Right Place, Right Time: The Life of a Rock & Roll Photographer

By Bob Gruen

“Gruen chronicles his adventures as one of the preeminent photographers of rock and roll in his spectacular memoir . . . a roller-coaster narrative” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

 

Bob Gruen is one of the most well-known and respected photographers in rock and roll. From John Lennon to Johnny Rotten; Muddy Waters to the Rolling Stones; Elvis to Madonna; Bob Dylan to Bob Marley; Tina Turner to Debbie Harry, he has documented the music scene for more than fifty years in photographs that have captured the world’s attention.

In Right Place, Right Time, Gruen recounts his personal journey from discovering a love of photography in his mother’s darkroom when he was five, through his time in Greenwich Village for 1960s rock and 1970s punk, to being named the world’s premiere rock photographer by the New York Times. With fast-paced stories and iconic images, Gruen gives the reader both a front row seat and a backstage pass to the evolution of American music culture over the last five decades. In the words of Alice Cooper, “Bob had the ultimate backstage pass. Can you imagine the stories he’s got?”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647000134

Bob Gruen

Bob Gruen has documented the rock music scene for more than forty years, capturing renowned images of the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Blondie, and Green Day, among many others. In 1972 Gruen formed a close friendship with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and served as their personal photographer, documenting concerts and press conferences, as well as capturing serene moments between John and Yoko, and the first images of their son, Sean Lennon. Gruen took the iconic image of John Lennon wearing the New York City T-shirt. His photographs are in the permanent collection of London's National Portrait Gallery and have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum. Bob Gruen lives and works in New York City.

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CHAPTER 1

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

Donovan and Joan Baez • Bob Dylan

In July 1965, the Newport Folk Festival was the place to be. As Bob Dylan said, the times they were a-changing, and folk music spoke to young people who wanted to be a part of that change.

American combat troops had just been sent to Vietnam that March, and thousands of young war protestors marched on Washington. At the same time, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s freedom marchers were attacked by police and state troopers in Alabama. It was a tumultuous time, and music—not just folk and rock, but R & B, jazz, everything—reflected that. And I was just one of the millions of kids who wanted a front-row seat for the revolution.

That April, I got a minimum-wage job at the World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, selling film and flashbulbs. I’d just moved into my first apartment in Manhattan, in the area below Houston Street that’s called SoHo now but was part of Little Italy back then.

So, I was just one among the thousands who saw the list of performers who were going to be at Newport and really wanted to be there.

I was already into folk music. Or, at least, I had an acoustic guitar that I could strum, and I sang songs by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and others. All of whom were going to be at the festival, alongside Joan Baez, Donovan, Mississippi John Hurt, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Peter, Paul and Mary.

The music spanned the folk spectrum. While some of the performers sang traditional folk songs, others—Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie—performed their own compositions, new, topical songs that spoke to the changing times. And why? Because they sensed, as we the audience sensed, that music mattered. If you wanted to send a letter, you used the mail. If you wanted to deliver a message, you set it to music, and Newport was where everyone would hear that message at the same time.

I just had to be there, but I couldn’t afford tickets, which I think were five dollars a night. I had no connections to the music press, no musician friends who could put me on the guest list, no reason at all to receive any kind of preferential treatment.

What I did have was a friend of my mom’s who ran a public relations firm, who was willing to give me a letter saying I was there to represent them. It was a long shot, and it was not true. His company had nothing whatsoever to do with music. But with the optimism of youth, and that letter in hand, I quit my job at the World’s Fair and, because I couldn’t afford film any more than I could afford festival tickets, I stole a pack of twenty rolls of film on my way out.

Around one hundred thousand folk music fans descended on the quaint seaside town of Newport, Rhode Island, on the weekend of July 22–25. Thousands of them camped out on the beach, and that’s where I pitched my tent, too. When darkness fell, cool winds swept in across the water, and I was chilled in my suede jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots. People built bonfires to crowd around, and we’d gather for hootenanny sing-alongs.

Becoming a part of the crowd was easy. Actually getting into the festival was a little more complicated. I made my way to Fort Adams State Park, where the festival was staged, and presented my letter at the press office.

Obviously, they had never heard of me, or the company I claimed to be representing. Their first reaction was to turn me away. But I remembered something my mom always said—Never take no for an answer. Instead, it can be the beginning of an interesting conversation.

I was persistent and they were busy, with all the other journalists and photographers demanding their attention. They finally agreed to give me a photo pass. And that was it. I was in. Camera at the ready, and free to roam wherever I chose.

