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INTRODUCTION

Bob had the ultimate backstage pass. He was backstage with all these bands.

Can you imagine the stories he’s got?

—Alice Cooper

One Sunny day in 1979, I was crammed into a small rental car with a young heavy-metal band called Riot. We were driving across Texas from one show to another.

I was telling them stories about my life as a rock photographer, and the driver was listening so intently that he missed our exit. The next exit was now fifty miles away, so that little mistake added a hundred miles, and ninety minutes, to our drive. But nobody in the car seemed to mind. They just said, “Tell us more stories, Bob.”

Until then, I had never realized just how many great stories I had, and how interested people were in hearing them.

I took my first concert photos at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Bob Dylan famously shocked the world by going electric; camped at the Woodstock Music Festival; met John and Yoko at an Aretha Franklin concert and became their friend and personal photographer; drove Tina Turner’s Jaguar down the Pacific Coast Highway in a fog so thick that I couldn’t see the road; was at CBGB for the birth of the New York punk scene.

I documented Salvador Dalí making the world’s first moving hologram of Alice Cooper; became friends with the notoriously wild Keith Moon, drummer for the Who; toured with the ever-colorful New York Dolls; rode the bus with the Sex Pistols for their ill-fated American tour; and took the picture of Led Zeppelin members posing like rock gods in front of their jet plane.

And those were just some of my stories up to that day in Texas in 1979. Since then I’ve collected a lot more—having a long and hopeful conversation with John Lennon just two nights before he was murdered; living for close to a year in Japan and connecting with the rock scene there; flying with Green Day in their private plane; and hosting Joe Strummer on my couch.

Just about every music fan knows my photos. They’ve seen them for years on album covers and posters, in books and magazines, in art galleries and museums. Some of them are iconic: the picture of John Lennon in the New York City T-shirt, the Clash on a rooftop with the Empire State Building behind them, the Ramones in front of CBGB, Tina Turner whirling across the stage. The history of rock and roll is captured in my archive of many thousands of images, more than half a century of rock culture told in one classic image after another.

Those photographs, however, show you only what I saw. Right Place, Right Time is about how I grew as a person—from a young kid with no particular agenda, with a camera and a passion for capturing the moment, to a professional photographer witnessing the evolution of generations of musicians who have come and gone, never quite made it, or succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

For me, this book is not just about rock and roll. It is about freedom . . . the freedom to express your feelings, out loud. My focus has always been to communicate that sense of freedom, the passion and desire to be fully in the moment.

Tommy Ramone once said that in order to create a successful rock band, “The image and the sound must gel.” Punk author Legs McNeil (Please Kill Me) concurred, “You have to have a great song, and you also have to have a great image to go with it.”

There’s the style, the swagger, the show, the song. But rock and roll also needs an image—as much as it needs a guitar and a mic. And this was even more true before the YouTube era, before the Internet existed, even before Rolling Stone published its first issue. In small broadsheets and fanzines, on album covers and concert posters, the image has always been what helps draw the fans to the concerts.

To me, my photos aren’t just pictures, and the artists in them aren’t just acts. I wasn’t visiting the rock lifestyle as a journalist, I was living it. I’ve been lucky enough to work, travel, and become friends with many of the greatest artists in music. They became my extended family—my wonderful, crazy, wildly creative, and sometimes dysfunctional extended family.

Like any family, we’ve had our ups and downs, experienced one another’s triumphs and tragedies, and attended one another’s weddings, birthday parties, and funerals.

I’ve lost some of my most inspiring friends—John Lennon, Joe Strummer, Giorgio Gomelsky, Joey Ramone, so many . . . too many! But I’ve made new ones, as well—Billie Joe Armstrong, Supla, and Jesse Malin, unofficial mayor of the Lower East Side.

Because these people are my family, my stories about them aren’t the usual ones. I know them as wildly talented, three-dimensional, and often perfectly ordinary people. My career has given me an intimate perspective that I hope comes through in these pages.

I reflect on taking the first photos of John and Yoko’s baby, Sean. Going shopping with Tina Turner, and watching her cook dinner for her kids. Sitting at the bar in CBGB with Johnny Rotten, right after the Sex Pistols had broken up. And I’ll never forget Debbie Harry kissing me on New Year’s Eve 1979 in Glasgow.

All the time I hear from young people, “I want to follow my dream.” In Right Place, Right Time, I’ll share what following one’s dream means to me: It means believing in yourself, giving up security, and taking chances. It means getting out there and living your life—loudly.

