Takin A Walk/Episode Twenty Six with Rock n Roll Photographer Henry Diltz in Studio City California

Podcast Transcript

Buzz Knight

On the special LA edition of the takin a walk series. I’m on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, and I’m thrilled to be takin a walk with an iconic photographer of our time. A man who has had the bird eye view of a who’s who of rocks stars, name a classic artist. He’s probably photographed them. His work is represented by the Morrison hotel gallery. His name is Henry Diltz. I can’t wait to hear what this raconteur has to say. Let’s take a walk with Henry Diltz.

Announcer

Takin a walk with Buzz Knight.

Well, Hey Henry it’s so great to be with you here in Studio City., taking a walk.

Henry Diltz

Yes. Down crowded Ventura Boulevard.

I know it’s got a great energy though. There’s so much, there’s so much going on here.

Vibrant spot. Oh, there goes a school bus. Yeah. There’s a school bus as long as there’s no sirens going by.

Henry it’s an honor really to meet you and I really look at all your work and I’m in awe of, uh, of what you’ve had a bird’s eye view for. Yeah. Um, it’s like so many amazing pieces of work, but let’s go to the beginning with you as a musician. And tell me, tell me how the modern folk quartet became a band.

Henry Diltz

Yes. Okay. It was the folk music days, you know, the 59 60 61. And I had just been to college in, in, in Germany and American college in Munich, Germany. And I was, and I transferred to the university of Hawaii to study psychology G but I also wanted to play the banjo. So I bought a banjo and went to Hawaii, studied psychology for a few years. And philosophy ended up singing in a little coffee house every night called the green sleeves coffee house. And, um, you know, we, we, we would sing folk songs, different people would come in, play the guitar. We’d put a group together, a harmony group. And we came to, to California to seek our fortune. And we did well right away. We, we were very well rehearsed and for several years in Hawaii and no one had heard of us here in LA.

So when we went to the Troubador club for their boot nanny night, which is their opening, which is their open mic night, we got up there. And when we hit the first cord in this song, the ox driver, the whole audience stood up clapping, and it was scary, you know, like what is happening because we had this four part harmony, you know, and there weren’t, there weren’t many, four part harmony band mostly three part, you know, or two part. And so that kind of sealed our, our fortune for a few years, we signed up with Warner brothers records. We started touring folk, folk tours around the country and being on shows and stuff. And we did that for four or five years. During that time I met all of these fellow musicians that were, you know, fellow folk, singers. I mean, I met Steven Stills in New York.

He used to come down to the village gate and sit on the edge of the stage and listen to our harmony. You know, I met David Crosby on tour in Florida. Uh, I just, you know, the Mamas and Papas were real good friends of mine. They were all people that we knew from backstage, you know, and from, from, from meeting on the road and hanging out of the Troubador and then one day on one of our tours, we went in to a camera store and, and the guy in front of me, Cyrus farer walked in and there was a table full of used cameras. And he just reached down and grabbed one and said, oh, a camera I’ll have one. You know, I was looking for one, he said, so I’m gonna buy that. And I was right behind him. And I just thought that I didn’t think without even thinking, I just reached down and said, yeah, Hey me too. Just, it was an impulse, you know? Well,

This was like a $20 camera,

Right? $20 used camera, a little used, it was a Japanese camera. I remember that instead of just the folding open, the whole back came off. And then you put the film in. I managed. So then Cyrus said, when we got in our vehicle, he said, pull into the next drug store and I’ll buy film. And he handed the three of us spot cameras. He handed us each a yellow box and I said, Welly, how do you set these numbers on the camera? He said, well, look on the box Kodak fill box. It’s a sunlight, two 50 at eight. I said, oh, okay. Two at eight, and let’s go outside. And she, so for a, for about a month, we took a lot of pictures on the road, got back to California, developed the film. And I was surprised and delighted to see that they were all these little square trans, oh, you can hold it up. Look, it it, and, and I said, well, let’s have a slide show of them. And that was the whole thing that started it. Because, because if, if, if it had been a black and white proof sheet, uh, wait, I wanna take this picture right here. Yeah. If it had been a black and white proof sheet, I wouldn’t have been so interested, you know, I wouldn’t have, um, sorry.

It’s okay. And he’s taken a picture, true photographer

That window, that, that round window that’s such a great,

Well, I love, I love that you stop and take a picture and now I’m gonna tell you who this reminds me of hint my wife in a second, because my wife’s a photographer and we will be walking and talking Henry and she has to stop and, and take

A picture. Exactly. You see it, you gotta take it, you know? Yeah. I

Think that’s fair. You still have the original camera.

It might be in the back of one of my several garages. I’m not really sure, you know? Um, but, but the thing was, um, we had this slideshow and what really, the moment that it bit me was when I saw the first slide on the wall, in the dark, all of my hippie friends watching and this huge eight foot picture of a great moment on the road with us were the, the bass player blew his cardboard bass case up with M eighties in the desert. And it shot up in the air and he’s running away in the background. And there was that picture on the wall to share with all our friends. I said, this is magic. I mean, it’s like, we’re right back there, you know? Right. Uh, that was the moment you were hooked. Yeah. I just said, man, I gotta take more pictures so we can have more of these slideshows. You know, it’s so much fun. And you know, they were my friends, it was a great audience.

