"He told me, `I'll do anything you want.' So I took off his shirt. And the picture I got-his eyes were broad, naked; he was ready for anything. That was his poem to me, about his loss of youth. About being at peace with himself. And ready to die."
Leibovitz is constantly asked about the last John Lennon photo. "I'm still very emotional about it. But every time I look at that picture..." She shakes her head. "I'm still holding it in."
She credits Lennon with helping her to relax in her work. He was her first Rolling Stone cover portrait in 1970. "I was really scared. But he started me off on the right track. The way he acted, he showed me we're all equal, just human beings."
Leibovitz got her start at the San Francisco Art Institute; then lived-and shot photos-for six months in a kibbutz in Israel. On her return, her boyfriend, a photographer for Time, Life, and the Chronicle, urged her to show her photos to Rolling Stone. "He thought it'd be great if his girlfriend worked for Rolling Stone. Me the small one, he the big ones."
At the rock magazine, the art directors were impressed with her portfolio, including a shot she'd taken the day before of poet Allen Ginsberg and a Cockette sharing a joint at a rally.
`And the rest," she shouts, "history!" Since Rolling Stone, it's Annie who's scored the big ones: Esquire, Paris-Match, Stern, the London Sunday Times and-oh, yes-Time and Life.
Leibovitz is insecure no more. Working on the book, she said, "I've gotten to like my work. Together, the pictures looked really strong. I saw a great deal of strength."
At age 32, with her first book out, Leibovitz says, "I feel like I'm just beginning. The book is like a calling card. To let me shoot at my own pace."
What advice does she have for aspiring photographers?
"Become stand-up comics." She's been on tour too long. "No, the way I did it was-I had that opportunity at Rolling Stone. So starting at small papers and magazines is a good idea. And remember that people buy ideas, they don't buy photographs."
-November 19, 1983
San Francisco Chronicle
Rick llE!lsoll:
A TKAVELIN' MAN AT HIS OWN PACE
fter a couple of years of freelancing, I came to realize that I wasn't much of a freelancer. Sure, I'd done well by freelance standards, appearing in a wide range of magazines, from Parade and TV Guide to Esquire and Playboy, and branching out far beyond rock and roll with a piece on the classic restaurants of San Francisco for Food & Wine magazine.
But I got most of my work from people finding and calling me. I wasn't much of a selfsalesman. I'd never found it easy to promote myself, and that's exactly what freelancing required. I had to pitch not only ideas, but myself.
Yet when a good friend, Claire Harrison, a publicist I'd known since the sixties, suggested that I write for the San Francisco Chronicle, I initially resisted. My ego questioned the wisdom of a national magazine writer going local. But, freelancing, I'd already written for several Bay Area publications. And as I looked at the overdue bills piled up in a basket, I realized I could use a regular paycheck. And the Chronicle made it easy, offering me a feature writing position that didn't require my being at the office. Thanks to Claire's husband, Ed Reed, I'd learned about personal computers in 1981, and I could file stories by modem.
By its assignments, the Chronicle further widened my world, as I wrote about prison guards, sex workers, New Age devotees, and computers. Of course, I also wrote music articles, ranging from teen heartthrobs Menudo to Carmen McRae and Cab Calloway. The latter's reaction to Michael Jackson's "moonwalk"? "Fifty years ago, they called it the buzz," the 78year-old Cab told me in 1985. "None of these steps they're doing now are new. The breakdancing is nothing but what we called acrobatic tap." Rap? "That was scattin'. Times change, names change."
I saw Calloway at the Venetian Room in the Fairmont Hotel. The landmark nightspot was trying to keep up with the times, booking artists like Donovan, John Sebastian, and exTemptations David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks, as well as standard-bearers like McRae and Rosemary Clooney.
In 1984, the Fairmont brought in Rick Nelson who, to most of the room's older patrons, would forever be Ricky. For those who sought black-and-white memories, Nelson gave them their money's worth. Behind the scenes, however, things weren't quite as harmonic.
THE FAIRMONT'S PUBLICITY OFFICE IS IN A SNI1'. "They're not listening to a thing we say," says the publicist. "It makes us look like ninnies."
