Roger Ebert has always been one of my favorite writers and, in my opinion, the best film critic writing in America today.

But……… I have to heartily disagree with some of what he wrote in his film review in Friday’s (1/29) Chicago Sun Times.

His report was from Sundance, where a new film was premiered. It is titled “Smash His Camera” and profiles Ron Galella, the king of the paparazzi’s.

His review starts out:

“He is a viper, a parasite, a stalker, a vermin. He is also, I have decided, a national treasure.”  He goes on to say “I disapprove of him, but enjoy his work.”

He describes a press conference where Robert Redford was asked about the film. “He told a tale of shooting “Three Days of the Condor” on location outside of the New York Times Building. To elude Galella, Redford entered one end of the building, raced through its second floor to the other end, slipped ito his trailer, disguised his stand in as a double, and had him run to his car to be driven away. He was able to enjoy the sight of Galella hurling himself onto the limo to shoot through its back window.”

My thoughts:

Was he describing a photographer or a person committing assault on a public street?

Can any of what Galella does be described as photography?

I ran into Ron Galella twice. The first time was in the photo pit at Madison Square Garden. There were maybe 40 photographers calmly waiting for the show to start, Galella among them. When the house light went down and the band hit the stage, people started maneuvering for position. There was plenty of room, and the usual ballet of people with cameras walking around, in front and in back of each other was taking place, all with a certain degree of civility. Half way through the first song, I felt a large elbow crash into my shoulder, knocking me into the barricade. It was Ron Galella, wanting my spot and certainly not caring if I wanted to give it up.

The second time was during the Rolling Stones tour of 1989. On an off night, someone threw the band a party that everyone on the tour was invited to attend. When I was ready to leave, I realized that I was walking out right behind Mick Jagger, who was immediately assaulted by a large group of paparazzi. Being the professional celebrity that Mick is, he stopped and smiled for everyone so that they could all get their shots. He then entered the back of a limo. That is where Ron Galella pounced! Standing right next to the window that Mick was closest to, he repeatedly took the exact same shot, a close up of Mick’s profile, a large flash going off each time, trying to provoke Mick into turning toward him, to no avail.

So the moral of the story, to me, is- Is Galella even a photographer, or just a thug on the street attacking celebrities for profit? And what does that do for the photographers that actually care about the quality of their images, and who think that everyone, even if they are famous, deserve the right to go out in public without being attacked (and then having someone profit greatly from the attack). Is it any wonder that most celebrities equate the word “photographer” with negative thoughts. And….as far as I can tell, Ron Galella pretty much started it all!

When I was young, one of my goals was to someday work with some of the blues greats I went to see at clubs around Chicago. YIKES! Guess it happened.

I have spent a lot of the month down at Buddy Guy’s club Legends listening to an amazing musician at the height of his power. It is no wonder that people like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and recently John Mayer cite Buddy as one of their biggest influences. Some of the nights this month I find myself crouching in front of the stage forgetting to shoot photos because I am listening so intently.

Last night (1/23) in the middle of his set, he brought Mud Morgenfield (Muddy Waters son) up on stage to do a song with him. It brought back thoughts of the past- Mud sings like Muddy and even kind of looks like Muddy.

Last week my friend Matthew Skoller called and asked if  he could bring a group of guys over to my house for a photo shoot. They had recorded a CD late last year, and it was nominated for a Grammy. They needed some publicity shots. So on Thursday (1/21) some great blues musicians started appearing at my house. First Billy Branch, one of the great harmonica players in Chicago. Next Carlos Johnson, a blues guitarist that I had photographed many times around Chicago. Next was Billy Boy Arnold, a major part of almost all of Bo Diddley’s great songs from the 60’s. Next in the door was Lurrie Bell, son of Carey Bell- Muddy Waters harp player for many years, and one of Chicago’s greatest guitar players. Finally, to round out the group, John Primer (Muddy Waters guitar player for many years) rang the bell. For the next two hours, an amazing discussion –and a few beers- was passed around the room. (And many pictures were taken).

