They have often said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Whoever assumed this was possible never looked through the lens of Jimmy Steinfeldt’s camera as he stood in front of Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Miles Davis. The photographs he captured often provoked only one word: wow.
Steinfeldt, who got his start as a music fan in Minnesota, shooting shows because he wanted to capture the moment he was living, has recently published his first book, Rock N Roll Lens: 30 Years Of Music Photography & Stories. Full of colorful images he shot of everyone from Madonna to Rod Stewart, Guns N Roses to Tina Turner; Steinfeldt has added in delightful anecdotes about each encounter, never failing to bring the musician to life.
Some of the stories are funny, as when shooting Robert Plant in the 90’s, he witnessed ole Percy “cruising around on his gas powered skateboard;” and some are (almost) surprising – James Brown posing for a photo with Coolio and while waiting for the flash to power back up for a second shot, he announced that “’James Brown don’t wait for no one’ and walked off.” It’s enough to make an average fan sigh in envy as Steinfeldt remembers talking to Johnny Cash about scouting, shooting pool with John Mellencamp and being blessed by Keith Richards.
Glide had the pleasure of speaking with Steinfeldt one recent afternoon about his rock & roll adventures from behind his lens.
After learning I was based near New Orleans, Steinfeldt was excited to tell me that one of the musicians on his bucket photography list was none other than Fats Domino. “There’s a picture that is missing in my book,” Steinfeldt announced: “The person at the very top of the people that I haven’t photographed and he’s right there in New Orleans.”
Fats Domino
That’s the man, absolutely. As a matter of fact, I wrote Fats about a year ago and my gosh, he wrote me back and he sent me an autograph. Can you imagine that? Hopefully someday I’ll be able to meet him face to face and maybe even take a picture of him. But I know he’s certainly up in years. I photographed John Lee Hooker, Cab Calloway; not in this book but certainly maybe in a future book, some of the great legends that are up there in years – BB King, Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, many of his contemporaries and of course Chuck Berry, who is in the book. So one of these days maybe, God willing, the great Fats Domino. It’s so important to see the legends, particularly if you’re enamored by music as you and I are. These legends won’t be around forever and it’s important to see them. Did you ever see Pinetop Perkins?
No, I didn’t
I got to photograph him a number of times and when I photographed him, he was 90-something and he just kept going and going. Some of these players are just amazing. They play basically until the day they die.
Les Paul did it.
That’s right, and of course Les is in my book.
You’ve been doing a lot of interviews for your book. Does it feel strange being on the other side?
Oh yeah, it’s a new experience and it’s given me great insight to so many of the bands that I’ve worked with over the years. Just like you’re saying, being on the other side, I’ve observed so many of these artists that do interviews and basically do publicity for their record releases and now I’m on that other side being interviewed. So now I can empathize with all the musician friends that I’ve worked with through the years. Part of it is really fun and sometimes if you have a lot close together, it can be a lot of work. But mostly I am enjoying it. Also, because I’ve been to a large extent a press photographer for so many years, I had a kinship to other members of the press. So I don’t feel intimidated.
Why did you decide to put your book together right now?
I think the shortest answer would be that I just felt that it was time. I could have done this book earlier but I guess I wasn’t ready to undertake what was a huge editing job, a huge writing job, and then all the things that go with it. Publishing my first book, I had to learn to do all that. So it just kind of felt like the right time. Expanding on that a little bit, Leslie, I would say that certainly for me the biggest job was recalling and writing the stories. I’d already taken the pictures, and I love taking pictures and obviously I’ve made a career out of that.
Now, I also have written reviews of concerts in the past but that’s not my forte. I felt I was an ok writer but I really had to hone my writing skills, I felt, to be able to put out a book that I’d be proud of. So it took a long time for me to sit down and recall all the stories I wanted to tell in this book and then to write them, and as you know from what you do, to rewrite them and rewrite them again. I also have good friends who are fine editors who reviewed it and made suggestions on everything from spelling to more important things like phrasing.