The audience was already in position, thousands of folk fans facing the stage in rows of folding chairs. Comparing that vision to the same scene a year or two later, it was a very staid event. The hippie scene was barely beginning. Guys were starting to grow their hair a little longer, but they were still wearing shirts with collars, like the Beat Generation. Khaki pants and tweed sports jackets. T-shirts wouldn’t become ubiquitous for a few years yet.

The girls were wearing their hair long, too, but straight, down their shoulders and backs. They wore loose-fitting tops and jeans. None of them looked like proto-revolutionaries, but their hearts and their voices were already in the right place.

With my pass in hand, I was able to go backstage, where I saw Buffy Sainte-Marie playing an acoustic guitar, singing her anti-war song Universal Soldier. I stopped dead, just watching her. I was a huge fan, knew all the lyrics, and when she saw me mouthing the words, she smiled and invited me to sing along with her!

But I couldn’t—I was too stunned. To me, Buffy Sainte-Marie was the sexiest person at the entire festival. I just stood there, awestruck. I got good pictures of some of the performances, though—Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Donovan, Joan Baez.

Then it was time for the star of the festival, Bob Dylan. His rock and roll (not folk) album Bringing It All Back Home had been out since March and had long since sent shockwaves through the folk music scene. Rocking songs like Maggie’s Farm and Subterranean Homesick Blues had very little to do with folk, but his lyrics were as sharp as ever . . . sharper, in fact.

Donovan and Joan Baez, Newport Folk Festival, Newport, Rhode Island, July 22, 1965

I was completely enthralled. I was driving in my car the first time I heard Subterranean Homesick Blues on the radio, and I was so electrified by the words and images that flew through my head that I had to pull the car over and just listen, trying to absorb it. The last line—The pump don’t work ’cause the vandals stole the handle—whirled around in my head for days.

Then, just a few days before the festival, Dylan’s new single, Like a Rolling Stone, came out. It hadn’t been on the album—it would be on the next one, Highway 61 Revisited, but that was not the only surprise. The song felt endless; it was more than six minutes long, at a time when no single—certainly no hit single—had ever gone over three. Clearly, whatever Dylan had in store for Newport, it was not going to be traditional folk music.

The sun had just gone down as Dylan strolled onto the stage and the stage lights came up. He looked so cool. He looked like a rock star. He was often described as scruffy looking, but he came onstage in Spanish boots, tight black jeans, a black leather jacket, and under it, a really unusual orange shirt, with a tab collar that was fastened, but no tie!

You have to understand. That in itself was an act of rebellion. Nobody wore a tab collar without a tie. Nobody but Dylan. It looked so wrong—but on him it just looked right. In fact, that outfit might have been the thing that put off the folk fans in the audience, even before he started playing. That and his stance. He stood like a rock and roller.

As he and his band—a pickup group mostly comprised of members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band—played the long, jangling Like a Rolling Stone, about half the crowd started booing while the other half was cheering. Then they got to yelling at one another.

It was chaos! Nothing like this had ever happened at Newport. Butterfield and the Chambers Brothers had already played electric sets of traditional blues and everybody liked them. But for Dylan to do it, that was sacrilege.

Dylan, clearly upset, stopped playing and left the stage. I headed around to one side. Peeking through the fence that stood around the backstage area, I watched as Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, pushed an acoustic guitar into Dylan’s hands and begged him to go back out and play some of his old hits to mollify the crowd.

Bob Dylan, Newport Folk Festival, Newport, Rhode Island, July 25, 1965

He did go back out, to sing Maggie’s Farm and, fittingly, It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, a familiar ballad that calmed the crowd down. But the damage had been done. The folk scene was never the same after that night. The times really were a-changing, and I think everybody there felt it. The message that Dylan once sang quietly with an acoustic guitar was now being shouted out above a loud, driving, rock-and-roll beat, and the mostly clean-cut crowd simply didn’t know what to do with it.

To me, it was clear Dylan was announcing that the folk music of America was now rock and roll, and that the young generation wasn’t going to be quiet and polite anymore.

The night Dylan started rocking out onstage—Sunday, July 25, 1965—was also the start of my life as a real rock photographer. Luck and timing would forever play big roles in my career, never bigger than being at that festival, on that night. Dylan changed a lot of people’s worlds, but he changed my life. He showed me what was possible if you just went out and did it.