My own dream was simple. I wanted to take good pictures, go to interesting places, and meet fascinating people. Someone once asked me and Malcolm McLaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols, how we had planned for our success. We both said, “Plan?”

Malcolm summarized this attitude well: “When you go to sleep at night, you have plans for the next day. The next morning you wake up, the phone rings, and your plans change. You make the best of the day, every day.”

It takes courage to live like that, every day unplanned, with unexpected turns. But you have to do it if you want to follow your dreams. It’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time, and then you have to do the right thing. That isn’t something you can plan. You have to follow your instincts and try to not second-guess yourself.

That is how I’ve always lived my life.

Growing up in a typical suburban home on Long Island in the 1950s, I saw Elvis on television and listened to rock and roll on Murray the K’s Swingin’ Soiree, an all-night radio show that I tuned into under the covers in bed, with my parents sound asleep in their room next door.

My twin passions, music and photography, were born at the same time: By the age of five I was spending hours in the darkroom with my mother, an attorney who was an amateur photographer. I got my first camera when I was eight and had my first picture published in a local newspaper when I was thirteen.

Still, in my house, photography was considered a hobby—and in the wider world, rock photography didn’t exist. My parents expected me to graduate from college, get a secure job as a businessman, start a family, and live the American Dream. Instead I dropped out of college at nineteen and moved to Greenwich Village in 1965.

I did not have a career plan. My plan was to turn on, tune in, drop out, and live with a rock band—so that’s what I did.

I arrived in New York City as a naive young man, ready to start having adventures and learning the ways of the city. There were some very lean years, but I could survive on twenty-five-cent hot dogs and a one-dollar bottle of wine.

At the time I started—and really for most of my career—photographers were servants to the music business, merely there to provide adequate images of an event, their identities inconsequential. If I wasn’t there to pick up the phone when someone called, then they just called the next photographer on their list. The competition was fierce.

My career advanced one contact and opportunity at a time. I’d go to a concert, then to a few clubs to check out what was going on there, then to an after-party or perhaps another late-night club. But I took my camera with me everywhere.

Then I’d go home driving along the Hudson River at sunrise, and head straight to the darkroom to develop my rolls of film. After a short lie-down, I’d make prints and take them around to the magazines and record companies. And then, that night, I’d go out again and repeat the whole cycle. I did that for decades. Following your dream is hard work.

I owe a lot of my success to the fact that many of the musicians I met and photographed considered me a friend. As Yoko Ono said of me: “John and I felt he was sensitive. In those days, photographers were all so pushy, and he wasn’t. His photography shows what his character was, and that’s what’s so beautiful about it.” I put my camera down when someone didn’t want their picture taken, and I never gave much direction.

Some of my best pictures are of musicians in a dressing room or at a party, in the back seat of a car or on the street. I got those pictures because I was out there, all the time, open to chance, to the moment, to letting things unfold. And they were relaxed enough around me to be themselves.

“Bob’s best pictures are the ones offstage,” Iggy Pop said. “They’re important for what they document about the interaction between the people in them. You get a lot of information about either what these people were really like or what games they were playing.”

My passion for the music and for the people who make it comes through in my pictures. They’re not always technically perfect. Sometimes the focus is soft, or the figure is blurred, but the feelings are clear. I want to capture the spirit and passion of the moment.

I’m in my early seventies now, and I still go out most nights, happy to be sober, to hang out with and photograph old friends and new. I know I’ve changed over the years. But the passion that I started with for capturing the moment is as alive within me as it ever was, and the drive to keep going, keep photographing, keep documenting the world in which I live my life—that remains undiminished.

I still get as excited looking at a newly taken photograph as I did when I was younger; I still feel a shot of adrenaline when I look at a particular image and think, “That’s the one!”

CHAPTER 1 WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

Donovan and Joan Baez • Bob Dylan

In July 1965, the Newport Folk Festival was the place to be. As Bob Dylan said, the times they were a-changing, and folk music spoke to young people who wanted to be a part of that change.

American combat troops had just been sent to Vietnam that March, and thousands of young war protestors marched on Washington. At the same time, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s freedom marchers were attacked by police and state troopers in Alabama. It was a tumultuous time, and music—not just folk and rock, but R & B, jazz, everything—reflected that. And I was just one of the millions of kids who wanted a front-row seat for the revolution.

That April, I got a minimum-wage job at the World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, selling film and flashbulbs. I’d just moved into my first apartment in Manhattan, in the area below Houston Street that’s called SoHo now but was part of Little Italy back then.