Really, the book is in my voice. Everybody who knows me, and has known me a long time and has read the book, say, “It’s just like I’m sitting down with you, Jimmy. It’s just like how you talk.” (laughs) I feel good about that but the writing was a big part. And lastly, I will say a number of really good pictures that I thought about putting in this book are not in the book cause I didn’t feel I had the strongest story to go with it. So unless it was a great photo that also had a great story, it didn’t make it into this book.
Why did you want to include the stories instead of letting the photographs just speak for themselves?
A number of reasons. I would say first and foremost is I’ve had the great opportunity to know and meet, and in some cases, work closely with a number of the artists through the years. Some I’ve met only briefly but even I recognize that these people have millions of fans, millions of listeners, and the percentage of people who really get to work with them is pretty small and I’m one of the lucky people who was able to meet these people. I know you’ve been able to meet and work with so many cool people in your career. So I’ve thought it was important to share these stories cause not everybody is able to have a story like each of these individual stories that I’ve had. And also I felt, just generally, it would be more interesting to the reader. As proud as I am of the photos I’ve taken over thirty years and I think frankly they would stand very strong if they were just the pictures. But the book just wouldn’t be as engaging, I felt, if there were only the pictures. And from what most people told me, I’m really happy I made that decision despite the fact that it delayed putting out the book for maybe a year or so, cause it took that long to write it the way I wanted it to be written.
So it was harder writing it than actually picking out the photographs.
That’s right. I probably have somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million photographs. So the first job was to figure out from those which of the artists that I felt would really be able to tell the story of my career, then edit artist by artist. And even that was an edit of tens of thousands of photographs. So that was quite a chore to do the editing.
Did it ever become so frustrating to do that you thought maybe you just didn’t want to do it anymore? Or was it always fun?
Well, that’s a very good question. One of the things that I am is that I’m a pretty patient person. So I did feel pretty much throughout the project that if I didn’t get to look at all the photographs I wanted to today or this week, well, there’s tomorrow and there’s next week. So I didn’t really feel a super-tight pressure to get it done at a certain time. So that helped make it not an uncomfortable task. I think that probably says it best cause it was a very big job. The other thing that was fun was as I was going through the photos I would come across a photo that I had just completely forgotten about. Sometimes they were pictures of me with an artist or of a friend that I haven’t thought about in years with an artist. I would scan those and send them to my old friends and they’d email me back and go, “Oh boy, that’s great to see that picture,” and so on. So it was some fun trips down memory lane. Some people I couldn’t find easily. But now with of course Facebook, I was able to find people in my past I had forgotten about for years. That was kind of a fun surprise in doing the editing.
Why did you choose Michael Jackson as the main cover photograph?
I just thought that was my strongest picture. A lot of these pictures have a great deal of meaning to me, talking about the other pictures on the cover. Madonna, that was my first picture in Rolling Stone; Paul McCartney, Wings was one of my favorite bands of my teenage years; Clapton, of course, being an amateur guitar player, I’m a huge fan of guitar players so Clapton is one of my heroes. But the Michael Jackson one seemed like a natural shot to use. It’s probably the strongest shot that I’ve taken in all the years and it’s a well-known picture of mine.
What still intrigues you the most about shooting live concerts?
A lot of it has to do with the excitement of being in there and trying to capture a great moment in time. I started out, of course, in the days of film and I’d show up at most concerts with usually two rolls of film. That’s seventy-two pictures. Of course, we take many more nowadays cause it costs nothing to develop them and so forth. But it was so exciting to get the pictures back from the lab not sure if your pictures turned out good or bad or great or whatever. So it had a lot to do with the exhilaration and excitement of seeing if I could create a great photo from a great moment. There certainly was an excitement of being there and seeing musicians that I admired and admired their music. It was just really thrilling. Every show was thrilling and also every show was a little nerve-wracking, even after all these years. Everything from, make sure you get there on time and make sure you get a good position, make sure all your equipment is working. I think anyone in this business has had some piece of equipment fail in the middle of a shoot and then you have to figure out what to do. So the enjoyment of it and the exhilaration of doing the job has kept it interesting for me.
Is that why you didn’t go the route of nature photography or wedding photography? Something other than music.
