Showing posts with label HEATHER HARRIS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HEATHER HARRIS. Show all posts

9.25.2018

DETROIT ROCK PHOTOGRAPHER ROBERT MATHEU DIED


Sad news tonight, the Original Detroit Rock photographer Robert Matheu passed away suddenly September 21, 2018. Details are still pending and we will update this tribute as soon as possible.

Heather Harris Los Angeles Rock Photographer graciously wrote this tribute to Bob for DRNRM tonight...

Robert Matheu, Ron Sobol and Kurt Ingham photo Heather Harris

My colleague, photographer Robert Matheu passed away September 21, 2018 at the house of a friend. He leaves a wife and his three young daughters that everyone who even vaguely encountered Robert knew were the light of his life.

Robert Matheu's photography career includes hundreds of album and magazine covers worldwide. Bob had photographs in PLAYBOY, ROLLING STONE, CREEM, LIFE, TIME, MOJO, MELODY MAKER, HARPERS, VOGUE and THE LOS ANGELES TIMES.

The MC5 Olympia Arena Robert Matheu

He was a documentarian and tour photographer for Iggy and The Stooges, tour photographer for Brian Wilson, photographer of memorable shots, live and studio of George Harrison, Johnny Cash, MC5, The Rolling Stones, The Pretenders, The Clash, Cheap Trick, Patti Smith, Adam Ant, the Stray Cats, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, Bruce Springsteen, The Faces, The Who...(whew, out of breath) and so on and so on and continued from 1969 through 2018.

Fred Sonic Smith with Iggy and Sonics Rendezvous Band phot Robert Matheu

His two books of his own and others' photography were Creem: America's only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine by Robert Matheu and Brian J. Bowe, plus The Stooges: The Authorized And Illustrated Story, by Robert Matheu and Jeffrey Morgan.  The official Iggy Pop action figure is based upon a single photo that Robert took at the first reunion of Iggy and The Stooges with James Williamson, Scott Rock Action Asheton and Mike Watt, London, England, May 3rd, 2010.

Ron Asheton (The Stooges) and Niagara Detroit were two of Bob's friends

But even these myriad accomplishments sound a little dry considering whom I'm describing. One of the touchstone continuities of anyone who had anything to do with the Stooges, Robert was the everpresent reminder of the Stooges' Detroit roots, to which his enduring friendship with Iggy Pop was testimonial.

Robert began photographing at the Grande Ballroom and all those other legendary venues that hosted all those other legendary acts from 1969 on. His loyalty to his Detroit friends and clients was equally legendary.


Backstage at Iggy and The Stooges show at the Hollywood Palladium, December 1, 2011- Evita Corby, Robert Matheu, Allie Shields (daughter of Sabel Starr Shields.)

He always seemed to be in a great mood, loved to joke around with one and all, in the audience, in the photographer areas, backstage or just with fellow music fans.

My friend Evita Corby, who James Williamson's girlfriend in the 1970s reminded me of another side of jocular Robert though. When James was onstage, she said Robert was very protective of her, since young beauties like her were a magnet to too many creeps otherwise.

Live rock music, particularly the Detroit-spawned variety meant everything to him and it showed in his spectacular photos of all this city's greatest musicians, then spread his talent to artists worldwide, everywhere.  Rock music past and present has lost one of the good guys who cared passionately about what he shot. RIP Bob

-Heather Harris, 9/24/18

Robert Matheu Website
Robert Matheu Facebook

2.07.2014

LA 1973 IGGY AND THE STOOGES: ROCK PHOTOGRAPHER HEATHER HARRIS:



How a born and bred Los Angeles person like yours truly came to appreciate Detroit/Ann Arbor/Michigan music from afar at a relatively early age... Rock and Beatles/Stones had saved my sanity from a toxic family, and I liked my music loud and fast. While I preferred Lennon's hard-edged rocker covers my chums gravitated to their beloved McCartney ballads and worshiped the latest faux-Joni. Egad, why?


Experts contend that in popular musical tastes, females prefer emphasis on great lyrics and males fixate on insistent beat or groove. Balderdash. If you don't remember the power and musicality of a song first, how can you later dissect what was sung? With this in mind, I tried to infiltrate any club that didn't catch my underaged ass and began photographing that to which I could get access in 1967. I was open to anything good, preferably great. With greatness in mind, a lot of focus came upon The Stooges circa 1970.


I was fortunate early on to encounter the in-person musical orbit of John Mendelsohn, a music writer for Creem Magazine and Rolling Stone who mattered in the late 1960s and 70s. And he didn't just like but loved the Stooges as kindred subversives. He trumpeted same to anyone who'd read or listen, particularly like-minded, quirky new friends such as visiting rookie musician David Bowie on the latter's first USA trip.

 
Corroboration of Mendelsohn introducing Bowie and consequently, for better and worse, his management MainMan to the Stooges' music can be found on page 148 of Paul Trynka's first edition of his Iggy Pop bio "Open Up and Bleed.") Here in L.A. as with most of the world in the pre-internet Pleistocene, absolutely no one beyond Midwestern zip codes had any prior Stooge exposure prior to Mendelsohn's lauding thereof.
 

Hence the importance of Mendelsohn's 1970 Entertainment World feature, one of the first if not the first nation-wide cover stories on The Stooges in a mainstream multi-arts magazine, not just a regional, music-based one. Their centerpiece article by Mendelsohn featured lots more natural stage light, live performance photos which took great skill then (and a close, personal relationship with a pro lab that would push film beyond recommended specs) by Kurt Ingham (AKA singer Mr. Twister) (and future Mr. Fastfilm.)
 

Unfortunately I hadn't met the great arbiter until after the first Stooges gigs in California mid-1970, so my first opportunity to photograph them became the Whisky A Gogo, Hollywood CA in 1973. At the only freebie possible for this impecunious college student/photojournalist, my twenty-two minutes of photographing an appallingly short second set of two songs ("She Creatures Of The Hollywood Hills" and "Open Up And Bleed") yielded all my vintage Stooges' shots since seen over the years in domestic and international periodicals both print and online. They were everything heretofore touted, wild yet precise musicians, wasted, cute and dangerous. The audience initially was scared of them: I thought it was hilarious. At the time, 1973, I could only sell a single image. The world had yet to catch up.


As a Fine Art major at UCLA, I was used to true innovators in my art history lessons being ignored by their contemporaries. Outliers are outsiders, so the slander and malediction of The Stooges meant zero to me. At least in this instance forty plus years later, its audience finally caught up with the onetime maligned Iggy and The Stooges, inducting them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010, acknowledging what punks everywhere had known in those intervening decades: they fucking ROCKED. I have been sufficiently fortunate to photograph Iggy and The Stooges in about a half dozen venues, nowadays always to huge, out-of-control-enthusiastic audiences. See LINK to find them all.

 Scott Thurston, James Williamson and Heather Harris

Iggy and The Stooges were my gateway drug to all that Detroit/Ann Arbor/Michigan music had to offer: now let's hear it for The Ruiners and Turn To Crime! -Heather Harris 2014
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