Subterms
Alice McDermott, 70, writer There are three kinds of novels I’ve never taken to heart: science fiction, murder mysteries and novels about novelists. So I’ve decided to try my hand at each. If I fail, they’re probably not books I’d want to read anyway. Thurston Moore, 65, musician and author I’m putting the final touches […] More
Debbie Harry, Chris Stein and their bandmates built a career rooted in wit, excitement, pastiche and sex. A new boxed set, “Against the Odds: 1974-1982,” traces their journey.As Chris Stein searched for rare recordings to include in “Against the Odds: 1974-1982,” a handsome chronicle of the new wave band Blondie’s emergence from underdogs to pop stars, he rummaged diligently inside a packed barn on his property near Woodstock and —“I don’t have a barn,” Stein exclaimed in a recent interview, in a tone that was exasperated but also comedic. “The boxed set says I have a barn?” He sighed. “It’s a garage.”Up in the Blondie stratosphere, something has always gone wrong, even when things were going right. “Against the Odds,” out Friday, documents a volatile timeline of massive chart successes accompanied by personal and professional missteps.“I mean, missteps is an understatement,” Debbie Harry said with a chortle.In an hourlong video conversation, Stein, 72, who plays guitar and functions as the abstract mastermind of Blondie, and Harry, 77, the alluring singer who fronts the band and writes its most elegant lyrics, reflected on the unlikely success hinted at in the title of the boxed set. From 1974 to 1982 and beyond, the pair were inseparable lovers who, with their bandmates, built a career rooted in wit, excitement, sex and a Pop Art sensibility that included pastiche and appropriation. Harry and Stein remained close even after their romance ended in 1987. She’s even godmother to his two daughters.Because they combined an omnivorous curiosity with a playful foxiness rarely attempted in that era of rock music, the band was not taken as seriously as its peers — Talking Heads, Television, Ramones — yet found its way to national TV appearances, arena shows and the top of the charts. Its biggest successes came when it traversed styles: Of Blondie’s four No. 1 hits on the Hot 100, two are disco (“Heart of Glass” and “Call Me”), one is reggae (“The Tide Is High”) and one is a prescient celebration of hip-hop (“Rapture”).The boxed set — the first authorized by the band — makes an argument for Blondie’s greatness, both musical and visual. The Super Deluxe Edition includes the band’s first six studio albums, 36 previously unreleased tracks, and a foil-wrapped 144-page hardcover book with liner notes and photos. At 17 pounds, it’s the definitive account of a sound, attitude, look, and aesthetic that proved inspirational to generations of artists across a spectrum of genres. Madonna has called Harry “a role model,” and the band’s songs have been covered or sampled by Miley Cyrus, Kelly Clarkson, the Black Eyed Peas, Missy Elliott, the Bad Plus and Def Leppard.For Harry, “the lead singer of Blondie” was a character she invented, “which spoke of what was acceptable for girls at that time, and the way I had steered myself through life, having a certain facade,” she said from her Chelsea apartment, with a garden view behind her. “It was the same thing David Bowie did.” In her flinty 2019 memoir, “Face It,” Harry says she “was playing at being a cartoon fantasy onstage,” much like Marilyn Monroe. She never pretended that men and women didn’t stare at her, never pretended she didn’t like the attention, but also never took herself too seriously.“I loved how she presented herself,” Shirley Manson of the rock band Garbage said in an enthusiastic phone call. “It wasn’t pandering to the male gaze. She looked smart and sassy, and felt a little dangerous. You forget, because Blondie make it seem so stylish and effortless, how good the songwriting is. They’re the complete, untouchable package.”Harry was raised by adoptive parents in Hawthorne, N.J., but frequently wandered off to Manhattan, and moved into a $64-a-month apartment on St. Marks Place after college. She worked as a model, a secretary for the BBC, a Playboy bunny and a clerk at a head shop. None of it was satisfying. “Music was always a huge, haunting influence,” she said. “I wanted to be in the art world. I felt I should be making music.”Harry sang in a short-lived, bucolic hippie band called Wind in the Willows, and was “sort of a hippie” herself, she said. Her next band, the Stilletos, was an