Was there any, um, um, extracurricular stimulants that were part of

That time? Well, we all smoked. God’s herb, you know, I mean in the sixties, seventies, and as I often say, how do you think all that music came outta Laurel Canyon? You know, that’s right. I mean, it wasn’t, you know, it’s not, it’s not a drug as Ray Manzarek from The Doors said, it’s not a drug, it’s a sacrament, but you know, smoking a little bit of grass. I now call it Gods herb because it is, it’s a flower, God put here. That’s right. And it keeps children from having, you know, convulsions. Uh, it actually keeps my hand steady. I have a little tiny tremor when I sign photos. If I have a, a few little hits of a, of a joint, my hand settles down, I sign, here you go. Yeah. Oh, it’s a great thing. I don’t know how it got such a bad name. Oh, well, you know, things have changed.

Yes. You know, musicians love to smoke it because, uh, it, it kind of turns off the monkey tapes in your mind. Yeah. And it makes you in the moments, like smell the roses. So you sit there, you have a little smoke and then immediately you want to pick up your instrument and you want to start playing, making music. Yeah. Um, it’s just, it’s just a really wonderful thing that makes you, makes you happy. Make engages your mind. I mean, it makes life better. So anyway, that’s, that’s the

end of that, but, but that’s, that’s perfect.

But did you ever think in your lifetime, by the way that you would see the legalization of cannabis? I mean,

I dunno, Mickey Dolenz used to say, you know, if they ever legalize this stuff, it’ll ruin it because we do it together as a sort of brotherhood, you know, right. Secretly and illegally. Right. And we all break the law together. Yeah. As some, that’s kind of interesting, uh, idea, you know? Uh,

But did you know, so when you realized you were captivated by photography, is that when you kind of segue out of, uh, music, meaning as a musician?

Uh, well, no, I, you know, for a while there I was a musician and a photographer. I wasn’t a photographer. I was just a musician that picked up a camera and, and loved. I I’ve always, I’ve always loved people. You know, I’m very interested in people. In fact, when I went to, to college in Germany and Hawaii, I majored in psychology, which only meant that, that too, I was interested in, what is this? Are we, what are we doing? What are we focus? I’m very interested in, in, in, you know, the being here on this planet and what, what that means.

Well, what is so cool too, about walking here in places like this is the, the people watching too. I mean, yeah. It’s just a fabulous thing to just see people engage. I always try to wonder when I walk by somebody I’m like, well, what are they thinking about? You know, what’s on their minds, you know, are they having of good day? Are they having a lousy day?

You know, sometimes at the airport I will sit. If you have to wait an hour for a flight, I’ll sit there and watch hundreds and hundreds of people walk by. And one day I was sitting, I was thinking, you know, you know how big your life is? You’re the center of a alive. You have a past, you have a history, hope, screams your connection with people. All of that is repeated in every single person. In other words, every single person walking by is the center of a whole universe, their own private universe. And you, it’s kind of awesome because you see all these nameless people, but you think each one is this incredible sort of galaxy. Yeah. You know,

There’s a story to tell

There is that, you know? Yeah. Yeah. But back to that morning, when, when we, we were leaving the University of Michigan and we stopped in the secondhand store and of course we had smoked a little, little morning toke, like sure. Like every musician. Right. Does, you know, it’s kind of just kind of like a way of life. Yep. Uh, and so, you know, being a little high, it was like, not even high, just normal, just kinda wakes you up. You know? So when I saw Cyrus grab a camera, I just said, yeah, what the heck? You know, you know, me too. Wow. If I’d have been walking in there with a, a load of stuff on my mind, I wouldn’t have noticed. Right.

And just think, yeah. Right. Yeah. Think what you, would’ve, what you would’ve missed. So where after that first initial, like, look at what you did. Yeah. And, and amazement. Um, what was the next moment that you realized that you were further hooked? Was it a particular your album cover?

No. No. First of all, after that night, I swore I would take more photos for more slideshows. Now I wasn’t, I hadn’t photographed any, any groups or music. I mean, so the next couple weeks

I was hanging out with all my friends. That’s what we did in LA. We hung out every day. And by the way, that’s what musicians do. They hang out. We don’t have a nine to five, you know, and almost everything we do with our fellow musicians and a club or what, you know, wherever it is. Um, and I, I just started photographing everything, everybody I saw in the next two weeks, so I could get more pictures to show. And they were the guys in my group, their girlfriend, friends of friends, you know, whatever it was, uh, wherever I was, I would just, I was turned on to collecting images that would entertain my friends. Okay. That was what it was. And it was framing that added to the added fun part is framing. You know, you see something and there’s several ways you could frame it. If you get in close, you could get the wide shot, you could go vertical, horizontal. And there’s something, you know, kind of internally artistic about that. It’s feeling though. It’s just feeling. So that kind of sees me, you know

