Framing Life through the Lens of Henry Diltz

Henry Diltz was a fixture in the Southern California music scene. As a musician himself turned photographer it was his knowledge of music and his unwavering commitment to capturing the moment that made him one of the most legendary rock n†roll photographers of the past 60 years. Although it was not planned, Diltz has created an homage to a very particular time and place in the '60s and ‘70s LA music scene. Not every photographer had the ability to create such intimate photos that make you feel like youâ€re right there. That you are living in that moment. The iconic collection unveils the rise of Laurel Canyon and the scene that was embracing emerging talent such as Cass Elliot, Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Eric Clapton, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, The Doors and countless others. 

The windy roads and hidden houses were only part of what made Laurel Canyon so attractive to musicians. It was really inexpensive, and one by one, everyone had moved in so you were surrounded by like-minded people. This was important during a time of up upheaval in our country. By the early 1970s Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne took up residents. When asked; Browne described Laurel Canyon as “an amazing tribal life.” For Diltz it was simply a place to frame life.

SVZ:
Iâ€ve got to say Iâ€m very excited to sit down with Henry Diltz. This cat is one of the great photographers in rock history. Not everyone knows this but he didn't start off that way. He was a member of the Modern Folk Quartet. Which became a quintet at some point. And they were just a very cool part of the folk rock scene. Like Loving Spoonful, The Birds and the Mamas and the Papas. Phil Spector produced them which is an unusual combination. He would go on to be the official photographer at both Monterey and Woodstock, which is just incredible. I want to introduce him with a song. He will confirm the story but I think it was going to be part of an album. And then Phil got sidetracked. I believe it was Ike and Tinaâ€s River Deep Mountain High album. And, this one song that he did produce ended up the title theme, the theme of The Big T.N.T Show, which was kind of a sequel to the T.A.M.I. Show. The T.A.M.I. Show being one of the most famous rock concerts ever with everybody; Marvin Gaye and The Rolling Stones and James Brown. And this was gonna be a folk rocky follow up to it.

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SVZ:
Thatâ€s really great to go from the Modern Folk Quartet to photographer. It wasnâ€t planned right? You just kind of started taking pictures for the hell of it?

Henry Diltz:
On the road, I was just out on the road singing folk music. I was doing college concerts and folk clubs back and forth across the country. We went into a little secondhand shop one day, and there was a table full of little cameras for 20 bucks. And one of the guys said, “Oh, a camera. I'll have one.” And without even thinking, I said “Yeah, me too.” We took pictures for a few weeks. When we got the film developed, it was slide film. I had no idea what that was. I never thought about it. I was just framing up my friends and framing up stuff I saw on the road. So we had a big slideshow. And that's what blew my mind. When I saw that first picture. It was eight feet wide, glowing in the dark, and Iâ€m sitting there with my friends just watching. “Wow!” I said. “This is magic! I'm going to do more of this.” After that, I would spend all my days in Laurel Canyon photographing my friends so that on the weekend, we can have a slideshow and I could show them pictures of themselves. And thatâ€s how I got into it.

Drew Carey: 
I know a couple of photographers that work live concerts. Nowadays they let you come in and photograph the first three songs then you have to leave. When you were starting out you could photograph the whole concert, right? Pretty much whatever you wanted to do.

Henry Diltz:
Oh, yeah. I mean, when The Doors played the Hollywood Bowl, I squatted right there in front and shot the whole show. I was the only photographer.

Drew Carey:
Wow, the only one?

Henry Diltz:
That happened quite a few times. You could always shoot the whole show.

Drew Carey:
I love how into it you are. One of the great things about your photographs to me is how intimate they are. You could tell that you're either a friend of the band or you at least have their trust or whoeverâ€s picked you knew you could catch them in a lot of intimate moments. And I know that as a photographer, anybody that's been photographed, you really have to have a lot of trust there. And kind of ingratiate yourself. So they kind of forget about you or let their guard down. This way you can catch those moments. Do you think it was because you were a musician in the first place that lets you get in with them?

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Drew Carey:
I love how well you know photojournalism. Itâ€s a very clear distinction in your work. I consider you a photojournalist, as well as a regular portrait photographer. I think thatâ€s because you get a lot of candid moments when you're following people around.  Thereâ€s a lot of that in your work. And you really have this gift of catching that perfect moment. You have so many good unposed looking posed pictures. Do you agree? Does that make sense?

Henry Diltz:
Yes. I have a framing jones is what a friend of mine told me once. I like to frame things, that is just the wonderful thing about picking up a camera. You can look at little slices of life. You can aim where you want. You can aim it at a group of friends and you can wait for just that moment where they all laugh, and you go click, and you got that moment. I know that it's up to me, my job to pick that moment. Itâ€s for me to decide when Iâ€m going to push the button. And I do tend to wait until they really look good. Or sometimes there's a moment where there's some energy. I often wait and I watch. And then when it kind of happens, I take the picture.

Drew Carey:
Back in the film days, you've kind of had to because you only have so many pictures in your camera. Now you can shoot 30 frames or 60 frames in a second.

Henry Diltz:
Right, digital is now a whole new world. I said 15 years ago, “I will never go digital. I am a film guy!” I was using Nikon cameras, and 35 millimeter little spools of film. And I picked up a friend of mineâ€s Canon, a big telephoto lens, and I looked through it, and I said, “Oh my God, this focuses itself. And it sets its own light reading.” I always had a light meter, a spot meter to take a reading. But this digital camera is amazing. You don't even have to be there to take the picture almost. And so I got into digital, because it was just kind of easier and quicker. There's a lot of advantages to it.

Drew Carey:
My friend that takes concert pictures, he sets up remotes all over the arena, behind the drummer and above the stage and he moves around and hits the remote buttons as the show's going on. Just a single picture, you almost don't have to be there.