almost vaudevillian girl group whose set included a song called “Wednesday Panties,” and when the Warhol associate Eric Emerson brought his roommate Chris Stein to see the band, he was entranced by Harry.Stein, like Harry, had graduated with an art degree, and he had the advantage of growing up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, as the only child of intellectual immigrant parents who met as members of the Communist Party. When he was 17 and a self-described hippie weirdo, his band opened for the Velvet Underground, and he resolved to never get a job. “I was on welfare,” he said from his Lower Manhattan loft. “And I painted a bathroom once,” he added, deadpan.Both got a jolt of inspiration when they saw the New York Dolls play at the Mercer Arts Center. “They were funny and nasty and naughty,” Harry recalled. “It was everything I needed at that time.”Harry was naughty, too. A 1979 profile of Blondie in this newspaper made note of Harry’s “disregard for underwear.” Her purposeful use of sexuality wasn’t much more explicit than, say, contemporaneous TV ads for Serta mattresses or Calvin Klein jeans, but it was also an era when everyone, especially men, felt entitled to comment on women’s bodies. The attention on Blondie was “all about how I flaunted my underwear. It’s the Madonna/whore dichotomy — those seem to be the two acceptable occupations for women,” Harry said with a laugh.For Harry, “the lead singer of Blondie” was a character she invented.Gie Knaeps/Getty ImagesTheo Kogan, the singer of the punk band Lunachicks, said she saw Harry as part of a triumvirate of 1970s tough girls that also included Olivia Newton-John’s leather-encased transformation at the end of “Grease” and Pinky Tuscadero, the motorcycle-riding, butch-but-femme character on the hit show “Happy Days.” “They showed that you can be a glamorpuss and also be tough,” Kogan said in a phone interview.A clever and stylish couple, Stein and Harry became the Nick and Nora Charles of CBGB, ground zero for New York’s rock underground. The two share many qualities, including hard-shelled cynicism and a capacity for not giving two figs about criticism. But Harry admits that at first, criticism “really floored me. It can knock you down, or it can make you want to fight harder. So it has a lot to offer,” she added with a laugh.So about those missteps Harry alluded to: Blondie’s backstage distractions included fights with the band’s manager and accountant, exploitative contracts, internal band squabbles that evolved into lawsuits, and for Harry and Stein, drug addiction. “Heroin and cocaine,” Stein said. “That’s what you did back then.”Much of this narrative becomes clear in “Against the Odds.” The first of the eight discs features early home recordings and demos of the band from 1974, all of them tentative and uncertain of style. Naysayers at CBGB who were unimpressed with the band used the derisive nickname Blandie, and they were relegated to a perpetual opening act.When they released their first album in 1976, Harry was 31 and Stein was almost 27, which was ancient per punk standards. But the material improved in subsequent years, especially with “Dreaming,” one of the best songs ever written about being young, broke and fabulous in the big city. The guys in the band — the keyboardist Jimmy Destri, the bassist Nigel Harrison, the drummer Clem Burke, the guitarist Frank Infante and Stein — perfected a look: dark suits, skinny ties, mod hair. The songwriting took a leap, with key contributions from Destri, Harrison and Infante, right as Blondie paired with Mike Chapman, a sharp Aussie producer who’d had glam rock hits with the Sweet and Nick Gilder. “It was like the Beatles getting together with George Martin,” Stein said.That creative relationship, however, was not without drama. “The first time Mike saw us play live,” Harry recalled, “he said afterward that he’d never laughed so much in his life. I guess I felt it was a compliment.”Chapman produced the band’s first No. 1, “Heart of Glass,” a thumping, synthesized, drum-machined disco track in which Harry finds herself “lost inside adorable illusion” and “riding high on love’s true bluish light,” a poetic summary of romantic ambivalence.Not for the first time, Blondie was accused of “selling out” (that was once a thing) by embracing trendy dance music. “The whole anti-disco movement smacked of class war to me,” Stein said. “When I was a kid, my heroes were 60-year-old Black men — Bukka White, Howlin’ Wolf. Disco was just an extension of R&B.”