July 12, 1991,
Poplar Creek concert pavilion
outside of Chicago
The Sisters of Mercy and
Public Enemy
Absolute disaster.
This came up in anotber subreddit so I thought Id ask here. I was excited to see both bands, but the college student Goth kids clashed with the inner city Public Enemy fans, and promoters pulled out show after show, leaving the tour to die after only a few shows.
HOLLYWOOD AND IVAR, across from the L Ron Hubbard Scientology center on the corner there’s an unmarked building that used to have a late night pizza spot, and around the corner there’s an unmarked door that if you had a key led up the Hollywood 24 hour band rehearsal rooms. There were probably 40 different rooms, all carpeted with leftovers in no particular color scheme, it was maybe $350 a month and no live ins, but there’s always one or two guys down on their money and staying but thats ok cause it meant hes be looking out for anyone not supposed to be there…also meant he needed money badly so we put a camera in our room anyway. I loved those rooms, had mine for maybe a bit over a year and it was packed with gear, synths, guitars, a GIANT double p.a system one for electronic drums and synths/samplers, another for vocals and it sounded PERFECT had those QSC? I think Theyre called? Chinese amps, lotta power, two giant cabinets for that one, and two powered 15” with a tweeter for the vocals, loved it, CRANKED at 4 am life is good.
One day we’re setting up and sure enough we start hearing QOTSA songs… and we’re looking at each other like…nooo….. cant be….so we set up like usual, and could not ignore they sounded EXACTLY like QOTSA…..and ALL they were playing were QOTSA songs…. Well, wouldn’t be the first time, and we had a HOT band, all originals, mix between industrial, funk, and metal, like if Nine Inch Nails was being played by Parliament Funkadelic, or vice versa, it was totally unique, at least we thought so, and went FULL BLAST into our set. After a while, we quit playing and noticed it was quiet upstairs…well could be a LOT of reasons a band is quiet, so after a few, they started again, we’d listen 5 min, then WED start, and again, after 30 min of heavy metal electro funk live we were writing and playing, we’d stop….and it was quiet… We’d look at each other and go…”are they listening to us??” And We’d all LAUGH and go “NAAAWWW, QOTSA AINT UPSTAIRS NOT PLAYING FOR A FEW MIN SO THEY CAN HEAR US, COME ON GUYSHAHAHA!!!” See there were other bands around us too but they’d put on music, talk real loud to girls, drinking beer and stop by to say hi or borrow a guitar string, so there was always some residual noise, but from upstairs? Whenever we stopped, especially if we were just on point, there was not a SOUND from up there. That went on a few weeks until I had to go on the road with another band, never wanted to go bug them just to see if it was them and they did hear us I’d feel dumb asking anyway, but I’ll say this much, when we THOUGHT they were listening to us and we thought for SURE it was QOTSA, we played harder, louder, better, and funkier than EVER before! So if anyone knows if that was them, ok if you say it was or wasnt Im sure the year isn’t accurate but I don’t feel like looking it up, or just tell em we loved listening to what we thought was them!
I shot this on a Ricoh 35 mm using Ilford b&w film probably f:8 at 1/60 or 1/30 no flash as I was trying to avoid being seen by security besides I love the grainy look of high ISO 200 and 400 speed film, the effect here is exactly what I wanted, and I shot 2 rolls of Kodachrome ISO 50 and 100 and got the high detail, color rich positives the colored lights and smoke machines made so beautiful up close, I’ll post those in a bit, but I had those printed as cibachrome on thin metal foil (I think tin or aluminum? Anyone know what cibachrome is printed on?) plates and the colors are absolutely beautiful. Im getting ready to make some large prints do any of these different colors resonate with anyone? If you could say why or why not I would be very appreciative, I have an opportunity to use a new type of color printer, but instead of adding ANYTHING that would take away from these photos, I wanted to hear other opinions from people to whom the artist is important, thanks for any comments no wrong answers here
This is a photograph I took of Andrew Eldritch, lead singer of Sisters of Mercy on their first U.S. tour at the Cabaret Metro, June 03, 1985.
It was shot on a Ricoh 35mm SLR camera at f:8 1/125th of a second using Kodachrome ISO 25 speed film. The gig featured Wayne Hussey, Gary Marx, Craig Adams, and their trusted drum machine Doktor Avalanche. They played 8 songs;
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First And Last And Always
Body And Soul
Marian
No Time To Cry
Possession
Walk Away
Emma
Amphetamine Logic
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This was the first and ONLY tour featuring original band members Hussey and Adams, the high quality recording off of the sound board is prized by collectors and has been favored as one of the greatest goth shows of all time, since Adams and Hussey left the band after this tour to form The Mission UK.