Now when you said the slides show, I seem to recall at, um, the Fillmore East, when I saw, um, my first concert there, which was the Jefferson Airplane and Joe Cocker actually. But I seem to remember that at the shows, then there would be, um, almost like slide shows that were being, uh, shown at concerts. Am I right about,

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes they’ll show ’em behind, you know, some, I mean, it used to be light shows, all lights and Joshua Light

Yeah. You know, swirling, psychedelic lights. Yeah. I mean, I’ve done plenty of slideshow for, for singers that want up something in the back, you know, in the background. Yeah. My friend, John Stewart, from the Kingston trio in his solo career, did these great songs about people, Midwest, you know, people in America. And so we put together a slideshow of farmers and just, just people that I had. And he had that behind him while he was singing. Now, that was really fun, you know? Yeah. So, so we did, when I say a slideshow, it means I, I put a carousel together of 80 slides and we’d go to a friend’s living room and have 20 or 30 friends over.

Are you still doing slides shows for friends?

I do. Now I do it on the road and it’s digital, you know, it’s through a, through an iPad and a digital projector.

And now I’m up on stage talking about the pictures to a whole audience. No, it’s not my Karmic group of friends. I would say more than half of them have already gone to the other side anyway, you know?

So now how does a photographer who started the way you started think of digital photography today?

Well, in oh five, I was saying I will never be a digital guy. I’m a film guy through and through. And then I picked up my friend at a cannon with the big telephoto lens and I just picked it up and looked to it and I said, oh my God, it’s, it’s focusing itself. And it’s setting its own light reading. I mean, here I was using a, a spot meter. I have to hold this thing up to my eyeball and, and read somebody’s face and then set the numbers on the camera and do all that. This was automatic. I said, my God, it’s like, you don’t even have to be there. You could just send the camera. And, um, so, so you were,

You were then like you bought it

Then, right? Yeah. I said the self focus thing was great, cuz you know, if you’re in a hurry and you don’t get it really sharp. And then later you think dammit, you know, I can’t use that. It’s not sharp enough. I thought, well, that’ll be a solution to that. Uh, I just, yeah, I, I was immediately interested in it. And the, the thing that I really love about digital photography is you can keep all the photos you ever take and you can give them all away. At the same time. In the old days, when I would shoot slides for an album cover, they would have to go to the art director or the record company. And nine times outta 10, you’d never get ’em back. They’d get lost somewhere. Is that right? The printing company or the, you know, nobody cared once they had the cover.

So many of my album covers I don’t have the original pictures where they, if they were digital, I would right. Cause you keep them all and you give digital copy. Like I’m saying, you know, I would shoot a group. I’d have to that next day, bring the film to the camera store, pick it up a day later. Then, then, you know, put, stamp my name on it, sort it all out, you know, up plastic sheets and give it to the, the manager or the art director, whoever it was that would take a good part of a week today. You shoot, you go home, you put it on your computer, you print. Well, a few years ago you print a CD. Now I guess it’s a thumb driver. You just email it to the, to the record company, the manager, the agency, each guy in the group, everybody can get everything. Yeah. And I get to keep it all as well. That to me is magic.

Well. And how do you feel about the fact that albums have made such a resurgence?

Well, I think it’s great. The, the old album cover was a great art form. The, you know, the 12 inch square, that was a great art form. And I worked with a terrific art director, Gary Burton. Most of the covers I did were with Gary Burton. We were a little team. Um, and we would, we would always Gary’s idea. He was like the, like the scout leader, you know, the scout master because he would plan the trip he would in what to do. We’re gonna go. What he wanted to do was get the group out of town, away from their girlfriends and their managers and their phones. We didn’t have cell phones. And so in the early seventies, like we went out to the, to the desert with the Eagles to do that first album cover. So we would plan an adventure that would get these guys out just with us.

So, and then Gary would say, just shoot everything that happens. Film’s the cheapest part. See, that was the insane which I did anyway. I just shot everything I saw. I mean, I’m just busy framing and clicking. And by the way, I am a passive photographer. I am not a, in your face guy that would never work, you know, in the music business, the reason I was able to be in the lives of all these people and be on the road with frog’s Nash and Eagles and bad company and the monkeys David Cay all over the world is because I wasn’t a pain in the ass. You know, I was quiet. I was respectful. Yep. Um, you know, I’m not jumping in there in front of everybody saying, okay, you know, look over here. Yep. Like I’m the photographer, I’m here to take your picture. Like you stand over there. I mean, oh God, I hate that. You know,

I, I just let, like to just quietly observe and watch and document, I’m kind of doing it internally. It’s my own thing I’m doing. I’m not thinking, oh boy, oh, get this picture in front of the world. No, I mean, I took all for me. It was all my fun framing, watching people, you know? And of course, of course I knew they were great musicians and I loved, loved the music too. It was a way to get me to keep me into that world, you know?

So go back to that first Eagles session that you were talking about out there in, I would imagine those, uh, young gentlemen at that time, they were like probably like choir boys in that era. Right.