“For me, it was about dancing,” Harry added. “I loved going to clubs.”Blondie earned a second No. 1, “Call Me,” working with the producer Giorgio Moroder, who observed the band working — or more precisely, bickering — in the studio and decided to record the music with players who weren’t wasting his time. “He’s a happy guy,” Harry said. “Why would he want to have that around?”A fifth album, “Autoamerican,” came out in 1980 and featured a smash cover of “The Tide is High,” a 1960s ska song by a Jamaican group, the Paragons, as well as “Rapture,” the first No. 1 song in the United States to feature a rap vocal. Stein and Harry were curious scenesters, always eager to find new trends, and it was inevitable that they’d cross paths with rappers. The “Rapture” video featured the future “Yo! MTV Raps” host Fab 5 Freddy, his fellow graffiti artist Lee Quinones and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Accusations that the group had appropriated music by people of color followed, and Stein doesn’t deny it. “I always say, Black people invented and the white people presented,” Stein said. “It’s just part of the power imbalance in America and elsewhere.”Stein and Harry became the Nick and Nora Charles of CBGB, ground zero for New York’s rock underground.Stephen SprouseBy 1982, the final year of the boxed set, conflicts within the band were untenable, and Harry was spending most of her time tending to Stein, who was hospitalized with a near-fatal skin disease. “We were pretty stoned,” Stein said. “That’s what exacerbated the illness I had,” he added. Blondie broke up.Stein and Harry did, too, in early 1987. Their split seems to have been more sad and resigned than rancorous, and Stein was heavily involved in Harry’s post-Blondie solo albums. In 1997, they re-formed the band, which has continued to record and tour, now with only one other original member, Burke. When Blondie was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, the former members Nigel Harrison and Frank Infante stood onstage and fruitlessly beseeched Stein and Harry to let them perform at the ceremony. Blondie drama is eternal.Harry and Stein continue to work, both together and apart. He’s an accomplished photographer, has his own memoir coming out next year, and is toiling away on a Blondie documentary, which has been in progress since at least 1978. “We’re still hustling,” Stein said. Perhaps new missteps lie ahead.Harry has acting gigs, a reissue of her first solo album, “Koo Koo,” and is still active in the downtown music scene, braving smelly rock bars in search of inspiration. Well past the age of a Madonna or a whore, she’s inventing another acceptable occupation: the inspirational septuagenarian. “You’re not used to seeing someone Debbie’s age hanging out and going to clubs,” said Kogan, the Lunachicks singer. “That’s the beauty of her — she’s a role model for us as adults, as well as when we were younger.” More
“Throw the note over your shoulder!” Debbie Harry, Kathleen Hanna, Justin Vivian Bond and other singers recall Barbara Gustern, a beloved vocal coach who was killed last month at age 87.Barbara Maier Gustern, a 4-foot-11 woman from the tiny town of Boonville, Ind., exerted an improbable and little-known influence over New York’s overlapping music scenes, guiding cabaret performers, stage actors and rock stars to get the most out of their voices.Ms. Gustern, who died last month, had a gift for unusual metaphors that made her teachings stick. In the bedroom of her 17th-floor apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, where she gave lessons almost every day deep into her 80s, she would ask her students to build theaters inside their heads. Your tongue, Ms. Gustern said, is the stage. Your soft palette is the fly space. You must sing from the very back of stage, projecting your voice into the fly space, through a blowhole at the top of your head.