That may be. I would say that probably the two reasons that come to the top of my head as to why I have concentrated on music photography specifically, or entertainment photography generally, is that there’s an excitement and exhilaration factor of photographing in that situation; and also my lifelong love of music. I took guitar lessons from the time I was a little kid and like everybody else I enjoyed listening to the radio. Remember vinyl records? I had an LP collection. Now, everything is an MP3, which is ok. But I’ve always had a love of music. So I would say those two things: the excitement of photographing concerts and the love of music.
By the way, I have done a tremendous amount of other photography. I’ve done a lot of what I call Americana photography. I get in my car and I just drive cross-country, north and south, east and west, all around the United States, overseas too, photographing what I call a lost America: abandoned gas stations, things of that nature. And that might be another book somewhere down the road. I love doing that and that’s really just for myself. I also do a lot of photography for models for their portfolios and also I do a lot of photography for movies. We call it stills. I’ve worked on some movies with Al Pacino and also David Carradine and a number of other various movies, and that’s a very exciting type of photography too.
Is that how you know Gary Oldman? You have a photograph of you with him on your Facebook page.
Actually, that’s not how I know Gary Oldman. I met Gary only recently and I met him through the Morrison Hotel Gallery at several big exhibits there. I not only photograph those events but I did a bunch of what you do and that is I got to interview a bunch of legendary photographers who, frankly, have influenced me. It was very exciting to do that.
Not really. The Beatles in their heyday were before my time. The music I grew up with was a little bit later, around the time of Paul McCartney’s band Wings and other artists whose music influenced me a lot would be Joe Walsh, Elton John, then a little bit later, the music of Clapton and the Stones and Zeppelin, of course. Zeppelin was a huge musical love of mine.
I think it really wasn’t till a little bit later that I finally started to catch on and listen to The Beatles a lot, and realized that the music I loved so much had been influenced by The Beatles. And I should add that once I realized how fantastic The Beatles music was, realized how much I liked that music, I did everything I could to be able to photograph Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. And I have photographed both of them. Ringo is not in the book but I photographed him at least a couple of times. I really wanted to shoot George Harrison. Early in my career he was still touring occasionally but not very much. And of course I never had a chance to photograph John Lennon. But quite recently I got to photograph and interview Julian Lennon and what a nice guy, really a terrific person. And very involved in charity work too, which impressed me.
I’m donating a buck a book of my book to the Make A Wish Foundation. I do a great deal of their photography for their LA chapter. I do that as a donation to their wonderful cause and they’ve recognized me. In fact, I’m looking now at a wonderful plaque that they presented me with. So I wanted to give something, some of the proceeds from the book to that organization.
What is the biggest change you’ve seen in the live music photography business?
I would say that, just generally, things have become more impersonal. When I started out, you could just show up at any show with your camera. Then of course they required photo passes and that was fine. In fact, in those days, I put in a request with artists’ label or the publicist. It might have been because I started my career in Minneapolis, which was a smaller market. I’d put in a request and not only would I get a photo pass but I’d get two complimentary tickets. It was great. When I was done shooting I could watch the wonderful show. When I moved my studio to Los Angeles, which was fifteen years ago or more, things had already become much more strict and tighter. I would maybe get one review ticket. In recent years, you don’t even get a ticket. If you’re there to photograph a show, you photograph it and you’re out of there unless you bought a ticket. Now, I’m still able to get into a lot of shows with a ticket or special pass because I’ve worked with just about everybody. But for people coming up now, it’s tougher and as I indicated, from time to time, when I’m done with my job, I’m out of there.
I would not like that. That’s only happened to me very, very few times in all the years. I’m usually allowed to shoot quite close up and in some instances through the years I’m allowed to shoot on the stage and so forth. But I rarely have to shoot from way, way back. I would not like that. I’ve done it a few times and you get the best that you can. But I will tell you something interesting. I recently photographed last year the Dalai Lama and it was very exciting and a lot of the photography that me and the other press photographers had to do was from far back and I rented a special lens for that event. But we were allowed in groups to go up to the stage for really only a few minutes to get some close-ups. So that worked out very, very well.