This whole month is reinforcing in my mind why I still do this crazy job, and why sometime it could be the greatest job in the world!

Recently I was sent an article from a Canadian website concerning a rights grab by the Vancouver Olympics.

It seems that professional singer and songwriter Nicole Scoffield wrote a composition called Sea to Skyway about the road that links Vancouver and Whistler, which come February, will be the main sites of Olympic sport events. Scoffield sent the song to VANOC, as well as to B.C. premier Gordon Campbell and Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson.

She got a shock when officials at VANOC sent her a contract demanding she give up ownership and royalties — even before they would listen to it.

This got me to do some research some other Canadian websites

TechDirt has some great stuff about what the Vancouver Olympic Committee is doing concerning controlling rights to certain words such as Olympic!

So after living through the years of  discussion about whether or not the Olympics would be good for Chicago, and then having the whole point rendered moot by the Olympic committee’s rejection of my fair city, I am glad that I will never have to deal with that mess. Just the everyday mess of the music business!!!

On an unrelated note, just photographed the mighty Anvil last week. The publicists (Heidi Ellen Robinson and Julie Arkenstone) couldn’t have been nicer and more professional. One email set up the shoot and the photo pass and a perfect followup email with all the details was sent in plenty of time to print out and bring to the gig. Anyone who has ever worked with Heidi knows that she is one of the great ones, and anyone who works for her is learning form the best. Makes me long for the good old days!!

The question I am asked the most is “How do I get photo passes to concerts?” There is no simple answer. But one of the most important principals is DON’T START BY TRYING TO GET A PASS FOR THE ROLLING STONES!!!

Start small- every band who is playing arenas was at one time traveling around in a van, playing in clubs, usually having no problem with people photographing them.

A prime example:

In 1981, I was asked to photograph a 10 day music festival in downtown Chicago called Chicagofest. Many stages, and at least 4 bands per day per stage.

On July 30^th I went down to the rock stage in the middle of the afternoon and found a bunch of really cute women sunning themselves on the lakefront before they played their set. I looked at my schedule and found out that they were called the Go-Go’s. They were more than glad to pose for some pictures before they went on, and we remain friends to this day.

A little more than a week later, on August 9^th, I went to the same stage to photograph Jimmy Vaughn, who had just quit the Fabulous Thunderbirds to go solo. He told me I should catch his brother Stevie Ray, who was opening for him. WOW! Stevie invited me to his show at a club that night, where I did some photos of him. We remained friends until his tragic death in 1990.

January brings incredibly cold weather to Chicago (10 below zero wind chill today!!) and the one guy that could warm up any cold day anywhere. That would be the amazing Buddy Guy, who spends most of the month of January playing in the club he owns here (Buddy Guy’s Legends). For 4 out of the 7 nights of each of the January weeks, the epicenter of the Chicago music scene. There should be a rule in the music business that everyone who wants to be in a band and play in front of people should have to watch Buddy- to learn how a professional does it. Each night he proves that along with being one of the greatest living guitar players on the planet, he is also a master showman, spending almost as much time wandering through the club playing and singing as he spends time on stage. This almost always includes a trip outside (Remember- January- Cold) and occasionally a trip into one of the clubs washrooms- just to check that everything is clean and sanitary!

I had the opportunity last month to photograph him for the cover of Downbeat magazine. As per usual, he wanted to do the photo shoot at 10 AM- imagine a rock musician wanting to get up that early- and took great pride on the fact that he beat me to the club that morning. He was very gracious and did whatever was needed to get the shot we wanted

So, I won’t get much sleep for the next month, but it will be worth it!

For the end of the year, I will not rip on anyone in the music business (Will probably start again in 2010, but you never know!)

Instead I want to talk about something that is taking up most of my time these days. About five years ago, my friend Alice Peacock and I started a not for profit called Rock For Reading. We do two things:

1.We give monetary grants to small after school reading programs and small organizations that help with literacy issues in the Chicago area. At this time we have made monetary grants totaling $250,000.00.

