Interesting Bob and Jimi stuff:
emplive.com
Also:
Arts & Entertainment : Friday, January 19, 2001
archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com:80/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=feaemp19&date=20010119
Visual Arts
Photos showcase Elvis, Beatles and
Dylan before fame, and at the brink
By Mark Rahner
Seattle Times staff reporter
An early Elvis sighting:
He's waiting in line to buy his lunch with grizzled old-timers at a
Sheffield, Ala., train station, looking insolently at the camera. They
don't notice him.
This is before Elvis became a velvet painting hanging between Jesus
and JFK.
It's July 1956, and young Elvis Presley is on the way home from the
recording session for "Hound Dog," "Don't Be Cruel" and "Any
Way You Want Me." In another month, the world will be changed
forever, and he'll be mobbed if he stands in any line for anything
again.
And it's also one of the 48 black-and-white images of Elvis, the
Beatles and Bob Dylan at Experience Music Project's new photo
exhibit, "Artist to Icon." It runs through May 1.
The small showing, replacing architect Frank Gehry's models in the
Special Exhibits Gallery, captures candid glimpses of the musicians
at pivotal moments in their lives: just before and at the moments
their careers went supernova and they became cultural forces,
legends or self-caricatures. Some of the images are familiar, like the
young John Lennon from the Beatles' Hamburg club days in 1960
(dramatized in the "Backbeat" film), wearing a leather jacket and
standing in a doorway. Other images are rare:
Dylan rehearsing at a piano before his Philadelphia Town Hall
concert in 1964, at the nexus of his shift from folk to rock; Elvis on
a train, absorbed listening to an acetate of his recording session on
a portable record player; Lennon and George Harrison visiting
original bandmate Stuart Sutcliffe's Hamburg art studio in 1962,
after his death.
"There's tons of photos of the Beatles and Dylan and Elvis," says
EMP curatorial director Chris Bruce, "but to have this sort of insight
into their personalities really before and after they became the
legends that they are is completely unique. And to have the
photographer have that kind of access to stars over a period of time
is pretty unprecedented."
Three of the original photographers will be on hand for a panel
discussion that's free and open to the public, 7 to 9 tonight: Alfred
Wertheimer, hired by RCA in 1956 to document the newly signed
Elvis in black-and-white, partly because the film was cheaper;
Daniel Kramer, who shot Dylan in 1964 and 1965, when Dylan
had seen from the British Invasion the direction he thought music
"had to go"; and Max Scheler, who captured the Fab Four during
the rise of Beatlemania in 1964.
A concert to open the show starts at 9 p.m. in EMP's Sky Church
(free for members, $5 for non-members). Local musicians paying
tribute to Dylan, Elvis and the Beatles will include Chris Ballew (of
the Presidents of the United States of America), the Walkabouts,
Rusty Willoughby (of Flop), Eddie Spaghetti (The Supersuckers),
the Giraffes and Dave Keenan and Friends.
Bruce hopes the event will give people a glimpse behind the
stardom and into the creative process of the holy rock trinity. "It's a
nice foundation for understanding where the music that has affected
our lives came from." |