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Personally, I was maybe 17 and had never seen them before. No one had, but it was still sold out. Naturally, like good little Death Rockers we got good and high on the way to the show, drank the bottles stolen from grocery stores on the way (Death Rockers have jobs we arent gutter punks, but they wont sell to us and we didnt feel like waiting 35 minutes for someone to buy us liquor.) Then last, we ingested a large amount of amphetamines of several varieties, all dumped into a mortar and pestle, crushed to the right consistency, and snorted with a communal disposable straw. A gold one was produced, but the wisdom of non destroyable drug paraphernelia was hastily discussed and the gold straw quickly retreated with the promise to leave it at home next time.
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Our salad consisted of truck stop white crosses, biker crankcase homemade meth, and a gram of cocaine. Oh, like you were never seventeen. This was forty years ago. mirror was put back in passenger sun visor and everone checked their hair and the girls their makeup. I wish I had a photo of us all in black from head to toe, Kohl's, zippered kicker boots, black stretch denims and motorcycle jackets (I was driving a Datsun 210 hatchback😆but STILL had to try and look cool) and the girls wore black fishnets properly shredded, miniskirts with Doc Martins and lacy black bras, with shredded black t shirst and biker jackets.
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IT was summer and normally everyone would leave their biker leatherz in the car, but I needed everyone to smuggle part of my camera setup since this was the 80s and cameras were ABSOLUTELY forbidden in concerts, which is probably why I did it. 4 rolls film, 2 lenses, camera body and flash, all I needed. Light meters are for homo fashion photographers who use halogen lamps or momentary UV flash.
I had already shot 40 shows by 17. My first was Alice Cooper at 9. Dad was head of the first aid booth at Alpine Valley when I was a kid, and I always brought my camera to every show.
We said hello to friends and laughed at older guys in denim jacketz who couldnt quit staring at the delicious hardbody 16 year old girls we had with us. I was with my buddy Ray, Im not a tough guy but Ray was a South Side kid who hit first and opened doors for girls. He was the kind of guy who would ask on the phone if I had someone to bring to a party and if I said no, hed yell, "TRACY! IS YOUR FRIEND JULIE GONNA WANT TO COME WITH US? YEAH? OK TELL HER TO COME ALONE AND DRESS HOT" And sure enough, Ray would show up with 2 girls, one for me and she was always hot. Ray and I felt safe together, the girls felt safe, when youre young in a town full of perverts and no internet to hide behind, we went everywhere in groups.
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Finally the band hit the stage. they were all dressed in black with heavy black Bausch & Lomb Ray Ban Wayfarers, black velvet dress coats, black denim jeans with studded belts and almost cowboy boots, we figured they were kicker boots from Scunthorpe, well known by us because while England couldnt make decent cowboy boots and every band starting with The Beatles picked up a pair in USA, Scunthorpe was a steel refinery town and made special boots that were impervious to molten steel and looked cool AF. It was also well known by computer nerds (which Death Rockers all were Monday -Friday) as the town you couldnt enter in computer files because it has a 4 letter word in its spelling so Computer nerds from there couldnt get packages. Anyone working on computers in the 80s was a nerd, and we were proud of it.
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Anyways it was probably the most badass show Id seen and is still known today. We were all hypnotized by the one and only Sisters if Mercy in their original form and no one moved, not even the band, for an hour and ten minutes. THEY LOOKED LIKE FUCKING WITCHES and had thick British accents and were all I think 19 years old and hated every band that came before them except Arthur Brown and Roky Erickson and we loved them for that.
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Someone posted earlier about having a band with no drummer and the logistics of that. The OTHER bands I saw in Chicago as a kid with no drummer were Big Black (If you dont know Big Black, its high time. Leader Steve Albini produced some of the greatest albums ever, but first he was in Big Black, and they used a drum machine.)
Another was Skinny Puppy, a band from Vancouver Canada who epitomised the goth/industrial sound, and they used samplers and drum triggerz and pads, but no drummer on a kit. Again, they were legends in their own right.
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So if you use a drum machine, no one will care as long as youre good, if you arent it will make your drums at least consistent to build on. Good Luck.
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Golden German Acrylic Translucent paint on salvaged textured flourescent light ceiling cover found in construction site (taken with approval of foreman), rear lit with standard 100w White light bulb as i look around my spacefor leftover things to make a box frame with
Influenced by the movement of Soviet era Bolshoi premiere ballerina Maya Plitseskaya who was famously guarded as a talent of enormous Soviet propaganda but in reality many of her colleagues like Neureyev and Barishnykov had already defected to the west, causing Soviet officials to clamp down on her hard, and once she slept with a handsome British diplomat (many millions of Soviet men had died in the war) She was suspected of revealing secrets to the West and kept from touring outside of the Soviet iron curtain, often saying in press conferences she wanted to avoid the decadence of the west, as Neureyev and Baryshnikov were now openly homosexual in the United States. The Soviets insisted the United States turned them gay, but in reality, well, we know better. She was finally allowed to leave after the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.
