George S. W. DuBose
George DuBose was born in Rabat, Morocco, to a US Marine major and his 19 year old bride. At two months, George returned to the US with his mother and began a life of frequent relocations. He never went to the same school for more than two years.
This constant moving with his family broadened his exposure to the various culture styles across the USA.
Growing up listening to Top 10 radio with his seven transistor radio under his pillow, George developed an early interest in popular music. When the Beatles broke out in 1964, his interest in music deepened and he began to study guitar. A few years later, George was in a cover band with other boys from the neighborhood and when he taught the drummer the chords to the popular song "Gloria", he was astounded when six months later, the drummer was playing Jimi Hendrix note for note.
He became aware of what "talent" was and clearly the drummer had more musical talent than George and George was inspired to look for his talent somewhere else...
George had in interest in art, his maternal grandmother was a professional illustrator and George enjoyed his high school and college art classes quite a bit. It became clear to him that he inspired by realism, but didn't have the patience to render images to his satisfaction.
In college, a fellow student invited George to visit Manhattan and when his pal bought a 35mm camera, they walked through the streets of Manhattan photographing. It was on this occasion that George got the "photo bug". It was a photograph of old ashcans freshly painted red and yellow that was George's first "meaningful" photo.
Feeling a bit lost in college, George joined the US Navy in 1971 in hopes of getting training in photography. Although photography training in the Navy didn't pan out, he got a job in a photo lab and began photographing bands playing in the local nightclubs. He would photograph a band on Friday night and then spend Saturday in a darkroom making prints, delivering the prints to the band on Saturday night, asking for $1 per print that they took.
Returning to Washington, DC, George got a job in a passport studio, making dozens of passport photos and trying to get the best out of each of his subjects.
Realizing that New York City was the hub of professional photography, George enrolled in a NY photo school while washing dishes in an Italian restaurant in NJ. Realizing that the courses in studio lighting were in the second year of the photo school, George found a job as an offset camera operator and learned about the printing process and how the graphics were prepared.
In an effort to get back on track for a career as a portrait photographer, George began to make phone calls and knock on doors looking for a job as an assistant to professional photographers. His first job was with Lane Pederson and Jim Erwin, two busy fashion photographers. They offered him a full-time position and after the work day, he could use their cameras and film to develop his own portfolio.
Working with young fashion models who needed photos for their portfolios, George began to make small photos for Andy Warhol's "Interview" magazine to advertise Andy's t-shirt line and when the staff at Interview invited him to see an unknown band from Athens, GA, the B52s, George invited the band to come to his bosses's studio and made a band shot that Interview printed.
A second photo session with the B52s led to George getting one of the photos used for the band's debut album cover. Tony Wright was the art director of this LP and although Tony didn't like the band and used an alias, Sue Absurd, as his credit, he began to give George other assignments. Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Lydia Lunch's "Queen of Siam" were projects beginning the working relationship between George and Tony.
Tony hired George to photograph the Ramones for their cover of Subterranean Jungle and the following year, Johnny Ramone called George to do their next album cover for "Too Tough To Die". Johnny asked George if he knew any other art directors, because the Ramones didn't like what Tony had done with George's photo for "Subterranean Jungle". George told Johnny to stick with Tony as art director and just "tell Tony what you want".
When the cover for "Animal Boy" came up, Johnny said that he just wanted "handwriting" on the cover, George realized that he could do the photography and the design on his own. He went on to work with the Ramones for 10 more years, making dozens of photos of the band for their covers and publicity.
When George was hired by Prism Records to photograph Biz Markie, "the human beatbox", his career took a broader direction. Prism morphed into Cold Chilllin' Records, signed up Big Daddy Kane, Kool G. Rap and DJ Polo, Roxanne Shanté and got distribution through Warner Bros.
Perhaps it was his constant migration as a youth and experiencing a wide range of cultural influences that gave him a wealth of concepts leading to creating covers that reflected the artists and their music so well. It was George's dressing Biz Markie as a mad scientist that let to Biz's MTV breakout and Biz's first gold album. George's Hip-Hop images appealed to a wider market through their story telling and sense of humor.
After photographing and designing hundreds of covers for rock and Hip-Hop artists, George met a German doctor and decided to move to Germany. He continued to work with magazines and bands who needed packaging.
Today, George is publishing series of books based on his photography and the stories behind his work with the artists. He makes exhibits of his own work, he has curated a show featuring other music photographers and since the Ramones' 40th anniversary of the release of their first album, he has been showing The All-Ramones Pop Up exhibit. 100 photos of the Ramones from the very first photo session with Bob Gruen, to Jenny Lens' photography of their first West Coast tour, a collection of the cover images George made and dozens of publicity photos made for the band over their 20 year career. This Pop Up exhibit give fans who were not even born when the band stopped touring a chance to see what the band looked liked in the beginning and throughout their long career.
Now after 20 years in Germany, George is retired from active photography, working on more photo books, maintaining and sailing his 11 meter sailboat around Europe. Enjoying the good life...
Longer version:
What got me interested in photography?
You could say it was the old Kodak Autographic bellows camera from the ‘20’s that my Grandfather gave me. I was about 15 years old, I had to special order the 828 film that the camera used. 828 was paper backed roll film that took 8 shots. The film was about 3.5 x 5 and there was a little trapdoor on the back of the camera that I thought was to allow your subject to write his name on the paper backing. Although I never checked, I imagined the autograph would come out on the negative as well as the paper.
The most practical use I had for that old camera was to tie a string to the shutter release and then to the door of my bedroom, hoping to photograph my brother sneaking into my room. Sort of an automatic surveillance camera.
My real interest in photography, began in 1970, when I accompanied my college friend, Bruce Lowen, on a trip to Manhattan when he wanted to buy a camera. He bought a 35mm Pentax Spotmatic and we walked around Manhattan, shooting what captured our eye. This photo of Puerto Rican garbage cans is my oldest surviving image. I was intrigued by the fact that someone would actually take the time to paint old garbage cans. Only later, when I actually lived in NYC, did I figure out that building supers numbered their ashcans to be able to identify them, in this instance the cans were color coded.
Bruce told me tales of his cousin, George Coppers, who had received training in the US Navy as a photographer and then moved to Brussels to open a color lab. This was appealing to me and although the Navy wasn’t so appealing during the Vietnam-era, I decided to see if I could transfer to a university that had photography education classes.
At that time, 1972, there were only two or three schools that taught photography as a major. Brooks in California and Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Both had waiting lists of over a year. As I became more disillusioned with college and the pre-law program, the thought of Navy training in photography became more appealing.
To make a long story a little shorter, I never got trained by the Navy, but I did buy my own Minolta SRT-101 camera and began to shoot the rock bands that played in my local nightclub. In order to defray my expenses, I learned to process my own film, then I got a job in a photo lab. I used to shoot a visiting band at the club on Friday night, process the film and make some prints during the day on Saturday and Saturday night, I would take the pictures to the club and try to get the band to pay $1.00 each for the copies. I was starting to get the idea that photography was going to be an expensive hobby.
Out of the Navy and back living with my parents in Washington, DC, I landed a job in a passport studio directly across from the main passport office in Washington. I got a lot of experience loading 4x5 negative holders and processing and printing that film, but I will never forget once when I asked my boss a question about the exposure factor of the 4x5 camera, he handed me a book. Guess I wasn’t going to learn much from that guy. Another revelation happened when my boss was out of the studio on a Saturday.A college professor walked in without an appointment and ordered the 32 shot package. Holy shit! Our prices and packages started with only one exposure, but the boss was always trying to sell the 4, 8, 16 or 32 shot packages.I could handle the 4 and 8 shot package, but had never thought about what I would do for 32 exposures. The lighting in the studio was suspended from tracks on the ceiling and I wasn’t supposed to move the lights at all. After about 8 shots, I pulled down the black paper and tried to remember what I had read in the photo magazines about other lighting set ups. Somehow, I faked my way through and shot 32 pieces of 4x5 film. The client left very pleased and said he would return on Monday to pick up the proofs.
