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The Rolling Stones
This shot was in Laurel Canyon in October of 1969. I was in a Studio City camera exchange when this big burly guy came up to me and said "Hey, are you a rock photographer?" And I said "Yeah." And he said "You wanna shoot The Stones?" And I said "Sure!" He said "Come up to this address tomorrow afternoon." I got up there maybe three o'clock and they were all still sleeping. So I had to wait around, and then they woke up about four o'clock and then they were eating breakfast about five o'clock and I took a few shots of them -- like Keith Richards with a glass of milk, and a picture of Mick Jagger eating his scrambled eggs. And they sat around. This wasn't like a scheduled publicity thing, it was just sort of a side thing for the publisher that did their songbooks; sometimes they wanna get their own pictures. So he had hired me unofficially. By the time they actually got outside to pose for this picture (which they weren't that happy about), it was dark, too dark to shoot. It was darker than this picture looks because I took a very long time exposure – I was shooting like an eighth of a second. And they knew it was too dark to shoot and I didn't have a flash. I didn't use a flash in those days; I shot entirely available light. So they're not even looking at me, except for the bass player Bill Wyman; he was nice enough to be looking at me, semi-posing. The rest were kinda just looking around like "What the hell is this? This is a joke!" And I didn't want to appear to be an idiot and just say it's too late to take the picture, so to save face I sort of pretended that I was able to take these pictures. Through the miracle of the darkroom we were able to get a few of 'em to actually look alright. It shouldn't have come out, but it did. My big chance to shoot The Rolling Stones, and that's what happened.
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September 2001
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