Blackwork has always been the issue for me. Plenty of colors, even opaque colors shine brightly when rear lit using the sun as your partner. Blocking that massive nuclear furnace is where things get tricky. In order to get a single coat layer of nothingness, what staring into the abyss, the bottomless pit of the soul of an unredempted sinner. or better yet a whole town of them, Ive found HP laser printer ink combined with Golden acrylic, about 1:1 then put in a pot on the stove for about 2 hours on LOW heat, until its an opium like sludge, set it aside to cool and harden. Pick up any oil lamp with a floating head, fill it with rapeseed oil and place a copper circle above it, you can find an old cooking pot with a solid copper base at a thrift store (also NEVER cook with copper pots -look up if necessary) then cut out the copper bottom and place over burning rapeseed oil lamp flame, it takes about an hour to get enough for one use, but 3 days will make enough for a bottle. Scrape the black stuff off the copper and place in the sludge, use regular extending medium to reconstitute into useable airbrush paint, its done when it drips out of the bottls and RUNS down a piece of paper leaving a solid black trail. Slow, thick drips wont make it through atomizer,( add more medium) thin trail less than width of drop (use less medium), otherwise you now have a single coat black that wont dry grey, wont tear off half of itself when removing masking tape, stores forever, and when painted under glass, is 100% reflective. Chinese have been making rapeseed oil black for 4000 years but for airbrushing it needs to stick. Blackest black ive found. Vanta black is for other uses.
Shot on Ilford 400 b&w film probably 1/125th at f:8 since I rarely used a flash on bootleg photos, for anyone who is interested-bringing cameras into concert venues was strictly forbidden during the 70s and 80s, until camera phones were a thing (and even at the beginning, phones were confiscated by bouncers and concert security when seen to be pointing at the stage)
Unless you were officially hired by the band or press who tightly controlled what photos of which artist could be released, taking photos at concerts was heavily censored. Axl Rose famously jumped into a crowd once to start a fight with a guy video taping a Guns N’ Roses show. Videos and photos could be sold for money, there were many cases of photographers being sued, cameras being smashed, bouncers grabbing people for snapping a little instamatic and tossing them on the street, it was a big problem.
I was the artful dodger of Chicago concert photography back then. I would go early and get a look at a roadie’s “ALL ACCESS” pass, almost always the current album cover, go buy the cd, go to the library, print “ALL ACCESS” or “PRESS” on the cover, go to kinkos (a 24 hour print shop they were EVERYWHERE from the 80s through about 2004) make me a tour laminate, go back to the venue, find a girl in a skirt who wanted to meet the band, have her tape a 105mm lens and 4 rolls of film to her leg, walk up to backstage like I belonged and told the bouncer (sometimes even adopting a TERRIBLE English accent) “She’s stayin with the band at their hotel, aint got her pass yet, be a bro?” $10 helped…
Anyway thats how I got pix of every great band on tour in the 80s and 90s….but I had to actually LIKE them to go. And I LOVED the cure.
The stained glass window in my room reflected off the cellophane protecting the print, so I kept it in here.
Photos I took as a younger man, the Alice Cooper picture was from 1976 or 1977, Alpine Valley, Wisconsin. I was about 9 and had gotten appendicitis very bad and spent all summer in the hospital. My dad, being cool AF, said I could pick one thing, anything I wanted to do at the end of summer since I had a pretty bad one. I had seen Alice Cooper on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, and asked for tickets. I got them, but also a Ricoh SLR 35mm camera. By the time I was 14 I was probably the best photo bootlegger on Chicago's North Shore. Taking pictures at concerts in those days was "illegal" since using another persons image to make $ was intellectual property theft, but really a $10 bill would get me to the front row. It was then a game of whack-a-mole, Id pop up in the crowd, snap 3 or 4 shots and dive back down while security guards, always out of shape, tried to find me in sea of bodies smashed together. I have some epic photos of legends that have never been published, most have never even been seen.
Lakshmi, Hindu goddess of beauty and success. First known writings of her are over three thousand years old, yet there is a celebration dedicated to her that is still observed today. Devotees often paint footsteps towards their houses, inviting her in and offering gifts and food to her in hopes of children, and those children be gifted with beauty, charm, and success. Acrylic on plexiglass to be framed with led lights and rear lighting.