young Richard Pryor) provided by Henry Diltz for his feature in Monster Children Photo Annual 2013.
We here at Monster Children are big music fans and big photography fans. So big in fact, that at our Sydney gallery, we have collaborated with Blender Gallery to host ‘ICONS’, a collection of historical photographs of Rock and Roll spanning decades and featuring many of our all time favorite photographers, such as Henry Diltz. Then we thought, ‘wait a minute, we know that guy! And not just know that guy, we interviewed him!’
So in promotion of ‘ICONS’, on view on view now at the Monster Children Gallery, 7a Tanks Street, Sydney NSW, we revisit our cover feature with legendary photographer, Henry DIltz, as it appeared in Monster Children’s Photo Annual 2013. Enjoy.
Interview by Jason Crombie.
Did I ever tell you kids about the ’60s? Of course not; I wasn’t there.
Henry Diltz was though, and he has an enormous archive of photos and anecdotes to prove it. Henry’s decades-long photographic career started when he picked up a thrift-store camera and began shooting his friends who, for the most part, were—or would become—rock ’n’ roll icons. Since then he’s taken some of the most recognisable pictures in music history, photographing everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Kurt Cobain. These days Henry is a co-founder of the Morrison Hotel galleries in New York and Los Angeles, representing around 90 of the world’s best music photographers. But when he’s not in the gallery, he’s still out shooting, and it doesn’t look like he’s stopping any time soon.
Henry, which would you say is the most famous, iconic album cover that you’ve shot? Would it be the Doors’ Morrison Hotel?
It would either be Morrison Hotel or, among the people my age that I know, it’s Crosby, Stills and Nash sitting on the couch.
How was shooting the Morrison Hotel? Was that around the time of Jim’s trial?
No, before that—well before the trial. I don’t know when that was. I’m not even sure when he died. This was late ’69.
What was he like, Jim Morrison?
Well, the one word I’d use is bemused. Bemused is like sort of self-amused. Jim Morrison was a poet and he was an observer. And he was very cool. He would watch—a little nod and a funny, little smile. I would see him all over town. He was one of the local musicians in the earlier days. In maybe ’65 or ’66 I was still a musician playing in a folk band (the Modern Folk Quartet) and I would see him at the Whisky a Go Go, you know? I’d see him here and there—in town, at the store. And I’d say, ‘Hey man,’ and he’d just kind of nod and smile and wave.
Did you like him? Was he a nice guy?
Yeah, I liked him. But he was kind of cryptic. Bemused I say because he was kind of quiet. He didn’t come up and start blabbering at you. He wanted to hear people talking. We did the Morrison Hotel album. Do you want me to tell you the story of that?
Yeah, totally. Please do.
I had a graphic artist partner, Gary Burdon, and we had just done the ‘Crosby, Stills and Nash on the couch’ photo. I think the Doors saw that and they really liked it. And they wanted us to do their cover. So we went to meet with them, and I asked, ‘Well do you have a title? Do you have any ideas?’ They said, ‘No.’ They had all of this music but no idea what to call it or how to make it look. Then Ray Manzarek speaks up and he says, ‘Well the other day, my wife Dorothy and I were driving through downtown LA and we saw this old funky hotel called the Morrison Hotel.’ Gary and I thought, ‘Holy shit! Great!’
Perfect.
Yeah! We were like, ‘Let’s go down and look at it.’ So we drove down immediately. We drove down in Robby Krieger’s van. It was only Jim and Ray and Gary and I that went down to look at the place. And it looked great. A few days later we showed up with the whole band in the afternoon. And so we walked in and it was like a flophouse. It was where winos went to sleep it off. ’Cause it says on the sign: ‘Rooms $2.50 and up.’ Two dollars and fifty cents—not $250 like it’d be today.
You can’t even get a newspaper for $2.50 these days.
Exactly! So we went in the lobby and there was one sort of young guy behind the desk and I said, ‘Well, we’re going to just be over there taking some pictures.’ He said, ‘Oh no. No, you can’t. You need the owner’s permission,’ and he wasn’t around. So I said, ‘Really?’ He says, ‘Oh yeah. Absolutely. You need the owner’s permission.’ He was a famous slumlord or something. So I said to the guys, ‘Come on. We’ve got to go outside. We’re not allowed to shoot in here.’ It was fine. We wouldn’t have been able to get the same shot inside. We had no plan. We were just going to start shooting some photos in this funky hotel lobby. So we went outside and I thought, ‘Okay. I can have them stand in front of the window. They can’t stop us if we’re on the sidewalk,’ you know? I’m just about to say that when I notice through the window the guy has left the desk and gotten in the elevator.
You are kidding me. You snuck that photo? The Morrison Hotel album cover was a snuck photo?
