I heard a great song on the radio this week and it reminded me of a cool shoot. Back in the beginning of my career, I started contributing photos to CREEM Magazine. It was a very cool time in the business, and CREEM would accept photos of any musical artist, as long as they could make a good caption to go with it. So every month I would have 2 or 3 images in the magazine, and I was starting to gain the trust of the art director. I kept on hoping for an assignment, and finally one day it came! Charlie, the art director, asked me to do a shoot with an English band called Rockpile for the cover. They were a great band, with two legendary musicians- Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds.
So, I headed down to their hotel with all the equipment I could carry, knowing that this was a career making shoot. When I got to the designated room, I unrolled a piece of red background paper and taped it to the wall. The band walked in, and they couldn’t have been nicer (this was their first American magazine cover) and proceeded to do whatever I asked them to do. This wasn’t much, as putting four guys in a rectangle with room for copy isn’t easy, but I walked out of there with some great photos and a month later I had my first magazine cover!
There were many more covers since that day, but, as they say, you always remember the first time, and every time I hear a Rockpile song on the radio, I remember my first major assignment!