Although, look, of course, I mean, we left the Troubadour at two in the morning and drove out to Joshua tree, got there at five in the morning in the dark ate peyote buttons, smoked a joint, climbed a mountain and spent the day laughing on top of the mountain, you know, with a teapot of bubble peyote buttons on the fire. Oh yeah. We, we just, we had the great, that’s what you do in the desert. You know, you let go, you let loose.

What was Glen Frey’s comment about your photography?

He said, he said, this isn’t photography, this is evidence. I’m just shooting everything that happened. And you know, people aren’t posing for me it’s way, you know, that’s, you know, that’s, we’re over that, you know, in five minutes, you know, we’re all just doing what we do and I am too. And then I just turn around and snap a couple of pictures.

You don’t realize in that moment, I’m sure that it’s a moment. Right. I mean, when you’re in that moment, go back in time. Uh, you don’t realize how special that moment is Do you?

No, right. No, it’s just, it’s just the moment, you know, it’s what’s going on. Yeah. I mean, life is an adventure, you know, uh, it, it really is an adventure every day, but these particular days we’re huge adventures because we plan ’em out and go somewhere, go to an Indian reservation or go up to Big Sir you know, and just bring a group along and, and get ’em away from their everyday stuff

Yeah. They might, they say, oh, I have to go pick my girlfriend up. I can’t shoot anymore. You know? No, no. We’re out there for the day and the night and there’s no interruptions, So that’s an organic adventure thing, you know? And, and it’s, I always enjoy it. I’m participating in it, but I never stop to think, well, boy, no. Where will this fit in you know, I know in the timeline of my life, I mean, who thinks

That no, nobody.

So that first Crosby stills Nash session, uh, how did all that come together in that particular iconic album cover?

Gary Burton, my graphic artist partner, and myself both knew these three guys. I had known even that was 69. I met him in 63 in New York. You know, I knew Crosby for years. I knew all these guys before the birds in the Buffalo Springfield, you know, before. So musicians, I’d say it’s like a club. We all know each other, especially in LA, we all hang out

Everybody knew what was, what was going on. We knew they were recording an album together, you know? And, uh, and they needed pictures. Nobody had taken any pictures of them even to announce if they’re singing together. So Gary and I said, let’s, let’s go, come on. We’re getting this old Ford station wagon, 50 something, Ford station wagon, and drive around LA looking for little spots to take interesting photos. And we found that little house Graham had seen that house sometime earlier and said, I know there’s this great little house around here. And we found it and was a couch in front of it. They sat there, we took a bunch of pictures. And Gary said, the other thing that he said to me first thing was just shoot everything that happens.

Second thing he always said to me was back up, back up, get the whole house that’s. So I, they sit on the couch, I’m right up close to him, getting the couch from end to end in a horizontal frame, you know? And, but then Gary saw something and we were just shooting publicity photos, not an album cover, but Gary could saw that that whole house was interesting. And he said back up, back up, I backed up across the street and then I could see them on the couch at the bottom and the whole house around them. Um, and so that’s how that happened. The story with that is the, they hadn’t even named themselves yet. So when they sat on the couch randomly, it happened to be Nash Stills and Crosby. And then we looked at that in a slideshow a few days later and said, boy, someone said that would be a great album cover, but we’re in the wrong order.

Cuz now they just decided to be Crosby Stills and Nash. And that, that rolls off the tongue. Right. Uh, so I said, no problem. Let’s just go back there. How, how long would it take for you to jump on the couch in the right order? I’ll go click, click, click, we’ll have the same shot in the right order. And so we did a few days later, cotton Gary’s Ford station wagon drove back and the house wasn’t there with an empty lot. And as Graham says, it was a, Hey, there was a bunch of sticks in the back of the lot. They bull those, the whole thing down and made a parking lot out it right around the time that Joni’s song paved paradise put up a parking lot. And I said, my God, that is exactly right. So, so they they’re sitting in the wrong order and on that cover.

You know, and I’ll tell you an interesting thing about that. Gary was an architect. He’d been fixing up Mama Cass’s house.. And she said, Gary, I want you to, they got to be good friends, you know, probably smoking a little and laughing. And she said, I want, why don’t you do my first album come doing a solo album? And you, he said, well, Cass, I, I’m not a graphic artist. I’m an architect. And she said, well, you make a blueprint. You do an album cover. What’s the difference? Right, right. So he said, okay, I’ll try it. And he, a few days later saw me at a, a love in, on a Sunday, in a park, which was just a get together of hippies and um, said, Hey, you’re a photographer. You want to help me do this? And I said, I know Mamma Cass real well. Yeah. So that’s how we started working together. Gary and I

That’s so cool. How did you first meet Joni through CSN?

I probably saw her play at the Troubadour one night, you know, and then I met her, uh, with Graham Nash. I met her up at Cass’s house. I’d see her around town, you know, we all saw each other.

What was it like to photograph Joni?