When my boss came to work on Monday morning and saw what I had done, he exploded. “How dare I move the lights, who said I could use black paper?” He was furious!
When the client returned later, he was really pleased, I saw the professor come in and was eavesdropping from the darkroom. My boss started off apologizing for letting “the assistant” shoot such an important client. He offered to reshoot the 32 pictures himself for no additional charge. As the client was going through the proofs, I heard him say that wouldn’t be necessary, there were plenty of good shots. In the end, the professor said it was the best photo session he ever had and ordered 25 prints from 4 different shots.
My next career move was inspired by an article in the Washington Post about professional photographers. The drift of the article was that 95% of all the professional photography in the world took place in NYC and the average salary for a NY professional was $50K. Against the wishes of my family, specifically my paternal grandfather, I moved to NY.
I knew I needed more training, so I enrolled in a commercial photography school called The Germain School of Photography in Manhattan. As I began the two year program, I realized that it would be 6 months before I started to learn about studio lighting, the fundamentals they were teaching initially was predominately things I had already taught myself.
It became clear that what I really had to do was find an apprenticeship with a NY pro. More importantly, I had to find a job. Germain wasn’t refunding any of my tuition, I was running out of money.
I went to the NJ State Employment office and eventually, I saw a listing for “cameraman” and at a good salary. When I went to the job interview, I saw that although the company was a printing company, they had a very well equipped still life studio. Oh Boy!
Wrong! The company had a still photographer, they were looking for a cameraman to make offset negatives for the printing press. What did I know about offset photography? Nothing.
Perservering, I told the company president that if he gave me a chance for 30 days at half of the listed salary, I would get the documentation I needed to learn all the processes involved. If he wasn’t happy with my performance after 30 days, I would leave, if he was happy, he had to pay the full salary.
I went to the library, I wrote letters to duPont, who made the film and chemicals we used. I read all the manuals on the 30 foot long camera and the processing equipment. I pestered the co-worker in my department. I got the job. It wasn’t where I wanted to be, but I was making real money and learning more than I thought I would ever need to know about printing. How wrong I was.
After two years, my level of frustration was so high that I began to call studios in Manhattan, asking for assistance jobs, What I mostly got, was the staff assistant hanging up on me. I wrote letters that went unanswered. Finally, a friend of my uncle’s, gave me a map of all the fashion photographers’ studios, so off I went, knocking on doors. What I mostly got, was the staff assistant slamming the door in my face.
I finally landed a 3 month gig at a fashion catalog studio run by Lane Pederson and Jim Erwin, I was relegated to packing merchandise from the still lifes to be returned and schlepping the lighting and camera equipment on location. I was like a third assistant and wasn’t allowed to touch the cameras. As my cameraman job was from midnight to 8am, I could bus into Manhattan and work from 9am to 6am, hustle back to NJ, get some sleep and then head off to my night cameraman job.
Realizing that work made the time go faster than trying to avoid work, I began to spend my free time hanging out in the pasteup department learning to follow design layouts to make mechanicals, my diligence and aptitude was noticed by management and I was offered the chance to run a one color offset press. The side benefit of this new responsibility was that when I came to work at midnight, there was always a big pile of work to shoot for plates and print. If I really hustled, I could knockout the work in an hour or two, take a nap for several hours, while the boss just kept piling up the new jobs. At 6am I would rouse myself and finish the night’s work by 8am, in time to head into the photos studio in Manhattan for another 8 hours of work.
The work in the studio lasted for 3 months and then the whole staff, being freelance, was laid off for the holidays.
One day in January, 1977, Jim Erwin called me and said that of all the freelancers they had had during the previous fall, I was the most motivated. He offered me a full-time permanent position, plus I would have keys to the studio and could use the cameras and as much film and processing as I wanted.
I went to the boss at the printing company and gave my two weeks notice.
Erwin and Pederson were academically trained photographers, graduating from RIT, but more importantly, their work was varied and we were constantly experimenting with new lighting setups, new films and worked with top art directors and fashion models. Their clients ranged from Macy’s department stores to Volvo and Triumph cars. I received a very wide range of work experience. The best feeling I got from working with them, was whenever they would instruct me to do a particular task, the first thing I would do would be to think about what they wanted and how they told me to execute their concept. If I could think of a quicker or easier way to achieve the same results, saving me time and labor, they were always receptive.
One instance, we were on a shoot for Volvo in Williamsburg, Virginia. The art director was a nervous type and every day I spent several hours prepping the cars. This was a labor intensive process involving washing the road dust from the car, Armoral-ing the tires and interior, making the car look perfect for the Volvo showroom brochure.
It dawned on me one day as I was washing the cars for the umpteenth time, that if I could get the AD to decide which way the car would be facing in the shot, I would only have to wash the front OR the back and ONE side with two wheels. I promised the AD that the dirt on the far side of the car would NEVER be visible in the chrome.
Another instance, was that whenever Erwin or Pederson would shoot 220 film, only they could process the negatives. 220 gave one 24 6x6 cm negatives on one roll of film but the problem was that the base of the 220 was thinner that the base of 120 film and as soon as the film was softened in the developer, it tended to unwind off of the spool. If you were dealing with 12 rolls of 220 film in a very dark room and they began to unspool, you had a fiasco in the developing tank and a very costly reshoot.
It bothered me that Erwin and Pederson wouldn’t let me perform this task. I thought about the film problem for several days and realized that if I made a wire clip that would bridge the end of the spool, it would prevent the film from unwinding. My test clip from a thick paper clip worked, except that it rusted very quickly in the chemicals. Where to get stainless steel wire in a suitable thickness? A wire whisk for cooking served the task. Cutting one of the wires off of the whisk, bending it with a pair of needle-nose pliers worked like a charm. I was so proud of myself. I probably could have patented the idea for the clip. In the end, I only increased my workload.
A college friend of mine had designed a sound system in a jazz club in Brooklyn. I offered to shoot the performers in the club and give the club 16x20” B&W prints to display in the club. Erwin and Pederson very kindly allowed me to use their Nikons to shoot the performances and I built up a portfolio of famous jazz artists.
The next break in my career, this is the big one, was through social contacts, I began to shoot little ads for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. I wasn’t paid, but I started to get to know the people at the magazine. Soon I was developing the films that Andy himself shot at Studio 54 the night before.
One day, Richard Cramer, the assistant AD at the magazine, called me at the studio in the morning and said that Andy needed some films processed and needed the film by 3pm. I asked Pederson, if I could process some film on my lunchbreak. I ran the 5 blocks to Andy’s Factory, got the film. At lunch, I ate my sandwich in the darkroom and processed the film. After the film was in the drying closet, I forgot about it until 2:30. In a panic, I asked Pederson if I could quickly make some contact sheets and run the film down to the Factory. No problem…
By the time I arrived at the Factory it was 3:20. Andy was livid, he began to scream at me, “Don’t you know the meaning of a deadline? If you are not ready at the time you promise, you are dead.”
With my tail tucked securely between my hind legs, I slunk back to the studio.
The following day I saw my friend Richard Cramer.
He said, “It was really funny what happened yesterday.”
“What was so funny,” I asked?
“The way Andy was screaming at you. He was just teaching you a lesson. He didn’t need the film at 3. He just wanted to teach you about deadlines.” The whole staff was in hysterics.
Next big break, on December 12th, 1977, Richard called me from Interview. He asked me if I wanted to go to Max’s Kansas City to see a band from Georgia. I was interested as I had lived in Georgia in the ‘60’s, but I had to tell Richard that I couldn’t go because I didn’t have any money.
He said “No problem. You will be on the guest list.”
“What’s a guest list”, I asked naively.
“Oh…Cool!”
When I got to Max’s there were about 20 people in the audience. Lydia Lunch’s band, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks was the opening act. I was appalled to hear such caterwauling and screeching. This was punk rock in it’s truest form. I remember hearing Lydia discussing with a band member after her set that one of the songs was too long at 40 seconds and needed to be shorter.
