An artist’s vision of rock ’n’ roll
When you’re a couple of years into your first job after college, you think about a lot of things—like how to survive on meager pay, or if you have a shirt to wear to work that isn’t tragically wrinkled—but how you might reflect on that job 40 years later isn’t necessarily one of those things.
But that’s what I find myself doing as I psych up to see my friend and former Arkansas Gazette colleague Art Meripol’s exhibition of his stunning concert photos that soon will be on display at the Old State House. Art will be on hand for the kickoff artist’s reception at 5 p.m. Friday during downtown’s Second Friday Art Walk. The exhibition of his concert photos will stay up through 2024.
I was a ninth grader in December 1973 when I saw my first concert—the Doobie Brothers at Barton Coliseum—and by the time I was a junior at Rhodes College in Memphis I could name 100 bands I’d seen. Many piled up quickly as Tennessee’s 18-year-old drinking age opened up bars as a concert option.
One highlight: being among about 200 music lovers lucky enough to spend a whopping $5 to see the Police at the High Roller on Madison Avenue in 1980 as the band toured behind “Message in a Bottle,” its second single and the follow-up to “Roxanne.”
I worked summers during college at the Arkansas Gazette, where I’d started in 1976 as a copy boy, a job so far down the journalistic food chain that it became extinct decades ago. I came back after college graduation in June 1981, and as the youngest staffer and a live music fan, I was drafted as the person who would write about major concerts coming to town, which didn’t happen that often.
That changed after a hotshot New York newspaper designer was hired to conceptualize the Arkansas Gazette’s first Weekend section. Just before the designer left for the airport, he showed everyone how this new section would be laid out. To our surprise, he had created a spot for a feature on live music coming to town that weekend. We’d never done that, at least not every week, but—form over function—off we went. I soon found myself at places like the Sheraton at I-30 and Sixth Street writing about a musical duo who never dreamed they’d be featured in a statewide daily.
My journalistic luck changed when S.O.B. opened in what now is the East Village neighborhood, not far from the Clinton Center. The best local bands and nationally significant acts played there including the Band, Black Flag, Taj Mahal and Buddy Guy.
And just as S.O.B. was greatly expanding the number of shows worth covering, a nice fellow named Art Meripol joined the Gazette photography department. I soon learned he loved live music as much as I did, plus he was cool with the deadline pressure: If there was a concert on Thursday night, the review and photo would be in the Friday morning edition.
For Art, that meant developing film, making prints, and delivering a couple of choices to the news desk before 11 p.m. (Art would be back doing that work before I showed up to write my 10 to 12 column inches on the show.)
Our first concert to cover together was Kiss at the Pine Bluff Convention Center on Feb. 11, 1983. I remember being stunned at how expressive, how well-composed and how just flat-out fun Art’s pictures were. That might be when I first realized that “seeing” a great photo is a more important gift than the technical talent of shooting it. And that ability is at the heart of why Art isn’t just an award-winning newspaper photographer but went on to a stellar 25-year career at Southern Living.
With their theatrical makeup and wild gesturing, the members of Kiss were custom-made for photos, as was Wendy O. Williams, the lead singer of the Plasmatics, the opening band that night. The fact that Wendy strutted on stage with bare breasts, her nipples covered by electrical tape, added to the photographic appeal (and led the dad sitting with his young son next to me to almost strangle the kid as he grabbed the binoculars hanging around the boy’s neck to get a closer look for himself).
Art and I also teamed up in the mid-1980s on several shows at BJ’s Star-Studded Honky Tonk on I-30, which long ago quit featuring live music and later became Midnight Cowboy. Art’s shots of Ray Charles, Merle Haggard and Jerry Lee Lewis at BJ’s are three of my most treasured of his prints.
And neither of us will forget being on Reba McEntire’s bus behind BJ’s, Art clicking away as I interviewed her across a small table; she sweetly reaching across it to dab sweat off my forehead with a cocktail napkin.
Art and I covered dozens of other shows together, mostly at Barton Coliseum, which makes an exhibition of his Barton-heavy collection of concert photos a logical successor to the wildly successful “Play It Loud: Concerts at Barton Coliseum” exhibition that graced a gallery at the Old State House Museum until the end of 2023.
For those Barton concerts we traveled separately and scarcely saw each other because Art took his spot in the pit in front of the stage, shot as many rolls of film as he could during the first three songs—that’s all photographers were allowed to shoot—then hightailed it back to the Gazette to start developing film and making prints while I stayed and took more notes.
We also covered several shows together when we weren’t on deadline, including three memorable concerts in Memphis: Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band at Mid South Coliseum on Dec. 14, 1984, a 30-song marathon during the “Born in the USA” tour that concluded with “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”; the Go-Go’s/INXS concert at Mud Island Amphitheater on July 18, 1984; and Neil Young and the Shocking Pinks at Mid-South on July 12, 1983.
Art routinely presented me with matted 11-by-14-inch photos from all the shows we worked together, and his photos from those three Memphis concerts are highlights of my collection of his work. Some hang in my office today.
Follow Art Meripol on Facebook, and you’ll be delighted by his almost daily posts of prominent musicians’ birthdays that include a photo of one of them. So often my comment on those Facebook missives is something like, “I was there that night.”
So, yes, I personally (and vicariously) lived many of the moments that are captured in the exhibition that will debut Friday at the Old State House Museum. If you appreciate great concert photography and music history, go see this exhibition, which like all attractions at the Old State House, is free.
While you’re there, revel at perhaps my very favorite of all of Art’s concert photos: Tina Turner being super sassy on the stage at Barton Coliseum on Oct. 30, 1985, during the “Private Dancer” tour.
That shot, and so many of the others, make this 40-year lookback even more special for me, and reinforces how fortunate I was to have a job like that and a colleague like Art, who remains my dear friend today.