CHAPTER 2

GROWING UP

Mom and Dad · Great Neck Fire

As a kid growing up in great neck, long Island, I’d been into photography for as long as I could remember, and I have my mom to thank for that. Both of my parents were lawyers, but my dad went into real estate, building houses, and my mom specialized in immigration—she opened an employment agency that arranged for people to come from Europe to work in America. After a recession in the mid-1950s, my dad opened a travel agency to complement my mom’s business.

She was also president, or honorary president, of a variety of different organizations, business and philanthropic. But her hobby was photography. She never took more than family photos, me and my brothers playing on the beach during vacations, visits to relatives, and so on, but she had a good eye and she bought herself great equipment.

My family—my parents, my three brothers, and I—lived in a suburban house, and, when I was five, my mom built a fully functional darkroom in the pantry off the kitchen. Some of my earliest memories are of the two of us there in the red-lit darkness, and the acidic smells of the chemical solutions of developer and fixer.

(Left to right) Rudolph Gruen, Bob Gruen, and Elizabeth Gruen, Great Neck, New York, October 1958

She taught me how to process film, and how to count off the seconds while the film was developing (because you can’t see a clock in the pitch dark). I got to be very accurate at counting.

My mom gave me my first camera, a simple Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, for my eighth birthday in 1953. I soon discovered I was good at taking pictures—framing, timing. Even better, it was also something that was all mine, and not my older brother Richard’s. In our family, he was the genius straight-A student.

Photography was where I could excel. I soon took over as the family photographer, snapping photos of visits with aunts, uncles, and cousins, Richard’s bar mitzvah, and other family events and gatherings. I could not have known then that these early assignments would become so important for me later.

After all, taking family portraits is a lot like taking a band’s picture. You have to get everybody together and in the right mood all at the same time. You have to make sure everyone is looking at the camera and is engaged with the moment. You have to make sure nobody’s head gets cut off. Maybe it’s not so surprising that the music world became my family.

I received my first grown-up camera for my own bar mitzvah. A friend of my parents, Harry Fink, owned the large camera store Haber & Fink in New York City; he gave me a 35-millimeter camera, a Kodak Pony II, and also discounts on supplies at his store. The new camera was still rather simple, but it was far more advanced than my Brownie Hawkeye: I could focus it and set exposures.

I carried that camera everywhere. I especially liked action shots—my high school’s football games, dances, anything where something was happening. Whenever I heard sirens, I’d run to see what was going on. I had a drive to see exciting things and tell people about them—to show and tell.

One day in the summer of 1959—Friday, June 19, to be exact—as I was coming out of my mother’s office in Great Neck, near the Long Island Railroad station, I was startled and excited to see fire engines pulling up outside a burning building nearby.

I got pictures of firemen climbing up a ladder to the second floor. But I only had a few shots remaining on the roll, so I ran home, which was about a half mile, grabbed more film, and sped back on my bike.

A local photographer, Mike Miyata, was now on the scene, taking pictures in front of the building. So, he had that covered. I wanted to get the scene from a different angle—something I would do throughout my career—so I went into the six-story apartment building behind the one on fire.

I ran up the stairs to the roof. From there, I got shots of the whole scene from above. I hurried back home, locked myself in the darkroom, developed the pictures, printed a few of them, and rushed them to the local weekly newspaper, the Great Neck Record. I’m still not sure what made me think that they’d want a picture from a thirteen-year-old kid; all I knew was that I had a great shot and my age shouldn’t matter.

The editor liked one shot but wanted a better print. I went back home again, made a new print—dodging and burning, upping the contrast—and took it back to the editor.

I gave it to him, told him a little about myself, and left. It was only then that I realized that I felt hot. My breathing was normal, I was no longer sweating from all the biking, but it turned out that all the exertion had brought on a full-blown fever, and I would spend the next two days sick in bed.

Great Neck Record, Great Neck, New York, June 1959

It was worth it. I woke up the next morning and saw my picture on the front page of the local paper. The caption: The photo above was made from the apartment house behind the fire scene by 13-year-old Robert Gruen of 25 Oak Drive . . . Bob is in the ‘photographic business’ with Steven Rutt, 14 of 1 Wilbur Drive, a classmate of his in the 9th Grade at the South Junior High. He made this photo with a Kodak Pony II 35 mm camera—but he’s hoping soon to have a Leica.

The business part was a stretch—perhaps that’s why the copy department put it in quotes—but I was a bit of a budding entrepreneur. Steve and I had been friends since the third grade. He was the skinniest person I have ever known, his clothes hanging on him like on a scarecrow. He was already a genius inventor, always creating the most elaborate science projects while the rest of the class was still ooing and ahhing about the same old baking soda/vinegar volcanoes.