Next was the unknown band from Athens, Georgia. The set opened with a strange sound coming through the PA. It sounded like bees buzzing. It was the B-52’s. As they came on stage, they began to play music which I recognized as the Theme from The Peter Gunn show in the 50’s. The reason I recognized this song so readily was that when I was 7 years old, my parents would send me to bed and just at my bedtime, they would watch “Peter Gunn” on television. When I got my first guitar and couldn’t even tune the strings, the first song I figured out was…The Peter Gunn theme. I could play in on one string.
I fell in love with the B52’s on first note. Ricky Wilson the guitar player also played a Mosrite guitar made famous by the Ventures, California surf music pioneers. The first guitar book I bought was “Learn To Play Guitar With The Ventures”. The package came with a 12” vinyl album and charts of finger positions.
I went backstage at Max’s after the B’s set and introduced myself. I asked them to let me know when they would return to NYC. I went to a party where they were and tried to befriend them. I told them that I was working with Interview magazine and would like to take a photo of them for Glenn O/Brien’s music column.
When they eventually returned to Manhattan, I saw their gigs and tried to bribe them in coming to the studio with offers of Pina Coladas. It worked. Except for one minor detail. When they showed up for the party, they brought a dozen friends and Cindy Wilson had returned to Athens. It wasn’t even the complete group.
Realizing that this was the first studio photo of the band and that no photos had previously appeared in any papers, I asked Maureen McLaughlin, their manager to stand in for the missing Cindy.
It worked. Interview ran the photo and licensed it to Studio Voice, a Japanese imitation of Interview.
I still wanted a picture of the complete band, so the next time the B’s came to NY, I told them that I wanted to take another photo and produce a street poster to advertise their upcoming gigs.
As previously mentioned, I was a big fan of the Ventures, in fact the first LP I ever bought was Rubber Soul in mono, the second album I bought was Walk, Don’t Run, ‘64 by the Ventures. When the B’s came to my studio for the second session, I had in mind to recreate the cover from Walk, Don’t Run, ‘64. The Ventures always had a beautiful woman on their covers, on the cover of Walk, Don’t Run, ‘64 the band was on white paper sitting down with their instruments and there was a foxy lady in high heels, capri pants and a bouffant hairdo. This was exactly the way that Kate and Cindy dressed on stage. The name B52’s comes from their bouffant hairstyles being so high. Although, the band cooperated in recreating the famous pose on Walk, Don’t Run, ‘64 in the final selection they chose an all standing lineup shot.
I had 1000 posters printed placing at the top of the white space over the band’s heads some Japanese text that was the headline of the Studio Voice article about the band. I later learned that the Japanese text said, “B52s attack”. Under the Japanese text I would write the venue and date of their next gigs.
I didn’t know about wheat paste for mounting posters, so I would go around the neighborhoods near Max’s and CBGB’s stapling the posters to whatever I could sink a staple into. After going around the block near Max’s, I got back to my starting point and the freshly mounted posters were gone. I began sitting outside the clubs after the band’s performances and tried to sell the posters for 52 cents or 2 for a dollar.
One day, I got a call from Lori Kratochvil, the photo editor of Rolling Stone magazine. She commissioned me to shoot the band for a record review. I took the band to the World’s Fair Grounds in Flushing Meadow, NY and shot them in front of the huge globe called the Unisphere. There were many other cool monuments remaining from the fair and I shot color infrared, to make the trees and grass red as in the song Planet Claire I took the band back to the studio for the third time and shot tons of film, B&W, color, with all kinds of set and costume changes. When I got all the film processed, I presented all the shots to the group. They spent hours pouring over the images and finally selected one shot that they wanted me to take to Rolling Stone.
I called Kratochvil for an appointment and when I got to her office and gave her the slide, she said, “Where is the rest of the film?”
“This is what the band wants you to use.” I replied.
“I gave you the assignment, I want to see ALL of the film!”
“This is what the band wants to be published and out of respect to them I can’t let you use anything else.”
I never got another assignment from Rolling Stone. The magazine has published my photos on occasion, but never gave me an assignment.
I had offered to the band’s manager, Maureen, an extra room in my apartment when she came to NYC to do business for the band.
I had forgotten all about my offer when one day I was vacationing at my friend, Billy Halsey’s farm in Watermill, NY. I called my answering machine in my apartment to see if I had any important messages. I was surprised when Ricky Wilson answered the phone.
“What are you doing there, Ricky?”
“We’re all here…”, he said.
The whole band had moved into my apartment. I returned to the city to see what was going on. When I got to my apartment, the band was out, but the first thing I noticed was how clean everything in the apartment was. Especially the old bathtub. I had never seen it so white.
In 1979, two years after their Max’s debut, the band was signed by Chris Blackwell of Island Records. I received a phone call from Tony Wright, the creative director of Island. I went to his office with my portfolio and a collection of images from my various shoots with the band. It was obvious that the band had already told Tony which image they wanted to use. It was the same image that I had made the street poster with and the same image that had accompanied the full interview by Glenn O’Brien that was the second article about the band published in Interview magazine.
Tony asked me if I minded if he colored the photo. I imagined that he wanted to hand color the B&W original..
I didn’t realize that he was going to wipe out all the interesting details in their clothing, especially Fred’s suit. Tony flattened all the colors and made the background yellow. It was a striking graphic. That combined with the fact that the B52’s were very much of the moment meant that the B52’s yellow album some people think is titled “Hi-Fi” became an instant classic.
The album got a special mention in Art Direction magazine and has been featured in many books that review albums.
The irony is that it was my first job with Tony, I loved the band, he hated their attitude. Tony listed his credit as Album Design by Sue Ab-Surd. So-o-o-o absurd…
I believed so strongly in the band that I bet Tony a case of Dom Perignon that the record would go gold in a few months.
It took ten years. Gary Kurfurst, their manager, is so cheap that he made me pay $85 dollars for a gold record plaque. By 1988, I had several gold or platinum records in my collection and wasn’t used to having to pay for them.
On the following pages, I show some of the photos from this era..
Maybe I was the only photographer Tony knew in New York. He had arrived from London to open an art department for Chris Blackwell of Island Records fame. Tony gave me another job, Kid Creole and the Coconuts.
New group, never heard of them. The concept was the group, all 23 people, in a jungle. I called the Bronx Botanical Garden and got a location fee that looked like a telephone number. I spoke to my mentor, Lane Pederson and he suggested that I rent jungle plants made out of plastic from a company called Modern Artificial.
What a shock I had when I visited Modern Artificial. They had palm trees, elephant ear plants, the whole jungle world created in plastic. I never would have dreamed such things even existed. That’s the best thing about having a mentor.
Here I must digress a bit, while I was still an assistant to Lane, I was contacted by a young man who wanted to be a photographer’s representative, I think we met at a party. He had contact with another young woman whose father owned a Seventh Avenue coat manufacturing company called Cuddlecoat, specializing in petite sizes.
Anyway, it was the rep’s idea to try to get some business from Cuddlecoat, as Cuddlecoat had just run an ad in the NY Times. The photographer who had shot the NY Times ad, had had a custom canvas backdrop created and shot the model in front of this backdrop that was supposed to be an upstate New York lake. Well I thought it was a volcano, complete with lava running down the side and the perfect backdrop for the Kid Creole debut album.
I did go on to shoot a series of Cuddlecoat advertisements for Vogue magazine and one that ran in the NY Times “Fashion of the Times” was reviewed by Art Direction magazine.
Back to August Darnell aka Kid Creole. Evidently, August was still under contract to RCA Records with a band called Dr. Buzzard’s Savannah Band. Because of this contract, he couldn’t show his face on the cover of the ZE Records release of Kid Creole. Hence August wanted to hide in the jungle behind 23 of his closest friends, including the famous music writer, Glenn O’Brien. Just to be sure he wasn’t identifiable, he wore a black mask.