I have done a number of, I guess you would call it news photography assignments. It’s not most of what I do, obviously, but not only have I photographed the Dalai Lama, I photographed President Clinton, President Obama, I photographed Gorbachev when he came to the United States years ago. So when I hear about something that kind of gets on my radar that’s kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity, one of these people are going to be in my city, I’ll make the enquiries and I’ll get the permission and I’ll photograph something like that. And of course that is very exciting.
I want to ask you about a couple of the photographs in your book that I found very interesting and the first one is Warren Zevon.
Oh yes. Boy, am I glad you asked me about him. I must tell you that here in my studio about ten feet away from me right now is a photograph on my studio wall of me with Warren. He autographed it for me and you see, I’ve photographed Warren many times and on it he says, “To Jim, Aooooooooooo, Warren Zevon” (laughs). Obviously, referencing “Werewolves Of London.” I think about him all the time, I really do. I play guitar, as I mentioned to you earlier, but the other day on PBS was one of these wonderful shows that he did years ago, the history of Jesse James. So I watched it and I really enjoyed it. Then after it was over, I remember Warren had that wonderful song, “Frank & Jesse James” from one of his early records. So I taught myself how to play it on guitar. So I think about him all the time and of course in this picture [in the book] he is wearing a Twins baseball jersey and that’s because the show was in 1987 and that’s when the Twins were in the World Series and won the World Series. That picture really has a special meaning to me. I’ve also photographed and met his wonderful son, Jordan Zevon. He’s a musician too but nobody can compare to the funny, cynical – there’s a lot of words to describe Warren, but he was one of a kind. And I got the sting of a little bit of Warren’s sarcasm (laughs) Even though I knew him.
There’s a story I will tell you about this and it isn’t in the book. It just would have been too long of a story but I’ll tell you about it. This is probably my favorite photo I ever took of Stevie Ray Vaughan. It really says it all. He was so influenced by Jimi Hendrix. He was also influenced by his older brother Jimmy. I photographed Jimmy Vaughan with the Fabulous Thunderbirds. But I photographed Stevie Ray Vaughan many times and I got to meet him a number of times. And just as I say in the book, I don’t think I met a kinder, nicer person in the music business than Stevie Ray Vaughan. When he took time from his busy schedule to pose for me when he had other things to do after a show, it’s something I will never forget.
About six months after I took that picture, I forget exactly the timing, but I sent two copies of that picture of him smiling at me backstage to his tour manager, who had given me an address, so that Stevie could have one and that he could autograph one and send it back to me. And of course Stevie died, tragically as you know. And son of a gun if about maybe a month after he died, or two months after he died, an envelope came in the mail from the tour manager and I was afraid to open it. But I opened it up and the picture came back to me but it was not signed but there was this wonderful handwritten note by his tour manager who said something – and I have it somewhere, that note – “Dear Jimmy, thanks for the photo. Sorry that I could never get this signed for you.”
And I just thought that was so amazing, that this tour manager would take the time to get back to me after that tragedy. And I suspect that he did that type of thing with other people who had either sent a letter or whatever. It’s something I’ve not forgotten. So I guess Stevie influenced everybody that was in his sphere to be thoughtful and kind.
What do you do primarily now as a photographer?
Well, primarily now, and for some time now, I’ve been concentrating on photographing album covers. We still call it that but (laughs) every artist needs pictures for their websites and Facebook as well as CDs. And actually when you download the MP3 you can get the little thumbnail, so they need art and that’s what I’m concentrating on. I’ve done quite a lot of album covers. I’m still shooting live whenever the spirit moves me, when there is something that I really want to cover. As I mentioned earlier, I’m doing stills for movies. Right now I am spending a lot of time, and very happily so, promoting the book. And even though the book is done, I’m working on the book all the time. I do book signings, I’ve also had some gallery showings and exhibits, and I’m going to return to my hometown this summer and do a series of signings there where a lot of these pictures were taken.
Where can people get your book?
The very best place to go is quite simply www.jimmysteinfeldt.com The other place they can go is Amazon. Right now it’s available at those two places. I am working at getting it into brick and mortar stores; it’s a bit of a chore, as you might know. Also, the wonderful thing about having it on both my website and Amazon, I’m able to see exactly who buys it and if they want it autographed a certain way. Then I can send it right out from the studio. I carve out a portion of my day to take care of those orders every day.