Steve and I once put together a pump, tubes, and a timer to build a rain forest where it actually rained every twenty minutes. We used to go shopping for parts on Cortlandt Street in downtown Manhattan. Before they built the World Trade Center, a lot of little army and navy surplus stores were there, so that’s where we’d get vacuum tubes, capacitors, and other electronics.

We became partners. I took and developed the pictures while he invented things like a strobe flash for my camera that is still the best I ever used. We called ourselves Coast Photographers, and that’s how the Record credited the front-page photo.

Mike Miyata’s picture, by the way, was on page twelve. As it turned out, he would be the first photographer I worked for as an assistant.

I continued to take pictures through high school, as well as at rallies for local political candidates. One year, when I was about fifteen, the images used on the campaign posters for both the local Democratic and Republican candidates were my photos.

High school itself didn’t interest me too much. I was considered one of the nerds. The only place I shined was in the theater group, where I was the AV guy in charge of the sound and lighting; I was also the guy who would show the movies and the slide shows in your class, because I knew how the equipment worked.

Music was always a part of my life growing up, but never as much more than background. I sang along with the songs I liked, I had my favorite performers, I bought 45s like any other kid. My parents were not at all interested in music; the only record I ever remember my father liking was by the Talbot Brothers of Bermuda. And while Mom’s uncle Joe was a jazz musician, I didn’t meet him until much later.

I did enjoy Miles Davis. I’ve been a fan forever; I must have been seven or eight when I first heard him and I was immediately swept away by his music. One of the first records I ever bought was Kind of Blue. It was so beautifully smooth, soft and meditative, and when my school gave me the trumpet to play, I was happy. I remained a trumpeter for the next three years, until my orthodontist pointed out that the trumpet was pushing back my teeth, and I needed to wear braces.

I also enjoyed the Weavers and Pete Seeger; in fact, they were the ones who first showed me how music could become a force for something more than mere entertainment. Pete Seeger played at my elementary school when I was around thirteen. Pete sang about peace and love, individuality and workers’ rights. He had the audience singing along in three-part harmony and everyone went home smiling.

Just a few days after the show, there were letters to the editor of the local newspaper complaining that the school had allowed a communist to perform.

It seemed incredible to me that a simple folk singer could be accused of being a communist, of trying to subvert the system, simply for singing songs of freedom. For the first time, I found myself thinking about the incredible power of music—what it meant, what it was saying. I began to pay more attention.

CHAPTER 3

THE EMERALD CITY

Hank Aberle and Al Lax · Justice League

One day in 1963 when I was seventeen, my good friend from high school Mike Gayle came to my house with a record and said, "You’ve got to hear this."

When he played it, my knees went weak—I fell to the floor laughing. This guy is not a singer! What is this? I couldn’t believe that Mike was so into this nasal caterwauling. Who the hell is this guy?

It was Bob Dylan.

Mike told me to listen to what Dylan was saying, rather than the sound of his voice, and when I did that, suddenly it made sense. Dylan’s lyrics soon became my bible. He was saying things that I didn’t know I felt about myself and the world until he said them. A couple of years later, in the same room, I played a Dylan song for my mother; It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) was filled with dark, surrealistic imagery like:

Disillusioned words like bullets bark

As human gods aim for their mark

Make everything from toy guns that spark

To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark

It’s easy to see without looking too far

That not much is really sacred

I don’t think Mom got it, but I did.

I was inspired, so I bought an acoustic guitar and taught myself the basic chords to play folk songs. It was also Mike who taught me how to straighten my curly hair. Mike was African American, and while he didn’t straighten his own hair, his mom did hers, so he knew all about Perma-Straight, the hair relaxer.

I went over to his house and he put the goo on my hair. It smelled like formaldehyde and stung my scalp. When we washed it out, my hair was slightly rubbery but absolutely straight.

I was thrilled. Having grown up seeing Kookie Burns on 77 Sunset Strip, and the guys in the Brylcreem commercials with their hair blowing in the wind, I loved having straight hair. Even better, as it grew longer, a lock of it curled down around my eye, which I thought looked very cool.

My dad, on the other hand, thought I looked like a girl.

I didn’t care. Before going to bed each night, I’d comb my hair back and wear a stocking cap to keep it straight. I continued straightening my hair until 1969, when a hairdresser friend convinced me to stop, and he cut off all the straight parts. From now on you’ll never need a comb or a brush, he told me, and he was right. I’ve enjoyed naturally curly hair ever since.