Well, she’s very beautiful and smart, you know? So it’s always an interesting conversation, which you don’t get in the picture. She always says really, you know, wildly deep thoughts, you know, about mankind and you know, we’re the most destructive generation, where are the whales? Where are the butterflies, you know, where are, you know, and thank God for Buddhism and you know, talks about the original sin, you know? And you’re like, oh my God, this is like a history class, you know, really right. Every time I’ve ever gone over to our house and talked to her, I wished I had either a tape recorder or, or a darn video crew. Right. But then it wouldn’t have been the same. We wouldn’t have talked quietly about all this, you know? Yeah. So she’s marvelous lady. Very, you know, I, I often I do slide shows around the country and talk to audience and I’ve show ’em the pictures and tell ’em the stories basically.

And um, I always say, you know, folks, the, all of these people in these pictures, the reason they’re so well known and beloved it is they’re amazing people. Yep. You know, they are a little bit a cut above, you know, the ordinary person. Yes. That they’re clever. I mean, good Lord James Taylor, you know, Jackson Browne. I mean, Jimmy Webb, he’s one of my favorite composers. I mean, but they’re all amazing that they could, well, the thing is their song or writers now here, here, my little rap about that. Because because years ago there were songwriters and singers, like Frank Sinatra never wrote me songs. Elvis Presley never wrote songs. They sang the song that songwriters wrote.

Yep. And then a combination, I think the Beatles playing Ed Sullivan and all the folk groups made sure they we were on the road up in New England.

We pulled into a motel early to watch Ed Sullivan. We knew the Beatles would be on. We heard about ’em knew they were some fantastic thing. Never really knew much about ’em. And we, we saw them wagging their heads and singing. She loves you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s like, wow, that is so joyful. And look, they have an electric base. We had a standup base. We went out the next week and got an electric bass and electrified our guitar. And we said, what are we singing about the ox driver for, we could be singing, you know? So that happened. And also, um, Bob Dylan wrote a song for Woody Guthrie. Right. Kind of a talk and thing about Woody Guthrie. And so that was the beginning sort of, of singers actually writing their own songs, their own thoughts. Yep. So now when you can hear Joni Mitchell sing about her, you know, her love for somebody or something, you know, oh my God. Her observations are so amazing, you know,

She’s striking.

Yeah. So you get to it’s the fruits of her mind and her feeling and all of that. It comes out, you know?

Yeah., you, you mentioned earlier before about how, how, how huge music is in our lives, you know? Yeah. Is it 20%? Is it 50%? I heard a lady once said for me, it’s a hundred percent because I don’t do anything without music on. So I buy that. But you know, we, we are a frequency, you know, we are millions of, of, of cells. We are, we are a electrons spinning around. We are made up of that, our bodies, you know, and, and, and we’re, we’re, we’re a frequency. And so his music is a frequency, you know, it’s interesting, uh, Cyrus in our group, when we would sing folk concerts, he, he would often, he would say, or he told me once anyway, he said, you know, when we sing to an, the sound is coming out of our mouths and going straight into their ears, it’s a one to one connection of that musical frequency. I mean, the same thing happened. We put a record on, but it’s, you know, it’s coming through, but you’re getting that frequency. Um, and that’s why it’s so huge, I guess it just stimulates our mind and our brain and the memory, you know, from the first time you heard

Yes. Yes. So, so many things I have to ask you though, there’s a couple of movies that as you, we were talking about, uh, folk music and everything. I wanted to see what you thought of these movies, just for their perspective. One was, um, uh, The Mighty Wind, you know, the, Mockumentary, done by Christopher Guest

I love that movie. Sure. I mean, it’s with your friend

Ed Begley Jr. Who we just saw

Yes. She was in that. Yeah. I’ve seen that a few times. I love that. Right. Uh, it’s kind of the machinations of it are kind of what it was like, you don’t get into everybody’s head, you know, really so

The other one is, , did you see Inside Lewin Davis?

No Never did Cohen brothers.

And that is the take off on, you know, the Dave Van Rock sort of Dylan, era, Greenwich village and everything. And, um, but it’s a strange story. I love it to death, but it’s a strange story that involves a cat. And if you see that movie and you could figure out what that movie’s about, would you please let me know?

Yeah. Okay. Oh, sure. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. But I love it. The cat gets away. Yeah. Yeah. And I won’t ruin it for you because I think you, I think you’ll appreciate it. So the Morrison hotel cover that is

Okay. I, oh, you know, I was, I started out by telling you that that Gary was an architect. Yes. So when he made album covers as architects, too, they want to incorporate new materials or new ideas. So when we went to print that Crosby Nash, first album on the couch, he told the printers that the printing company, I want you to turn the paper over and print it on the uncoded side. Now up to then all album covers are glossy. They have a glossy finished one. He said, no, I want to print on the UN coded the mat side of the paper. And they said, well, we we’ve never done that. You know? I mean, it’ll soak up the, he said, I don’t care to do it. He and he had the group behind him do what he says. And, and so when you hold that first original cover that folds out, it’s gotta feel a texture to it. It’s organic. You feel the roughness of the paper, a slick glossy plasticy thing. Yep.

And so that, that was a great, you know, innovation that

It’s a find

Yeah.

Through experimentation. Right.