2. We acquire books from book drives and from publishers and supply them to schools and after school reading programs in the area, many times stipulating that the books need to go home with the students- sometimes the first books that the child has ever owned! To date, we have donated 425,000 books. We recently received a donation of 93,000 books from a publisher in Minnesota, which will be sorted and inventoried this week and distributed after the first of the year. Also, I have just come home from the second of two days of driving around in a rental van (through a driving blizzard yesterday) picking up 300 boxes of books from 21 Borders book stores in the Chicago area. Borders held a book drive between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and we are the recipients of all the books. Total should be about 30,000 books!! They will be sorted and distributed after the first of the year.

Doing this makes me feel like I am doing something positive in the world. It also makes me forget about all the morons in the music business that I have no interest in dealing with! (Couldn’t resist!!)

Happy New Year!!!

Early in my career, I met a person that I still to this day think was the greatest publicist in the history of the music business. His name was Paul Wasserman, and during his career, he worked with the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Jacksons, Tom Petty, The Who, and later in his career- U2 and Depeche Mode. He passed away in 2007 after his career unraveled at the end. But during the active part of his career, he was the best there was. He had the incredible ability to say NO in such a way that no one went away angry, something he had to do often, as most of his clients were such big stars that they didn’t need to ask for publicity, they had to manage it.

Probably the most important piece of information he ever told me (during a flight in a small plane that we all thought was going to crash in central Florida while on the road with Tom Petty) was this:

There are two kinds of publicists-

The good ones– they are the ones that tell their clients what they should do, as the client is paying a lot of money for the publicists advice!

The bad ones– they ask the client what they want to do (when of course the client will agree to do as little as they can get away with). These kind of publicists are basically just glorified secretaries!

Unfortunately, these days there are many more of the second kind than the first kind in the business today. When I ask for more access than what is usually given, more often than not the response will be, “I wish I could help you, but the band doesn’t agree.”

A good publicist talks the band into granting more access, because he or she knows that this will help the band.

Final thought: When we were flying in that small plane, through a thunderstorm, toward Gainseville, Florida, to meet Tom Petty for his first major hometown concert, one of the thoughts going through my head was:

Obituary-

Legendary music publicist Paul Wasserman dies in plane crash, music photographer also perishes!

In 1992, a Canadian film crew made a documentary called Blast Em. It was an indepth look at the Paparazzi scene at that time (in the days when paparazzis were just assholes, not MONUMENTAL assholes. The film was broken into three parts, one exploring a Hollywood guy who followed movie stars such as Sally Kirkland around awards shows, another exploring New York based photographer Nick Elgar, who is quoted in the film saying that stars such as Robert DeNiro have no right to any privacy, as they are celebrities, explaining why it is Ok to sneak through the kitchen at the New York Hilton to crash a private event to which he was not invited  to get photos of DeNiro eating and then harassing him for blocks as DeNiro was trying to walk home after the event (something most major celebrities cannot even try to do today).

The third part focused on Victor Malafronte, a New York “photographer” who, at the beginning of the film set out to get a photograph of Michael J. Fox, his wife Tracy and their newborn child (apparently, they have no right to privacy, either). He built a World War Two style bunker in Central Park across the street from the building that the Fox’s lived in, supplied it with his equipment, food and drink, blankets etc. and proceed to wait a few days for the family to leave their house. He runs after them with a camera and very long lens, gets in front of them and takes an incredibly lousy, out of focus photo of the Fox’s. The photo commanded about $100,000 from a tabloid.

Moving forward to today’s economy, last month www.thedailybeast.com wrote a blog post exploring pricing of celebrity photos. Their conclusion was:

The price for paparazzi photos has plummeted 31 percent, according to an exclusive Daily Beast survey. Is this the end of the celebrity economy?

They continue:

Recently the celebrity media bubble has burst—destroyed by the recession, among other factors—leaving hordes of paparazzi, the agencies that employ them, and the magazines and Web sites that showcase their wares, facing a new, very bleak reality.

