Behind the lens
The man who photographed the Beatles, the Stones and The Who
Ethan Russell was with the Rolling Stones — the infamous 1969 tour that ended in Altamont — when he got the call from Glyn Johns to join The Who in England to talk about the cover art for the band’s next album.
Russell, a relatively novice photographer from California, had already left his mark on the world of rock and roll by shooting the photos for the Beatles final album “Let It Be” and the Stones’ biggest selling LP to date, the compilation “Through the Past, Darkly.”
So it came about that Russell found himself in a six-litre Mercedes driving at breakneck speed on a rainy day through the English Midlands with Pete Townshend at the wheel. The three other Who members and a small number of road crew followed in two other cars.
They were returning from a concert and Townshend wanted to hear Russell’s ideas for cover art on the drive back. Unfortunately, Russell had none. There was no grand design, no artistic concept, not even a marketing plan. Nothing.
Then the photographer noticed a couple of large blocks looming out of a piece of barren industrial landscape near the side of the road. The cars stopped and the entourage walked toward these strange concrete monuments.
The four band members — Town-
shend, Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon and John Entwistle — immediately thought of the opening scene of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the one with the apes dancing around the monolith.
As if on cue, they all started jumping around this concrete block, hooting and hollering like monkeys. Russell, of course, started taking pictures.
“Then I looked up and Pete (Townshend) pissed on it,” recalls Russell in an interview from his San Francisco home. “He was the guy that got that ball rolling.”
So, rock fans, goes the story behind the making of the controversial cover art for one of the era’s greatest albums, “Who’s Next.” If you’re too young to remember the 1971 record, it’s the one that starts with “Baba O’Riley” and ends with “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
The cover art shows Townshend, Daltrey, Moon and Entwistle walking away from the aforementioned concrete slab, three of them doing up their trousers. Four distinct lines of urine can be seen on the wall.
Russell will likely tell this story in much more graphic detail on Thursday, Jan. 26, when he brings more than 350 of his photos to The Studio (at Hamilton Place) in an audio/visual presentation he calls “The Best Seat in the House.”
The iconic photos tell the story of rock and roll’s greatest bands and Russell tells the story behind each picture.
Russell has pretty much seen it all (although Led Zeppelin fans may be disappointed). He grew up in the San Francisco area during the heyday of Haight-Ashbury and moved to England in the late ’60s “to be closer to the music.”
Russell had a camera, but no formal training in photography. He had dreams of chronicling the scene in work, but that changed after a Rolling Stone magazine writer asked him to bring his camera along to an interview he was doing.
The subject turned out to be Mick Jagger. The next interview was John Lennon. Russell, now 71, was just a little younger than his subjects and got along well with them.
“I was mostly in a state of overwhelm,” Russell says. “I didn’t know what I was doing, honestly.”
His subjects thought otherwise. One thing led to another and Russell was taking the last Rolling Stones group shots featuring band founder Brian Jones for the cover of “Through the Past, Darkly.”
He also did a solo shoot with Jones at the former Stone’s English manor. At one point, the obviously inebriated Jones, dressed in a stars and stripes flag shirt, pointed a longbarrelled gun at Russell. Was he scared?
“No, I wasn’t worried at all,” says Russell. “For one thing, I thought it was very cool. For another, I happened to know something about guns and I could tell it was a pellet rifle.”
A few weeks later, Jones was found dead in his swimming pool.
Russell was also invited to Twickenham Studios in suburban London to record the final tempestuous recordings of the Beatles for “Let It Be.” He spent 30 days there photographing the Fab Four, as well as taking in the famous final live concert on the roof of the Apple building.
In the fall of 1969, Russell became one of a 16-person entourage that made up the Stones’ North American tour documented on the album “Get Yer Ya-Yas Out” and the film “Gimme Shelter.”
Russell was onstage at Altamont when a member of the Hells Angels killed a gunwielding member of the audience. He’ll tell you all about it at the show.
A decade later, Russell was called to New York to shoot some video for John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s final project, “Double Fantasy.” He filmed them in Central Park, not long before Lennon was assassinated. Russell’s got a story for that, too. Jerry Lee Lewis, Jim Morrison, the Moody Blues, Cream, Traffic, Eric Clapton, Linda Ronstadt, Rickie Lee Jones and Rosanne Cash are among the other musical stars Russell has photographed. He has also produced
and directed films with Leon Redbone, Emmylou Harris, Paul Simon, Hank Williams Jr. and Joni Mitchell. As well, Russell has authored two books, including “Let It Bleed: The Rolling Stones 1969 Tour.”
Back to “Who’s Next.” Were those streams of water really urine? Certainly Townshend’s was. Russell watched him do it. But what about the other three? Let’s pick up the rest of the conversation from the point where Russell says he saw Townshend doing the dirty deed.
“I thought, OK, let’s roll with that,” Russell says. “But the other three couldn’t manage it and their little spots of urine are actually rain water that I gathered with film cans and put on to the monolith.” And that, rock fans, is show business. You may be wondering what those giant concrete slabs actually are. Russell didn’t even know until about eight years ago when a Who fan contacted him and told him the monoliths were on the site of an old colliery, slated for landfill. Apparently, they were placed there to help the landfill settle evenly.
“They’re still there, except now you can only see about two feet of them poking out the top,” says Russell.