So, I was just one among the thousands who saw the list of performers who were going to be at Newport and really wanted to be there.

I was already into folk music. Or, at least, I had an acoustic guitar that I could strum, and I sang songs by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and others. All of whom were going to be at the festival, alongside Joan Baez, Donovan, Mississippi John Hurt, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Peter, Paul and Mary.

The music spanned the folk spectrum. While some of the performers sang traditional folk songs, others—Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie—performed their own compositions, new, topical songs that spoke to the changing times. And why? Because they sensed, as we the audience sensed, that music mattered. If you wanted to send a letter, you used the mail. If you wanted to deliver a message, you set it to music, and Newport was where everyone would hear that message at the same time.

I just had to be there, but I couldn’t afford tickets, which I think were five dollars a night. I had no connections to the music press, no musician friends who could put me on the guest list, no reason at all to receive any kind of preferential treatment.

What I did have was a friend of my mom’s who ran a public relations firm, who was willing to give me a letter saying I was there to represent them. It was a long shot, and it was not true. His company had nothing whatsoever to do with music. But with the optimism of youth, and that letter in hand, I quit my job at the World’s Fair and, because I couldn’t afford film any more than I could afford festival tickets, I stole a pack of twenty rolls of film on my way out.

Around one hundred thousand folk music fans descended on the quaint seaside town of Newport, Rhode Island, on the weekend of July 22–25. Thousands of them camped out on the beach, and that’s where I pitched my tent, too. When darkness fell, cool winds swept in across the water, and I was chilled in my suede jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots. People built bonfires to crowd around, and we’d gather for hootenanny sing-alongs.

Becoming a part of the crowd was easy. Actually getting into the festival was a little more complicated. I made my way to Fort Adams State Park, where the festival was staged, and presented my letter at the press office.

Obviously, they had never heard of me, or the company I claimed to be representing. Their first reaction was to turn me away. But I remembered something my mom always said—“Never take no for an answer. Instead, it can be the beginning of an interesting conversation.”

I was persistent and they were busy, with all the other journalists and photographers demanding their attention. They finally agreed to give me a photo pass. And that was it. I was in. Camera at the ready, and free to roam wherever I chose.

The audience was already in position, thousands of folk fans facing the stage in rows of folding chairs. Comparing that vision to the same scene a year or two later, it was a very staid event. The hippie scene was barely beginning. Guys were starting to grow their hair a little longer, but they were still wearing shirts with collars, like the Beat Generation. Khaki pants and tweed sports jackets. T-shirts wouldn’t become ubiquitous for a few years yet.

The girls were wearing their hair long, too, but straight, down their shoulders and backs. They wore loose-fitting tops and jeans. None of them looked like proto-revolutionaries, but their hearts and their voices were already in the right place.

With my pass in hand, I was able to go backstage, where I saw Buffy Sainte-Marie playing an acoustic guitar, singing her anti-war song “Universal Soldier.” I stopped dead, just watching her. I was a huge fan, knew all the lyrics, and when she saw me mouthing the words, she smiled and invited me to sing along with her!

But I couldn’t—I was too stunned. To me, Buffy Sainte-Marie was the sexiest person at the entire festival. I just stood there, awestruck. I got good pictures of some of the performances, though—Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Donovan, Joan Baez.

Then it was time for the star of the festival, Bob Dylan. His rock and roll (not folk) album Bringing It All Back Home had been out since March and had long since sent shockwaves through the folk music scene. Rocking songs like “Maggie’s Farm” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues” had very little to do with folk, but his lyrics were as sharp as ever . . . sharper, in fact.

Images — **Donovan and Joan Baez, Newport Folk Festival, Newport, Rhode Island, July 22, 1965**

I was completely enthralled. I was driving in my car the first time I heard “Subterranean Homesick Blues” on the radio, and I was so electrified by the words and images that flew through my head that I had to pull the car over and just listen, trying to absorb it. The last line—“The pump don’t work ’cause the vandals stole the handle”—whirled around in my head for days.

Then, just a few days before the festival, Dylan’s new single, “Like a Rolling Stone,” came out. It hadn’t been on the album—it would be on the next one, Highway 61 Revisited, but that was not the only surprise. The song felt endless; it was more than six minutes long, at a time when no single—certainly no hit single—had ever gone over three. Clearly, whatever Dylan had in store for Newport, it was not going to be traditional folk music.

