No Such Thing As Was: Down at the Rock and Roll Club, 2012-2020

Sunday, November 29, 2020

Down at the Rock and Roll Club, 2012-2020

For kicks I've gathered some photos that I've taken at shows over the past decade or so. We all miss live gigs dearly; looking through these images brought a bit of the beery, ear-ringing rush back to me. I'm an amateur (at best) photographer. I lack the photo journalist's access and higher-end gear. These were taken with variously crappy phones, in always-tricky lighting, a beer or three in, usually as I was jostled, rammed, or otherwise flying about as the band held forth. Hence the iffy quality of many of these, a feel to them that I like, as the blurry or inelegantly composed photo at a rock and roll show feels more like a memory and less like a promo shot. I try to catch on a musician's face or in her gesture images that feel like the moments we're in, a tableau of attitude and sound, and hopefully I'm minimally obnoxious to those around me as I'm doing it. "Onstage, you're three seconds ahead of life," Keith Richards wrote. Camera in hand, I'm playing catch up. There's as always a bit of luck involved, both of the good and bad kind; plenty of photos I took at some of my favorite shows down the years just didn't come out well. Here's to being down at the rock and roll club again, soon. (The above photo was snapped, from the ground, at a Hives show at The Vic, in Chicago, on June 30, 2012.)