So I built the jungle, rented the volcano backdrop, this was my first “on demand” professional assignment and though I wasn’t intimidated by the thought of building the artificial jungle, the thought of facing 23 people in my studio was a little unnerving. Luckily, I didn’t have to get all 23 in one shot, 12 on the front cover and 11 on the back cover.
Now, to get their attention. They all seemed to know each other and weren’t really paying attention to me or the camera. That is when I remembered the best way to get the attention of musicians is to count off the beat. 1-2-3-shoot. Works like magic everytime. Only this time, the subjects couldn’t hear me they were talking so much. I got a whistle. A loud whistle.
Standing on top of a chair to get a higher angle, blowing my whistle, I got the shots.
Wish there had been a video of that day.
When a photographer successfully pulls off a shoot, the client tends to come back the next time that they need a shot and in this case, ZE Records came back with Lydia Lunch “Queen of Siam”. What a coincidence! Lydia and her band, “Teenage Jesus and the Jerks” had opened up for the B52s at their first show in NYC at Max’s Kansas City. I didn’t like Lydia’s approach to music, I still hadn’t grasped the full concept of punk rock. But, hey, I wasn’t going to let my taste in music get in the way of earning a buck. Not when I was earning $125 a week as a photo assistant.
At the concept meeting at ZE Records, Lydia showed me a book of portraits titled “Glamour Portraits of the Thirties”. She singled out a shot of Lucille Ball looking into a mirror. Lydia said that was what she wanted.
I contacted Eric Boman, a Vogue photographer, I had assisted on several occasions. I knew that Eric had recently arrived from London to establish himself in NY. I also knew Eric wasn’t rolling in money himself. Further, I knew that he was an excellent makeup artist, having observed him doing the makeup and then taking the photo on one occasion.
I offered him $500.00 if he would do the hair and makeup for my shoot with Lydia Lunch. He agreed. On the day of the shoot, Eric spent a couple of hours working on Lydia’s makeup and styling her hair. I was working on putting up a large mirror and getting the lighting exactly as in the Glamour portrait book. When Eric was finished, he called me in for a look, I thought he did a great job. When Lydia turned around in her chair and looked in the mirror, Eric asked, “Do you like it”.
A resounding, “NO!!!” was uttered and Lydia began pulling on her hair and thoroughly mussing it. I think Eric was a little crushed, but he didn’t really get the punk ethic either.
Lydia wore a black leather bustier with cement nails protruding from the breasts, her pale skin in strong contrast with the black hair, black leather, white skin and red lipstick. I think the end result was striking in the photos.
I photographed Lydia a second time for a poster to promote her single “Atomic Bongos”. I had to go shopping with her for a day to get props for the photo. When I arrived at her apartment in the section of the Lower East Side that was a battlezone, with lots full of rubble and lone row houses that make one wonder what was holding them up. Climbing the stairs to her apartment, I was not surprise at what I found within.
The first thing that caught my attention was a large fish tank that had been converted to a terrarium, complete with a huge tarantula. The rest of the apartment was like a museum of the macabre. I had the impression that the apartment was really an extension of Lydia’s personality. A little weird, a little scary.
Off I went on a guided tour of the Greenwich Village antique shops searching for antique toys and Pitiful Pearl dolls to dress the set behind the two conga drums that formed the basis for the “Atomic Bongos” concept. I think Lydia was just interested in expanding her doll and toy collection at the expense of the record label. We must have spent $1500 on toys that afternoon.
Tony continued to throw jobs my way. Because of the connection to the B52s, Gary Kurfurst asked Tony to art direct the Ramones’ album, “Subterranean Jungle”. Only this jungle wasn’t going to be green and leafy. At the creative meeting with the Ramones, they explained to Tony and me that they wanted to be shot riding in a subway car, but the shot had to be through the open door of the subway car. Johnny Ramone suggested just going to the train yard in the Bronx where all the subway cars were stored.
To me that was a logistical nightmare. First one would have to get permission from the Transit Authority, second we would have to get a maintenance worker to unlock and open a subway door and lastly, I would have to be standing on quite a tall ladder to get on the same level as the band inside the subway car.
I had a better idea, the “B” train would dead end at 57th Street and 6th Avenue, the train would sit there for 20 minutes before reversing on its return journey to Brooklyn. During the waiting time between trips, we could pull off a few quick shots and then wait for another train to come into the station.
I didn’t know the band at this time, never saw them perform and hardly knew any of their songs, so there wasn’t the comradery that would develop later. I set up my two battery powered Norman 200B strobe lights on the subway platform and waited for the band to arrive. After they came and we shot a few rolls before the train left the station. While we were waiting for the next train to arrive, Monte Melnick, their tour manager, baby sitter, drug counselor and general road wrangler, pulled me aside and told me that the band was planning on getting rid of the drummer, Markie Ramone, so I had to isolate him somehow from the other three. I arranged Johnny, Joey and DeeDee so they were visible through the open door and then I had to suggest to Markie that he sit alone looking through a smaller window of the subway car.
As I was shooting that setup, a NYC policeman walked up the platform and said, “What do you think you are doing?”
“Shooting a rock band.” I replied in my most sincere tone of voice.
“Do you have a permit?”, he asked.
“Permit? I go to The School of Visual Arts. (I did, at night) I am shooting this band for the magazine, East Village Eye. I don’t know about permits.” (Actually, from all my assisting to fashion photographers, I knew all about location permits, but didn’t feel like hassling myself for one).
“Well, I have to call this into the station.” The officer said.
A few minutes later, the police officer summoned me to the payphone (this was in the days with radios didn’t work in the subways). “The sergeant wants to speak with you.”
“What’s going on?” the sergeant asked.
“I am shooting a band for the East Village Eye, I didn’t know I needed a permit. We are shooting only when the train stops, we are not holding the doors open or in any way delaying the trains. I am not using any subway electricity.” (My strobes worked on batteries.)
When he asked, “Who is the band?” and I replied, “The Ramones.” to my surprise the sergeant said, “Go ahead. Let me speak to the patrolman.”
It turned out that the Ramones had recently played at a benefit for the NYC Police Department in order to help the Department raise money to buy bulletproof vests.
I had shot everything with 2-1/4 color print film as Tony wanted to clean up the train and paint graffiti on it in his own style. I thought the cover looked reasonably cool, but it turned out the Ramones hated it.
A year later, I got a call from His Royal Highness, Johnny Ramone, the boss Ramone himself. He told me that he wanted me to shoot another cover for them, but did I know any other art directors.
“What was wrong with Tony Wright?”
“The cover he did looked fake, we didn’t like it.”
“Don’t write Tony off so quickly.” Tony is extremely versatile, I told him, he will do what you want if you tell him what to do. I felt an allegiance to Tony, after all, I would never have shot “Subterranean Jungle” if Tony had used another photographer.
At the subsequent creative meeting, Johnny asked me if I had ever seen “Clockwork Orange” the Stanley Kubrik film.
“Not completely,” I said, not elaborating that I found the film kind of boring and didn’t appreciate the excessive sadism that the film projected.
Johnny told me that there was a mugging scene in a tunnel in London and that the band wanted to recreate that scene or at least the feeling of it.
Back to my mentor, Lane Pederson. I asked Lane where could I find a small pedestrian tunnel. He told me there were lots of tunnels in Central Park and suggested one near the Children’s Zoo. I check that tunnel as well as a dozen other tunnels in Manhattan, but Lane was right, the small diameter of the tunnel at the zoo lent a scale to the shot that was perfect. The tunnel was small, making the guys in the band look bigger.
As this was a job for Warner Bros. Records and the budget was quite substantial, we rented a Winnebago for a dressing room, I asked the band what they wanted in way of refreshments and they said pizza and beer.
I had two assistants, a location permit this time, the Winnebago had an on board generator, we blocked off one end of the tunnel with plastic sheeting to control the smoke from the smok machines. I had many powerful lights with blue gels on the background and white light from the front.
