#mickhaggerty

Gamma 2, Elektra Asylum Records, 1980

This was an exciting project that I made some photographs for with the brilliant art director Mick Haggerty.  This was the second album by the group Gamma that was formed by the great guitarist, Ronnie Montrose, who sadly left us in 2012.

Mick contacted me and asked if I could produce a conceptual band photo that would appear on the back, or inside cover of Ronnie’s new record, Gamma 2. At the time I was very engaged in traditional B&W darkroom practices.  It was (and no doubt still is) very common that a band wants to manipulate a photograph by switching out, or stripping in heads from one negative with another to create the perfect group shot. Back in the days before Photoshop it had to be done manually in the darkroom by way of a very time consuming process that involved registration pins, masks cut from Amberlith and multiple exposures on one sheet of photo paper.

I decided to employ this process to create a collage of the band that gave a sense of Ronnie’s intensity and the hard edge of the band’s music.

I found a suitable industrial location, conveniently located near the Burbank airport, so the band could fly in from San Francisco, we would do the photo shoot, and they could be on their way back to San Francisco in just a couple of hours.

The shoot went very smoothly and the images came out perfect. However the darkroom printing process was so much more work than I envisioned that there were times in the darkroom in the apartment where I was living, (next door to the Whiskey a Go Go nightclub on Sunset Strip) that I thought I’d really just have to bail on the whole idea.

I remember late one night as I soldiered on printing dozens of versions of this composite band image that I got an unexpected call from Ronnie Montrose himself. He was in New York at the time, but had just been thinking about me, and how much he dug the concept, and well, just wanted to check in and give me some encouragement. How he knew I was printing at that very moment, and having such a struggle with it, I will never know. His support however could not have come at a better time, which by the way was well after midnight in Hollywood. The fact that in New York it was really quite late, and that he was contemplating my activities so stuck me that I finished the composite that same night. I guess I should say, “I couldn’t have done it without you Ronnie, thanks for that.”

Everybody was pleased with the final band image (above right), at which point Mick asked me if I’d be willing to collaborate with him on a photograph for the front cover. He asked me if I was comfortable shooting it with an 8X10 camera. I of course said yes, despite the fact that I had never actually used one myself. But I was handy, and would rent it for a week before the shoot, so no problem. I did always want to make some photographs with an 8X10, so here was a great opportunity.

The shark’s fins had to be fabricated, and I had to go out and try and find somebody’s lawn we could cut up. Ultimately Mick’s studio partner agreed to let his lawn be the scene of the crime.

We hired a foot model ($100 per toe) to sit in a chaise lounge, Mick manned the water pressure, and on a day with perfect slightly diffused light we made the photograph, which just came out perfect.

However, the original photograph only had a woman’s feet and legs, and executives at Elektra Records, a division of Warner Elektra Atlantic were worried that women may find the image objectionable. WEA had just resolved a three year protest and boycott by women’s groups led by WAVAW after a Rolling Stones billboard depicting a bound and battered woman appeared on Sunset Strip to promote their 1976 album, Black and Blue.   

So as a solution we hired the same foot model, got the same chaise lounge, and re-shot the chaise section of the photograph, except that we added a man’s arm on the side of the chaise. I remember taking the original 8X10 transparency film from the first shoot and laying it on the ground glass of the view camera so that the new elements would line up exactly. This was so they could be manually dropped in seamlessly to the album cover mechanical.