JPG: Because you’ve taken so many photos of the band in concert and during portrait sessions in the later years, what about riding that fine line of putting in your photos yet not overdoing it?
JB: I have a lot of photos in the book. I have over 50 photos, which is about 25 per cent. Then, we started saying that I have too many photos in the book. Let’s take some of mine out but then we had to find replacements. I had a shot from ’94, I believe, taken in Oakland. It was a live shot, and you could see Phil, Jerry, Bob and Vince. We found a similar shot taken somewhere on the East Coast by Ebet Roberts, who is a New York City-based photographer, and hers was as good as mine. It just felt right to include other people in the book besides me.
We were conscious about me having as many photos in it, but latter-day Grateful Dead I have a pretty solid archive. So, that’s why I have that many photos in the book. I was in agreement with Josh. At the end of the book, we probably removed 15 photos of mine and replaced them with other people’s photos.
JPG: There are times I’ve gone back to my concert photos and noticed shots that I like a lot better than when I originally viewed them. Did you find shots like that for the book?
JB: Because I have so much of my Grateful Dead archive scanned…when I did my [Grateful Dead] book Between the Dark and Light back in 2001. It came out in 2002. We scanned about 2,000 images. So, I did go back and look a little bit at what I had scanned but I didn’t go back to original proof sheets or negatives to look for an outtake that might not have been seen. In hindsight that might have been a good idea because I probably have a handful of images here and there that are kind of cool that could have been dropped in that were slightly different versions.
We definitely were trying to find things that had not been published. All 2,000 of those photos of mine that were scanned were not necessarily ever in any books. So, there are a combination of things that are known by me and things that have never been seen by me.
*JPG: It’s always nice to be at one of your live presentations and hear the background stories behind your photos. In Eyes of the World, other than date and location, the only text is from Graham Nash and Josh Baron. Why aren’t there remembrances by the photographers or more details on the photos?
JB: We talked about all those things at length. We thought that maybe we’d do an index in the back that had short blurbs about photos by photographers but we found it to be a difficult task. A lot of people don’t remember much about what they shot or the back story on them and a lot of photographers are deceased. Jim Marshall is no longer with us. He’s got 25 photos in the book. He’s got the cover of the book, but there is not back story except for what I’m able to glean from the estate, little tidbits of information.
Ultimately, we wanted this to be a book that was photo-driven. We talked about do we want the 2,500 word essay up front and who writes it? Does Blair Jackson write it? David Gans? Gary Lambert? Josh Baron? Does a photographer write it? I thought about writing something for the book and ended up not doing that.
Then, as far as Graham Nash [writing the Foreword], our first choice for writing a foreword was Robert Hunter but Robert’s semi-retired. Robert said, “Best regards. I love the project. I’m just not doing anything right now.” So, he passed. Then, we started going down the list. We actually reached out to Bob Dylan’s management, thinking it was a Hail Mary but we figured we should do it since we both have relationships with Dylan’s manager. He did get back to us and said, “Bob kindly declines.” The only other big name person that we thought about — and Graham was always in the mix, it’s not like he was a substitute or a last resort — I brought up Crosby because he and Nash both had great relationships [with the Dead].
We chose Nash over Crosby…we never asked David but he was on our list. We asked George R.R. Martin from Game of Thrones because he’s a big Deadhead, and we thought that would be an interesting different perspective but he declined because he was writing the new book and the season. We figured that was also a Hail Mary but we thought we’d try.
But Graham, really, was the perfect one — the name that kept coming up — for a number of reasons. He’s a musician that’s had a career as long as the Grateful Dead. He’s been in the public eye for 50 years. So, he has that perspective. He was around and a contemporary in the ‘60s with the Hollies and then, obviously, in the late ‘60s with CSN and CSNY. So, he’s got that perspective. He’s a photography collector and photographer. So, he’s got that perspective. The strongest connection is that he gave Jerry Garcia his Alligator guitar that he played all during Europe ’72. When CSN were recording “Teach Your Children,” Jerry played the pedal steel on that, and as a gift, a thank you, Graham gave him the Alligator Stratocaster, which is the one Jerry guitar that nobody knows where it is.
So, there were all these strong ties, and we always in the back of our minds were like, “Graham could be perfect for this but let’s shoot for Hunter. Let’s shoot for Dylan…” Not that Graham is any less of an important person. We just were trying to figure out what would be the most unique thing for this book.
JPG: There’s that photo of Owsley Stanley with Phil. What about some of the other buried treasures that you found for the book?