After shooting Polaroids and several rolls of 2-1/4 slide film and having to listen to Johnny asking why the Polaroid took so long (one minute), then changing the Polaroid to B&W (30 seconds), then Johnny looking at a B&W Polaroid and saying, “I thought we were shooting in color?”
I remember letting the band take a pause asking them if they wanted to eat some pizza and drink some beer, they ate the pizza, but I noticed that the beer was untouched. Towards the end of the shoot, I took another color Polaroid and this time the front flashes didn’t fire.
Wow! The silhouettes of the band in the tunnel against the blue and smoky backlights was really powerful, Tony asked me to shoot a whole roll with no front lights.
I called a wrap and the band quickly disappeared. After my assistants broke down all the equipment and loaded everything into the Winnebago, I offered my crew a beer. All the beers were gone.
When I showed the developed film to Tony, it was clear that the backlit shots were by far the most powerful and since this was the ninth LP for the band, most of which had their faces on the cover, it was easy to convince the group to use the silhouettes. Tony added some simple block white type to the front, “RAMONES, TOO TOUGH TO DIE” and one of the classic LP covers of all time was created.
The next year, I got another call from Johnny, they wanted me to shoot another cover and this time they wanted funky handwriting for the album title. My handwriting is pretty funky, so this time I decided to wing it alone without Tony.
I don’t know what the Ramones were smoking back then, but it sure gave them wacky ideas. This time they wanted to go to the Bronx Zoo and shoot in front of the chimpanzee cage, with one of the Ramones holding a baby chimp. The title of the album was to be “Animal Boy”.
Well, one phone call to the Bronx Zoo, “Can we shoot a rock band holding a baby chimp in front of the chimpanzee cage?”
“Absolutely not!”
“Can we bring our own chimp and stand in front of the chimpanzee cage?”
Absolutely not!”
OK, what now, I thought. Only one thing to do, build in the studio, a facsimile of a monkey cage, rent some gorilla suits, hire a trained chimpanzee. Simple.
Initially, there was talk of dressing Zippy the Chimp in a black motorcycle jacket á la Ramones, but someone, Monte probably, pointed out that some people might think that Zippy was actually a band member. That idea was quickly shot down.
Building the cage out of large wooden dowels, painted black, renting the gorilla costumes that looked reasonably realistic, hanging car tires on chains, making contact with Zippy, the Chimp (of David Letterman’s Monkeycam fame) was the hard part. The shoot went smoothly and easily. The guys in the band took turns holding Zippy.
Zippy got so excited by all this attention, that he was so wrapped up with interacting with the band members, he wouldn’t look at the camera. Finally, his trainer walked up to Zippy and said, “Zippy!!!” and smacked poor Zippy right on the kisser.
Zippy was back in focus after that.
Of note, the extras playing the gorillas in the cage were Legs McNeil and one of the Ramones roadies.
I shot the rest of the back cover as a still live and the insert of the LP had a eerie shot of the Old Jewish Cemetery that was still preserved if not maintained, in the West 20’s. Mark Weinberg helped with the graphics this time, but my handwritten “Animal Boy” made the front cover.
The next year and another call led to the shooting of “Halfway to Sanity”. This time the band wanted something in Chinatown, like in an alley or something. I scouted possible locations, thought about the lighting in each location, got the required permits and told the band to meet me at a certain address on Mott Street in Chinatown. I had my cousin, Army Captain Peter Wilkinson and his friend, Bob Thomas providing sidewalk security, calling them the “Husky Brothers” as each of them weighed in excess of 250 pounds.
My first location was a narrow stairway leading from the sidewalk up to the first floor, there was no door so the stairway was open to the public. I placed a powerful strobe on the first landing, gelled with a red filter, had a smoke machine to fill the stairway with smoke, tested the lighting with the white front light firing the red strobe up the stairs by photo-electric slave. The strobe unit in the stairway was powered by a gasoline run electric generator, that wound up making a lot of noise and fumes, irritating the customer’s of the second floor Chinese restaurant.
Everything was ready for the band to arrive. When they pulled up in their van with Monte Melnick, all I had to do was ask them to stand in front of the stairwell, turn on the generator and lights, have the Husky Bros. control the sidewalk traffic and shoot a Polaroid.
Again, Johnny was bugging me about why the Polaroid took so long, but by now I was used to his questions. After waiting one minute for the Polaroid to develop, I passed it around to the guys in the band, when the Polaroid got to DeeDee, he said, “Cool! Can I go now?”
“No! DeeDee, that is only a Polaroid. I have to shoot some real film for Warner Bros.”
Quickly burning three rolls of 2-1/4 slide film in the Hasselblad, Johnny announced that that was enough.
“Good”, I replied. “We can move to the next location.”
“No!” said Johnny, “That’s enough.”
“Johnny, I got another location, just two blocks from here in a really cool alley.”
“No, that’s it!”
“Johnny, Warner Bros. is paying too much money for me to turn in only 36 pictures, they’ll kill me!”
“Just tell ‘em to talk to me.” Johnny said.
That is to date, the highest rate per minute I have ever earned in a photo shoot. Fifteen minutes. Actually, my favorite shot of that package is the one of the Peking ducks, hanging from hooks by their beaks, with fatty glaze dripping off of their tails.
1988, another phone call from the Ramones. They were becoming as predictable as the swallows returning to Capistrano. This time it was a still life for a compilation album titled “Ramonesmania”. Still life photography isn’t my thing, but it was cool to see all of the memorabilia that the Ramones has produced or collected over their career. This record produced the only gold plaque I ever got from the group that I did the most covers for.
1989, this time for the cover of “Brain Drain” they wanted a macabre painting of a cemetery or some kind of brain being drained? I got Matt Mahurin to do one of his inimitable paintings, same old block type for RAMONES, but got my graphics assistant Rick Springer to do the blood spattered album title.
1992, another phone call. This time I was fresh out of ideas, but I had begun experimenting in 1985 with shooting the reflection of bands in Mylar film, a silver plastic produced by DuPont. I originally got the idea, when I was still in the Navy stationed in Pensacola, Florida. my girlfriend at the time was a little older and had return to Pensacola to dry out a little from the fast and furious lifestyle in NYC in the late 60’s. One day, she told me that her ex-NY boyfriend had just shot an album cover for Spirit, a California psychedelic group. The name of the album was “The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus”. The group was photographed in a small room, with Mylar on the walls, floor and ceiling. Ira Cohen was the photographer. His photos were mightily impressing to me, the group was dressed as wizards and in this Mylar chamber, the images gave the effect of the viewer being on a heavy LSD hallucination.
Fifteen years later, I began experimenting with Mylar and unknown bands. When I met the band for the concept of the upcoming album, I went to the SIR rehearsal studios and met with Johnny, Markie and CJ. Joey rarely if ever went to the band’s rehearsals, which were designed more as an aerobic workout for the older Johnny and even older Markie. I brought my portfolio and showed them the pictures of the unsigned bands in the Mylar effect. I told them that we could always put a “normal” shot of them on the back cover.
I asked them what was the name of the album and when they told me “Mondo Bizarro”, I thought the image concept would really fit title, not knowing that the next album would be called “Acid Eaters”.
The three of them agreed to the shot concept, but I had to call Joey at his apartment and sell him this idea.
When I told Joey that I had met with the others and they had approved a concept, Joey told me, “George, you can still do the design and all, but I was thinking of using another photographer, who takes these kind of melting photos.”
“Are you talking about Ira Cohen?”
“How do you know?”
“I showed my Ira Cohen ripoffs to the other guys and they approved the concept.”
Joey replied, “ If you do shots like that melting thing Ira does, he will think I stole his idea and gave it to you and Ira will be mad at me.”
“Well, we will just have to arrange a meeting with Ira and see what we can work out.”