As I was finishing high school, my parents, like all middle-class suburban parents, wanted me to go to college and get a degree in something I could use to make a living.

I had no interest in any of that. I wanted to take pictures, meet girls, and surround myself with interesting people and artists. I did try college several times—Southern Illinois University, C.W. Post on Long Island, and Baltimore Community College. But it didn’t work. I was bored and restless every time.

In fact, the only things I learned were lessons that would serve me well in my desired career. In Illinois, for example, I took pictures for the college newspaper and learned how to hold my liquor. In Baltimore, I became a regular at a music club for the first time, but certainly not the last.

My first love, unsurprisingly, was a folk music club that I went to pretty regularly, even though I didn’t have money to pay for the admission or buy drinks. I went just to be there and hang out and, after a while, I became friendly with the guy who ran the place, and he started to let me in for some of the shows.

I remember seeing Tom Paxton play there and getting to talk to him afterward. When I mentioned that I was driving back to New York City that weekend, he asked me if he could have a ride. So, I drove Tom Paxton from Baltimore back to Greenwich Village, the first of many musicians I would offer a ride to in my career.

The other thing I remember about Baltimore was having fierce arguments with a racist sociology professor who said he wouldn’t allow Zulus with spears to take over the streets of his neighborhood. We were arguing one day when he suddenly told me, Why don’t you just go to Greenwich Village and smoke pot with the hippies? He meant it as a put-down, but I thought, Good idea!

I dropped out of college in the early spring of 1965, came home to Long Island, and got that job at the World’s Fair, selling film and flashbulbs. It wasn’t the most glamorous occupation in the world, and it paid minimum wage, less than sixty dollars a week. But I was nineteen, and a dollar went a lot further in those days. You could drive around for two or three days on a dollar’s worth of gas; hot dogs cost a quarter; a bottle of wine was a buck.

Alan Nevins, a guy I knew from Great Neck, had a Manhattan apartment, a one-bedroom with a living room and kitchenette on Sullivan Street between Spring and Prince Streets. Or, at least, he did until his father made him move back home. Mike Gayle and I moved into his apartment that June. Shortly after, Alan’s father changed his mind and threw him out again, and Alan moved back in with us.

The rent was $125, split among the three of us—although we didn’t pay $125, because we could never come up with that much money. That would soon lead to problems, but for the time being, we were settled.

New York City at that time was, and still is, amazing. It lives; a vast organism with its own heartbeat, and always something new to discover. Kids still come to the city to be bowled over, and they are. Places may change, stores may disappear, but it’s still New York City. A place where you can leave your past behind and invent a new future.

I used to wander Greenwich Village alone for days on end and never tire of the sights, sounds, and smells. There was music everywhere, coming from basements and windows and doorways. The omnipresent aroma of incense and pot and who knows what. Even now, no matter how many times I walk the narrow, cobbled streets around the Village, it never grows old. There is always something new to see.

I discovered so much music there that I might never have heard in Great Neck, like the Mothers of Invention. To this day, I remember Help, I’m a Rock, a track from their very first album that sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard on another rock album. There, too, I was introduced to the music of the Holy Modal Rounders, who I regard as the first-ever punk band; and the Fugs, a band whose collision of rock, poetry, art, and protest was seminal in my life.

Hanging out in Washington Square Park one day, an established meeting place for countercultural types of all persuasions, I met two girls named Fritzy and Pixie. They were on their way to a club called the Scene, on Forty-Sixth Street off Eighth Avenue, up in the Times Square area.

I’d never heard of it, but I tagged along. I was impressed when the doorman, Teddy Slatus, allowed me in because I was with the girls and he knew them. They explained that the Scene had a policy of always letting the regulars in, and I soon discovered that a lot of the nightclubs operated this way, because that’s how they developed the kind of crowd, and the kind of atmosphere, that they wanted—sexy rock- and-roll girls at one club, creative artists at another, great dancers at yet another.

As my first taste of true New York City rock-and-roll nightlife, the Scene was a great introduction. It was run by a guy named Steve Paul, and even though it had been open for less than a year, it was already a very popular hangout for visiting musicians. You’d never have known it was there, unless you already knew about it. The door opened directly onto the street, and it really was just a doorway, nothing fancy, nothing to let you know what happened behind it.

