As we begin The Days Between, the stretch that runs from Jerry Garcia’s birthday (August 1, 1942) to his passing (August 9, 1995), we revisit this recent conversation with Jay Blakesberg.
When he's not busy capturing moments at music festivals and concerts, doing portrait or video work or giving his slideshow presentations across the country, renowned photographer Jay Blakesberg creates the next in his series of fine art coffee table books. The latest, Jerry Garcia: Secret Space of Dreams, deals with his lengthy period taking pictures of the Grateful Dead beloved leader. The 208-page hardcover book features 139 photos of Garcia that run from the middle of his career with the Grateful Dead and covers the last third of his life.
“My Garcia book, believe it or not, is my 15th coffee tablebook of my music photography, which blows my mind,” Blakesberg said during ourconversation.
Many of the shots come from his days as a fan making his wayto the front of the stage while others find Blakesberg in the first decade ofhis career taking portraits of the musician, behind-the-scenes shots and Garciainteracting with others. Secret Spaceof Dreams begins with an image from the first time he brought a camera to aDead show -- September 2, 1978 at Giants Stadium – and continues,chronologically, to the last frames from the April 1995 making of the “SmokeGets in Your Eyes” music video.
Besides the photos, the book contains several generations of musicians pontificating on the lasting influence of Garcia and what he means to them. That includes a foreword by John Mayer, introduction by David Gans, afterword by Dave Schools and essay by Trixie Garcia. Quotes are also peppered throughout from the likes of Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, David Crosby, Jim James, Carlos Santana, Trey Anastasio, Robert Hunter, Jackie Greene, Jorma Kaukonen, Country Joe McDonald, David Grisman, the Core Four members of the Grateful Dead -- Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart.Blakesberg is promoting the mid-October book release with a number of slideshow presentations and book signings including Oct. 29 at Bahr Gallery in Oyster Bay, NY, Oct. 30 at FTC at the Warehouse in Fairfield, CT, Nov. 2 at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, NY and Nov. 3 at the ACE Hotel New York in New York City
For more information on the book, go to www.blakesberg.com. For more informationon the events, check out his social media pages -- Jay Blakesberg Photographyon facebook, jayblakesberg on twitter and Instagram.
JPG: As I was goingthrough Jerry Garcia: Secret Space ofDreams, I noticed all the different years and places covered. I waschecking the index to see what photos are from shows I attended. Also, it mademe wonder how many shows of the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Band did youattend?
JB: I think I saw the Grateful Dead right around 250 times and the Jerry Band,whatever, a few dozen.
JPG: And then, howmany did you attend as a professional photographer in the pit with anassignment?
JB: Minimal. A handful. You know, the great thing about theGrateful Dead was they always allowed you to bring a camera, a professionalcamera. What is the definition of a professional photographer, I’m not reallysure anymore? (slight laugh)
JPG: That's why Imentioned a photographer with an assignment in the photo pit.
JB: Yeah. Dylan and the Dead, I was a fan at the rail, andthat was in '87. I don't think I started getting into the pit until maybe ‘89or ‘90, like actually in the pit. Before that, everything I shot wasfrom wherever I could be.
JPG: I followed that same route as well.That's why it's always amazing, the shots one gets when you have the approachand the stubbornness of “I'm going to capture this.” Now, let’s go the originsof the book. You mentioned about this when we talked your previous book, Eyes of the World: Grateful Dead Photography1965-1995.
JB: The last Grateful Dead book, Eyes of the World, I wrote with Josh Baron, one-time editor of Relix magazine who has moved on to otherthings in the ticketing world. We self-published that. That was a monumentaltask. There are 60 different photographers in that book. Josh was like, “Ithink we should do one with Garcia and reach out to the same photographers andget different images.” I was like, “That's a great idea.” Then, Josh had someother family stuff come up and some work stuff come up and he felt like hecouldn't put the time into it that he needed to put into a Garcia book.
And I had been thinking that I wanted to do a Garcia bookfor many years. WhenJosh backed out of the big book that we weretalking about doing, which was similar to Eyesof the World with 40, 50, 60 photographers, definitive from the beginning.
My Jerry Garcia book is not just pictures of Jerry Garcia. It's pictures of Jerry Garcia playing with the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia Band, hanging out with Country Joe McDonald or Carlos Santana or Bill Graham or whoever it is. My only prerequisite was that Jerry be in every photo. It didn't matter who he was in the photo with. So, we were going to do that same approach and just come up with different photos than what was in Eyes of the World and focus just on Jerry.