I was feeling pretty confident that I would still get to shoot the job, because Johnny had approved the idea and what Johnny wants, Johnny gets. Johnny loved the opportunity to needle Joey about anything.
The day came to meet Ira. I went to Joey’s apartment and was led into Joey’s extra apartment, where Joey put up guests and stored his cds. Thousands of them lining the walls in custom made shelves. There in the middle of the room sitting on a bed, was this chubby guy with a full grey beard and bushy curly grey hair. I walked over to him and introduced myself. He wasn’t friendly at first, I told him that we had had a common girlfriend named Kenna Jean Morris of Pensacola, Florida.
His eyes brightened a little, saying, “You know Kenna Jean?”
“Sure, I dated her for a couple of years and she turned me on to your Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus record just when it was released in 1970 and you have been a huge influence on my surrealistic photography. I have been working with Mylar for several years now, because of your influence.”
His eyes brightened a little more.
“Can I show you my portfolio?”
“Ok,” he said and after looking at my Mylar shots. He said, “Your work is very nice, maybe it’s a little more commercial than mine…a little slicker, but nice.”
“Ira,” I said. “I have shot many Ramones covers, I have met with Johnny and the other guys and they want me to shoot this cover. I told Joey that I had to meet you and explain to you that I have been copying your Mylar style for several years, Joey has nothing to do with this, you are a big factor in my career. What can I do to make you feel less ripped off?”
“Oh, I see,” he said, “maybe I can just come to the album session and smoke a joint and give the session my blessing?”
Monte Melnick the Ramones tour manager rolled his eyes and quickly replied, “No, no, no!!! No joints!!!”
“ Ira, I have an idea. How much is your Jimi Hendrix photo in the Mylar chamber?”
“$1500”, he said.
“I have an idea. I will buy one of your Hendrix prints, Joey, you’ll by one too, right?”
“Right,” said Joey.
I approached the Mylar shots in a different way than Ira, instead of building a Mylar room, I built a room of foamcore, three walls and a ceiling, covering the walls, ceiling and floor with colored paper. Red in this case. Across the front of the open end of this eight foot cube, I stretched the Mylar. The band stood inside the box, facing the mylar and I stood behind the group inside the box, hiding myself behind the band members, shooting their reflections.
The cool thing about Mylar is that you can’t really control what you are getting. You can vary the tension on the Mylar, producing a flatter mirror or loosen the Mylar and you get more ripples. However you work with the Mylar, you don’t know what you are really getting until you see the finished film.
After I shot the band on the Mylar and got the finished films, made some color prints of my favorites, there were some really cool images. I made an appointment to show the prints to Johnny, CJ and Markie, it was clear to all of us which shot was the coolest.
Then I had to go to Joey’s to convince him to go along with the chosen shot. Of course, he didn’t like himself in the shot that the others liked, but he had to wake up a little earlier if he thought he was going to make me worry about negotiating a final choice for the front cover.
We were in the beginning of the computer era taking over graphics and I told Joey, just to choose any Mylar shot that he liked of himself and I would “cut and paste” it into the shot the others had approved.
I think he was a little disappointed that it wasn’t more difficult for me than that.
As I had promised, the front of Mondo Bizarro is this melting LSD hallucination the back is a fairly normal Ramones lineup shot.
Special thanks was given to Ira Cohen for his guidance, inspiration and pioneering efforts in Mylar photography. I don’t know if Joey ever bought his Jimi Hendrix print, but I did and treasure it highly.
The Ramones manager always had a “thing” for cartoon or illustrated covers and after Mondo Bizarro there were no more photographic covers. I did go on to take some of my strongest portraits of the Ramones.
To publicize the release of Acid Eaters, I was contacted to shoot some publicity stills. After ascertaining the title’s name, I realized that the cover of Mondo Bizarro would have suited the title of Acid Eaters more, but that was water under the bridge. I developed some additional concepts along the psychedelic theme. One of which was to have the Ramones sitting on a psylicybin mushroom smoking a hookah pipe a la the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland.
This entailed building a mushroom large enough and strong enough to support four Ramones. Building a wooden frame, then covering it with chicken wire, I then covered the construction with epoxy and fiberglass. Waiting for the epoxy to set, it gradually became clear to me that this construction was too flimsy. I had had a limited budget, so buying more fiberglass cloth and epoxy was out of the question.
Maybe if the fiberglass was covered with plaster, the construction would be strong enough. After schlepping five hundred pounds of plaster of paris into th studio and covering the whole contraption, I painted the plaster international orange. The shoot was the following day and when I returned the following day, to my horror, the plaster hadn’t dryed because I had painted it and the paint hadn’t dried because the plaster was still damp underneath the paint. I sent an assistant rushing off to my apartment to get four small oriental rugs to keep the orange paint off of the Ramones clothes.
It turned out that the structure I had built was strong enough, although damp, it did hold the four Ramones. I pulled the stuffing out of a Hollofill pillow to make the white spots that one finds on a real psilocybin mushroom. Knowing that the background would be replaced in Photoshop, I stood some white panels in the background.
The background for the next shot was created by rolling white background paper across the floor, then rolling black paper on top of the white. Taking a plumb bob, I snapped converging chalk lines onto the black paper. Then my assistants, cut out alternating square of the black paper, in the end giving a super op-art checker background with a totally false perspective. I climbed a very tall ladder, shot down on the Ramones and the point of view almost makes you dizzy to look at it.
When I got the film back, the op art shots looked great, but my mushroom…what an ugly disaster!
The mushroom looked horrendous and the white stuffing looked only like white stuffing. What to do. Quickly realizing that only a real mushroom would do, I phone John Holmstrom, the publisher of High Times magazine and asked him if he could recommend an expert mushroom photographer to me. John gave me the name of a photographer in California. I explained my problem to the other photographer and he agreed to send me a 35mm slide of an actual psilocybin.
To my surprise, the mushroom was brown with white spots and in the shape of a very pointed dome. Thankfully, Photoshop came to the rescue. Drawing a path carefully around the Ramones, I could cut them out of the original scan, then I took the scan of the real mushroom and stretched it and colorized it so that it was a very bright orange and close to the shape of the original mushroom contruction. Then I could paste the Ramones on top of the real mushroom and the posture of the band looked realistic. I cut out the white panels in the background, pasted more copies of the real mushroom around the photo, varying size, shape and color. Then I needed to make a background for the whole shot. Again, Photoshop to the rescue. I created a 16” x 16” blank document, I selected a Mandlebrot Fractal images from Kai’s PowerTool’s plug in for Photoshop and started to render a fractal pattern into the blank page. The thermometer time indicator didn’t move, didn’t move for half an hour, didn’t move for an hour. Of course the fact that I was using the state of the art MacIntosh II CI with a whopping 32mb of RAM might have had something to do with that. I restarted the computer thinking Photoshop had frozen. I reselected the fractal and hit “render”. Again, nothing happened. I decided to go home and see what I had in the morning. I knew I would either have a fractal or not.
I did. Putting all the elements together, the group, the fractal, the mushrooms, I found I had created something beyond my wildest dreams. The Ramones mushroom shot is still one of my favorite shots of my whole career.
In order to provide the publicist, Ida Langsam with slides, I had to print out the digital file as an Iris print and then rephotograph the Iris on slide film. It worked.
One of the last shots I did for the Ramones was the back cover of Adios Amigos. The Ramones wanted to be executed by a Mexican firing squad. I built a stucco wall 12’ x 12’, took some industrial styrofoam insulation, carved and painted them brown, so it looked like hand-hewn beams sticking out of the stucco, trying to build a set that looked like an adobe wall. Spread sand all over the floor, rented Springfield rifles and bandoliers, bought four brand new sombreros. I had the Ramones line up against adobe wall, Monte Melnick, Ira Lippy and others were extras holding the rifles, playing a sleeping Mexican sitting against the adobe wall and one person acting as the officer commanding the firing squad, but all you could see was the arm of the officer dropping the sabre, giving the command to shoot. The point of view was from one of the riflemen. I thought the whole thing went well.