That’s right. That’s what I was leading up to about Gary, Gary Burton. But now, so the Doors apparently saw that album and called us, you know, within a week or two and, and called Gary, he was the art director. Cause they call him and say, we want you to do our cover. So we went to meet with them at their little office and it was just Jim and Raymond, and Gary and I, and we said, okay, uh, great. If you got a title, he said, well, no, well, do you have an idea? What kind of, what do you want on the cover? What’s it, what’s it about what do you, no, we don’t know. That’s why we called you and we’re going well. Uh, you know, Raymond randomly speaks up at that point and just says, you know, my wife, Dorothy and I were driving through downtown LA the other day.

And we saw this old funky boat hotel. It said Morrison hotel on the window. And Gary and I both went, wow, that sounds great. And we went down that same afternoon, we got in their Volkswagen Van and drove down there. It was, it was great. Took a picture of Jim behind the window sitting there. So then we went back a week later with the whole group and we got out of our car. It was the bands old Volkswagen van. We all fit in there. We walked in and they walked into the lobby. It was empty. It was some old secondhand furniture, you know? And, and a guy, young guy behind it desk. I, I was walking in last. I just said, yeah, we’re just gonna be over there for a few minutes, taking a few shots, you know, with nobody to bother, you know, and he got very animated.

Oh no, no, you can’t take any pictures in here. You’ve gotta get the owner’s permission. But where is he? Well, he’s not here. You know, apparently in, in retrospect it turns, he was a famous slum lawyer who was very, very hard to deal with. And that guy was in fear of his life. If we took a picture in there. So I walked up to the doors and I said, Hey, you guys, the guy’s not gonna let us shoot in here. Let’s walk out on the sidewalk. And I’m thinking they can’t stop us on the sidewalk. We’ll take it in front of the window. Right. To tell you truth. I don’t know what picture I would’ve taken in the lobby because, you know, so we all marched outside and we stood in front of that big window that said Morrison hotel. And they’re just about to stand with their backs to that window.

And I looked in and I saw a light go on in the back of the lobby, a big light. And I, I looked through the window. I said, I, oh, that’s the elevator light. The guy left the desk so quick run in there. And by golly, they ran in and just hit those marks. You know, we didn’t have to say, you know, you move to the left, you, they just bang right there. And I backed up and I, I took, well, first I took a few shots close up and then Gary said, back up Henry, back up, get the whole window, you know, here he is again. And there he is again. So I did that five minutes. We were out of there.. And then Jim said, well, let’s go get a drink. We’re in downtown LA. We went a few blocks to skid row where we’re driving along, looking for, trying to pick a bar.

They’re all our and pawn shops and out the out the, the front window on the next corner, somebody said, look Hard Rock Cafe, no one ever heard of that before. And so we’ll look at our beers in there. We went in, we spent, you know, an hour or two, I don’t know how long it was, but Jim liked to buy beers for some of the old winos in there because he liked to hear them tell their stories. Jim was a, a very kind of quiet internal, like a poetic guy, you know? Uh, and so he, he, he wasn’t, uh, outgoing. He didn’t talk a lot, but he liked to listen. He liked to hear people and mull over in his mind, these guys were saying, you know, at 16 and joined the merchant Marine. They’re like, you know, you know? Yeah. So, uh, and then we put back a picture of that Hard Rock Café on the back of the door Morrison hotel. And they got a call from England. As soon as that record came out and a voice said, would you mind if we use that name, we’re starting a cafe here in London. And they said, no, go ahead. So that was, and now years later, I have a I’m part owner of a chain of galleries called Morrison Hotel Galleries in which you can buy my photos and 125 other photographers photos. Um, and so that one day we got the name of our business and the name of the Hard Rock Cafe

All in that afternoon, that was the, yeah. I, I need to go back and consult my, my horoscope for that day. Right. That was a, a productive day.

Now how did the, um, opportunity for you come to be the photographer of record for a Woodstock and for Monterey,

You know, both, I always say phone call, you know. So, but with the, with Monterey pop, I think it was just, you know, John Phillips from the Mamas and Pappas is a good friend of mine is a fellow folk singer long, you know, long before I picked up a camera, I saw him somewhere and he said, Hey, Henry, we’re gonna do this big festival up in Monterey. You want to take pictures for me? I said, yeah. And that was of fact the second one Woodstock, the phone rang. And it was a fellow named Chip Monk, Edward Bar Ford Monk, plus his nickname was Chip. k. And I had seen him well at Monterey. He was a lighting director there. And, and then a lot of the folk tours that we did, he was there doing the, doing up sound and lighting, staging, all that. So he called me, he said, Henry, he said, I’m out in New York. We’re gonna have a big music festival out here in a couple of weeks. You ought to be here. I said, well, chip, I’ve read about it. But I, I don’t know those guys, you know, how am I going? He said, look, I’ll talk to the producer. And the next day, Michael Lang called

Man. A few words. He said, chip says, we need you. I’m sending you an airline ticket and $500. I said, okay, I’ll go have, and I got there a couple of weeks before. I think almost three weeks before the festival, they, they had changed locations. The original township had voted the out, you know, they didn’t want all those damn hippies all over their lawn. So then they found Yasgurs Farm and they were just starting to build that great big wooden deck at the bottom of that, that natural amphi theater, which was growing with, um, alfalfa, you know? Yep. Beautiful green field. And my job was just to hang out all day in and document what was going on, waiting for the festival to start. But in those couple of weeks, it was like being at summer camp. I went to summer camp in upstate New York, you know, as a boy.