Brandy Navarre of the X17 agency calls this new world, “the Post Britney Era,” seeing as it was Britney’s much-publicized downfall that coincided with, and fueled, the paparazzi industry. In 2007, paparazzi agencies estimated that 20 percent of their coverage was devoted to the fast-falling pop star. X17 had 15 photographers devoted exclusively to Spears.

Real photographers can only hope that this trend continues!

My theory concerning music critics:

A music critic cannot like anything that is popular.

Reason 1: They have set themselves up as “experts” on popular music culture, and as such, have assigned themselves the task of advising the rest of us about what is “cool and hip” and letting us know what new band is going to be the “next big thing.” They also have the self assigned task of letting us know what is relevant.

Reason 2: To justify their jobs, they have to “find” new artists before the public does to justify their job and quantify their hipness.

Nobody ever seems to be keeping score to determine how many times their “next big thing” ends up working at a fast food restaurant within a year!

In his latest book, Chuck Klosterman, in my opinion the best popular culture writer working today, while talking about a journalist questioning ABBA’s relevance in the world in 2001:

“I suppose it is true if you use the word relevance like most people who regularly write about music, but it is false if you think about how the world actually operates. As a rule, people who classify art as “irrelevant” are trying to position themselves above the entity; it’s a way of pretending they’re more in step with contemporary culture than the artist himself, which is mostly a way of saying they can’t find a tangible reason for disliking what something intends to embody. Moreover, the whole argument is self-defeating: If you classify something as “irrelevant,” you’re (obviously) using it as a unit of comparison against whatever is “relevant,” so it (obviously) does have meaning and merit. Truly irrelevant art wouldn’t even be part of the conversation.”

There was a time when music critics had a pretty good track record in finding and exposing good new bands. There was a large quantity of publications, both local and national, who assigned a lot of column inches to new music. That era seems to be disappearing. Seems that most new music is discovered on the internet. Column inches are getting harder and harder to come by, and are mostly taken up by superstars and the “flavor of the month.”

More next week.

In July of 2005 I was asked by Chicago Magazine to photograph a new band from Chicago called Fall Out Boy. They were just starting to make a name for themselves, and were on the Van’s Warped Tour. A traveling collection of bands that traveled the country in a caravan playing in the parking lots of concert venues. The magazine gave me the number of their publicist at Island Def Jam Records in NYC, and told me to try to get a portrait and a good live photograph of the band, as they were going to use two photos, one to illustrate the article and one for the table of contents.

So I called the publicist to set it up (about a week before the show). After I introduced myself and explained what I needed (to do a quick photo shoot with the band, and to shoot their whole set the following weekend), this conversation ensued:

Publicist: What was your name again

Me: Paul Natkin

P: Have you ever done any work in the music business before?

M: Yes I have done a few things in the music business.

P: Then you should know that what you are asking for is absolutely impossible!

M: Actually, I have been doing this for 33 years, and it is pretty easy to set up!

P: Sorry, there is nothing that I can do for you.

M: Can I call you a few days before the show and see if there is anything that can be done?

P: Sure

The day before the show, I called her to see if anything had changed. The conversation continued:

P: What was your name again?

M: Paul Natkin

P: I am sorry, but what you are asking for cannot be set up. The best I can do is give you the cell number of the road manager. If  he answers his phone, see if he can do anything. Good luck!

So I called the road manager, expecting no call back as the tour was in Detroit that day and traveling all night to Chicago. Ten minutes later, he called me back. When I explained the situation to him, his response was:

“I don’t know what she is talking about. We just sit on our bus all day waiting to go on. Shouldn’t be any problem getting the guys together to do a photo shoot.”

The next day, I went out to the venue, did a really great photo shoot with the band, who couldn’t have been nicer, and later that day shot their entire set.

When I sent the disc of photos to the magazine, they called me and asked me to bill them double what we had agreed upon for the shoot, as there were so many photos to choose from that they were going to increase the article from 2 pages to 4 pages and use more photos (They ended up using 6 photos)

All was well that ended well, no thanks to the publicist!