The last shoot I did for the Ramones was at their last live show in NYC. There was a live album planned and although I had tons of live shots of the Ramones from various venues, they wanted more. The last NY gig was at the Hammersmith Ballroom, when I arrived the hall was full, making my way to the front of the stage, the security man saw my photo pass and informed me that I only could shoot the first 3 songs (a totally idiot rule that I will discuss later). I knew better than to discuss this with security, so I asked him for the Ramones tour manager, Monte Melnick.
Monte arrived and confirmed that the three song rule was in effect. I reminded him that I was George DuBose, the official Ramones photographer and I didn’t shoot only three songs. Monte said we had to speak to Johnny. We went upstairs to the dressing room and when I saw Johnny I said, “Johnny, you are paying me to shoot for your live cover, what is this three song shit?”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot about you, George, you can shoot five songs.” Throwing me a little bone like that wasn’t going to work.
“Johnny, I am your photographer, I never release unapproved shots, you can see all the shots I get tonight . You can choose if you want them for your live cover or not!”
“Ok, Ok,” he replied, “you can shoot us until I take off my black leather jacket.”
Fair enough I thought.
I had prepared a little surprise for the band. Since this was their last show, I brought an old Canon AE-1 that had a broken light meter, I put a lens on it that only cost me $20. After I shot the Ramones for about 20 minutes or so and Johnny removed his black leather jacket, before the security got to me and could throw me out, I reached into my camera bag, pulled out the broken AE-1, pretended that I was taking a few shots and then proceeded to smash the camera on the stage. I was hoping that the camera would fly to bits, but instead all that happened was that I got a bad gash in my hand.
After the concert, we met at a bar near the gig and I spoke to Johnny, thanking him for involving me all those years and for letting me shoot the last show.
Johnny asked me why I smashed my camera on the stage. I replied, “Well, if you guys are quitting, so am I.”
They really quit, I haven’t.
It was really depressing for me when Joey died. I have had skin cancer and Joey and I discussed his cancer on occasion. I was under the impression that Joey’s cancer was in remission and when he had a relapse, I fully expected him to recover. Sadly, he didn’t.
Dee Dee’s passing grieved me as well, but I wasn’t as close to Dee Dee, in fact, every time I met Dee Dee for years, I would have to reintroduce myself, he never could seem to remember just who I was and why I was there. I felt that his overdose was just a really dumb thing. I am all for freedom of choice and all, but there is no reason to overdo things.
The Ramones gave me the thickest file in my archives, album, publicity, posters and live shots, I have hundreds. They were so easy to deal with as well. There was not to be a front man, even though Joey was the lead singer, he didn’t get to stand separate from the others. All I could do was line them up shoulder to shoulder, remind them not to smile, especially the new members and shoot them. For their part, they loved the fact that I was so fast, never fiddling with the lights or anything. I would build 3-4 setups before the group arrived and they would stand in one set, bang-bang-bang…eat some pizza, while my assistants move the cameras and turned on the lights for the next setup, bang-bang-bang…eat some more pizza, do another quick shot and they were outta there. I never could keep them longer than two hours.
When Ritchie joined the group for Too Tough To Die, I noticed that on the albums that he played on, he wrote some of the more commercial tracks. When Ritchie asked for a raise from his $250 a week salary and 1/4 of the merchandising revenues, t-shirts with his image on them, Johnny refused to cut him in and Ritchie quit. Not very professional of either of them, but I always felt that Ritchie was a better drummer that Johnny was a guitar player. I thought the Ramones should have kicked Johnny out and kept Ritchie, but that was before I knew who was the boss of the band.
One other incident after Ritchie quit, the Ramones auditioned other drummers. I was to due new publicity shots for the group with the new drummer. The afternoon of the shoot, Clem Burke, Blondie’s drummer showed up first at the studio. I was shocked to see him wearing a Chanel t-shirt with the double C logo. I asked Clem if he knew what group was joining.
“Yeah, the Ramones,” he said.
“Not with that t-shirt!”
Although he’s a great drummer, Clem didn’t last very long with the band.
The Mudd Club.
One day in the Fall of 1978, Kate Pierson of the B52s, told me that a really cool singer would be performing at Max’s Kansas City that evening and she would get me on the guest list if I was interested. Always interested in music. I told Kate that I would go to the club early and save a table in front for the B’s. I remember that on the way to Max’s that evening, I had to walk through a blizzard. It had been snowing all day and there was already a foot of snow on the ground.
Arriving at Max’s early enough to grab a table smack in the middle of the front of the stage, I ordered a drink and waited for the B’s to arrive. When they finally showed up, there was a gentleman with them who introduced his name as Steve Mass. He told me that he was opening a club further downtown and that the B’s had agreed to play opening night. Steve told me that there was going to be go-go girls in cages, an electric garage door that could come down in front of the stage incase the band was lousy, but would stop playing when told to stop.
Opening night was really special (as were the opening nights of most NY clubs) the art crowd, the uptown crowd and the social glitterati were all in attendance. It seemed like people had gotten tired of Studio 54 (the most popular club in Manhattan and probably the world) and were looking for something different, something with an edge and the Mudd Club fit the bill to a “T”.
The B52s were unsigned, but hugely popular in NYC. Combining that with the fact that opening night was Halloween meant that half the crowd was in costume. The band played in their underwear with even the guys wearing bras and panties. Someone had painted a lunar landscape as a backdrop, it was a photographer’s nirvana.
David Bowie was at opening night, I remember Frank Zappa would hang out there, I saw what was purported to be Joe Jackson’s first US gig. That gig of Joe Jackson’s was another turning point for my career. I had a friend in Pensacola, Florida, who was a rock singer and his name was Joe Jackson. When I heard the radio advertisements for Joe Jackson’s performance at the Mudd Club, I was curious to see if it was indeed my old pal from Florida.
Turned out that it wasn’t, but this Joe Jackson from England, put on an impressive punk show. I found Joe much more believable than Elvis Costello. What made the evening special was that midway through Joe’s set, a woman began shouting in my ear. She told me that she was the publicist for A&M Records and that she would give me $75 for a picture of the empty stage. She said that this was Joe’s first concert in America and she want to document the funkiness of the Mudd Club stage.
Since I had been there for the whole show, it was no problem to shoot a couple of shots after the set. I went back to Lane Pederson’s studio about 3am and process the film, made contact sheets and about a half dozen concert shots including the empty stage. I grabbed a few hours sleep in the studio before my day as a photographer’s assistant began. When Lane came to the studio at 9am, I asked him if I could deliver some prints to A&M during the lunch break. It was going to be a slow day in the studio and Lane was always so supportive.
I was in A&M’s office at noon and Kathy Schenker, the publicist I had met the night before was shocked to see that I already had finished prints. Unbelievably quick service. She was sufficiently impressed that she gave me assignments for publicity shots, concerts and record covers for the next 5 years.
All from having saved a seat for Steve Mass at the Klaus Nomi gig.
The doormen at the Mudd were usually celebrities of a sort. I remember the first or second week after the club opened, I went with a friend. Keith Haring, the graffiti illustrator, was on the door and although he knew my face from being at the club every night for the past two weeks, he was gay and decided that he didn’t like my heteroface and further decided to implement the “no single guys” policy. This was a policy from Studio 54 that the doorman would invoke frequently to keep the “bridge and tunnel” guys from getting in. Bridge and tunnel, meant that you were from outside Manhattan, Jersey, Brooklyn or Queens, and not “cool” enough to hang with the trendy Manhattan night crowd.
When Keith tried to run this on straight ol’ me, I looked sternly in his face and told him that I was a friend of Steve Mass’s, I was on the Mudd Club’s permanent guest list, I had Steve’s private home number and would Keith like me to call Steve for clarification. Keith let me in. We never were friends, even though Keith’s boyfriend was a distant cousin of mine, Juan DuBose.
