Start writing….. is the prompt.
Would you read this book I’m pitching?
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Adventures of an Unchaperoned Teenaged Girl, a photographic memoir
The attraction of this project is that it is a photographic memoir.
In addition to the potential of it being an elegant coffee table picture book, Adventures of an Unchaperoned Teenaged Girl charts the explosive living history of the birth and growth of the original Los Angeles punk scene. Along with the photographer-author’s iconic images in their full glory and as featured on album covers and editorial pages, Adventures will also share images from the time, ranging from tour posters, backstage passes, zines, news clippings, and ads giving context to complete the presentation of an era in rapid transformation. Adventures’ visual wonderland punctuates punk’s as well as the author’s many milestones.
Concept
Does the world need another punk rock memoir? So many of my friends and idols have published theirs already.
I do believe the answer is “yes, what the world needs now is another punk memoir.”
Why? In a word: RASHOMON.
RASHOMON is a film by Akira Kurosawa released in 1950. It is iconic. Its title alone is shorthand for the phenomenon when the same event is described in significantly different, often contradictory ways by different people who were involved.
My book will join the ranks of so many memoirs, histories, analyses, and pictorals of punk rock’s birth and impact shown through both critical and personal lenses. I write and illustrate with my own photographs a personal narrative from my life as a middle-class suburban fan who grew from childhood to adulthood with art, music, and culture derived from world travels with my family and on my own. My fellow punk memoirists have done the same: sharing their stories, their family photos, their newspaper clippings, and assorted ephemera that show us the building blocks of punk. We’ve so often been in the same room at the same time, but our stories aren’t the same even if the events are. The beauty of having so many living storytellers is precisely that we each remember different elements and value them differently. It’s as though, reader, you are there!
Textually, my story explores the influence, motivation, and fruits of my generational niche (“Jones,” very young for a Boomer, too old for GenX; punk rock was defined by my generation). The essays around the photos in the book delve into how my subset of early, original punks embraced the other misfit cultural movements that came before and folded their cards into our playing deck. The cards we hold and play aren’t merely paying homage to Europe between World Wars, Woody Guthrie, the Beats, Mods vs Rockers, Roots music, Haight Ashbury, Glam, glitter and Art rock. This book strives to prove that 1970s punk is a continuum of the power in the union of outsiders. My story connects the dots between our misfit predecessors’ narratives and creative ethos, shows the parallels between cultural epochal moments and how they fuel the advancement of pop culture. Music is a mode of storytelling merging melodies with language to create songs; rock & roll is a mode of storytelling merging songs with action, and punk took that combination and created a magnificent subculture and inadvertent iconoclast heroes.
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And now a few stream of consciousness words before I get back to burning the midnight oil.
Today, I learned of the deaths of guitar legend Duane Eddy and of ELO keyboardist Richard Tandy. I was a fan of them both, and have two-degrees-of-separation with each of them, but I’ve only got the energy for one story tonight.
On Saturday, November 17, 1973, Electric Light Orchestra played a concert at Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo, CA in their support of their latest album, On The Third Day. I went to this show because it was on a Saturday. I would have preferred to have gone to see them at the Hollywood Palladium earlier in the week, but I was in high school, and they played on a Wednesday, so, no dice. As it turns out, I probably had a much better experience at the Cal Poly show. I had my Learner’s Permit to drive, and you really do have to have an licensed adult driver with you, but even back when I was a young lady, I drove like an old lady so I was often able to drive solo without my parents freaking out as parents do. However, it was a dark and torrentially rainy night, so my father insisted on driving me up there.
Dad did not attend the concert with me. He waited in the car, smoking cigarettes, probably listening to the radio. I think he waited in the car because he understood that a 15 year old doesn’t want her rock concert date to be her dad - any one or several friends, yes; one parent? No. I always think of this when I watch ALMOST FAMOUS (I will tell you about my great envy of Cameron Crowe sometime soon - we are age-peers and seeing his byline in the LA Times or Rolling Stone was inspiring when I learned we were the same age. All I could think of was “what a cool mom he must have that he can live this rock journalist life”).
The show was in the gymnasium and was general admission, but instead of an empty floor for the standing audience to fill up, folding chairs were set up neatly. Of course, I bum rushed the front row. I came prepared with a Super 8 movie camera (model Canon 518, purchased by my parents in Tokyo in 1965) and a Kodak Instamatic 126 - the sublime and the ridiculous! A month earlier, I had seen Faces (with Rod Stewart- they were all wearing satin) and Rory Gallagher (wearing denim) at the sports stadium at the University of California, Santa Barbara and only had the Super 8. A few days later, the dude who worked at my favorite record store displayed some prints of Faces/Rod pictures he made at the show and I became enthralled with the craft. (Up until then, I wanted to pursue a career as a cinematographer and worked with movie cameras. I had an Instamatic because everybody did.) So even though I didn’t have a real camera (an SLR), I brought the Instamatic, which has a fixed focus, shutter speed, and apeture - good luck shooting a concert with that!
Elvin Bishop Group opened the show. Because I was a record store denizen, I knew who he was - he hadn’t yet had the hit “Fooled Around and Fell in Love.” He was just working the touring circuit like the blues hound he is. His signature song when I first saw him was “Rock My Soul.” And yes, I shot one cartridge of Super 8 movie film of Elvin Bishop.
During the band change-over, even though the lights were dimmed, from the front row, one could see the band adjusting their amps and getting into position. Also, because it was 1973, a college gym, and a relatively small town, the stage was basically a two-foot riser. It was exciting to see the caped violinist tuning and twiddling amp knobs, and I called out to him, “WILF!” for Wilf Gibson, the violinist who played on the album and whom I had seen on ELO’s television appearances wearing a cape. But the musician approached me and said, “I’m Mik.” The man who in the future would play a blue violin and not wear a cape, Mik Kaminski.
I was then too embarrassed to ask him to smile for a photo; I would have had to use a flash cube too. Nope, I would just shoot the live action show.
Friends, these are the absolute shittiest concert pictures ever taken! I can’t wait to show them to you (they are at my California house). They are absolutely 1973 film stock, red eye (flash cube), poorly focused (fixed focus lens, remember?) pictures with terrible contrast. BUT, I was standing mere inches from the stage, and that experience spoiled me. After that, I always had to be as close as possible.
And now, back to the point of remembering the departed Richard Tandy… and it has nothing really to do with Mr Tandy, but about correspondences and degrees of separation and how those relationships, insubstantial as they are, make us feel closer to the music, and feel a bit more invested in it.
ELO records were welcome in my parents’ house because of the strings - my parents took this band seriously as musicians rather than as pop stars. As a piano student, it was always the keyboard parts I would listen to on the second pass (first of course, one takes it ALL in). I’ve felt my connections to bands through the keyboard parts - Ian Stewart, Nicky Hopkins, Ian McLagan, Alan Price, Mike Garson, Steve Nieve, Nick Cave, and my exceptionally talented friend, Benmont Tench.
Since I have no fabulously shitty Instamatic photo of the late Richard Tandy to share with you, I am going to give you a fabulous photo of my very dear departed friend, Ian McLagan, one of the greatest Hammond B3 players who ever lived…. on the guitar (it’s from 1980, Pasadena, CA - one of his first gigs with his Bump Band)