So, I ended up doing it myself and doing it with my photos. Looking through, flipping through the book, you'll see full pages that are just a single quote from somebody. Those words help tell the story about who this man was along with the pictures. I could have easily done a book that was 208 pages that's just photo, photo, photo, photo, photo or four photos on a page or 10 photos on a page but I didn't want to do that. I wanted to do a book that had impact, visually and emotionally.
I think that this book does that because of the combinationof the photographs and the words of all these different artists. There's quotesthat I found that are from Jerry, quotes from Bobby, Billy, Mickey, Phil butthen there's quotes from people like Jeff Chimenti who never played withGarcia, Oteil Burbridge, Luther Dickinson, Jackie Greene and Warren HaynesandGreg Ormont of Pigeons Playing Ping Pong.There's all these incrediblemusicians out there that were influenced and inspired by Garcia. Those arepeople that I reached out to to get some words from because underneath all ofthis whole jam community Jerry is somewhat this big thick, giant root that hasbeen feeding off of and making all these branches of all these incrediblepeople for decades now.
JPG: Some of themwere very touching; the Jeff Chimenti quote, what Dave Schools wrote.
JB: The Schools one was great. Schools wrote the Afterwordfor the book, and Dave’s a big Deadhead. Schools wrote the Forward for one ofmy LOCKN’ books that I did a few years ago. Me and Dave are good pals. He's avery funny articulate guy. If you follow him on Instagram, you could see a lotof that prankster-ness in him. So, I knew that he would be a great choice towrite an essay for the book.
I didn't know if John Mayer would write the Forward or not.I asked John. John is a good communicator but it took awhile for him tounderstand what I was asking him to do. And John also had to think hard aboutthat because it puts a lot of attention on him in the Grateful Dead world wherehe doesn't always want that kind of attention. John is obviously an attentiongetter because of who he is but he's always been very very cautious of…hedoesn't want to be thought of as someone replacing Jerry Garcia or trying to beJerry Garcia. That's not who he is and he's very, very aware of that. Heis a very self-aware person.
I asked him to write a forward from the standpoint of aguitar player who was a phenomenal guitar player, as you know John is, and assomeone who's also become one of many people in that scene, whetheryou're doing it with Furthur or The Dead or Dead & Co. or Phil and Friendsor RatDog or Dark Star Orchestra or JRAD or Jerry's Middle Finger or the GarciaProject or the list goes on and on and on and on with hundreds and hundreds andhundreds of bands out there that are Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia tributeprojects. So, there are a lot of people that have and continue to stand in thatslot, stand in those shoes, playing those guitar licks whether you're doing itin front of five people in a small bar or 50,000 people at Citi Field in Dead& Co. All of the people get to say something about playing that music andwhat it means. It just so happens that right now John Mayer is the guy that'sdoing it in maybe the biggest band of them all.
John and I have become friends and he agreed to write it.Even the other night, when I saw him and gave him a copy of the book and he'slike, “Oh yeah, I gotta re-read the Forward. I know I was happy with it becausewhen I finished writing it I was crying a little bit.” I'm like, “I was crying,too. You fucking nailed it.” So, I'm thrilled to have John's words in there.
Of course, we have David Gans who wrote an incredibleIntroduction and we all know who David is -- musician, Grateful, Deadhistorian, etc.
And I coaxed some good words out of Trixie Garcia. She hasreally come into her own in terms of really helping preserve and perpetuate thelegacy of her father who in a lot of ways was an absent father for her but shehas embraced it in a very different way over the last few years in terms ofbeing a really big part of this community. She did an incredible job, giving mea really nice one page essay about being Jerry Garcia’s daughter.
JPG: So, you got John and Dave and DavidGans and Trixie…I'm sure you could've got someone from the Core Four to write aforward or something, more than just adding a quote from them. Was it a senseof the photos were of Jerry but the words were of the next generation to showthe continuation of what the music and the man influenced?
JB: I thought a little tiny bit that it would be nice to get, like you said,this next generation or once removed generation. I thought about askingWeir…Phil and I are pretty tight and Mickey and I are pretty tight…I just feltlike I didn't want to single out any one of them and exclude any of them, youknow what I mean? So, I just went with quotes and all those quotes from thefront the band members I found online and other books and other sources. Ididn't want to bother them, you know what I mean? They get asked so often to doso many things and they said so much about the subject already that are scatteredthroughout the pages of the interwebs that I knew that I could find a bunch ofreally great stuff and if I brought it altogether in this one book, it wouldtake on a new life and some new meaning. Here's a quote from “Relix.” Here’s aquote from “Rolling Stone.” Here's a quote from “The Golden Road” magazine,whatever it might be. All those quotes from, from Bob, Phil and Mickey werethings that I found.
