The 43rd annual Fest For Beatles Fans brought together an impressive array of super-fans and people in a position to show and tell first hand accounts involving John, Paul, George, and  Ringo.  It was a pleasure to be able to roam around the Hyatt Regency Jersey City On The Hudson with the benefit of a camera and a microphone.  

Louise Harrison is protective about revealing the few years of her brother George Harrison’s life that haven’t been exhaustively documented.  However, she made it clear that in his boyhood, he was definitely not the quiet one!  

Maybe the best evidence of the enduring legacy of The Beatles is how much love they get from people who have worked with them.  Mark Hudson wrote and produced no fewer than eight album with Ringo while Rob Shanahan has been photographer for his record covers, tour books, and t-shirt art since meeting Ringo in 2001 through Sheila E.  They spoke of the surreal aspects of making the transition from huge lovers of the group to being in its inner circle.  They were naturally beside themselves when transcendent moments occurred like Rob photographing Paul showing up at Ringo’s show at Radio City in 2009 or Mark singing harmony vocals with Paul during a session for 1998’s Vertical Man. 

The same is true of Klaus Voormann who was as close as anyone to The Beatles with a history going back to the days on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg ion the early 60s.  He played extensively with John, George, and Ringo from ’69 to ’76 as a member of the Plastic Ono Band and on sessions for albums like Imagine, Walls & Bridges, Rock n Roll, All Things Must Pass, Living In The Material World, Dark Horse, Goodnight Vienna, and Ringo’s Rotogravure which was the last album to feature contributions from all four Beatles before Lennon’s death in 1980.  Voormann generously narrated an executive summary of his spiffy new book,  Birth of an Icon:Revolver 50 while flipping through its pages.  See the bonus video below for more with Klaus. 

Lastly, enjoy another bonus vid with Charles Roberts who invited The Quarrymen to play at a street party in ’57 at which the first photograph ever snapped of that group was taken…

The Quintessential New Yorker will not be erased!  Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed’s companion since the early 90s and wife from 2008 until his death three and a half years ago, spearheaded the effort to present his complete archives to the NYPL.

Lou Reed became synonymous with New York personifying its street smarts, experience, skepticism, and most of all, its cool.  His songwriting was unflinching in its depiction of gritty urban life full of drugs and sex.  New York and its inhabitants were often characters in his songs.  He immortalized the old factory crowd in his most popular song chart-wise, Walk on the Wild Side from the David Bowie produced Transformer in ’72.  He mythologized the city’s seaside resort in the Lower Bay with the song and album Coney Island Baby in ’76 and saluted Brooklyn’s signature beverage, the egg cream, with the opening track on Set The Twilight Reeling twenty years later.  On the New York album from1989, Reed turned his extraordinarily keen eye on the five boroughs like never before; lovingly devastating the town in a brilliant song cycle mixing actual characters like Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan with fictional characters like Pedro at the Wilshire Hotel. 

Born in Brooklyn on March 2, 1942 – Lou spent the first nine years of his life in Kings County before moving to Freeport, Long Island at the age of nine.  Lou’s sister Merrill, who spoke at the press conference last Thursday, wrote this excellent article that disabuses some of the misconceptions about his childhood.   He graduated Syracuse university in ’64 and met John Cale in NYC where they hatched The Velvet Underground.  Soon The Velvets were featured in Andy Warholâ€s Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia events.
In ’67, while the summer of love flowered on the west coast, The Velvet Underground and Nico debut album came as from another world. You likely know the quote attributed to Brian Eno that everyone who heard it started a band.  Lou Reed is as inspiring as ever and his archives are safe with NYPL.

Here’s some more with Laurie Anderson who confesses to, at one point, thinking Lou was British as well as re-enacting operas with him!

Henry Diltz shot pictures at Woodstock and Monterey Pop.  The folk musician & photographer shot Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Jimi Hendrix, and The Doors.  He described Jim Morrison as quiet, laid-back, and cool – not much like how Val Kilmer portrayed him in the 1991 Doors movie directed by Oliver Stone.

Joel Bernstein‘s photography of Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Tom Petty makes him one of the few people who are on a par with Diltz in the world of music photography.  Among other remarkable experiences, he was the guitar tech at The Band’s The Last Waltz concert and worked with Prince both in the studio and on tour.

Graham Nash has been in front of  both Diltz and Bernstein’s cameras and is friends with both men.  He described fondly his first meeting with Bernstein at Joni Mitchell’s Carnegie Hall show in 1969 in the early days of his role as her official photographer.  Nash is also a highly acclaimed photographer in his own right.  The night after Nash presented Diltz with the 2015 Lucie award for Achievement in Music photography, these three men gathered at the Roxy Hotel in Tribeca (on October 28, 2015) to display their work and tell some stories.  And man, do they have some stories!  When I spoke with them, they agreed that trying to plan and create photographs is generally a fool’s mission.  They’re all about capturing moments, not manufacturing them…

The Icelandic songstress Bjork gets a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.  The museum show coincides with a handful of concert dates this month (and one next month) by Bjork at different NYC venues.

A dynamite exhibit, Sinatra: An American Icon, at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is the way to begin appreciating Frank Sinatra this year, the centennial of his birth, with lots more ways soon to come.