Pleased To Meet You

You may not recognise his name, but you will certainly have met Ethan Russell's work.  A multiple Grammy nominated photographer and director, he is the only photographer ever, to create covers for the Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who. 

He is currently exhibiting fifty photographs taken over the last three decades at The Blink Gallery, London in an exhibition titled, Pleased To Meet You.   Featuring seminal moments with the Beatles' John Lennon, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, as well as a galaxy of other key artists, Pleased To Meet You  is compulsive viewing not only for music and photography lovers, but for anyone interested in recent popular culture. 

A twist of fate propelled Russell into the centre of the 60s pop world after he arrived in London in the summer of 1967, intending to become a writer.  He began working in a hospital for autistic children; ten months later he was photographing The Rolling Stones.

"I came to London having originally flown to Sweden from the US.  I bought a Volvo, drove to Denmark, France, Italy and then London, which definitely seemed more special in 1967 than it feels now."

"I was brought up by an English nanny, and I remember her just being hysterical, especially when we watched the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, so I have always felt very at home in England."

By chance, it was a friend of a friend who introduced him to The Rolling Stones.

"There were quite a few Americans in England at the time, mostly for two reasons.  Either they were very intrigued by the music coming out of the UK which I was, or they were outsiders leaving America because of the Vietnam War."

"Not unlike now, America was polarised over the war and I was disgusted with my country at the time and glad to be out of it.  A friend who had left America overtly to get away from the draft was staying with me, and a friend of his came to stay.  He was interviewing Mick Jagger, and asked if I wanted to take the pictures."

Further work followed, in part, Russell believes, because he was a young American living in 60s London.   

"People always ask me about this, and one of the issues is that the Americans were a great market for the British.  Rolling Stone Magazine was obviously successful because more than anywhere in the British press at the time, they were taking the music seriously, where as the UK equivalent, Melody Maker was trivial in comparison.   I was accepted because in some measure, I represented that as a young American and I think they liked that."

"I also got on well with all the people in Mick Jagger's office, and it's not insignificant that the woman who ran the office is godmother to my children today, so we've been friends for 40 years now."

There is no artifice or arrogance to Russell, and the same can be said of his photographs.  The pictures are in essence an observation, allowing a rare glimpse into the world behind the scenes of mass screaming fans and energetic stage performances.  Because of this they have an intimate quality which transports the viewer across decades, back stage with the Rolling Stones or to the front row of a Doors concert. 

"Fundamentally, at the time, that was what I was capable of.  Because I was not a trained photographer, at that stage in my career, I didn't have a lot of choices.  I just shot what was natural to me, but at the same token, they have lasted very well because they are very honest.  People who like my work, like the fact that they feel they were there."

In 1967 Russell was asked to shoot a cover for the Rolling Stones album, Through The Past Darkly (1967), and the exhibition includes the subsequent shot behind the shattered glass.

"The only rock 'n' roll photograph I had ever taken in my life at the time was of a band called Blue Cheer which my brother managed.  I had shot them with their noses pressed against the glass and it looked kind of weird.  I knew Mick needed a cover and I suggested that idea.  Michael Joseph was an English advertising photographer and he had shot the Beggars Banquet on original 8 x 10 transparencies.  I had never seen anything as beautiful as these and thought to myself, I want to do that."

"Mick didn't like Michael Joseph's high quality images, and he also felt that way about the ones I shot because they were too slick.  So we did a lot to try and make it less sharp and that's where smashing the glass came from.  We threw bricks at thirty six-by-six-foot sheets of glass, and in the end the one that worked was the safety glass because it didn't shatter." 

It was Russell's involvement with the Rolling Stones that lead to him doing the covers for two of The Beatles' albums, Let It Be and their final album, Hey Jude.

It was Russell's involvement with the Rolling Stones that lead to him doing the covers for two of The Beatles' albums, Let It Be and their final album, Hey Jude.