I just thought it would be better to get some otherperspectives in there. I don't think John Mayer, he has spoken about Jerry inthe press and he's done interviews with Gans on his “Tales from the GoldenRoad” on SiriusXM but I really don't think that he has expressed his feelingsanywhere the way that he did it in the Forward and in this new book. Maybeyou'd know differently but I think it's a pretty original approach and somereally, really beautiful words about him.
JPG: If that wasn'tyour intention to do that, it still offers more resonance that Jerry’sinfluence runs through generations. Speaking of resonating moments andlife-changing events, your first Grateful Dead show was Sept. 3, 1977 atEnglishtown, New Jersey.
JB: Correct.
JPG: I know youposted on social media that photo of you with the bong resting on your chest.Did you bring your camera that day?
JB: No, I didn't own a camera. I was15-years-old. You don't have a lot ofserious interests at 15 years old.
JPG: That brings meto this. You're in the crowd at other shows. You're taking photos of theGrateful Dead. Did that influence you at all as far as your career choice to bea concert and portrait photographer?
JB: In the beginning I really wasn't taking pictures of the band ‘cause Iwanted to make some prints and throw ‘em on my bedroom wall. I was justcreating my own memorabilia. I was giving them to my friends. It took a fewyears before I realized that maybe this was my calling. This is what I wantedto do. This is what I really loved.
Also, in the late 1970s, early 1980s, you couldn'tnecessarily go to a photography school and walk out with a degree and be like,“Okay, I'm a photographer now. Start paying me money.” You know what I mean? It's one of those creative fields that youhad to create your own reality and had to work 10 times harder than anybodyelse, just like being a musician. You could go to the Berkeley School of Musicand be the greatest musician in the world and you could be selling insurancetoday. It's the same thing for photographers and writers and filmmakers andanything else out there in the creative realm.
I definitely was thinking in the early ‘80s, “I would loveto make a living as a photographer as opposed to getting paid $7 for a photohere in this newspaper, $12, $15 for a photo in this magazine" but I hadno idea how to approach that, create that, find that. It wasn't until I moveddown to the [San Francisco] Bay area in ‘85, and by '87 started really tryingto figure out how to make a little bit more money as a photographer because Ididn't know what else I wanted to do. I knew I loved photography and that'swhen I really started pushing hard in terms of showing my work to othermagazines and trying to get work as a professional photographer.
JPG: During that period you were takingthe Grateful Dead and Dead-related projects but what was so great for someonelike me who loves the Dead as well as being a major alternative rock fan, youtook photos of all those alt-rock bands in San Francisco clubs. It became thisgreat historical overview that showed you were there for the music notjust specifically the Dead.
JB: Absolutely. A couple things. First of all, I loved all that music. Ireally loved being against the stage, being crushed at a Jane's Addiction showor the Pixies or the Butthole Surfers or the Red Hot Chili Peppers or whoeverit might be. That was a really exciting time for music. There's somuch incredible stuff coming out from everywhere.
At that same time in the late ‘80s, ‘87, ‘88, ‘89, themainstream media really didn't give a shit about the Grateful Dead. So, eventhough I was really getting back into the Dead and shooting the Dead and wasinto it, I couldn't really make a lot of money doing it. There was anassignment here, an assignment there, a story here, a story there but it wasreally the way I was making a living was shooting magazine covers and featurestories and working with the alt-rock bands such as the Chili Peppers and thebands of that time.
That music, that time, that is 30 years ago.I'm sure you follow me on Instagram and probably saw that post I did of a portraitI did of the Chili Peppers on Sept. 16, 1989 for the cover of “BAM” magazine.That is 30 years ago. (laughs) Don't you feel like "Blood Sugar SexMagik" came out yesterday? Don’t youfeel like Louder Than Love” isa brand new record from Soundgarden? “Been Caught Stealing” is still on MTV.All of that stuff is just…you think of the Grateful Dead and you think, “Oh,1960s. 50 years.” You think of Jane's Addiction, you think, “Oh yeah, they'restill around." New band, Chili Peppers! But that shit was 30 fuckingyears ago, dude. (laughs)
JPG: Right, but that’s all stillrelevant to me.