“Your blowhole — these weird little tips that you’re like, ‘That just changed my life,’” said Kathleen Hanna, the frontwoman of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, who credited Ms. Gustern with restoring her singing voice after medical issues so severe that she thought she might never sing again.The cabaret singer Justin Vivian Bond prepared for a performance at Carnegie Hall with Ms. Gustern’s help. “I filled that room effortlessly, because the inside of my head was basically an extension of the room,” Mx. Bond said.Another one of her students, Tammy Lang, who performs under the stage name Tammy Faye Starlite, said, “Everyone I knew in the downtown scene worked with her. She was the mother to us all.”Her friends and students recalled her as the grandmother who wore dominatrix gear to perform as a go-go dancer at a playwright’s birthday party; who left her friends in the dust as she ran to catch a subway; who danced on top of a table at the cabaret theater Joe’s Pub.Ms. Gustern with one of her star pupils, the performance artist and singer Taylor Mac.Jackie RudinShe had come to the city in the late 1950s with dreams of making it on Broadway. After realizing she wasn’t going to be a star of the stage, she stopped auditioning for parts and dedicated herself to the work that would bring her an unexpected kind of glory.In a recent Facebook post, she wrote that she wanted to die at age 127 by running across the street and accidentally colliding with a Dewar’s Scotch truck. The end came in what appeared to be a senseless act of violence, when someone shoved her to the sidewalk near her home on March 10. The suspect, Lauren Pazienza, who turned herself in almost two weeks after the incident, has been charged with manslaughter.At the time of her death, Ms. Gustern was three days away from recapturing the fantasy of her youth, and returning to the stage.‘Sing It to the Back 40!’Barbara Joan Maier’s family ran a hardware store in Boonville. Bobbi Jo, as she was known, sang at the Methodist church and, as a teenager, taught Sunday school. Later, as a student at nearby DePauw University, she joined the Young Republicans club.Her pursuit of a stage career took her away from all that. She auditioned for parts in New York and joined regional theater troupes along with summer stock companies in the Poconos, landing parts in “The Sound of Music” and “Threepenny Opera.” She traveled the world, a cruise-ship mezzo-soprano.While singing in choirs at a synagogue in the Bronx and a church in Brooklyn, she got to know the man who would become her husband, Josef Gustern, a singer and actor with a bass voice. They married in 1963 and had a daughter, Katherine.While they scrounged to make a living in music, the names of Ms. Gustern’s peers were appearing more and more frequently in Playbill and on Broadway marquees. At around age 40, she faced the fact that she was too old to be cast in lead roles, much less as an ingénue, and she began her next act by taking a job as a teacher at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in Manhattan. Her husband continued to hustle for stage work, and finally in the early 1990s he scored a long-running part in the Broadway production of “The Phantom of the Opera.”As she settled into the city, Ms. Gustern gained an appreciation for New York’s rough-and-tumble glamour. For some years, prostitutes hung out on the street where she lived, and on morning walks she would try to tell the future by counting the condoms on the sidewalks, as she wrote on her Facebook page, which she treated like a diary. Fewer than three meant trouble; more than three portended good luck; a colored condom indicated that a million-dollar check was on the way; a black one signaled imminent nuclear attack.She began to establish a reputation among insiders of New York’s singing scene in the 1980s, when the avant-garde singer Diamanda Galás took a lesson from her while visiting New York. Ms. Galás ended up moving to the city full-time, in part to keep studying with Ms. Gustern.“Diamanda opened the gate,” said Ms. Lang, the cabaret singer. “And then everybody saw that, ‘Oh, this is somebody who’s open to something that is different.’”Debbie Harry, the lead singer of Blondie, sat in for one of Ms. Galás’s lessons around 1998. Then she began studying with Ms. Gustern. “I had never really tried to learn how to sing properly,” said Ms. Harry, the rare performer who has sung at CBGB and the Café Carlyle. “She taught me more about the voice and your body as an instrument.”Debbie Harry, left, and Ms. Gustern at the Broadway opening of the musical “Passing Strange” at the Belasco Theater in 2008. Ms. Harry credited Ms. Gustern with teaching her “how to sing properly.”Nick Hunt/Patrick McMullan, via Getty ImagesAnother of Mr. Gustern’s students was Murray Hill, an actor, comedian and singer, who spoke at a gathering for her at Joe’s Pub on March 27, after a memorial service at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Midtown. “She was the first, and only, person to say I wasn’t tone-deaf,” Mr. Hill wrote in an email.Tragedy seemed to reinforce Ms. Gustern’s devotion to teaching. In 2003, her daughter died of a drug overdose. Her husband died in 2017. After whole days of lessons, she often spent her nights at students’ performances.Perhaps the biggest job of her career came recently, when she served as the vocal coach for the 2019 Broadway revival of “Oklahoma!” She stayed with the production, which won the Tony Award for best musical revival, until it closed in 2020.