This week marks 40th anniversary of Los Angeles Rolling Stones Forum concerts

Mick Jagger on stage, 1969 (Photo by Ethan Russell)

By Phyllis Pollack

This week marks the 40th anniversary of the two Rolling Stones concerts held in Los Angeles at the Inglewood Forum on November 8.

This is Part 2 of an interview with award-winning photographer Ethan Russell, who was hired by the band to serve as their tour photographer for their 1969 tour, promoting their Let It Bleed album.

Part One of this interview can be found here.

In this article, Russell continues discussing his documenting the tour. His photos are currently on exhibit at the San Francisco Art Exchange, an event marking the 40th anniversary of the Rolling Stones tour. In commemoration, his photos, as well as works from of a few photographers who shot the Rolling Stones in 1969, will be on display through December 31 at the San Francisco Art Exchange at 458 Geary St. Russell's photos may also be purchased through his self-titled website at www.EthanRussell.com.

Ethan, was it ever different for you when shooting different band members? Was it the same process or approach shooting Mick Taylor as Keith Richards, for instance?

It wouldn’t have been different, not because of them, but because of me. So for example, I was reasonably intimidated by Keith most of the time, but for no reason. He never did anything to me to merit that. Charlie Watts gets along with everybody. He did then, and he still does, right? He called me when my father passed away. I used to have a hair cutter in San Francisco, and Charlie did the same thing for him. Bill Wyman, who I interviewed for the book, always was a straightforward and interesting guy. Mick Taylor was the youngest and the quietest, in the way of musicians being quiet. Not particularly about words. I think the same is true for Keith. At the end of the day, Keith’s silence is more about being a musician, and that’s where his energy goes. Mick Jagger is a pretty cosmopolitan guy, so if he wanted to talk, he talks, although he’s reasonably guarded, so we don’t know a whole lot of things about him. (Laughs.)

As far as the '69 tour, have you ever figured out how many shots you took?

Well, the tour is one thing. I shot them on and off for a couple years before that. But ’69? I have roughly five binders, figure 12 rolls in each binder on average, times 36 pictures a roll.

That’s two thousand, one hundred and sixty of black and white.

Yeah. I didn’t have a lot of color. I didn’t shoot so much color. If you’re going into the kind of real environments I shot in, you need the speed of black and white film that you can shoot in lower light. It was just the choice that would almost be forced on you. But the reality is I like black and white better than color as a rule anyway, and it’s much, much more forgiving. You can get a picture in an environment, where it just really wouldn’t work in color.

I never used flash. I mean I did, but very infrequently. It was a combination of not really being comfortable with using it, on an equipment-expertise level, not really understanding it. But the other part of it was my not wanting to be obtrusive. I feel a little bit differently today, because as you get older, your tastes can broaden. I like Weegee, a press photographer who always used flash on camera. His photos have a wonderful graphic, stark quality, that if I had known it at the time, I would have been more interested in. But at the time, I didn’t like that style, so I wouldn’t have wanted to shoot it anyway.

That was one of the questions I wanted to ask you. Your portraits, your photos, the black and white ones, express so much more than so many other peoples’ photos that were shot in color. Why do you think that is? Because you would think that you would be missing an entire dimension, but yet you capture this intensity. How do you explain that?

The communication that is required – in any art - is telling the story. And if the color is not helping tell the story, then it’s just getting in your way. One of the issues with shooting color is to be able to work in a color temperature that doesn’t get in the way of the photograph, being able to shoot in places without needing supplemental light. And especially sort of technically, the color film at the time was very challenged in the kind of lighting conditions I was in. It’s much less true today. I was testing out one of the digital cameras when I was in L.A., and I shot in the merry-go-round in Santa Monica at night without flash. It was unbelievable, the pictures.

Still, color – if it’s not helping tell the story - can easily subtract from it.

I’m asking this on a purely historical basis. What would you say that your five most significant photographs from the 1969 tour are? When it comes to their historical import.

On that tour?

Yeah, from the 1969 Rolling Stones tour on a historic basis.

The Brooklyn Museum exhibit that is now running, called Who Shot Rock (Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present), used the photograph of Mick on stage at Altamont. And in terms of history, and a single image on that tour, just because of the confluence of events in that photograph, etcetera, that would pretty much have to be there.

Let me think. I really like the photographs that were shot in Steven Stills’ basement, because it was this tiny little room.