"They" are the people surrounding Rick Nelson, who's about to open at the Venetian Room. He's played Vegas, Tahoe, and Atlantic City, but this is his first time in any Fairmont supper club, and he's beginning with a series of false starts. He was supposed to arrive in San Francisco the night before opening night last Tuesday. Just before the holiday weekend, the Fairmont got word that he wanted to end his rare day off (from touring) at home in Los Angeles. Fair enough: he'd be here early Tuesday. Early on Tuesday, the hotel got the latest: He'd take off from L,A. in his private jet around 4:30, just five hours before he was to hit the stage.
He therefore wouldn't do a rehearsal; not even a sound check. "Don't worry," his people told the Fairmont. "He doesn't need one."
"We strongly recommend a sound check," the hotel publicist says, "because this room is different from the Cow Palace or a regular auditorium." Ella Fitzgerald does sound checks. So does Vic Damone and everyone else. But Nelson would trust his advance sound engineer. The Fairmont, then, had to scrub a run-through that would have been open to the press, for publicity purposes. Ditto any live interviews.
Except this one, which had been scheduled for Friday, then Saturday by phone, and was finally nailed down to opening night, between performances.
The shows-no surprise-started late. At 8 P.M., Nelson hadn't arrived at the Fairmont. At 8:56, he was reported in his suite. By 9:45, he was on, fifteen minutes late, with a show full of rock and roll, delivered laconically and casually, with a winning grin here, a raised fist there, and very little eye contact. This may be the Perry Como of rock.
After the show, and a short delay in his suite, he has maybe thirty minutes to talk. He sits in the parlor of his suite and fidgets with a cigarette. He looks like he's in a dentist's chair, and he is not at all relaxed about being asked why he's so late getting to this important date.
He plays innocent. "Just getting out of L.A., you know ...so, it took us a long time to get out of there, a lot longer than I thought. Actually, it didn't seem like it was outrageously late. I don't know."
He is all the things I'd been told to expect. Unfailingly polite, modest, outwardly shy, and not particularly glib or articulate. At 44, he looks 30 (until you get close up and notice that his bountiful hair is dyed: that his chest hair is a distinguished gray, and that a few lines have crept onto his still-angular face) and sounds about 20. His sentences are halting, pock-marked by nervous tics, as if he were still in a scene in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
He carried his reserved manner onto the stage. and his style, combined with his rock-dominated repertoire, earned him a tepid response from the Fairmont audience. Sure, there were those in the front rows who lip-synced while he sang "Garden Party" (his last big hit, in 1972). But no applause greeted his classics, all well-delivered: "Poor Little Fool," "Travelin' Man," `Stood Up," "I'm Walkin'," "Lonesome Street," "Hello Mary Lou" and "Believe What You Say." Except for low volume on his microphone for the first couple of songs, he didn't suffer for the lack of a sound check.
"I'm not sure what category tonight's audience was," said Nelson. "I felt like a lot of people hadn't heard 'Garden Party.' Even in Atlantic City, there's usually somebody out there recognizing it." The Mr. Manners in him quickly took over: "I don't want to put down any audience. They came to see... something."
Many in the audience were there to see a memory from a bygone era, a cute kid from a warm TV show. Nelson nodded. "There were people who grew up with me and weren't necessarily music fans, but there are a certain amount of people who were into the music."
He never tir
es of meeting fans who ask him about the television show. "That's a compliment," he said. "I look at the shows now, and they were good. They had a beginning, middle, and an end. You can't really compare them with what's happening now, because it's a different time."
In what remained of our time together, Nelson offered these random thoughts:
About acting: "I really haven't pursued acting. I enjoy music too much. I've always felt closer to music, even when I was a little kid."
About his hitless slump from 19 64 to 19 70, after eighteen Top Ten records beginning in 19 5 7: "I never felt I was in a slump, just that a new thing started happening, like the Beatles, and a lot of American artists had trouble getting air play.... That was a time I was really searching for direction; I didn't have any."
