They had no visual sense at all, but by reversing the norm, they made that the visual sense which is kind of genius. It was just like, “what in the world is going on?” These guys look like they just gotten out of jail. And then we had the Sex Pistols and it was almost like the uglier you were, the bigger you were going to get. I mean, if you look at CBGBs, those bands, I mean, forget it. We want to find the things that we find that nobody had seen.” All that comes out of a very gritty dark place. Everything had gotten so big and nothing against any of the bands that were huge, but at some point all the fans of true hard core music went like “enough of that.
I think the punk era was really glamorous because it was reaction against the real processed pictures of coliseum rock from the '70s. Why do you think that sort of grimy punk, like all these pictures kind of look dirty and grimy? Why do you think that was glamorous in the '70s? What was so glamorous about that? I was stoked to see pictures of Blondie, David Bowie, Lou Reid, Iggy Pop in here.
But speaking of, back in those days, I’m an enormous fan of '70s punk and glam. It’s just like it was yesterday.” The picture evokes that feeling.ĭigital technology is great in many ways, but how do you think people are missing out not having record covers and fold outs? It’s kind of a lost art. Almost every time I’ll look at a photo like that one of Iggy Pop that’s in the book and I’ll go like, “God, I remember seeing him. If I look at a picture, it reminds me of the music. I kind of always had this theory that you look and listen with your eyes and your ears at the same time. I’m like, I’m buying that record because it’s just the look that gets you, it’s almost as much as the music. I remember the first time in '56, I saw Elvis. Then this whole industry of photography grew up because it’s the look of rock 'n roll, it's something that helps sell it.
#Pictures of iggy pop tv
I mean, it’s the baby boomer kids who grew up in TV which was visual and then they started reading magazines about music which had never existed really. One reason is because the audience for rock is a very visual audience. Why do you think rock is such a visual medium, for being a musical form? Photography has always been a huge part of rock music.
#Pictures of iggy pop full
Watch our full conversation Bill Brentley collected rock 'n roll's rarest photographs I mean, they’ll be a few in here that have been seen before, I’m not saying everyone, but I’d say 95 percent of the pictures are things that most people had never seen. I looked through every photo book, almost, that comes out and I know the difference between every minute you look at the pictures now for over 50 years and you go, “oh, that’s a great picture, but I’ve seen it a hundred times.” The idea was to find the photos that were new to most people. People who buy this book, they’re never going to have seen these pictures before. We really tried to get all crowd sourced, but the ones for the bands we didn’t have, we went to the professionals and then got off-road to find things they hadn’t sold and over-used too many times. find a great Dead picture that hadn’t been seen a million times or an Iggy Pop picture, anything that’s not over-used to illustrate a certain group. I’d known a lady at Magnum Photos named Susan Brisk, a photo researcher.
#Pictures of iggy pop professional
We started to go through all the pictures and finding photos of those bands and then the ones that we didn’t have photos of, that were very important bands, then we had to go to professional photographers and see if they had things that hadn’t been used much.
We came up with about 200 bands and we had to knock that down by 50. He and I started whittling it down to which bands we think really needed to be in the book. And we got close to 5,000 pictures, which is quite a bit. He called me up and asked me if I wanted to write a book about crowd sourced pictures - and I’m kind of older, I didn’t know what crowd sourced meant - but he told me it would be a process where people would submit their photos to the Smithsonian website and then we will go through and pick the photos and pick the bands we want to cover. The man who’s the director of books there used to be the road manager for the Flaming Lips and I was their publicist at Warner Brothers. Most photography books are put together by a professional photographer or feature professional photographers, but this book is a little different. Bill Bentley has been a drummer, a record store clerk, a DJ, concert promoter, music producer, the former A&R director at Concord Music Group and a Vice President of Warner Brothers Records. His new book “Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen," is a photography book of rock 'n roll pictures.īentley sat down for an episode of "Salon Talks" to talk about Prince, Joni Mitchell, Iggy Pop, Sly and the Family Stone and so much more.
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