When they were rehearsing?

Well, they rehearsed in a couple of environments, yeah, but this room’s small, got kind of single bulb, and it supports my theory that at heart, all real bands are garage bands. There’s a kind of purity to them. They’re simple. A couple of Keith in particular that I like.

Keith Richards rehearses in Los Angeles, 1969 (Photo by Ethan Russell)

Let me think. There are a lot of pictures from that tour. Hold on a second. Let me remind myself. One of my favorite shots I love from that tour is just of the audience.

That was going to be another one of my questions.

There’s a shot of the audience coming off its feet and rushing the shade. It’s in the trade book, the Let It Bleed book. I love this picture of Mick carrying Seraphina (Charlie Watts' daughter) and Keith on the lawn.

(Writer’s note: Mick Jagger is wearing a sleeveless tank top, standing in the yard, holding the toddler, as Richards lays on a mattress, smoking a cigarette.)

I love the ‘How Long Will They Last?’ sequence.

(Writers note: The photo shows Mick Jagger standing in front of a sign that says, “How Long Will They Last.” It was taken at the Warner Brothers sound stage in Burbank, one of the places where the band rehearsed. The sign was from the dance contest scene in the 1969 film "They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?")

But the shooting back at the crowd, whenever I work with a band, that’s the first place I go.

Can we talk about that, because I really did want to ask you about that. What made you want to shoot the audience, and can we talk about those audience shots from a historical basis?

Well, it’s what they see.

That’s brilliant.

That’s what they see. That’s what they see every night. That’s the only way in a single photograph to get the event. Because the event isn’t just the band, and the event isn’t just the audience. It’s the combination. And so that’s where you get the energy of the night. That’s why I do it.

You could not shoot those audience pictures today with that same effect, because everything is so different. It’s unfortunate, but, well, part of it is because of what happened at The Who concert in Cincinnati in December of 1979, and…

Well, what happened at Altamont was the precursor.

Exactly. And at most of their shows today, the audience would never be that close to the stage, of course.

Well the whole business has changed so much. I shot Audioslave, I mean not to pick on them. But their management wouldn’t send me the music.

Why? They were afraid you…

They were afraid it would be pirated. So I had to fly to Los Angeles, and the music was played for me in a conference room. So the difference is in the quality of the experience – at least for the photographer – is between really being in the heart of it, the recording of it, just in the absolute blood of it, there’s no other word. And to having the music and the artists be so segregated from each other. And then that control piece really starts to eat away at participating in the process of the art, or of the music. Because what the photographer, or writer, gets to be involved with is navigating the handlers (I refer everyone to Jonathan Swift). So the experience – and the recording and output – are fundamentally altered. It’s about money of course. But the price is certainly a loss of the human experience of it.

Photography and writing are a great form of expression.

Right. But for some reason for me, my first encounter with photography that really meant anything to me was Family Of Man, which you must be familiar with.

Part of the magnificence of Family Of Man, in addition to, obviously the photography, is how the quotes are woven into it. So it’s this interplay between the words and the photographs. You have on a single spread, three nursing mothers – one from Holland, 2 from the USA – and a quote from Euripides, “And shall not loveliness be loved forever?”

So I was wondering about my own relationship to this. I didn’t want to be a photographer, in the sense that I thought about it as a child, or young adult, or ever truly considered it as a career. I wanted to be a writer. And then all the sudden I get to photograph John Lennon, The Beatles, the Rolling Stones. What’s the purpose of that? Why didn’t someone else who really wanted it get that experience? And if you have got to put an answer to it, and of course, any answer you put to it is a joke, because there’s no answer you can know. But – it’s a little self-serving – if you take the position that things happen for a reason, then one of the outcomes is a) I didn’t overly exploit the pictures for years b) and so, finally, I was able to surface and weave them into a history. And the value of all of it as history is a pretty clear value to me. To be able to look back, especially with our generation, which has mixed historical background, if you look back at it, and can in a sense, relive it, really get to be there, maybe there’s a way to try and get a handle on it. That was the whole point of the big Let It Bleed book. To try and let people try and imagine they were really actually there.