JB: One of my favorite ones is this picture of Bob Weir in the face makeup from “Trip or Freak” in ’67. I do work with the Jim Marshall estate. I do editing and digital production and other things with them. Jim was a good friend of mine. So, I was doing research with the estate for a book that they put out a couple years ago called The Haight: Love, Rock, and Revolution, and we looked at about 3,000 proof sheets from the Haight-Ashbury. The way that Jim cataloged all of his work was by artist, and I found those photos on a proof sheet that was labeled Janis Joplin. Since it didn’t have any demarcation that it had any Grateful Dead on it, it was a long forgotten proof sheet. I believe that photo is in the Amir Bar-Lev documentary Long Strange Trip but it’s never been seen in a Grateful Dead book. That was a real nugget find for me.
There’s also a great shot of Garcia in a red turtleneck playing in the Panhandle [in Golden Gate Park] in ’66 that is also used in The Haight book, and I found that slide while doing research for that as well but it’s big and bold in our book. There’s some other really cool Panhandle shots that I found of Jim Marshall’s with this crazy sound system. On the Jim Marshall side of things there was a handful. That Panhandle shot had never been published.
Roger Ressmeyer did a lot of work with the band in the late ‘70s. Love that shot of Mickey Hart at the soundboard. The James Lee Katz shots had never been published or seen in print. There’s the Alvan Meyerowitz shot of Phil Lesh and Owsley Stanley. There’s very very few photographs of Owsley out there. When I showed it to Phil he was like, “Oh my God! This is incredible! I’ve never seen this!” because him and Owsley were super-tight, really, up until the end. Phil might have been the only guy in the band that was still in touch with Owsley right before he died.
There’s a great shot of Kreutzmann in the dressing room where he’s looking out the window at the Fillmore in ’66. That’s a Jim Marshall color shot. I’m pretty sure that one has never been published anywhere. So, there was a lot of cool stuff.
JPG: Was there anything you discovered in the band’s later years?
JB: Oh, yeah. As we got to ’94, ’95, Jerry didn’t look so good. So, we were conscious of that. We wanted people to see Jerry at that time in his life but we didn’t want to show photos where he looked really bad. So, there’s that smiling shot of Garcia from ’95 by Larry Hulst. Larry is an old, old, old Deadhead, Bay area photographer friend of mine who I’ve known forever. I met him, I think, when I first came to California to photograph New Year’s Eve in ’79. He also has a shot in there from ’74 in the book. The [’95] shot is a black and white and he’s got a big smile and he looks relatively healthy for the time. That was something I had never seen before.
Then, there’s all the Michael O’Neill stuff. He has the back cover of the book. Michael didn’t shoot the Grateful Dead a lot. He’s a working photojournalist and he shot them for the cover of Rolling Stone, ’87 “Touch of Grey” era. Josh reached out to him and he was very generous. He showed us all of his proofsheets from that shoot. That series of black and white square portraits that are on page 210 – Jerry smoking the joint, Mickey with the drumstick in his ear…all of this stuff has never been seen; that beautiful portrait of Kreutzmann, full page. So, these were outtakes from that particular shoot.
On 236 there’s that portrait of Garcia that’s shot by William Coupon. That was shot for the cover of Rolling Stone. It was seen in that context but William’s not a Deadhead, just a working photojournalist. So, it’s great to show it in a Grateful Dead book.
JPG: I was going to mention the Robbi Cohen shot from ’87 at Telluride, Colorado of Jerry messing around, holding his ear and leaning over to Bob. That’s always been one of my favorites.
JB: Robbi has a lot of great stuff. I’ve known Robbi for decades and ran into her at Lockn’ and I walked through her gallery that she has there where she sells prints and said, “Send me this, this, this, this….”
(He mentions the double page spread from Buckeye Lake Music Center) That was taken by a friend of mine, Bill Smythe, who I’ve known for decades. Bill shot a lot of wide stuff and lighting stuff for Candace Brightman (Grateful Dead lighting designer). When I was thinking about the book, I thought that I’ve got to reach out to Bill. He’s a slow internet responder. One of those guys who only checks his email once a week or every two weeks, doesn’t live or die by email like many of us. He sent me pages of slides. I just love this photo because it shows the scale of what it became towards the end.
Love the shot of Hornsby with the accordion with Jerry. That’s a Robbi Cohen shot. The two drummers on page 264, that’s a Bill Smythe shot. Because he was shooting from the soundboard a lot, working with Candace, and he had a long lens, he was able to get up high enough to get that kind of a shot.
Even the photo of the band on the Index page, a David Gahr photo, that was the band’s first New York appearance. I don’t think it’s ever been published. When I showed the book to Phil, he looked at it and was like, “Aaaaah! Café au Go-Go.” He knew right where it was from.
JPG: Last thing. The book title. You could have called it many things such as Grateful Dead: A Visual History or whatever. Any significance to using Eyes of the World ?”
JB: Really, Josh came up with title and I went with the flow. (laughs) He liked “Eyes of the World” for a long time. When we first started working on this book, for the first six months, we just called it “The Big Book of the Grateful Dead.”
Eyes of the World, it’s got a photography reference without being a photography reference.
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