“Her career was actually at a high point at 85 years old,” said James Davis, who played Will Parker in the show.During a typical lesson, Ms. Gustern would sit in an antique wooden chair on one side of the bed, a portable keyboard on the blanket before her. The student would stand facing her, on the other side of the bed.“Throw the note over your shoulder!” was one of her catchphrases. Ms. Gustern used bits of Indiana argot to make a point. Rather than telling students to project their voices, she would say, “Sing it to the back 40!” City metaphors crept in, too: “Your mouth is a taxi cab,” she would say, “and your molars are the back doors of the taxi cab. And they’re opening, both of them.”When leading scale exercises, she told her students to use the phrase “he is a really bad bad bad bad man” or the schoolyard taunt “nyah-nyah nyah-nyah-nyah.” She recorded herself going through warm-up exercises and gave the recordings to her students, so that they could practice along with her when they were apart.Ms. Hanna, whose punk style compels her to sing abrasively, said she started meeting with Ms. Gustern more than 10 years ago, after she had undergone surgery on her vocal cords to remove polyps. For a time, her work with Ms. Gustern was her only artistic activity. She learned she had been holding her breath when she should have been letting it go. Under Ms. Gustern’s guidance, she began to exhale before hitting certain notes and to pronounce an ‘h’ before glottal strikes.Ms. Hanna’s voice is back. This month she is starting a tour with her band Bikini Kill. “Without her, I would have been done,” Ms. Hanna said of Ms. Gustern. “How do you thank someone for your career?”Back to the StageBeginning in 2016, Ms. Gustern directed a series of cabaret evenings featuring Austin Pendleton, an actor noted for his character roles in films, and Barbara Bleier, who made her Carnegie Hall debut at age 4. “Make your mouth a little narrower at the top,” Ms. Gustern would comment at rehearsals, and the right rendition of a song would pop out, Ms. Bleier recalled.Now and then Ms. Gustern would perform as part of their show, including a memorable “Santa Baby,” which she sang while making eyes at Ms. Bleier’s husband. But she preferred to remain in the background.That had begun to change in recent months, when she was leading rehearsals for “Barbara Bleier and Austin Pendleton Sing Steve and Oscar,” an evening dedicated to the songs of Oscar Hammerstein and Stephen Sondheim. As they headed toward opening night at Don’t Tell Mama, a Midtown piano club, the group decided that Ms. Gustern would sing three songs herself. For one of them, the “Oklahoma!” showstopper “I Cain’t Say No,” Ms. Gustern planned to pantomime sitting on the lap of a cowboy.“The thought of doing a show was like sentencing me to be tortured,” she wrote on Facebook on March 10. “But as of today all that is reversed.” Now, she continued, “I feel like a singer again for the first time in forever.”A few hours after posting those words, Ms. Gustern was shoved. She died from head injuries brought on by the fall. Ms. Pazienza, a 26-year-old former events coordinator from Queens, has been released on bail from Rikers Island and is due to appear in court on May 10.In the weeks before her death, Ms. Gustern was leading rehearsals of a cabaret show featuring Barbara Bleier, center, and Austin Pendleton, right. After a postponement, they took the stage at Don’t Tell Mama in Midtown Manhattan on March 27, with Paul Greenwood on piano.