Yeah! We ran in and they just got right in those places. We took one roll of film, literally. One roll of film. Color prints. I started up real close from the side. And my partner Gary said, ‘Back up. Back up. Get the whole window.’ So we did that and then we got out of there before the guy even came down. He didn’t know we did it. It took five minutes.
That’s incredible.
People think we spent several hours and we planned it. No. It just happened. And then we’re out on the sidewalk and Jim says, ‘Let’s go get a drink.’ It was like four o’clock in the afternoon. We got in the van and drove a few blocks to a place called Skid Row, which was all bars and pawn shops.
It’s still there.
It is, yeah. So we’re driving slowly down the street looking for the right bar—there were so many of these skuzzy old bars. And then coming up around the block, someone goes, ‘Look there’s one called the Hard Rock Cafe.’ So we parked and went in there and drank some Budweisers. And Jim loved hearing these old guys telling their stories, their hard-luck stories. We bought a few beers for the guys in there and they talked to Jim. He didn’t say much of anything but he was obviously very interested. He was really paying attention. I took pictures outside and my partner Gary put that on the back of the album. So the back was the Hard Rock Cafe. As soon as that came out, the Doors’ office got a call from England. And a voice on the other end of the phone said, ‘Would you mind if we used that name? We’re starting a cafe here in London. We want to call it the Hard Rock Cafe.’ They said, ‘Hey sure. Go ahead.’ That was the first of the whole empire.
No shit, really? That’s how Hard Rock Cafe got started?
That’s how they got the name. That’s where they got the idea.
That’s insane.
And then years later, an old black man told me, ‘You know, back in the ’30s, I used to walk by that place as a little boy.’ It had nothing to do with music. It meant like a rock and a hard place. The hard rock, like the hard luck, you know? Hard times. Hard scrabble.
Who was the most fun to hang out with? Who did you like to shoot?
I really liked Crosby, Stills and Nash. I was in a harmony group, a group that sang a four-part harmony. Crosby, Stills and Nash harmonize so wonderfully. They were fun. The Eagles were tons of fun on the road.
The Eagles? Are you serious?
Oh yeah. They knew how to party correctly on the road, how to get the girls.
Huh.
It was really fun to hang out with Paul McCartney. I knew his wife, Linda. I’d met her in New York some years before she’d married Paul. So we were friends and one day when she was married to Paul she needed photos of both of them to go in a songbook. So I went out to their house in Malibu and shot photos of them. A few years later, they called me and wanted me to come out to the Virgin Islands and spend a week with them on these boats while they recorded London Town. That was fantastic. Paul is a Beatle, you know? He’s also a wonderful guy. He’s just a load of fun to be with.
The Eagles, though? I’d have thought the Rolling Stones would have been the ones that knew how to party, just based on their reputation.
I never went on the road with the Rolling Stones. I shot a couple of concerts. I didn’t know Mick at all. In 1979 I got a call to go on the road for a couple of weeks with a band called the New Barbarians. And the New Barbarians was the new Ron Wood touring group. In-between Rolling Stones gigs, Ron Wood had done a solo album. The record company wanted him to support that by doing concerts around the country. So he put a band together. Keith Richards came along to play guitar and then they had a guy named… What was his name? Ah no, I’m going to do this thing where I can’t remember names now. He was a tall black guy who played jazz… Stanley Clarke! Stanley Clarke on bass. They also had Ian McLagan from Small Faces playing keys. It was a really great little group and they toured around the country. I was with them for three weeks. And that was very much like the Rolling Stones but without the boss, without Mick. So they sorta had more fun.
Was Mick a bit of a tyrant?
He was the serious type of leader of the group. In a way, without him there, they felt unfettered, kind of. It was more of a lark, less of a serious business. They just had a great time. It wasn’t a real serious thing.
You took pictures of Michael Jackson when he was a little kid. What was the energy around him like at that time?
He was a very polite little boy. I had taken pictures of the Jackson Five several times for teenybopper magazines. In the ’70s I photographed for teenybopper magazines. I did the Osmond brothers, David Cassidy, the Monkees.
How did you get started with photography?