In the early seventies, Nelson was among the pioneers who mixed rock and country music; in the process, he sprouted long hair and wore fringed cowboy outfits. What did Ozzie think? "My dad always hated my hair," said Nelson, "even when I was 11, 'cause I'd comb it all to the front."
About his status as a bachelor (After nineteen years, he was divorced two years ago by Kristin Harmon, an artist who, along with brother David Nelson's real-life wife, appeared on the TV series): "I'm divorced; I have a girlfriend and great kids."
About his being, currently, without a record company: "That's OK for right now. I'm doing an album." His last effort, Playing to Win in 1981, had smatterings of New Wave, and it left Nelson dissatisfied. "The end result was a compromise. It didn't have a direction. I ended up doing songs that I kinda talked myself into doing 'cause a pro ducer wanted me to. The things I feel best about are basically what I'm doing now. It's rock and roll."
About being wealthy and being able to do what he wants when he wants: "I think that's part of why I was terrible in school. I was never able to function." Were there problems with authority figures? He shrugged. "I guess. My folks spoiled me with a certain amount of freedom, giving me choices, not just saying, `This is the way it is.' I have a tough time when a guy who's an attorney runs a record company and tells you how you should sound, what kind of band you should use. My first reaction is to...go ride a truck. There's a certain freedom to riding a truck."
Finally, a little fire. But a knock on the door signaled the end. Not that Nelson appeared to be in any hurry. He thought about a comment he'd made three years ago, that "My whole career's been a comeback."
"I still feel that way," he said. "There's always a turnover in the audiences. Certain people phase out, and a new group that doesn't know anything about you comes along. It's a great feeling to have kids enjoying the old songs. The stand-up bass, rockabilly, which is what I started with in 19 5 7, is a new sound to young people."
By the time we left, Nelson was fifteen minutes late for the second show, he was yet to change, and a man from the Fairmont was stationed outside his door, waiting. He would be waiting for awhile.
-San Francisco Chronicle
June 1984
Rick Nelson, along with his fiancee and five band and crew members, was killed on New Year's Eve, 1985, when a chartered vintage DC-3 taking them to a concert in Dallas burned and crashed. Nelson had been working on a new album, but the last vocal he would commit to tape would be as part of a group, singing background vocals for two songs by Lionel Richie, "Se La" and "Dancing on the Ceiling." Rick Nelson was 44.
Eddie fflurphjj:
WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS?
ife at the Chronicle-when I was there, a day or two each week-was strange. The paper itself was fine. Overwhelmingly dominant over the afternoon Examiner, the Chronicle meant power. If you wrote for the Chronicle, you got your calls answered; you got your interviews; you got in. And when you wrote, you got read.
But in the Chronicle Building in downtown San Francisco, employees walked around in a state of distraction, disarray, disinterest. At Rolling Stone, we were friendly, with hugs, kisses, and, at minimum, hearty hellos at the start of each workday. We were family. At the Chron, people seemed to look down, away, or straight ahead as they passed you. In the departments where I did most of my work-the Sunday Datebook and the People department-staffers were friendly, with varying degrees of warmth. And the late, fabled columnist, Herb Caen, always said hello. But, too often, as I made my way around the newspaper offices, I was reminded of the pod people in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Fortunately, I'd carved out a deal that allowed me to do freelance work as it came along. In 1983, settling into the Chronicle groove, I got a call from a former fellow editor at Rolling Stone. Paul Scanlon was now at GQ, and he needed me to run down to Hollywood to write a short piece on what might be called a "starlet," a young actress dazzling enough to warrant a session with the legendary studio photographer, George Hurrell.
I hadn't heard of this Daryl Hannah, but, within a few days, the spread was complete, and, not long after that, I wound up with a plum gig: the pop music column in GQ.
Meantime, through Paula Batson, a publicist who'd become a good friend, I hooked up with a chain of specialized magazines being published out of Knoxville by two young wizards, Christopher Whittle and Philip Moffit. For three years, before their 13-30 Corporation began running out of steam, I roamed the country and a particularly beautiful part of Europe on various assignments. For Moviegoer, which was distributed free in movie theaters, I went to Atlanta to watch Chuck Norris kick ass, and then to Nice, in the south of France, as Michael Douglas swashbuckled his way through Jewel of the Nile. For Campus Voice, I profiled various rock and movie stars.