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesThe “Steve and Oscar” show went on without Ms. Gustern, postponed to March 27. Before an audience of cabaret regulars seated in the banquettes of Don’t Tell Mama, Ms. Bleier and Mr. Pendleton turned the show into a tribute to their friend and director. “All these lyrics mean so many new things,” Mr. Pendleton said from the stage. He soon appeared befuddled, asking the pianist, “What am I going to sing here?”Others who relied on Ms. Gustern find themselves a little lost. The performer and writer Penny Arcade had drafted Ms. Gustern to be the musical director of a show scheduled to start around July. She said she was so shaken by Ms. Gustern’s death that she is now considering a start date in late fall. Eric Schmalenberger, a cabaret producer and performer, said he will lose what was, for a long time, the closest thing he had to an annual family tradition: trimming the Christmas tree at Ms. Gustern’s apartment with others in the music community who had nowhere else to go.But Ms. Gustern’s students have not lost her completely. She will live on for them in the form of the warm-up tapes she gave them. Many performers who studied with her said they listen to the tapes of her before every show; a few said they listen before rehearsals, too.Ms. Gustern on the carousel at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn at a party after “Only An Octave Apart,” a 2021 show featuring Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Ross Costanza.Joy EpisallaAmelia Zirin-Brown, a cabaret singer under the name Rizo, said that she has listened to hers more than 2,000 times. Ms. Harry and Mx. Bond estimated “thousands”; Ms. Hanna, between 500 and 1,000.They have become attached to one particular warm-up session, made specially for them. They have transferred the recordings from cassettes to CDs to computers to phones. They have backups, and backups of backups. No matter how many times they are told how to hit certain notes, or how to position their faces, they treasure the reminders.The tapes preserve the past. Mx. Bond’s includes Ms. Gustern discussing a lover from decades ago. Ms. Zirin-Brown’s assistants know the tape so well that they can predict the exact moment when, out of nowhere, Ms. Gustern’s cat jumps onto the keyboard.Ms. Gustern might have thought of herself as a helpmeet or second banana, but her students didn’t see her that way.“She meant so much more to me than I did to her, and that was totally OK,” Ms. Hanna said. “I would see her and she wouldn’t understand — I’ve been around the world with you. You’ve been here and you’ve been doing all your stuff, and, meanwhile, I’ve been in France, and you were with me. I’ve been around the world with Barbara a few times. I’m still going to be going around the world with Barbara.” More
His images of David Bowie, Lou Reed, Queen and others helped define the 1970s. He was still shooting the stars decades later.Mick Rock, whose striking images of David Bowie, Lou Reed, Debbie Harry, as well as more recent stars like Theophilus London and Snoop Dogg, made him one of rock and pop’s most acclaimed photographers, died on Thursday at a hospital in Staten Island. He was 72.His family posted news of his death on his website. No cause was given.Mr. Rock was often called “the man who shot the ’70s” because of his photographs that captured the rock stars of that flamboyant decade, both in his native England and in New York. He lived the rock lifestyle as he was photographing it, becoming part of the scene inhabited by Mr. Bowie, Mr. Reed and the rest.“I was drawn to the good, the bad and the wicked,” he said in “Shot! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock,” a 2016 documentary about him directed by Barney Clay.“I’ve lived a very wild life because I’ve been hanging out with a lot of very wild people,” he added. “And the camera just kind of led me by the nose.”Mr. Rock in 2016 at an exhibition of his photographs in Toulouse, France.Remy Gabalda/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSome of his photographs adorned memorable album covers: the bleached-out shot of Mr. Reed on “Transformer” (1972); the eerily dark image of the members of Queen on “Queen II” (1974), later recreated in the much-viewed music video for “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Others captured stars in poses — Mr. Bowie looking androgynously enigmatic; Ms. Harry, of the group Blondie, looking like Marilyn Monroe. And still others caught performances or unguarded moments.