The sun had just gone down as Dylan strolled onto the stage and the stage lights came up. He looked so cool. He looked like a rock star. He was often described as scruffy looking, but he came onstage in Spanish boots, tight black jeans, a black leather jacket, and under it, a really unusual orange shirt, with a tab collar that was fastened, but no tie!

You have to understand. That in itself was an act of rebellion. Nobody wore a tab collar without a tie. Nobody but Dylan. It looked so wrong—but on him it just looked right. In fact, that outfit might have been the thing that put off the folk fans in the audience, even before he started playing. That and his stance. He stood like a rock and roller.

As he and his band—a pickup group mostly comprised of members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band—played the long, jangling “Like a Rolling Stone,” about half the crowd started booing while the other half was cheering. Then they got to yelling at one another.

It was chaos! Nothing like this had ever happened at Newport. Butterfield and the Chambers Brothers had already played electric sets of traditional blues and everybody liked them. But for Dylan to do it, that was sacrilege.

Dylan, clearly upset, stopped playing and left the stage. I headed around to one side. Peeking through the fence that stood around the backstage area, I watched as Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, pushed an acoustic guitar into Dylan’s hands and begged him to go back out and play some of his old hits to mollify the crowd.

He did go back out, to sing “Maggie’s Farm” and, fittingly, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” a familiar ballad that calmed the crowd down. But the damage had been done. The folk scene was never the same after that night. The times really were a-changing, and I think everybody there felt it. The message that Dylan once sang quietly with an acoustic guitar was now being shouted out above a loud, driving, rock-and-roll beat, and the mostly clean-cut crowd simply didn’t know what to do with it.

To me, it was clear Dylan was announcing that the folk music of America was now rock and roll, and that the young generation wasn’t going to be quiet and polite anymore.

The night Dylan started rocking out onstage—Sunday, July 25, 1965—was also the start of my life as a real rock photographer. Luck and timing would forever play big roles in my career, never bigger than being at that festival, on that night. Dylan changed a lot of people’s worlds, but he changed my life. He showed me what was possible if you just went out and did it.

CHAPTER 2 GROWING UP

Mom and Dad · Great Neck Fire

As a kid growing up in great neck, long Island, I’d been into photography for as long as I could remember, and I have my mom to thank for that. Both of my parents were lawyers, but my dad went into real estate, building houses, and my mom specialized in immigration—she opened an employment agency that arranged for people to come from Europe to work in America. After a recession in the mid-1950s, my dad opened a travel agency to complement my mom’s business.

She was also president, or honorary president, of a variety of different organizations, business and philanthropic. But her hobby was photography. She never took more than family photos, me and my brothers playing on the beach during vacations, visits to relatives, and so on, but she had a good eye and she bought herself great equipment.

My family—my parents, my three brothers, and I—lived in a suburban house, and, when I was five, my mom built a fully functional darkroom in the pantry off the kitchen. Some of my earliest memories are of the two of us there in the red-lit darkness, and the acidic smells of the chemical solutions of developer and fixer.

She taught me how to process film, and how to count off the seconds while the film was developing (because you can’t see a clock in the pitch dark). I got to be very accurate at counting.

My mom gave me my first camera, a simple Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, for my eighth birthday in 1953. I soon discovered I was good at taking pictures—framing, timing. Even better, it was also something that was all mine, and not my older brother Richard’s. In our family, he was the genius straight-A student.

Photography was where I could excel. I soon took over as the family photographer, snapping photos of visits with aunts, uncles, and cousins, Richard’s bar mitzvah, and other family events and gatherings. I could not have known then that these early “assignments” would become so important for me later.

After all, taking family portraits is a lot like taking a band’s picture. You have to get everybody together and in the right mood all at the same time. You have to make sure everyone is looking at the camera and is engaged with the moment. You have to make sure nobody’s head gets cut off. Maybe it’s not so surprising that the music world became my family.

I received my first “grown-up” camera for my own bar mitzvah. A friend of my parents, Harry Fink, owned the large camera store Haber & Fink in New York City; he gave me a 35-millimeter camera, a Kodak Pony II, and also discounts on supplies at his store. The new camera was still rather simple, but it was far more advanced than my Brownie Hawkeye: I could focus it and set exposures.

I carried that camera everywhere. I especially liked action shots—my high school’s football games, dances, anything where something was happening. Whenever I heard sirens, I’d run to see what was going on. I had a drive to see exciting things and tell people about them—to show and tell.

One day in the summer of 1959—Friday, June 19, to be exact—as I was coming out of my mother’s office in Great Neck, near the Long Island Railroad station, I was startled and excited to see fire engines pulling up outside a burning building nearby.

