The genesis of San Francisco-based photographer Jay Blakesberg’s storied career goes all the way back to the late seventies, when he started to shoot concerts with his father’s 35mm camera as a way to produce his own personal memorabilia. In the years that would follow, photography evolved from a hobby into a profession in which many of his portraits and live performance shots of both the giants and rising stars of the music world would infiltrate the pop culture landscape through magazines, books, album covers and sleeves, websites, social media pages and more.
Of his renowned subjects; The Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, the Who, Carlos Santana, Joni Mitchell, Willie Nelson, Tom Waits, John Lee Hooker, the Allman Brothers Band, Phish, B.B. King, the Black Crowes, Tom Petty, U2, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Metallica, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction, Nirvana, Radiohead and the Talking Heads make up only a smidgen of the talent that can be found in his extensive body of work. While his career has grown to include titles such as filmmaker and publisher, he is still reinventing the visual arts time and time again from behind the lens of his camera.
In October of 2013, Blakesberg released JAM, a new coffee table book that includes over 200 pages of spellbinding live photos, mainly of the improvisational/jam bands and the scene that follows them. When it comes to the improvisational music no show is ever repeated, but thankfully, some can be remembered through this compelling collection of photographs that burst with kinetic energy and dazzling splendor. Glide recently caught up with Blakesberg to discuss JAM, his history of shooting the Grateful Dead and the scene that they inspired, the current state of rock photography, and his plans for the rest of 2014 and beyond.
Your book features many of the musicians and fans that played a part in making the history of the jam scene. When you first started photographing the Grateful Dead in the late seventies, did you ever imagine that such a vibrant scene would blossom from that experience?
I don’t think anybody expected it. You know, it’s funny because back in the late seventies and early eighties, the Deadheads were very insular and very close-minded musically. If you went to a Grateful Dead parking lot, all you’d hear is the Grateful Dead or the Allman Brothers. There really wasn’t really a jam band scene besides that. Yea, I’m sure people listened to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and classic rock, but in general it was the Grateful Dead. Now you go to a festival parking lot you’ll hear anything from the Grateful Dead to Phish to moe. to Umphrey’s McGee to classic rock and everything in between.
Thirty years ago or so, we really had no idea how much that whole jam scene was going to explode and blossom into a genre that I personally think is the most interesting and unique musical genre out there. I’d much prefer to go see a band like moe. night after night, who is going to play different songs in different ways every single time, than go hear Tom Petty sing the same songs over and over again. I love Tom Petty and I can catch him for one night or two nights, but not more than that on a tour.
You have these bands like moe. and Phish and Phil Lesh & Friends who are reinventing their own songbooks on a daily, nightly basis and I think that’s interesting and unique and what makes the jam world spin, at least for me personally.
What was it that you initially hoped to achieve when you set out to photograph the Grateful Dead?
When I first started going to see the Grateful Dead and bringing my camera, I was just bringing a camera because I wanted to create my own personal memorabilia. I had a dark room in the basement of my mother’s house and I was making 8 X 10 prints and thumbtacking them to the walls of my bedroom. I’d print 8 X 10s and bring them to the concerts and sell them for a buck or two a piece in the parking lots and make some extra cash to see more Dead shows.
I was too young to understand and know that I was really in the center of a really special golden moment in pop culture history. If I knew that or had more insight into that or was more mature, maybe I would’ve shot more pictures. Maybe I would’ve approached it from a different standpoint or a more anthropological, historical perspective, as opposed to being a fan that takes pictures here or there.
You’ve captured some of the most iconic photos of the Grateful Dead. How did the band first become aware of your work and what was your first official project that you collaborated with them on?
My first official project really came through Rob Wasserman, when he started working with Bob Weir. I was doing the photographs for one of Rob’s records “Trios” and Ratdog was sort of forming. I was asked by Rob Wasserman’s manager, Clare Wasserman, if I would do a portrait of Bob and Rob together for a new publicity shot for a duo called Weir-Wasserman. It wasn’t called Ratdog yet. Oh boy, that was maybe 1989, give or take? And before that, I was doing assignments for magazines like Relix and the Golden Road, and Rolling Stone magazine.
Bobby really loved those photos and I sort of became Bobby’s guy for a brief period of time there. Whenever he had a project where he needed a new publicity photo or needed some pictures, I was the guy that got called to do it. When they put together the first version of Ratdog, which was basically Weir, Wasserman and Jay Lane on drums, they brought me in to do the publicity portrait of the three of them. Bob wrote two children’s books with his sister Wendy and they needed photos for publicity and for the book jacket cover, and so I was hired by him to do the portraits of him and his sister for those two book projects.