Yeah. And this was like a, of course I, I didn’t have anybody to answer to, I just walk around doing the thing I loved doing and couldn’t stop doing anyway, you know? Right. I mean go to the hog farm, which with the, the pee, the hog farm from New Mexico came up and built the camp sites and helped with security. I’d go over there and hang out in top, maybe smoke a joint, watch the girls chopping up cabbage to make Cole Slaw, you know, . I’d photograph that. And back to the stage where there was this big wooden deck, like an aircraft carrier and all these hippy carpenters with their shirts off, all brown, sewing and hammering, you know, and the girls would come over lunch time and bring drinks and lunch. And I’m just there having a time of my life, you know?

And, and it was like an aircraft carrier in a sea of alfalfa, cuz that’s what was, that’s all we saw, you know, blowing in the wind. And then after a couple weeks, one day I was there and, and I looked up and at the top of that hill was a few people sitting there and I thought, what, what the hell are they doing? Where, you know, we’re out in the country here, what I are they doing there? What are they looking at? And I thought, oh yeah, that’s right. I forgot. You know? And then the next day there was, you know, a thousand people. And then the next day there were 400,000 people. It just happened. Bang, bang, bang. And I, I was living in a rooming house, down a dirt road that ran behind the state about a mile. But I, and I had my, my rent, a station wagon parked behind the stage that day when 400,000 people got there, I couldn’t get home.

I couldn’t drive down that road. These cars were parked on either side of the dirt road, not leaving space for a car in the middle. And even that space was full of bodies walking. Wow. It was, you know, like at the subway in New York city or something suddenly on this little country road. So I had to sleep in my stage for wagon backstage for a few days. And I just, basically, I mostly stayed up on the stage. That was my job, you know, document all the acts, you know? And what was it like shooting photos of Jimi Hendrix Well, you know, he didn’t play until on Monday morning, he was supposed to close the show Sunday night, but it was so backed up that he didn’t start till Monday morning and uh, came out right at dawn, wearing these colorful bandanas on their heads. And it was like, woo, we’d all been up for our, you know, I, I was, I got a couple hours sleep in my station wagon before I heard later it was Chip Monk up on stage, you know?

Yep. And I said, I grabbed my cameras and ran up there and I’m standing right at the edge on stage. I had the big all access pass. I could go anywhere. Yeah. All the other photographers were down in the pit in front of the stage. But I was like on stage Jimi and I, and it was great, you know, and then, but the moment, the quintessential moment was when he started playing the Star Spangled Banner, because I mean, here we were an army of peace and love hippies. Uh, many of whom are susceptible to the draft that hell no, I’m not gonna go over there and shoot strangers. And for what, you know, we were peace and love brotherhood. We were talking about angels, you know, and, and gurus and Indian medicine, men, and the good things in life, you know? And so suddenly he started playing that song.

And I know my first reaction was, wait a minute. You know, that’s their song, that’s the official country, you know, that’s the president in the army and the whole, you know, put up the flag, that’s the opposite of where we’re at. Yeah. But then as he played in all those, you know, the sounds of war, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom. You know, you’re making all the sounds that went with that song. And I kind of saw it, wait a minute, he’s reclaiming it for us. You know? Yeah. Because we were like looking at that 400, 450,000 people filling that whole basin, you know, was, and up to the top of the hill, it was like, like what the Sioux Indians felt like, you know

And the same for us, you know? Wow. And these were all peace and love, hippies passing it, joint, you know, shirts off dancing having to mean, there were no fights, right. There was no negativity. Yep. Cuz everybody was happy, you know? Yeah. That was Michael Lang’s original idea. Three days of peace and music, you know, by he pulled it off. So Jimi played that song and then, then I thought, wow. Yeah, he’s reclaiming it. So I never got a chance to ask him about it. But I talked to his conga player a few years ago on the 50th anniversary. I was on, you know, doing a talk with him. He said, yeah, we were in a rooming house near there for a couple of weeks before the concerts. And he practiced that song every day, the r. So it wasn’t just a singing off the top of his head. He had a reason, he was a paratrooper and you know, and later he years I have come to realize that the brilliance of that, that whole thing, because when Francis Scott Key wrote that song, he was up on a hillside looking over Fort MC Henry and the British fleet in the bay bombarding, Fort MC Henry boom, boom. You know, all that was going on, shooting their cannons. Yep. And the flag was still waving, you know? Right. So he was recreating that whole thing, you know, that was brilliant.

Wow. Well Henry, I got one last question for you. I was thinking about this one. Um, and we could go on forever taking this walk, but I was thinking we all have dreams that, uh, you know, come outta nowhere in our, our, our sleep patterns. Right. So do you ever have these dreams where you flash back to this moment with one of these, you know, iconic figures and they’re in the dream in a different form, has that ever happened to you?