Henry Diltz:
One of the other great advantages of digital is for all the years that I have shot for album covers or magazines when you are done you have to send them all the pictures. At that time they would be slides or transparencies and there werenâ€t any negatives. And so a lot of times you never get the pictures back. With digital, you can shoot 500 pictures, an hour later, you can put them on a disk, give one to the record company, one to the magazine, one to the group, one to the manager, and you get to keep all of them as well. That's the biggest advantage. And I have a couple of millennial assistants, so if something's too dark, I can ask them to lighten it a little bit. I never do any kind of Photoshop. With slide film, you couldn't. You didn't have that latitude. You had to have it perfect. That's why I had a spot meter. I just would take a reading. Make it 250 and eight and perfect. There it was.

Drew Carey:
Yeah, if you meter it right, you don't have to do any Photoshop. That's the goal, I thought.

Henry Diltz:
Right. Take it right to begin with. Thatâ€s what you had to do with slide film anyway.

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Henry Diltz:
A little interesting fact I learned later. I learned that this little bar had been there since the 30s. So hard rock meant mining or rock in a hard place. And yet, when we were there, and The  Morrison Hotel album came out, there was a picture of this Hard Rock Cafe on the back. The band gets a call from London one day and the voice says; “We're starting a cafe here in London, would you mind if we use that name?” And they said, “No, go ahead.”

Henry Diltz:
Years later, I started a music photo gallery with a bunch of friends of mine. And we accidentally named it The Morrison Hotel Gallery. So we discovered The Morrison Hotel Gallery and the Hard Rock Cafe. Sort of two empires, within a span of a couple of hours. This is a shot in the Hard Rock Cafe with Jim.

Drew Carey:
What time of year was it because there is a sign that says “Happy New Year” on the side of the bar.

Henry Diltz:
It was December 17, 1969. You got that from Jim a lot. Jim was a quiet man. He wasnâ€t the kind of a wild man people thought he was. He was very quiet. He just liked to observe. He was a real observer, because he was a poet. He liked to just watch what was going on. In this bar. He would buy beer for some of the old guys in there, because he wanted to hear their stories. They'd tell him that they ran away from home, joining the Merchant Marines when they were just 16. And heâ€d just sit there listening to their stories. You knew there were poems going on in his head.

SVZ:
Let's see the other album cover. Letâ€s look at one for Crosby, Stills and Nash.

Henry Diltz:
This was right off of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. These guys were doing their very first album together. I'd known all of these guys for a few years before this. So me and Gary Numan were recording, but they had no photo to put in the trade magazines or the newspapers and they needed to announce that they were recording together. We decided to head out and take some random shots. We weren't looking to walk away with an album cover. At this point, we were just trying to take the publicity shot. Then we found this little funky house and we found that couch. And they jumped on there. We took a bunch of shots. I took this shot right up close framing it just right. I always had to frame it just right. Gary said; “No, back up, back up, get the whole house”. So once again, I backed up all the way across the street. And we took that picture and then sold it as a wraparound album. But as the story goes we looked at these pictures a few days later, they said you know, that's a pretty good shot. That could be our album cover, except we're sitting backwards, because now we're gonna name ourselves Crosby, Stills and Nash, and that's Nash, Stills and Crosby. There was talk about flipping the picture over but then Stephen will be playing backwards. I decided we just go back a couple days later and take the picture again. We all got in the car, drove back and the house was gone.

Drew Carey:
From the photograph that place did look like it was getting ready to be bulldozed.

SVZ:
Man, that's funny. Thatâ€s a funny story.

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SVZ:
Man, that is an amazing shot of David Crosby, Joni Mitchell and Eric Clapton. Talking about Laurel Canyon I highly recommend checking out the documentary Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time on Netflix. Itâ€s a great documentary that really shows the groundbreaking music scene that was happening there at that time. Itâ€s really great seeing so many of your pictures in the two-part doc.

Henry Diltz:
Thanks. Laurel Canyon was a laid back neighborhood with unbelievable musicians but we didnâ€t know where it was going to go. And one by one friends' songs were being played on the radio.

Drew Carey:
Thatâ€s unreal. Henry, you know, I used to shoot sometimes. I was retired for a little bit and during that time I did sports photography. I shot the World Cup in Germany. But that's all I know is how to do that big telephoto lens. Three bodies all the time.

Henry Diltz:
And you're looking for that right moment. You're just here waiting for that one moment.

Drew Carey:
But I'm shooting all these bursts because you want to hit all the action.

Henry Diltz:
Yeah, that's a motor drive for sure.

Drew Carey:
Man, you really have such a good talent for getting those perfect moments. I really admire your great, great photography.

Henry Diltz:
Well, thank you. Of course you only see the one frame on the proof sheet that really did it. Thereâ€s a few outtakes. You donâ€t see all the other shots.

Drew Carey:
I find that a lot of comics and good photographers have a musical background because of the timing. To find these moments when you can just come in, really makes a difference.

Henry Diltz:
Steve Martin is one.

Drew Carey:
Johnny Carson was a drummer. So many comics played. I played music when I was a kid. It's not surprising. You had such a good eye for timing when you go from being a musician.

Henry Diltz:
And sometimes when you shoot and are live in a studio, you go into the room where they're actually recording and you can take pictures if you do it on the beat. Boom, boom, click. And they don't hear it. You have to click between the beats though or they kick you out.

SVZ:
All true, very true. Thank you, Henry. It was our absolute pleasure to have you on the LA Roadshow. Love the stories. Itâ€s been great to talk about your legendary work. Someday, we will have to continue the conversation over a drink at The Morrison Hotel Gallery.

Henry Diltz:
Letâ€s do that. Take care and thank you both.

Drew Carey:
All right, good speaking my brother, take care.