“I am not in the business of documenting or revealing personalities,” Mr. Rock wrote in a diary early in his career. “I am in the business of freezing shadows and bottling auras.”Befriending the stars of the day, which included taking the same drugs they were often taking, gave him the sort of access that most photographers can only dream of. As Mr. Reed put it in the introduction to one of Mr. Rock’s books, “Mick Rock was so much a part of things that it was quite natural to have him snapping away and think of him as invisible.”But Mr. Rock wasn’t limited to one era. He continued photographing rockers, rappers and other music personalities for the next 40 years, even after a heart attack in 1996 led him to embrace a quieter lifestyle. (“All I am is a retired degenerate,” he joked in a 2011 interview with The New York Times.) In recent decades he had photographed Snoop Dogg, Lady Gaga, Rufus Wainwright and many others.Bob Marley, photographed in 1975.Mick Rock“It was barely over a year ago I sat with you by the window listening to Bowie stories,” Miley Cyrus wrote on Twitter after learning of his death. “It was my honor.”Mr. Rock often said he was fated to have the career he had because of his name: He was born Michael David Rock on Nov. 21, 1948, in London to David and Joan (Gibbs) Rock.He graduated from Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied modern languages. While a student there, as he put it in the documentary, “photography wandered idly into my life.” He was hanging out in a friend’s room with a companion, and the friend had left a 35-milimeter camera lying about (which turned out to have no film in it, though Mr. Rock didn’t realize that).“I was with a young lady in a state of — I think chemical inebriation is probably the best way of putting it,” he told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2010, “when I started snapping away. I was just playing, but there was something about it that I really liked.”So he got himself his own camera, with film, and began taking pictures of friends and friends’ friends. One friend, whom he had met early in his time at Cambridge, was Syd Barrett of the band Pink Floyd. Through Mr. Barrett he came to know other musicians, and a few not only asked him to photograph them but also paid him.“I suddenly realized you could make money from this,” Mr. Rock wrote in “Classic Queen,” his 2007 book about his work with that band. “That was terrific: much better than getting a ‘real’ job.”Snoop Dogg in 2009. Mr. Rock continued photographing rockers, rappers and other music personalities well into the 21st century. Mick RockHe started writing for various publications and illustrating his articles with his own photographs. One musician he came to know was Mr. Bowie, and one particular picture he took, in 1972, was career-making. Onstage at the Oxford Town Hall, Mr. Bowie pantomimed performing fellatio on the guitar of one of his musicians, Mick Ronson, as he played. Mr. Rock’s photograph of the moment turned up in Melody Maker magazine.“This was that shot that put my name on the map,” Mr. Rock wrote in the Queen book. “Suddenly I was in demand, and my camera was clearly speaking louder than my words.”Famed shots of Mr. Reed and Iggy Pop came along about the same time.“I took those when Lou and Iggy were relatively unknown, unless you were really, really hip,” he told The Telegraph, “but somehow those shots seemed to have defined them forever.”Madonna in 1980.Mick RockSoon his reputation was such that Queen came calling.“I didn’t really know their music, but, when they played me their album, I said, ‘Wow! Ziggy Stardust meets Led Zeppelin!’ and that seemed to seal the deal,” he said.Mr. Rock moved to New York in 1977 and became immersed in the turbulent scene there that included Blondie, the Ramones and other performers.“I needed a new edge, and I found it in New York in spades,” he told The Sunday Herald of Scotland in 1995.“Over the years Mick Rock has made history with all the musicians and rock stars that he has immortalized,” Ms. Harry wrote in the introduction to Mr. Rock’s book “Debbie Harry and Blondie: Picture This” (2019). “A good photo session is sometimes as good as sex. You leave feeling well massaged, satisfied and a little bit outside yourself.”Debbie Harry in 1978. “Mick Rock,” she wrote, “has made history with all the musicians and rock stars that he has immortalized.”Mick RockMr. Rock’s marriage to the photographer Sheila Rock ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Pati Rock, whom he married in 1997; a daughter, Nathalie Rock; and five siblings, Carol, Jacqueline, Don, Angela and Laura.Mr. Rock’s work was featured in various exhibitions. In the Blondie book, he lamented that he’d made such an impact as a rock photographer that it restricted him in some ways.“Like a hit record to a rock ’n’ roller, the downside is that a great image, besides defining the subject, can limit what others call on the photographer to do,” he wrote. “I wouldn’t mind shooting the occasional politician or actor (or even a gangster or two), but that’s not how art directors or magazines view me.” More