It has happened to me. Yeah. I’m, I’m a big, you know, a big fan of dreams and you know, what’s happening really on the other side and all, but, but um, yeah, it’s funny. I have had like one dream of the Eagles, one dream of the Doors, one dream of Steven stills. I have one a year kind of, and I, and it’s never a replay of something that happened. It’s always something else, you know? I mean, we’re, we’re on the road somewhere and something’s happening. They’re there. I see them generally. My dreams are all people. I don’t know. You know, they used to be dream dreams where I was late getting to the, uh, the train station. I had all my friends were at the station waiting for the train and I had to get home and pack to get there, you know, really, you know, what they call those kind of dreams, uh, you know, uh, uptight dreams.

Yeah.

But then I do, I have dreams where it’s lots of people around and a really good friend I’m right there with everybody, but I don’t know who they are. They’re nobody that I know.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I don’t know, you know, some of it might be in your brain, some of it, you might leave your body and go to a place with a bunch of people.

Right.

So I don’t know, but yeah, I, I have had, I know I had a doors dream once I could bit that I did, but it doesn’t recur just one time. And I don’t even know why. Oh my

God. Yeah. Well, but you have, uh, left a indelible mark on me today, but on a, uh, multitude of generations here with your amazing work, uh, your, uh, uh, thoughtful, I, uh, the way you made everybody that you were, uh, photographing comfortable, uh, and the way you have sort of captured all of that is just, uh, part of our life. And I really thank you

It’s just the byproduct of my own adventure. Like I said before, I mean, people used to say, oh, oh, you’re a photographer. Are you a professional without thinking? I say, no, you know, no, I mean, I don’t have a gallery. I don’t have assistants. I don’t have lights. I don’t, I’m just a guy who likes to look at things and, and take a picture of them. And, you know, then, you know, I took a course in existentialism, you know, which is the moment. I mean, the past has passed. The future is a dream or a, or a plan. But the only thing that’s real is the moment that we’re in right now. And it kind of then bothered me that I was known for all these past moments. And then somebody said to me, yeah, but you bring the past moments into the present.

And I said, oh, okay. I can live with that. You know, I can live with it, but it is, uh, the older you get and the longer ago you took those pictures, it gets more and more surreal. You know, I read the gurus, I read the Indian gurus, yo Nanda, Swami, Sacha Denda. I mean,. I love books like that. Books, um, books that are spoken through people, you know, from the other side, from arch angels and from masters on the other side, they, they speak to somebody and they, they like dictate a book. I really love all that stuff. You know, some guru, you know, said, Hey, when you leave, when you die, which you know, I don’t like to use that word, cuz nobody does die. You know, you by you drop your body, but your spirit lives on and you do go to the other side and they said, it’s no big deal.

You walk into the next room. That’s, you know, that’s it. And so I glibly tell that to everybody and, and I believe it. I mean, I’m, I’ll be happy to get there. See, you know, I’ve, I’ve read a lot about it. People die on the operating table and they come back and they say, wow, I can’t describe the music. I can’t describe they’re they’re there for a couple of minutes. Sometimes they say, I saw God. And he said, you have to go back. One lady said I was running over a meadow, my feet, weren’t touching the ground. And then somebody said, this is not your pond. You have to go back and you just wanna be there. You know? And then recently a dear, a dear lady, friend of mine for 20 years, uh, transitioned out of the physical, you know, left her body.

And I, it was only a couple of weeks ago and, and I suddenly said, wow, it’s one thing to say, no big deal. You know, you’re just welcome. But when it’s somebody who’s a big part of your life and they’re gone, their big hole up there, you know, their energy is just gone nuts. That’s so I’m, I’m, I’m working with that now. And, but as my spiritual teacher used to tell me, isn’t it great, isn’t it great that we can deal with these things, you know, and, and learn from these things. You know, one of my favorite guru, Swami, Sacha Denda he said, of course, we’re all here to learn. We know that. So therefore we’re all students, but you should think of yourself as the only students and everybody you meet is human teacher. Now that will change the the day. You know what I mean? Yes. Instead of, you know, I mean, if somebody yells at you and yell back, you yell back. I mean, that’s a waste instead, you know, you say, thank you for telling me that, you know, you’re teaching me. Yeah. Maybe they’re just teaching you to deal with, with that kind of a person, you know, but, but everybody can teach something. Right? Peace and love. I’m just old hippie. You know, I really believe in it.

Well, Henry ditz, it’s an honor to meet you. And I’m so grateful that you took a walk with me. Thank you for everything.

Sure thing, Buzz. My pleasure. This is great. Now, we gotta walk 10 miles back.

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About The Author

Buzz Knight

Buzz Knight is an established media executive with a long history of content creation and multi-platform distribution.

After a successful career as a Radio Executive, he formed Buzz Knight Media which focuses on strategic guidance and the development of new original content.

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Takin A Walk/Episode Twenty Six with Rock n Roll Photographer Henry Diltz in Studio City California

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