One of my first assignments took me into the vibrant world of Eddie Murphy, just feeling his oats as a movie star. He'd killed on Saturday Night Live; he'd scored big in 48 HRS; he'd begun to talk about being as big as the Beatles.
Wit sometimes enables us to act rudely with impunity.
-Duc Francois de la Rochefoucault,
French author, soldier, wit (1613-1680)
0 N THIS SUMMER DAY, Eddie Murphy is under a lot of pressure. But from the way he's behaving on the set of his latest movie, you'd never know it.
During one of the breaks in the shooting of Beverly Hills Cop, Murphy is planted on the hump between the front seats of his trailer. His eyes are closed; his head is rolling from side to side; he is zeroed in on a cassette of his own music, which is booming through the trailer.
This 23-year-old movie star doesn't seem to have a thing on his mind, even though he's surrounded by a maelstrom of controversy and activity. First off, Best Defense has just opened to bad reviews and howls of protest. It seems that audiences were led to expect a Dudley Moore-Eddie Murphy teamup but got no more than a cameo by Murphy. Then, too, rumors have been flying around Hollywood that the young comedian is acting up on the set of Beverly Hills Cop. And there's the July 14 brawl in a Sunset Strip nightclub that landed Murphy in the middle of flying furniture, glassware, and fists.
Here in the trailer, however, he looks as if he couldn't care less. And that could be because he really doesn't care, or because he just doesn't have time to worry. Almost every night, after finishing the 8 A.M. to 8 P.M. workday on the set in L.A., Murphy goes to Stevie Wonder's studio and works on his music. The tune that's on the tape deck now is "Party All the Time," which Rick James wrote and helped Murphy record. Although he has begun recording music only recently, the comedian has been writing pop, funk, and reggae songs for a year and a half. His voice is flexible-just what you'd expect of a master mimic. In one song he sounds a lot like Stevie Wonder; in another he throws in a touch of hiccuping Elvis Presley.
"I don't feel there are any more entertainers like the ones back in the time of vaudeville: people who did everything--comedy, acting, singing, dancing," he says between songs. "That's the reason I'm doing the music. The next time I go on the road, I want to take a band with me. I want to do my stand-up comedy, impressions of artists with a band backing me, and then have my own music, too. I wanna perform the next time I go out. Make the audience, say, `What did we just see?"
> And to hear Murphy tell it, he plans to conquer the screen world as well. "This is where I can reach the most people; movies play around the world. I wanna do what Chaplin did: write, star, produce, and score the movie. But then every two or three years I'd go on the road with a show like David Bowie's. He is the hippest motherfucker in show business. He's an unbelievable actor; he's got this tremendous stage persona; he does everything but tell jokes. His kind of career is what I want. Only I tell jokes, too."
And with that, Eddie Murphy immerses himself in another of his songs. But a knock on the door interrupts his trance; the star is needed on the set.
Murphy doesn't budge. He knows this business too well. To the crew member's message that they're ready on the set, he responds, 'Are you ready, or are you ready ready? Call me when you're ready ready." Instantly he winds back into the music.
Murphy isn't big on rehearsing his lines before a scene. "As long as I know where a scene is going, I'm all right. I have what you might call a gift, a knack or whatever. Maybe it's because of the films I'm doing and the type of show I used to be in. On Saturday Night Live, if we rehearsed too much I started to complain, 'cause my performance needs to look like it's spontaneous. If I'm robotic, like I know every line and breath and I do a take, say, ten times, I think it gets progressively worse. In the beginning my energy's up, I'm experimenting with things, and it's better.
"I like having input," he continues. "The only movie I didn't do a lot of writing on-like in every scene-was Trading Places. The director, John Landis, knew the jokes and knew what he wanted. On 48 HRS., the script was more or less a shell. Every day Nick [Nolte], Walter [Hill, the director], and I would have meetings to change the scenes around. We pretty much wrote the movie as we went."
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 48