Eventually Mickey (Hart) became a little bit aware of me and I was asked to go to his place and shoot a recording session that he was doing with Babatunde Olatunji. And then Alvarez Guitars were shooting some ads with Jerry and Bob, and I was asked to come in and do some portraits of Jerry and Bob with some guitars for some ads.
Another time, the Golden Road was doing a story on Garcia and Hunter in early 1991, where I was hired to do the portraits of them together. Also, I was also doing some work with Bill Graham Presents and so I was starting to get some access through BGP because they were hiring me to also be part of their photography crew to document New Years shows and things like that. So I just start interacting more, and little by little, I kind of made some headway into that camp, to where I started to get laminates and backstage passes and photo passes and opportunities to shoot the band from the other side of the rail and not so much being a fan anymore and being more on the professional side.
From a music perspective, Deadheads will hold certain shows close to their hearts. How about from a photographer’s perspective? When you look at all your live shots that you took over all those years, were there any shows or tours that you think you best captured the essence of the Grateful Dead experience?
Well I feel like I did it over and over again. I have some of my own personal favorites. There are some shots of the Grateful Dead from the Warfield in 1980 and Frost in 1982 and Oakland 1987. There’s a bunch of different things like that, that stand out for me, but just in general, I want people to look at my photographs and have that photograph trigger memories. Sort of like music does.
Maybe when you hear a song on the radio and it brings you back to when you were a kid riding in your parent’s car listening to that song on the AM radio. “Let it Be” has done that for me. A lot of music that I’ll listen to when I’m driving or when I’m hanging out just kind of evokes these certain strong feelings about my past and things that I’ve done in my life and where I was at the time that song came out or when that show happened… and so I hope, I wish, that my photographs evoke a similar type of a feeling that brings you back to a certain space and time where maybe you were at a show with your best friend or you maybe met your girlfriend who became your wife or your boyfriend who became your husband… Maybe with a group of people and it was a road trip and there was something special about it… So you know, that’s something great about doing it from a historical standpoint.
I’m fortunate that, for some strange reason, from day one, I always dated my photographs very specifically so I know exactly when they were taken. I could pull out a photograph and know it was taken on September 26th, 1979 or that it was taken October 10th, 1982.
So here we are, thirty-five years later and my stuff is fairly well organized by date. I can post a photo on Facebook or have a gallery exhibit or put it in a book and have the date next to it and it can evoke a certain feeling from that person who experienced it on that exact same day that it happened. I see comments everyday on Facebook, people reacting to photographs that are now twenty, twenty-five, thirty years old. At the time, we thought they were just pictures of our friends hanging out, in real time, now they are history.
The photos in JAM are surreal and explosive. What are the factors that produce a great live shot?
Well I think that there are all sorts of things that make a live photo a great photo. First, there’s the historical perspective. There are no more pictures of Jerry Garcia being taken but there are pictures being taken of Phish and moe., and Umphrey’s McGee and String Cheese Incident and Widespread Panic and all these different bands every single day. Any picture of Jerry has some sort of historical, pop culture reference to it that sort of makes it a good photo.
I mean, yeah, there are plenty of bad pictures out there of Jerry too. I think in our over-saturated media society that we live in today, there many many many thousands of bad photographs out there, so a photograph of somebody like Trey from Phish onstage, standing there strumming a guitar with a microphone in front of his face doesn’t make it a great photo because it’s a picture of Trey. If you go on Facebook, you’ll see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of photographs like that of numerous artists, where people are commenting “Oh what a great photograph!” Well it’s not a great photograph. It’s a photograph of somebody famous but that does not make it a great photograph. Because of where we are with technology and everything else, I really truly believe that we live in a land of mediocrity, and mediocrity rules. When you have a glut of content, whether it is videos or photographs, a lot of it is mediocre.
For me, I have personal criteria that I try to meet. In terms of my book JAM, I think one of the main criteria of that book is that the photographs have to be super high energy. I think if you look at that book, that’s what you see, page after page. There are a lot of artists that are not in this book because I didn’t have that high-energy photograph that I was looking for. I feel horrible about that but that’s just the way that it flowed. What I’ve heard people say about my book JAM is that they’ve never seen so much movement and energy in so many still photographs. To me, that is a huge compliment, because that’s what I was going for; the all-out, full-blown high-energy rock and roll photograph. That was kind of the premise of JAM.