Let It Be (1970)
You can purchase this album from Amazon, priced £8.97
 
"I went down to the filming of Let It Be because they were the same people who had done The Rolling Stones' Rock 'n' Roll Circus a couple of weeks earlier, so I knew everybody.  I ran into Neil Aspinall who asked me to come down for one day and take some shots.  I said I wanted at least three days and when I showed him the pictures, they liked them and asked me to stick around.  I was just the fly on the wall, but that was what I was good at."

"The interesting part about the Let It Be cover is that it is the only cover where they are not a group but four separate people.  That's because I didn't say stand against that wall and let's take a picture, and as a result the cover was made up of individual photographs from the sessions." 

"Hey Jude (1979) was a little bit different.  By that point I was more capable as a photographer.  The session was meant to be in a studio in London and I had multiple shots that I was snapping.  I was going to have them on trampolines, flying about in the air but at the last minute, I got a call from Neil saying it was just going to be at John's house.  There isn't too much to say about it, except it was a little bit listless."

"John Townsend used to say; "Tell us what to do."  I was 23 and a little intimidated by imagining that I would tell people what to do.  I didn't tell the Beatles what to do in that context, I think the energy was reasonably listless.   Hey Jude was not great, they were about to break up and you can kind of see it.  There's a picture that is not in the exhibition, and the Hey Jude album cover is an outtake from that.  I wasn't particularly fond of that picture and I actually took my name off it which sounds like an odd thing to do, but the result is a very honest photograph of how they were feeling and they don't look particularly happy." 

The next cover Russell shot was in a totally different vein to his previous covers, purely because he did direct the members of the band.  This was the The Who's Who's Next cover, and amongst the exhibits is the contact sheet from this day. 

"At the time, Glen Jones was one of the hottest producers on the planet.  He called me up and said; "The Who can't get a cover, do you want to come down?"  I joined them on a gig in the Midlands and as we were driving back, we saw those monoliths by the side of the road.  I had no idea what they were, and Pete drove so fast it was scary, so they were gone in a second.  We decided to turn around and I directed them like Stanley Kubrick 2001 which is what the contact sheet is in the exhibition."

"I don't know what happened but at one point, Pete pissed on the monolith, but the others couldn't, so the other marks are just water.  I found out years and years later that it was an industrial waste site.  It's insane to think it existed but the monoliths were put there to stop that from shifting."

"The head of marketing at Virgin in America said they were so brave to do that cover, but there were no meetings about it.  That just happened and went out.  Now it has kudos as a great rock album cover."

Perhaps it's this lack of corporate interference that makes Russell's photographs feel so real and authentic.  Amongst the collection are two images of Yoko Ono and John Lennon dressed in black hooded capes, in a woodland setting.  In one of the pictures there is a black cat sitting on John's shoulder.   

"The extraordinary thing about that, especially viewed from today's perspective was that John called me and said do you want to come down and take some pictures. I went to his house and walked straight into it.  The door was open and there was no one else there, no one else around at all.  John and Yoko came downstairs, we took photos and I left."   

"It's almost unimaginable by the way things are managed today, but that was my experience over and over again.  When I did the James Taylor cover, I went into a studio and it was James Taylor and me.  There weren't any assistants, nobody from the record company, no management, nobody.  That would be unheard of today."

Russell is writing a book about the 1969 Rolling Stones tour of America which he joined them on, and one of things that is really evident he says, is that culturally, the 60s wasn't the same for America and Britain.  

"I think Americans took it more at face value, probably because we are younger as a nation.  We tend to create allegiances rather quickly and I think Americans really bought it, for lack of a better phrase.  The English had more distance about it, but none of the young British had the same stake as the young Americans, because they weren't about to be drafted to fight a war."

"My opinion is that there was a tremendous amount of value in what the 60s are about, and I'm hard pressed to find the same values in today's culture and I'm pretty sure that the planet is paying a price for it.  I'd much rather have been alive in that period than any that have followed, although there's no doubt in my mind that the drug part of it undermined a lot of it what was valuable."

Pleased To Meet You is on at the Blink Gallery, London until November 26th, 2005.  The nearest tube is Oxford Street and the address is 11 Poland Street, London , W1F 8QA.  Telephone: 020 7439 8585

For further information visit http://www.blinkgallery.com/main.htm