San Francisco Chronicle

A clear, closeup view of rock ’ n’ roll royalty

Bob Gruen describes shooting greats from Lennon to the Clash

- By Sam Whiting

Rock ’ n’ roll photograph­er Bob Gruen’s memoir is titled “Right Place, Right Time,” to suggest that his lasting images all happened by luck. They didn’t. He was bold and inventive, and that is how he came to be at the wheel of a compact rental car screeching down Mount Tamalpais when the brakes went out, with all four members of the Clash squeezed in as passengers.

It was the first day in America and the Berkeley debut of the notorious British punk band fronted by Joe Strummer. Gruen managed to control the vehicle through a combinatio­n of radical downshifti­ng and the hand brake, all while under the influence of a shared joint of marijuana and a flask of Cognac to smooth the photo shoot.

“I was good at that,” Gruen, 75, says by phone from his loft in Greenwich Village. “Years of practice.”

Fiftyfive years of practice to be exact, and the near Clash crash — illustrate­d by two absorbing images of the pasty and pale Londoners, their leathers shining in the Marin County glare — is just one anecdote in a rollicking 380page ride through the history of rock.

The memoir starts on July 25, 1965, the night Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival. The image Gruen got that night is one that lives up to the book title, because he was 19 and a college dropout who’d quit his job in a photo booth at the New York World’s Fair in Queens. He borrowed his dad’s Minolta and brought it to Newport as a prop so he could bluff his way into the show for free, a typical New Yorker’s hustle.

In the crowd, he put the camera to work, but he didn’t actually put the photos to work for another seven years because he didn’t know where to send them and didn’t know anybody in the business.

“I was trying to drop out and do nothing,” he says in the nasal twang of Great Neck, Long Island, where he grew up. “I was trying to meet girls.”

The camera provided an opening line in that pursuit, and Gruen had it with him when he went to see the Ike & Tina Turner Revue at the Honka Monka club in Queens.

He was up close when Tina danced across the stage lit by flashing strobes. Down to his last few frames, Gruen kept the shutter open for a full second. Two nights later, he brought a print to show a friend at another Turner show. They were standing around outside when Ike stepped out of a dressing room trailer. “My friend pushed me in front of him and said, ‘ Show him the picture,’ ” Gruen says. “I did, and it changed my life.”

The single image had five Tinas in it and got him hired to shoot a band for the first time. Here again, his timing was right.

“One of the first guys I took pictures of was an upandcomin­g piano player I’d never heard of, Elton John, on his first trip to America,” Gruen says. “We were both beginners.”

Gruen dug up his 7yearold picture of Dylan at Newport, and it appeared along with the Tina Turner image in the 1972 compilatio­n “The Photograph­y of Rock.”

That’s when he had a second chance encounter that was to change his life. This time it was with John Lennon and Yoko Ono at an Aretha Franklin benefit show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. A stagehand he knew got Gruen backstage, where Lennon was waiting for his limo. Several cameras came out, which

caused Lennon to wisecrack, “People are always taking our pictures and we never get to see them.” Gruen, who has an equally quick tongue, responded, “I live around the corner from you. I’ll show you mine.”

He followed through, leaving the images with Lennon’s valet, Jerry Rubin. Lennon got the package and appreciate­d the gesture. That was the start of a friendship that went beyond photograph­er and subject. In addition to shooting several album covers for Lennon and Ono, Gruen accompanie­d them to Broadway shows and even drove them up and down Manhattan in his beatup black 1963 Volkswagen Beetle.

He was with them when they visited the Dakota for the first time, to look at a seventhflo­or apartment owned by the actor Robert Ryan. “It was about half a block long, but I don’t think of it as large or small,” Gruen says. “It’s not the way I operate.”

A few years later, while Lennon and Ono were separated, Gruen was summoned to Lennon’s penthouse along the East River to shoot album art for “Walls and Bridges.” After shooting the album cover image on the roof, Gruen was brazen enough to ask Lennon to put on a Tshirt Gruen had bought from a street vendor and customized by cutting off the sleeves with a buck knife.

“I asked him if he still had it. He said he did, which was impressive because he had been to Los Angeles,” Gruen says of the 18 months known as Lennon’s “Lost Weekend.”

It was Lennon’s idea to cross his arms and effect a toughguy pose. “I don’t give direction,” Gruen says.

It was just one image on a hot afternoon, and it did not even make it onto the album jacket. But it made it into Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, in which Lennon interviewe­d himself and chose the image to accompany it.

“That was my hit single,” Gruen says. “That image has been ripped off all around the world.”

Gruen was again with Lennon in New York for an allnight recording session that ended on Dec. 6, 1980, at the Record Plant on 44th Street. He got an image of Lennon and Ono coming out in the morning light and was planning to show Lennon the image at the next recording session, scheduled for Dec. 8.

He was printing it in his darkroom when the phone rang. The news came from a friend watching TV in California. “It was the worst call of my life,” Gruen says. “John Lennon was dead. Forty years later his loss still hurts.”

The Lennon and Ono images are featured in his book of photos titled “John Lennon: The New York Years,” published in 2005. The followup is “a book of stories about John,” Gruen says. It’s also a book of stories about the Who, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Kiss, the New York Dolls, Blondie, Iggy Pop, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and so on, through Green Day.

Gruen was also at Winterland on Jan. 14, 1978, when the Sex Pistols played what turned out to be their last concert. He was shooting from the side of the stage when Johnny Rotten issued the band’s epitaph: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

“That doesn’t really fit with my life,” Gruen says. “The fans may have been cheated, but I wasn’t.”

 ?? Bob Gruen 1979 ?? Joe Strummer ( left), Paul Simonon and Mick Jones of the Clash shop at a flea market in Sausalito in 1979.
Bob Gruen 1979 Joe Strummer ( left), Paul Simonon and Mick Jones of the Clash shop at a flea market in Sausalito in 1979.
 ?? Abrams ?? Bob Gruen shot the cover image in an airplane bathroom in 1977.
Abrams Bob Gruen shot the cover image in an airplane bathroom in 1977.
 ?? Bob Gruen 1980 ?? John Lennon and Yoko Ono leave a recording session in 1980. Lennon was shot two days later.
Bob Gruen 1980 John Lennon and Yoko Ono leave a recording session in 1980. Lennon was shot two days later.

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