There’s also photographs in JAM, or that I take elsewhere, that don’t get deleted because it might be two people on stage. It might be Les Claypool and Warren Haynes jamming together, so that’s got a certain historical perspective to it. They might have been up there for a brief period of time or rocked opposite ends of the stage and they walked to the middle of the stage for five seconds and you got two quick shots, nothing brilliant but it’s a historical moment captured of two people that normally wouldn’t be onstage together. So there’s a lot of things like that, that I capture that have, in my opinion, pop culture historical value but they may never find a home where they get seen or they need to be seen or whatever but are just kind of a document of a special moment that happened onstage.
What are the greatest challenges that you have to defeat, or at least work around in your profession in order to get that great live shot?
Shooting live concerts is sort of like being in a war zone, especially if you’re at a festival and you’ve got anywhere from five to fifty photographers around you and you’re dealing with stage lighting that we have no control over. A lot of photographers are at the mercy of being able to shoot for the first three songs or certain number of songs. I’m fairly fortunate that, for the most part, I don’t have to work with those same restrictions and I can usually shoot a whole show from onstage, offstage, in front of the stage, at the soundboard, wherever I want and so I’m lucky in that sense, that I don’t have those restrictions and that enables me to be in a situation where I can hopefully capture more diverse and more intense energetic photographs than what’s presented to you in the first three songs.
There are some really great shots of Neil Young in this book and I read somewhere that he’s your favorite artist to photograph. Why’s that?
I don’t know if he’s my favorite but he’s definitely up there. I love shooting Phil Lesh, I love shooting Neil Young, I love shooting Carlos Santana, I love shooting moe., I love shooting Phish. There are a lot of great bands that I enjoy photographing but I do love shooting Neil because he’s so intense onstage. He’s a super iconic artist of the last fifty years of pop culture musical history so there’s that whole aspect. I’m a huge fan of his work, and his songs and his music. When he gets up onstage and plays, he plays like he means it and so I’m happy to be able to capture that.
There are a lot of bands that do that. I love shooting moe., because when they get going and they start getting animated, there’s no stopping them and the opportunities to capture incredible photographs are abundant.
You just have to be at the right place at the right time. I try to put myself in those places. You know, when I was a young lad of ten, my little league coach said to me “When you’re in the field, you need to anticipate the play.” Pretty basic advice, right? That’s advice that I live by and that’s advice that I give often to other photographers, just in terms of wanting to capture that moment. You might be giving up some other photographs, but if you can walk away with a brilliant shot, then who cares about all the pedestrian ones that everybody else is getting? So I’m always looking for the odd angle, the odd lighting or the odd guitar thing, or… you know, a different shot than what the other 40 or 50 photographers are trying to get and try to come up with something different.
The digital revolution led to a paradigm shift in your profession. At one point you had to learn the ropes of digital to keep doing what you’re doing. I read that 90% of JAM is made up of digital photos. Correct?
Correct.
So do you foresee any paradigm shifts in the near future of your profession, like the digital revolution had been in the eighties and nineties?
You know, I don’t think we even saw the digital revolution coming twenty years ago when we were shooting film. It came, we assimilated and I feel like, for me personally, I eventually got to the place where I liked what I was getting with digital. It took me a long time to get there, and I think I have a very unique style with my digital and I think that a lot of people have also tapped into that and have done their best to try and emulate it. I’m certainly not the first to do it but I think that in terms of the jam scene, a lot of people will recognize that my digital work has had a lot of influence on other photographers. It’s all good.
What is the next step? I don’t know. I really don’t know. The technology is always moving so fast that I’d imagine, before we know it, we could be shooting just video and pulling stills off of that. There are already cameras that can do that. High-end digital video cameras that shoot super high resolution and there are people and photographers who are using these digital video cameras to shoot still photograph jobs and pulling frames out of these and processing like still photographs. As for what the future holds, I’m sure they’ll be a lot of technological shifts and I hope that I can keep up with them.
So people always talk about the state of music… is it better, is it worse… How about concert photography? From your perspective, is it better or is it worse than the days of Jim Marshall and Elliot Landy, or it just is?
It’s different, because of the technology and the way that… When Jim Marshall was shooting, there were only a couple of magazines interested in what he was doing and there weren’t forty to eighty photographers shooting a glut of images. Even twenty years ago, I could go to a concert like U2, and there might only be six or eight photographers. You go to a show like U2, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, or Pearl Jam and there’s ten or fifteen or twenty photographers. Back twenty years ago when there was six photographers, one or two of them were professional, one or two of them were from a newspaper, and one or two of them were from the college newspaper. So there wasn’t a glut of images being created, there was just a handful. Now those numbers have multiplied, ten-fold, twenty-fold and so again, it goes back to what I said earlier, more is not better. I truly believe we live in a world of mediocrity. I think there’s a lot of people out there that call themselves professional photographers who are just consistently producing mediocre artwork, and that’s fine if that makes them happy but that’s not what I want to do with my career or with my photography. I want to continue to inspire myself by shooting images that really turn me on.
