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When I first started getting into live music I was pretty interested in rock photography. I recall having a CHUM-FM calendar on my wall that featured pictures of AC/DC, The Who and others from Toronto gigs. I remember in particular a shot of David Lee Roth drenched in red and blue light (and sweat). It was a closeup of the maned rocker hanging over his mic stand and every time I looked at it I thought how cool it would be to get that close to my heroes.
So on August 3rd, 1986 I tried my hand at rock photography by sneaking a 110 camera (without the fancy-pants flash) into the Moncton Coliseum for a Kim Mitchell concert. For the younger crowd, I urge you to google a 110 camera to see how primitive and rudimentary my equipment was. Oh sure, a 110 camera might look modern, newfangled and even a bit James Bond-ish to your young eyes but trust me, it wasn’t.
I arrived early and ran to the stage as soon as the doors opened – my standard protocol at any general admission concert – and staked out a spot front and centre where my lack of zoom lens would be irrelevant. Haywire (Prince Edward Island’s heroes-of-the-month that are most notable for being sampled in Maestro Fresh Wes’ Drop The Needle) opened the show and were actually pretty rockin’.
Not rockin’ enough to waste film on though. I was limited to twenty-four shots and I was going to make the most of them.
Kim Mitchell came out wearing his standard stage outfit of jeans, t-shirt and obligatory baseball cap, a blue Stratocaster slung over his shoulder. He spent the first half of his set hopping up and down in place delivering a pile of ever-so-Canadian near-anthems like Patio Lanterns, Go For A Soda, and Lager & Ale. However, when Kim noticed me trying to block out good shots of the show he headed downstage and knelt down on the stage right in front of me, his flashy fingers a foot from my lens. I clicked off half of my roll during a single guitar solo.
Kim Mitchell is such a good guitar player, such a good rock songwriter and singer and yet he still threw ample amounts of spotlight onto his almost equally-talented sideman Peter Fredette. Between the two of them (and the rest of the band of course) it was a great show that was totally amped up (for me) by the thrill of capturing what I was sure were going to turn out to be twenty-four epic shots worthy of album covers, concert posters, and probably even the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.
I’m sure I thought my new career was about to be launched. I would soon be enjoying easy and unfettered access to every rock star on the planet, we’d all become close – friends even – and I would be lauded as one of the great rock photographers of the era; a star in my own right. And most importantly I would never have to pay for a concert ticket again.
Now kids, imagine taking that sort of life-changing excitement and bottling it up for a week while you ever-so impatiently wait for your film to come back from the development lab, a process that was not only slow and tedious but would also put you back close to $15 per roll (AKA the price of a concert ticket).
(Now you know why nobody used to take pictures of their food* at a restaurant.)
The Kim Mitchell pictures actually came out not so bad (all things considered), though the quality in the photos lie more in the proximity and posing of the subject material and less on any skills apparent in the photographer. That said, I have found myself in the pit of several shows since this concert with a photographer’s pass around my neck. It was never a paid position but I did get to see a bunch of free shows and stick my camera in the faces of bands like ZZ Top and K-os, so there’s that at least.
*Frankly, the advent of digital photography alone can’t explain why so many people feel the need to take pictures of their food. Helicopter parenting, not keeping score in little league sports, twenty-four hour news channels, the ever-expanding Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, infant gender reassignments, kids getting names like Nhat’ally, Djeff, and Dayla-shawntollia, dog-booties, play-dates, selfie-sticks, Stubhub, iPhones, iMacs, iPads, iPods, and a burgeoning sense of self-worth despite an ever-eroding sense of personal accomplishment and life satisfaction due to acute internet addiction must play into it somehow. The irony is that the only reason anybody is paying any attention at all to the pictures people take of their dinner is so they can post a comment in hopes that you’ll ‘like’ it.
Todd Man Out 