First, you descended a staircase that opened into a kind of reception area or anteroom. There was a bar area, and in the middle of the bar, on the left, there was an opening into the larger room where the stage was.

There was seating toward the back, old worn-out banquet seats; and for some reason, my favorite became an especially worn banquette, with a hole in the seat, as though somebody had burned through it. Or burrowed!

I don’t know why, but I loved sitting there. Sinking down into the hole, I could see the whole room, and I’d just stare at everybody and wonder what was going on. Because I was still new to New York City, I didn’t really know anybody, and certainly nobody in the music scene.

I don’t even remember talking to anybody there, except one time when I was with my friends Hank Aberle and Al Lax, who Mike met in the Village one day. I took some pictures of them there that night, in a room lit only by candles. And that was important, because it was the first time that I figured out how to take a picture in light as dim as candlelight. Having learned how things worked at Steve Paul’s Scene, I started applying the same principle to other clubs, getting to know the doormen and doing what I could to be helpful to the venue, usually by taking pictures there and publicizing the club. Later, I’d even be publicizing the club owners by getting their photographs into the different magazines I was working for. They loved that!

Hank Aberle and Al Lax, the Scene, New York City, 1965

Meanwhile, another type of connection with music developed for me. Hank and Al were musicians, and soon after we met, Mike and an old high school friend of ours named Tom Winer started their own folk rock band, the Justice League. Everyone clicked.

I had the use of my dad’s station wagon for hauling the equipment, and I could also take pictures of the band—basically, I was a roadie with a camera. It also turned out that I was the only one of us who could remember all the words to Like a Rolling Stone, and once in a club, and once at the World’s Fair, I got up onstage with them to sing it.

Mike Gayle and Bob Gruen, World’s Fair, New York City, 1965

That was the extent of my singing career. I wasn’t comfortable in front of an audience. Like a lot of photographers, I guess, I was happier behind the camera. It made me nervous to have everybody stare at me. Over the years, I’d get over that, come out from behind the camera and develop my public persona.

This was the summer I saw Dylan rock out at Newport. I got good pictures, but I had no contacts at any magazines or in the music industry where I could sell them. I wasn’t even sure where the offices of the magazines or record companies were.

I did look in the phone book for the Manhattan office address of Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman. I took a couple of prints in, just to show them. I didn’t get to meet Grossman or anybody famous. But the receptionist thanked me for the pictures and, in return, Grossman’s secretary handed me a ticket to see Dylan at an upcoming show. She later told me that Dylan took the prints home, but I never heard anything more. It wasn’t until the 1970s that I began licensing my Newport picture of Dylan, which has been published many times since.

Meanwhile, the Justice League was beginning to sound really good. They were rehearsing in our Sullivan Street apartment and becoming more and more proficient. Unfortunately, our Italian neighbors did not appreciate the music in the same way that we

Reviews for Right Place, Right Time

[pomo58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Right Place, Right Time: The Life of a Rock & Roll Photographer from Bob Gruen is a fun romp through popular music from about the mid 60s to now-ish. Great pictures, fun stories, and a glimpse at a life well lived.I like to read about music, whether about specific artists or genres or, as in this case, a peripheral but essential aspect of music. Because so many books tend to be about an artist it is the literary equivalent of listening to a greatest hits album. Even genre or period books can be thought of as greatest hits albums, albeit of connected acts. This book, however, is like a greatest hits of all time album, crossing genres and spanning several distinct periods in the history of rock & roll, or perhaps more accurately, popular music.While the book is chronological, there is a bit of jumping around simply because Gruen often had to shoot several different acts within several days in different locations. Such was his life thus such is the narrative. That said, those periods are usually situated within a stretch where he is spending quite a bit of time and/or energy with a particular act. These extended experiences form, usually, the glue for each chapter.As a memoir, this is an above average book but probably nothing phenomenal. But when it is coupled with the sheer quantity of rock, pop, and R&B stars he worked with, this becomes so much more than a memoir. If you're as old as I am, this is like going back and reliving some of those days. The concerts, listening to the radio, watching the TV shows and, eventually, the channels. If you let yourself read slow enough to think about the acts he is talking about, it becomes almost like a soundtrack to your own life. If you're not as ancient as I am, then this is an excellent glimpse at what the industry used to be like and, if you choose to take the time, it can serve as an introduction to a lot of great artists and music.Highly recommend to readers of memoirs and especially entertainment memoirs. Those readers who supplement their reading with searching online (or in your music collections) for songs, interviews, and videos will find a lot of great search-worthy items here.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.