The Mudd Club even issued membership photo IDs. Having an ID card from “The Mudd College of Deviant Behaviour” generally meant you could get past any of the ever-changing doormen.
The Mudd Club got it name, Steve told me, from Dr. Mudd, the physician who, knowingly or unknowingly, repaired the leg that John Wilkes Booth broke leaping from the theater box to the stage of the Ford Theatre in Washington, DC, where he shot President Lincoln. Dr. Mudd was sentenced as a co-conspirator in the assassination and served his sentence in Fort Jefferson, in the Dry Tortugas, where he was so instrumental in fighting an outbreak of Yellow Fever that he was released from prison. Just the kind of dischord that Steve Mass liked to strike in people’s minds.
I never was totally against disco and I used to like to frequent “54” when I was on someone’s guest list for a corporate or private party with an open bar. Nothing tastes better than free booze.
The Mudd became a favorite venue for all manner of punk bands, newly arriving bands from the UK that weren’t superstar status yet. There were fashion shows from the likes of Betsy Johnson, Fellini film nights, art shows. An international clientele developed and I recall one night, or should I say early morning, Steve came up to me saying that he had been looking all over for me.
“Did I have a camera?”
“Always!” I was the official Mudd Club photographer remember.
“Princess Stephanie of Monaco is down on the dance floor, I want a photo, but be careful. She is surrounded by bodyguards.”
“Thanks, Steve, trying to get me killed or what?”
My nocturnal camera was a little German Paxette, about 3 x 4” made of metal with a tiny cheap flash in the bracket on top. This preceded the days of the plastic point and shoots from Nikon and Canon. The little camera was very discrete, but I had to prefocus and set the f-stop manually. Then I would “point ‘n’ shoot”.
I went downstairs and on to the dance floor. Stephanie looked very glamorous and was easy to pick out of the mostly punk crowd. There were obvious bodyguards, so I asked a girl I knew to dance with me for a moment so I could get a photo for Steve. We danced for a few minutes, edging slowly closer to the Princess. With my dancing partner providing a shield, I preset the focus and f-stop, waving my partner aside, I pointed, shot and quickly tucked the little camera under my armpit inside my suit jacket.
The bodyguards went on a feeding frenzy to see who took that shot. They couldn’t find anyone with a visible camera and since there were no further shots coming after a few minutes they calmed down.
I remember another important night was the night Marianne Faithfull performed her Broken English record, 2am rolled around, the club was totally packed and there was an equal number of people out on White Street. 2:30 came and went and although it wasn’t my place to say anything, I wanted to go home, I was a working stiff, but I also want to see Marianne. I went up to the dressing room, where she was sitting.
“Marianne, are you going to perform?”
She didn’t even know me from Adam, but she told me that she didn’t feel well. As it was the first time I had ever spoke to her, her croaky voice did make her sound shaky.
I told her that the club was packed with people that were dying to see her, some of us having been in the club for hours, there was a mob outside in the street and she just had to go on.
Being the trouper that she is, she went on stage and gave a stellar performance at 3am.
How did one manage to work a day job and then hang out at Studio 54 or the Mudd Club until 4 am?
We had an invention called the “disco nap”. One would get home from the office or wherever at 6 or 6:30pm. Sleep until 1100. In my case I would take the train downtown to Canal Street, eat a hot potato knish with mustard, drink a Lime Rickey and then walk 2 blocks to the Mudd Club. Party ‘til 3 or 4 am, train home and sleep until 8am and go to work. Our night’s sleep was won in two chunks. There were many days, when I would arrive at work either with the hangover that killed King Kong or still drunk.
I remember one morning working for Eric Boman that I was so plastered that after I built and lit the set for him, I sat in a chaise lounge and would just open the film packages, throw the film to him, catch the used film that he would throw back to me. He was a very understanding boss.
The Mudd Club was my favorite all-time hangout. Sniffing coke in the ladies room, ‘cause boys were having sex with each other in the stalls in the men’s room. I remember Sylvester Stallone, standing against the 5 ton air conditioner, saying “This place is a dump!!!” and stalking out. He obviously didn’t get it.
Warhol, William Burroughs, all the luminaries of the art, alternative life and what was being called the “downtown scene” would frequent The Mudd on a regular basis. The DJs were famous for playing the newest Plastic Bertrand or Sex Pistols, disco music, old Motown and even show tunes could be heard. One night Danny Heeps was the DJ and normally, he was playing the newest sounds for NYC.
One particular evening after a few cocktails, I was standing next to the DJ booth which was actually one end of the bar. Danny began to play a Michael Jackson song. Having been a lifelong “Anti-fan” of Jackson’s, having to put up with hearing Jackson at Studio 54 all too often, I had a reaction. My hip swung out away from the wall of the DJ booth and then I slammed it with my full strength against the wall, causing the needle on the turntable to skid off the record with a very loud E-E-RP. I just looked at Danny and smiled, we were good friends, so I don’t imagine that he thought I was capable of doing that.
Tom Waits
One day, I got a call from Robert Hayes, the editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. Interview had been giving me assigments to illustrate Glenn O’Brien’s Beat, the music column.
Robert wanted me to shoot Tom Waits. At the time, I wasn’t really familiar with Wait’s music, but I had heard of him and knew from the songs that I had heard that he had a gravelly voice and cultivated the image of a homeless bum. Robert told me that Tom wanted to be photographed in Times Square.
Great, I thought, you and every other out of town musician. I had photographed Bryan Adams and a few other bands in Times Square and one technique I repeated was to go to a traffic island at 43rd Street, where Broadway and Seventh Avenue converged. I would throw bread or popcorn on the ground of the traffic island and dozens of pigeons that always basked in the afternoon sun on the cast iron front of a building that faced west on Seventh, would fly down and feed on my offerings. When someone in the group would drop an empty soda can or house keys, the pigeons would jump up, giving an air of drama. Something I borrowed from an old Avedon photo in Central Park.
This time I had another concept that I wanted to propose to Tom. I rang him, introduced myself and told him I wanted to make arrangements for the Interview shoot. I told him that I had a concept. I wanted to have him stand in the middle of Times Square with a new heavy silver steel chain wrapped around his torso, binding one arm to his chest, but leaving the other arm free to allow him to hold a cigarette to his mouth.
“I don’t smoke.” Tom said.
“I have seen photos of you with a cigarette,” I replied.
“I quit.”
Great, I thought.
We arranged to meet at 43rd and Broadway at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon in February. I knew that the sunlight at that time of the day would provide great lighting for the shot. What I didn’t realize, since it had been 6 months since the last time I was in Times Square, was that the Marriot Hotel Corporation had thrown up a 40 story hotel, effectively blocking all my direct sun light. To make matters worse, it was about 20° below zero and windy, so cold that when I tried to take a Polaroid, the Polaroid just froze and wouldn’t develop, my hand-held light meter wouldn’t react, nor would the meter in my Canon.
Oy, hope and poke.
It was so cold that the pigeons, who normally roosted on the side of that castiron building were now sitting on over the grating where warmer air was blowing up from the subway station below Time Square.
Although, I didn’t realize it at the time, I was getting total backlight from the sky, no direct light at all, I was severely under exposing my B&W film. When I ask Tom to stamp his feet and try to get the pigeons to give us some action, the pigeons were so cold they wouldn’t budge. Tom chased them, they just ran around but wouldn’t fly, finally Tom tried to kick one and it jumped up out of his way. That made the shot.
Tom was a dream to work with, friendly, personable and so aware of his character and self-image that every shot was a powerful portrait. I just let him go through his characters and tried to record them on film.
Due to the underexposure, when I developed the film and made some prints, I had to push the contrast in the printing to try to get details in his very dark face. The best shot from that quick session has the jumping pigeon, Tom with his hand to the brim of his fedora, looking totally dramatic. People say that is my best photo.
George DuBose
George DuBose and ZZ Top
George DuBose
George DuBose and Chris Goss
Back in the daze