That was what I was trying to get to, that the only connection that fans had to the bands back then was the photographs, the books, which didn’t start coming out until the seventies, pretty much, the albums, going to the concerts, the magazines, and that was it. Then later, the bootlegs showed up and the films. Especially, from the vantage point, of back in 1969, you didn’t have concert DVDs, you didn’t have MTV, concert videos on YouTube, the Internet, and all of this. Add to that, especially on top of that, the vantage point that you didn’t just shoot the performances, you shot other things on the tour. So people who saw your photographs felt they shared in the experience by seeing your photographs. They felt they were part of it, that they were there; it was a communal experience almost, through the photographs.

If that history exists for any of the bands today, I’m not aware of it. So pick an artist, time travel thirty years into the future, is there a hole in the record? Is there any record at all? Are people thirty years later going to be able to truly get the same level of history? Because that is the downside of taking away access. You lose the visual history.

And I think, whether it was realistic or not, fans felt a closer bond with the Stones, in part, because of this documented history through photos. People vicariously felt they experienced it, even if they hadn’t been there, or hadn’t been there yet. Do you understand what I am saying?

I think that’s fair.

What do you feel the historical legacy is when it comes to the photos, and how it contributes to the musical legacy we have from that tour?

I think I talked about that a little earlier. What I am surprised about though is how attached fans can be to their version of history. I was once in a gallery in Washington, D.C. for mixed Stones’ show, and there’s a picture I took of Jagger on the ‘72 tour. His eyes are closed, and his head is back. It’s a pretty famous picture. And a guy is looking at it, and says to me, “He’s so wasted.” And I said, “No, he’s not.” (Laughs.) And he goes, “What the f*** do you know?!” (Laughs.) “Well, let me see. I took the picture, I was there, I know the guy.” And the investment some people seem to have in the image is immense. I don’t know why they’re so attached to the wasted, debauched image. But on its surface, it clearly can’t be the whole - not even a significant part of – the whole story. Look at their longevity and their immense body of work.

What do you feel about the fact that people have been posting your photos on websites without permission? The lack of respect for intellectual property when it comes to photographic works?

I think Americans in particular, but the world in general, has to look really closely at the value of intellectual property. It’s a two-part thing.

Regardless of your opinion about it, intellectual property is clearly an economic driver and a way for people to make a living in a pretty admirable way, out of the sweat of their creativity. And if you don’t have copyright and protection for intellectual property, then you don’t have the ability for that means of making a livelihood to exist, right? (And it could be you!)

It’s not like you can’t understand the desire for wanting everything to be free, but there are mechanisms for that, which could use a great deal more governmental support, like libraries. The down side to copyright infringement is you destroy really important economic activity, simple as that.

That’s a little different than about my pictures. It’s what it is about any artist in any field, in any endeavor. If you don’t support the right of ownership, you sort of undermine the artist. So the answer I think is both an economic answer and a human answer.

On another level, a nature-of-media level, I see photography becoming something different. Photos are so easy to take now. Cameras are so powerful. And the distribution is so easy via the web and social networks. It’s almost like they’re taking the place of words in a funny way. Because words are harder. And taking a few pictures, and putting them up on the web is easy. And one can see the wonderfulness of that.

But there are real, and in my opinion not properly appreciated, downsides to copyright infringement, and I include my photos among it. So yes, I think there’s a problem. I also see that in the absence of stealing other peoples’ work, photographs are also becoming more and more present, and there’s something sort of pleasant about that. It’s like a democratization of the image, if you will.

What do you think the fans are thinking when they go to your website, and they think, ‘I have to have one of these photos,’ and they buy them? They relate to specific photos and buy them. What do you think these photographs mean or represent to people who purchase them from you?

I don’t know the answer to that question for the obvious reason that I’m not in their head. My guess would be that for some, it would be kind of to attach themselves to the era, for pretty much straightforward, nostalgic reasons. For some, it would just be like one might buy a photo of Greta Garbo. It’s the idea of feeling the power of the stars, large enough that you want it nearby. And for some I hope, the one I hope is that they’re buying it because they like the kind of photograph, and what it sort of shows you about the way things were when the photo was taken. But I have no idea.

What do you think your 1969 photos say about the music, itself? Do you think the photos say anything about the Stones’ music?

I think the photos say something about the musicians that made that music. So at that level, I think yes, which is that you can see the way, what was required for them to make the music at that time.

Do you think your photos from the 1969 Rolling Stones tour influenced concert photography?

Well, some say it did, but I can’t answer that.

You’re a bit modest.

I could be modest or not modest. (Laughs.) I just don’t know. (Laughs.)