I got pictures of firemen climbing up a ladder to the second floor. But I only had a few shots remaining on the roll, so I ran home, which was about a half mile, grabbed more film, and sped back on my bike.

A local photographer, Mike Miyata, was now on the scene, taking pictures in front of the building. So, he had that covered. I wanted to get the scene from a different angle—something I would do throughout my career—so I went into the six-story apartment building behind the one on fire.

I ran up the stairs to the roof. From there, I got shots of the whole scene from above. I hurried back home, locked myself in the darkroom, developed the pictures, printed a few of them, and rushed them to the local weekly newspaper, the Great Neck Record. I’m still not sure what made me think that they’d want a picture from a thirteen-year-old kid; all I knew was that I had a great shot and my age shouldn’t matter.

The editor liked one shot but wanted a better print. I went back home again, made a new print—dodging and burning, upping the contrast—and took it back to the editor.

I gave it to him, told him a little about myself, and left. It was only then that I realized that I felt hot. My breathing was normal, I was no longer sweating from all the biking, but it turned out that all the exertion had brought on a full-blown fever, and I would spend the next two days sick in bed.

It was worth it. I woke up the next morning and saw my picture on the front page of the local paper. The caption: “The photo above was made from the apartment house behind the fire scene by 13-year-old Robert Gruen of 25 Oak Drive . . . Bob is in the ‘photographic business’ with Steven Rutt, 14 of 1 Wilbur Drive, a classmate of his in the 9th Grade at the South Junior High. He made this photo with a Kodak Pony II 35 mm camera—but he’s hoping soon to have a Leica.”

The “business” part was a stretch—perhaps that’s why the copy department put it in quotes—but I was a bit of a budding entrepreneur. Steve and I had been friends since the third grade. He was the skinniest person I have ever known, his clothes hanging on him like on a scarecrow. He was already a genius inventor, always creating the most elaborate science projects while the rest of the class was still ooing and ahhing about the same old baking soda/vinegar volcanoes.

Steve and I once put together a pump, tubes, and a timer to build a rain forest where it actually rained every twenty minutes. We used to go shopping for parts on Cortlandt Street in downtown Manhattan. Before they built the World Trade Center, a lot of little army and navy surplus stores were there, so that’s where we’d get vacuum tubes, capacitors, and other electronics.

We became partners. I took and developed the pictures while he invented things like a strobe flash for my camera that is still the best I ever used. We called ourselves Coast Photographers, and that’s how the Record credited the front-page photo.

Mike Miyata’s picture, by the way, was on page twelve. As it turned out, he would be the first photographer I worked for as an assistant.

I continued to take pictures through high school, as well as at rallies for local political candidates. One year, when I was about fifteen, the images used on the campaign posters for both the local Democratic and Republican candidates were my photos.

High school itself didn’t interest me too much. I was considered one of the nerds. The only place I shined was in the theater group, where I was the AV guy in charge of the sound and lighting; I was also the guy who would show the movies and the slide shows in your class, because I knew how the equipment worked.

Music was always a part of my life growing up, but never as much more than background. I sang along with the songs I liked, I had my favorite performers, I bought 45s like any other kid. My parents were not at all interested in music; the only record I ever remember my father liking was by the Talbot Brothers of Bermuda. And while Mom’s uncle Joe was a jazz musician, I didn’t meet him until much later.

I did enjoy Miles Davis. I’ve been a fan forever; I must have been seven or eight when I first heard him and I was immediately swept away by his music. One of the first records I ever bought was Kind of Blue. It was so beautifully smooth, soft and meditative, and when my school gave me the trumpet to play, I was happy. I remained a trumpeter for the next three years, until my orthodontist pointed out that the trumpet was pushing back my teeth, and I needed to wear braces.

I also enjoyed the Weavers and Pete Seeger; in fact, they were the ones who first showed me how music could become a force for something more than mere entertainment. Pete Seeger played at my elementary school when I was around thirteen. Pete sang about peace and love, individuality and workers’ rights. He had the audience singing along in three-part harmony and everyone went home smiling.

Just a few days after the show, there were letters to the editor of the local newspaper complaining that the school had allowed a communist to perform.

It seemed incredible to me that a simple folk singer could be accused of being a communist, of trying to subvert the system, simply for singing songs of freedom. For the first time, I found myself thinking about the incredible power of music—what it meant, what it was saying. I began to pay more attention.