And that’s what photography has always done for me. When you shoot digital, you look at it on the back of your camera five seconds after you took it, but with film you had to wait to get the film developed and go to a lab to pick it up and lay it out on a light table and look at your slides. Whether it was a concert, or a portrait or an album cover or a magazine cover… I’d go look at that film and look at it on a light table and I’d get so excited by the images. It turned me on, it really made me feel excited and it’s the same thing when importing my photos into a computer. I look at them and I adjust them, the contrast, the color and I look at it and it excites me and that’s what makes me to want to shoot the next show and the next show and the next show because I want to keep getting better images and more unique images and documenting that rock and roll experience that I’ve been part of for thirty five plus years.
I understand that you are managing the domestic licensing for Jim Marshall. How’d that come about and what are your plans to preserve and present his work in the 21st century?
Jim Marshall is obviously a big influence of mine. I remember looking at Jim’s work when I was a teenager in magazines like Relix and whatnot and I always thought “Wow, I want to do that,” but I really didn’t know what that meant or how to achieve that goal but when I moved to the Bay area in the mid-eighties and started to establish a career of my own as a music photographer, Jim befriended me as he did with many young photographers and I think that maybe he saw some potential in me, or a little piece of himself in me, because I started getting assignments from Rolling Stone magazine and other places and we became friends. We’d see each other around town and I stayed in touch with him. We had a few years where we didn’t see each other that often and then towards the end of his life we started working on a project together.
He wanted to publish a book of one of his best friend’s photography, who had died six months earlier from cancer, and I helped him get that book published through my book publishing company, Rockout Books, which also published JAM. It’s a book called a “A Dangerously Curious Eye” and there are pictures of Hunters Point in San Francisco that were taken in the late sixties and early seventies by a guy named Barry Shapiro. It’s a beautiful book. Jim wanted to make sure that his friend’s work would be preserved and so he put up a bunch of money to publish that book. Right after Jim put that money up to make that happen, Jim died.
I helped put his memorial concert together with some of the other folks that run his estate. Six months after Jim had died, we started talking about possibly working together because they, the people who own the estate, have certain strengths in some areas, and because I had been negotiating the licensing fees for my photographs for twenty-five or thirty years now, I understood that side of the business. I also had the skills to be able to edit his work. So I was able to bring certain skills to the table with the Marshall estate and they asked me to come on board with the licensing side of things.
That role has expanded now. I do a lot of editing and I also help them with some of the bigger picture stuff. I don’t really get involved with gallery exhibitions or prints or things like that. Just some of licensing deals and also some of the big picture things that we’re working on that will hopefully go ahead and preserve Jim’s legacy and keep his work alive and in the public eye in a righteous manner that is deserving of Jim’s work. So that’s where I fit into the grand scheme of things with the Marshall estate.
How about your own work? What does the rest of 2014 have in store for you?
2014, as far as I can tell right now has a lot of same of what I’ve been doing over the last few years. I do lot of different things. I also shoot and direct a lot of video. Most of my work is in the music space. I’m starting a cool project with moe. for their 25th anniversary which is in 2015 but we’re starting in 2014. I just directed a video for moe. for a single on the new record that we’re going to put out before that record comes out. I also shot photos of them in the recording studio at the end of 2013 for their new record. There are a lot of great festivals coming up. I’ve got Summer Camp, moe.down, Lockn’, Mountain jam, and Gathering of the Vibes. I’ve been shooting Hardly Strictly Bluegrass here in San Francisco in the fall every year for the last ten years or so, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be back doing that again in 2014. The Bridge School Benefit, which I’ve shot for almost 25 years, so I’m sure I’ll be back shooting that, and that’s with Neil and Pegi Young. We’ve got a lot of cool stuff planned for the Marshall Estate. Jim just won a Grammy Award. He was just given a Trustees award, and we flew down to LA to pick up his Grammy Award. I’m still pushing JAM because JAM has sold out two printings and we are now on the third printing.
I’m also starting on my next book in 2014 which is going to come out in 2015 and I think that book is going to be called Hippie Chick, and it’s sort of about the passion and the fashion of the girls and women who love rock and roll. I’ve been going through the archives and I’ve got some ideas of some things I want to shoot this year out on the road and I’m talking to some different writers that I hope are going to do some writing and work with me on this project so that’s another thing I’m looking forward to in the Fall of 2014.
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