JB: Me too. I don’t shoot as much of it because of a whole host of reasons, notthat I don’t want to. But, I've made my name in the jam world and that's whereI've got my connections and my people and my access, and I love every minute ofbeing at LOCKN' and shooting those bands and mingling with those people. Maybe,if I pursued just shooting alt-rock and gave up on the hippie lifestyle andstarted eating pop tarts for breakfast and smoking cigarettes maybe I'd be justshooting alt-rock bands and old punk bands. (laughs)
JPG: Around that same time was one ofyour big breaks when you took the photo of Brent Mydland in Washington D.C. Andthen, didn’t you get a tip about a Grateful Dead video shoot?
JB: There were a couple of things that happened around that time. The BrentMydland thing, I was a teenager. I was 17-years-old and stumbled upon BrentMydland and Bob Weir backstage at a No Nukes rally on the front steps of theCapitol in Washington D.C. That photo I took of Brent was one of the firstphotos that Deadheads saw of Brent in Relixmagazine maybe six months after I took it. That's how quick informationtraveled back then.
I would say that one of my big big breaks wasshooting a free U2 concert in downtown San Francisco when they were filming themovie "Rattle and Hum.” We had heard a rumor it was going to happenbecause they ended up using the Grateful Dead sound system for that show. Itwas the UltraSound people. That was on 11/11/87.
A week before that, 11/5/87, we had heard a rumor theGrateful Dead were going to be filming a music video for “Throwing Stones"somewhere in Oakland. I lived in Oakland, California at the time. We heard itwas going to be an abandoned high school in Oakland. It just so happened thatthere was an abandoned high school directly across the street from myhouse, the apartment I was living in, and that's where they were filming. Iliterally walked out my front door, crossed Martin Luther King Way and was atthe high school and walked on set and pretended I belonged there all day long.After about five hours, somebody said to me, “Who are you shooting for?” And Isaid, “Relix magazine." And they were like, "Okay." Nobodyquestioned it. Nobody said, “Who's your editor? Where's your assignment? Whatare you doing here? What's your name?” That's what it was like back then. Itwas different. This is a band that was exploding on MTV and had the biggestrecord of their career and I could just walk on a video set and pretend Ibelonged.
JPG: The good ol’ days. Was that yourJerry Garcia photo from that shoot where he's holding a sign and everyone'sco-opted it so the sign reads "I Need a Miracle” or other things?
JB: Yeah. Exactly. One of the crew guys on the video shoot took this piece ofpaper, cardboard, ripped it and wrote on it Happy New Year, handed it to Garciaand said, “Hey man, can I get a shot for my New Year's card?" I wasstanding right there so I got the shot also. I'm pretty sure the guy who tookthe other picture did it with an Instamatic or something like that.
I actually was the first person to butcher that thing.Pre-computer, I took a piece of white paper and cut it out with an Exacto bladewith all the rough edges and rubber cemented it on an 8x10 black and whiteprint and I hand wrote on it, “I need a miracle ticket.” So, that was one ofthe first ones. It's been everything from Happy Birthday, Happy New Year, HappyHanukkah, Happy Christmas, Happy Easter, Happy Passover, Happy Graduation,Happy Life, song lyrics, and everything in-between.
JPG: That's what I thought. That'sfunny. This nicely segues to bringing up your first portrait session withJerry. Was it nerve-wracking or had you done enough around the band that youwere just focused on the work at hand?
JB: My first portrait session was with Garcia in ‘91, and it was for “TheGolden Road" magazine, which is a Grateful Dead fanzine. Blair Jackson,the editor/publisher of that was doing an interview with Garcia and [Robert]Hunter and asked me if I wanted to do the photographs. By that point I hadalready been doing portrait work just about three years at that point; studiolighting, shooting with 35mm as well as medium format, Hasselblad, stuff likethat. So, I wasn't necessarily nervous about being with Garcia. I was excitedand I was very professional and could handle being around big rock stars 'causeI've been shooting rock stars at that point for a few years.
What I wasn't expecting is for Garcia and Hunter to be socompletely uninterested in the creative process of a photograph. They justwanted to go on and do the interview, go have lunch, whatever, and I was tryingto make a brilliant photograph because our job as portrait photographers wasalways to get the brilliant photograph because if you didn't get the brilliantphotograph why would that photo editor, art director, magazine, record company,whatever it is, ever hire you again?
JPG: Right. Exactly.
JB: We always didn’t get the brilliant photo but we always triedto. That was the goal. Always. Fuck mediocrity. Go for the best, right? or thebest that you can do in your situation. So, I was expecting to go in there andspend 20, 30 minutes with Garcia and shoot color film, black and white film, thisformat and that format, 35mm, medium format, hang out, shoot the shit…I got inthere and they gave me three minutes with him and I blasted through 35mm color,black and white. I think I shot a roll-and-a-half of black and white and half aroll of color and – boom -- that was it. The shoot was done. But, out of thatshoot I got some of my most iconic photos of Jerry Garcia including the coverof this book.