So I was in this folk band in the early ’60s and we did a couple of albums for Warner Bros, we did a single for Phil Spector. When we did that, we thought our careers were really going to start but he never put the single out. We were kind of an experiment for him. I think he was afraid to put anything out that wouldn’t automatically go to number one. So we were left kind of waiting for our careers to jump-start. In the meantime we did one last tour across the country in a motor home. We stopped at a little junk store in Michigan and we all bought these little second-hand cameras. We started to have a little photo freak-out on the road. When we got back to LA and had the film developed, it turned out to be slide film. I had no idea. I knew nothing about photography. But I loved looking through the little hole, framing it up, pushing the button and hoping it all worked out. My pictures all came out and they looked great. We projected them on the wall and I was like, ‘Whoa.’ This was mind-blowing, to see these moments, to see this history shining up on the wall, eight feet high. I said, ‘Oh my God. I’ve got to do more of these.’ That’s really all that I cared about, doing these slide shows for my friends. So then I started photographing all the people I knew up in Laurel Canyon where I lived, just so I’d have more pictures to show. My friends were, like, Stephen Stills and Mama Cass and David Crosby. Those were the people around me, so those were the people I photographed. In the middle of that, Tiger Beat magazine called. I’d had some of my pictures in magazines and they asked me to go down to the Monkees’ TV filming set and spend the day. When I got down there we were sort of like kindred spirits. They had all of these old guys photographing them. So when I showed up and had fun with them, was one of them, they really liked that. So for like a year after that, I was their main photographer.
How were you kindred spirits?
I had long hair. I had love beads. You know. We were hippies. Everyone smoked. We called it God’s herb. Everybody smoked that, everybody in Laurel Canyon. It’s what made the ’60s and ’70s the great songwriter time. People were getting high and taking a new look at life and how we approached it.
How much acid did you do in the ’60s?
Just a few times. For me, it was always a very spiritual trip. I went very deep into the meaning of life. It taught me a great deal. It was a very great experience. My favorite quote about that is what Jerry Garcia said when he first tried acid: ‘I knew there was more going on than they were telling us.’ You see life in a whole new light. I remember when I first took it. I got really high and I sat there and I took a deep breath. I thought, ‘Wow. That was the first real breath that I ever took!’ And then I looked and I discovered my hands. I thought, ‘My God! What amazing things hands are!’ I’d never really appreciated mine. ‘It is amazing that we have these things. What a miracle,’ and so on and so forth. You start appreciating life in a whole new way. And smoking grass just increased your senses a bit. It sort of made things a little more fun. Music was better. Colors were brighter. You got great ideas.
Oh, I know.
It was a very positive experience for us. I think too often kids do it to—what they call—‘smoke out’. ‘We got smoked out.’ It’s like taking downers. I never was a downer guy. I was more of an upper guy. Grass to us was to see things afresh.
You’re still shooting today. You’ve shot Nirvana and a lot of contemporary groups. Who do you like right now?
There are so many bands these days. I like the Mumford and Sons. But to tell you the truth, I hear them but I don’t really follow them. I don’t really know what groups there are. What did I see last night on Carson Daly? There was a band on there called Niki & The Dove, I think. They were interesting to watch but they’re not my favorite group. I’ve never heard of them before. I see groups and I hear groups. I just shoot groups that are totally unknown. They need pictures. They call me up and ask me to shoot photos of them.
How have the groups changed since the ’60s?
Well, it’s kind of coming back full circle to singer-songwriters and acoustic stuff. People are doing it at home. They do it in their garage or in their computer. I think it’s very healthy, the music business, because everybody’s experimenting.
Right. That’s cool. Most music industry people would probably say the opposite, wouldn’t they? ’Cause it’s a tough environment to make money, but you’re right, it’s forced people to be more creative.
It has because there aren’t these record companies to pack them up and send them on tour and give them money for videos. It’s not happening because it’s more on the internet now. You’ve got to make it on your wits. It’s what people like. That’s what it was like in the old days, in the folk days. You’d play in coffee houses and in folk clubs. And if they liked you, you were going to do great. If they didn’t like you, well then maybe you weren’t going to last that long. When the big record companies came and put the several millions of dollars behind certain groups and paid radio to play them, they’d build groups. They were like hip makers.
Right. And that’s a thing of the past now.
Kids now are making their own music and expressing themselves truly and freely. I think it’s really great. To tell you the truth, when I listen to music, I listen to Jackson Browne and Jimmy Webb and James Taylor, and Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Beatles. That’s what I prefer to listen to. If I’m in the car, I may turn on the radio and listen to groups and I don’t even know who they are.
In the ’60s, were you married?
No I was single. I did eventually get married, though.
Well let me ask you this: did you ever make out with Michelle Phillips?
No. I did with Linda Ronstadt, though! Michelle always had boyfriends. She was always with somebody. She was with Gene Clark or her husband John Phillips or somebody.
Yeah, I bet she was. She was a fox. So, Linda Ronstadt. Can I put that into the interview or will your wife get upset?
Yeah, you can. We were really good friends. Everybody knew everybody back then. We all hung out at the Troubadour folk club in LA. It was more of a family. There weren’t so many musicians, not like there are now. I don’t know what it is. I guess there are just more people in the world and more people doing things.
ICONS is on view at the Monster Children Gallery until July 28th. Free, no RSVP needed. Get over there.
