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Interview With Henry Diltz |
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Jess West-Rosenthal: Can you take us back to your roots a little bit. Those who do know the name know you as a photographer. The fact is you actually started as a musician and you’re still doing some playing today.
Well we stopped at this second-hand store, we all went in and came out with these sort of, you know, second-hand cameras, these used cameras. They were 35mm cameras… mine was some kind of little Japanese thing called a Pony I think and we bought some film at a drug store and for the rest of the tour we had a lot of fun taking pictures of each other and sort of everything that we saw during the day… we’d stop the camper next to a big field of cows, you know, we just took pictures of various things. We got back to L.A. and had a huge slide show. It was so amazingly gratifying. It was just amazing to see these moments blown up huge on the wall.
There’s something about slides. It’s not like a picture you hold in your hands. It’s got light behind it and it’s projected and you can make it real big and all your friends sit there and watch these moments. You know people loved it, and I loved it, and so from that moment on I decided that I would take a lot more pictures so we could do some slide-shows because it was so much fun, and that was the beginning of my photo career. At the same time in our group we were recording a single for Phil Spector and we thought finally we were going to make it. Brian Wilson came down and sat in the control room listening to it over and over and over… it was a Harry Nilson song called "This Could Be the Night." But then we waited that summer for Phil to put it out and he never put it out because he was going through his paranoid stage where he was afraid to put something out for fear it wouldn’t be 'number one' and his reputation would fall. Finally the others guys in the group said Ah Gosh… a couple of the guys lived in Hawaii so they said we’re going back to Hawaii, call if anything happens.
We all just kind of pursued our new interests. A couple of the guys became record producers and Chip produced the Monkees and Jerry produced Tom Waits and I started taking pictures. From the very beginning I took pictures of all my friends who were in the group and their wives and sweethearts and whoever was around, which always include some musicians. Like Mama Cass was a good friend and Stephen Stills and David Crosby… and you know, these were people that we knew from playing clubs and doing TV shows with them… right towards the end we did some kind of TV show with the Mamas and the Poppas, you know, at that show I took pictures of them.
Then, I think the first picture that I actually sold, or got used, was one of the Buffalo Springfield where I just uh.. Stephen invited me to go to a sound check at one of the clubs down by the beach and I went along thinking "while they’re doing that I’ll go and photograph people on the beach." Which I did. I didn’t bother photographing Stephen and Neil Young <laughing> while they were doing the sound check. But I didn’t get a good shot of a guy with a monkey on the beach.
You know… and then I walked back to the club just as they walked out the back door and there was this huge painted mural, you know, like a, not graffiti… it was a big mural of a guy on a unicycle or a tricycle or something. Real colorful, lot’s of pinks and blues… and I said "hey, let me just take a picture of you guys standing there next to that wall with that huge thing." So I did and about a week later a magazine called me, Teen Set magazine, and they said hey I understand you have a picture of the Buffalo Springfield and well, "how do you know that," and they said "well, we interviewed them and we said we need pictures and they said call Henry. So that was the first one. I got a hundred bucks… JWR: Was there ever any formal training on your behalf? HD: No. One of the guys in the group taught me how to load the film in and I said well what about these numbers on here, what do these mean… And he said, and I can still picture the day, standing there looking at this thing… there were two sets of numbers, one right around the lens and the other up on top with the little spindle and he said, well you look on the box and it’ll tell you right here, sunlight, you know f8 at 250, so… you set this little thing to 250 and this to f8 and that should come out just right if you’re in the sunlight. You know, I mean I taught myself and gradually got in to it. I got a light meter, which was spot meter which was one where you can take a reading from a distance because you know eventually I did a lot of stuff on stage… JWR: Who would you say has been your favorite subject? HD: Oh boy that's. JWR: Or is it a group or. HD: Oh that's really awfully hard. JWR: I mean just somebody that was either actually a joy to work with or just the pictures just came out stunningly. HD: Well, Joni Mitchell I loved photographing, the ladies are always nice, Linda Ronstadt, I mean Crosby Stills Nash and Crosby Stills Nash and Young were. was probably the group I photographed the most because I was such good friend with them to begin with and our careers kind of paralleled each others and I hung out with them time after time and went on the road and went to England and lived with Stephen, just so many opportunities that through the years I've photographed them the most. I've certainly loved there music probably more than anybody. Of course I love James Taylor and I really like The Eagles, I love McCartney, but that harmony. I was in a harmony group. We did four part harmony, that was a group that was close to my own musical tastes.
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Conducted Through E-mail During April, 2005 |