JPG: That's from that session?
JB: Yeah.
JPG: I did notrealize that because, obviously, the one in the book of Jerry and Hunter…
JB: Same session. January 31, 1991. In ‘93 when I was shooting Garcia for thecover of “Acoustic Guitar" magazine in David Grisman’s living room in MillValley I knew at that point if I needed to keep Garcia occupied and in front ofthe lens, the best thing to do was to let him play music. So, Garcia's outthere playing songs and singing songs with Grisman, and he sat for me for 45minutes while I was photographing him and got a ton of great stuff.
JPG: Was that something you justrealized or did someone suggest that to you?
JB: I think I just realized it ‘cause I thought once he had that guitar, whenhe was posing with a guitar it was a little bit different than when he wasactually playing the guitar and I could just sense it that when he played hecould sort of ignore me and he can look in my direction and he can play songsbut it didn't necessarily make him want to run.
JPG: You could say some people, for lackof a better way of putting it, love the camera more than other people. Maybeit's shyness. Maybe it's just feeling that there are better things to do.
JB: By 1993, Garcia had already been in the public eye for a solid 28 years.We'll call it ‘65 to ‘93, 28 years at that point. So, he had already done fourmillion photo shoots. All of these artists that I deal with that have beenaround for that long -- Carlos Santana, Neil Young -- all of them are so overthe process of a photo shoot because they've done it. Again, it comes backto me, us, the photographers, we still need to be brilliant. We still need tocome up with a really great photo. If we don't, then we failed. So,we're doing whatever we can with whatever little time they want to give usbecause they're over it and that's pretty much how that works.
JPG: So, it's a different way of beinginventive with the process of portrait photography. As we’re talking about allof this it relates to your slideshow storytelling presentations. It seems as ifyou've been doing more of them in the past year or two. I know you did LOCKN’and Peach Fest this year…
JB: I'm probably doing six or eight or 10 times a year at the most. I wouldlike to do it more. I love it. Last November, I did like a little Florida run-- JCC in Fort Lauderdale and JCC in Miami Beach. In Fort Lauderdale after Idid my presentation, I actually sat down with Oteil Burbridge ‘cause he livesthere and I interviewed Oteil on stage for about an hour. That was super fun. Idid a little run last spring where I did Nashville and Atlanta and a littlething in Macon, Georgia a couple of nights before that with Kirk West, theAllman Brothers Band photographer. We did a storytelling Q&A in his gallerybut not a slideshow.
JPG: Finally, what’snext as far as your next book?
JB: Yes, I have a few ideas, a few irons in the fire. Theone that I think might happen next is…this is a working title but it reallydoesn't work because there's women involved -- "Psychedelic Rebels andOther Cowboys." It'll be essays and photographs of people whose lives havebeen touched and changed by psychedelics. It’ll be a book of Leary, Kesey,Owsley, Terence McKenna, Jerry Garcia, the guys in the Grateful Dead, CarlosSantana…There's a variety of women in the book -- Denise Kaufman who was MaryMicrogram in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and is in The Ace of Cups, GraceSlick…Different people. Photographs that I did with short essays that arehopefully going to be written by Nicholas Meriwether, Grateful Dead archivistat UC Santa Cruz when the archives moved down there. He doesn't do that anymoreso he's out doing a bunch of different freelance projects. We've been talkingand we're hoping that he's gonna write the text for it.
I do want to do a book with a loose title called “Festival.”That's a pretty obvious one. It would be almost an update of my “JAM" bookbut just artists at festivals – LOCKN’, Peach, High Sierra, MountainJam…a whole bunch of different festivals and artists that have played at thesefestivals. That’s a book that I think would be really fun to do and resonatewith our community.
I have a third one of a singular artist that I’m juststarting to put together and seeing if this particular artist wants to do it.
My last idea, I want to do a Bob Weir book…
JPG: That was one I thought would becoming up.
JB: …and maybe a Phil Lesh book. But, I think, if I were todo a Grateful Dead book next or again, I think it would be a Bob Weir book.I’ve been shooting Bob for 41 years. I've been shooting Bob since 1978 and I’vedone a lot of work with him over the years, a lot of things. Ithink that it would be a really fun book and I think that people would reallydig it because Bobby is very important to our scene.
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