Feed your head!
How Mike Frankel’s innovative live photos of Jefferson Airplane landed him on stage at Woodstock
BUDDING New Jersey photographer Mike Frankel knew Jefferson Airplane were the future from the moment he saw one of their posters on a visit to San Francisco in 1965. Picking up their first releases the following year confirmed his suspicions, and he became a fixture at their East Coast shows, impressing the band with his innovative multi-exposure technique – an attempt to represent the Airplane’s kinetic, psychedelic rush of sound.
“Hearing the music, I just thought that it could not be shown in any other way than motion,” explains Frankel. “It became like a synaesthesia effect, of seeing the music coming at me in bursts of energy, and the lightbulb went off in my head. I was trying to describe the music in a way that really couldn’t have been done even with cinema at the time.”
Frankel insists that his take on psychedelia was influenced by art, rather than LSD. “People ascribed some of my photographs as being druginfluenced, but when I started I hadn’t even smoked marijuana, let alone taken an acid or anything like that. My inspirations were Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, the Surrealists and the Futurist movement in Italy. Boccioni and Marinetti were artists in the
Futurist movement who tried to describe motion: cars moving, people moving. This all really stimulated me.”
Frankel’s distinctive imagery appears on the cover of Airplane offshoot Hot Tuna’s 1970 debut, recorded just weeks after he’d accompanied the parent band to Woodstock. At the time, he figured it would be just another festival, but he describes the ascent to the back of the stage on the Saturday afternoon, while Santana reached the climax of “Soul Sacrifice”, as something akin to a spiritual experience.
“When we got up to the top, Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead was just standing there looking out and pointing. As far back as the horizon, there were people. The enormity of it was jawdropping. And everybody’s cool, everybody’s sitting there in a trance with the music. By the time we left the stage at noon the next day, I think a lot of people thought there was a possibility of transforming the culture into something more pacifistic. But of course, by Altamont, those dreams were crushed.”
Mike Frankel’s Hurricanes Of Color: Iconic Rock Photography From The Beatles To Woodstock And Beyond is out now in the US, published Penn State University Press; it’ll be available in the UK via Wiley in May