Dropping Acid Made Him a Better Photographer
The subject of the new documentary ‘Shot! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock’ talks David Bowie, Marlon Brando, and drugs.
Mick Rock has the exact name you would expect from a man who has a prolific, decades-spanning career as a music photographer. His work ranges from recognizable shots of legendary musicians — Debbie Harry, Lou Reed, Freddie Mercury, Joan Jett, to name but a few — to serving as David Bowie’s official photographer, to shooting the iconic Iggy Pop Raw Power album cover.
A new documentary about his life and career, SHOT! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock, hits theaters in limited release this weekend. We sat down with Rock to talk his own taste in documentaries and actors (he’s a big Brando fan), the relationship between drugs and artistry, and legitimate punk rockers of past and present.
Interview by Heather Buckley
Outtake: How did you get involved in this crazy film? Why did they feel like your story needed to be told because, obviously, watching it — your story needed to be told.
Mick Rock: Maybe. But before they’d locked me away. Well, I’ll tell you, people have been talking to me for a number of years about doing it. I suppose….photographers, they have stuff, they have visual stuff, and somehow I worked with certain people who were interested in like, forget about Mick Rock, throw in all my pictures of David Bowie and Queen and Lou and Iggy and Syd and all the usual suspects people want to talk about it — but that’s not my theory, it’s really more their doing, the doing of the subjects. But yes so a lot of people, a number of people, actually talked to me about doing it and I didn’t want to do it because I didn’t want to do a documentary the way most people think of a documentary. I did not, in fact, I challenged the director…the prerequisite was he hadn’t done a documentary before, that was important, not someone who had a formula, you know. Barney [Clay] I knew had a great eye, of course, you know, there was a downside because you didn’t quite know how to do a documentary, knew how to do great images, but he had to be, never done one before, and under forty [years old].
Outtake: So you weren’t looking for the old documentary style, with talking heads, 3/4 camera taking up that space, that stuff?
Mick Rock: I didn’t want that. Could have had that years ago, didn’t want it… to watch people justifying your existence it’s, to me, just a waste of time and space. Now, I will watch other documentaries and quite enjoy them with talking heads in it but it just, I knew it had to be different somehow or another. I didn’t, I just thought “oh, it’s going to be boring if you do that” and it needs to be a bit, something different. Whatever the fuck it is, it’s got to be something different. And I think that part got achieved, it’s not quite like, well, people say it’s not like any other documentary they’ve seen. …I would compare it to something I loved, which is that Marlon Brando one. I think that’s…I love, it’s still got talking heads but I mean I love when Brando speaks. And Nina Simone, which I haven’t yet seen actually…
Outtake: Are you taking about Listen to Me Marlon?…
Mick Rock: Yeah, that one.
Outtake:…that uses the audio recordings to tell the story.
Mick Rock: Yeah it uses all that interesting digital stuff too… he was, for starters, I think, without a shadow of a doubt, the single greatest movie actor of all time. Yeah he has some eccentric roles but he was, I mean, Apocalypse Now just watch him in there and, I don’t have time to talk through, you know, he got physical, and he was a pain in the ass, he got too fat and all the rest of it. If you watch that documentary that Francis Ford Coppola’s wife made about the making of Apocalypse Now, it’s extraordinary. Extraordinary that the tragedy was that he was so indulged in life that he had this very sad end, you know? The death of his daughter, his son that killed the boyfriend of his daughter, I mean it was all so awful and he got so fat and, ugh, but yeah such a beautiful young man and yet he did these extraordinary things as an actor.
Outtake: Well I think he’s more beautiful than any other other male on earth than in The Wild One.
Mick Rock: Well The Wild One is not my favorite ones because to me it’s very camp…it’s like watching a bunch of camp old queens camping around. But, to see him in Viva Zapata!, to see him in On the Waterfront, to see him in The Godfather, I mean that’s an extraordinary thing. Yes I mean I don’t mind The Wild One but nowadays it looks a bit, you see the Hells Angels, they’re nearly all very ugly, none of them are very pretty, very grisly, whereas Marlon, you know, you could give him a big kiss he looks so cute in The Wild One.
Outtake: Yes.
Mick Rock: I know it’s a signifiant piece, I understand…
Outtake: Well I’m just talking about from a visual standpoint, from an aesthetic standpoint, that time in his career when he was considered to be so beautiful and that would also encapsulate On The Waterfront as well.
Mick Rock: On the Waterfront, yes, that’s an amazing piece of work, especially in the cab, that thing…“I coulda been a contender”
Outtake: For me it’s Godfather, too, for performance, and Last Tango in Paris.
Mick Rock: Rod Steiger was a good actor too, no doubt, I mean he didn’t have the sexy aura that Brando had but he still did great work.
But we should be talking about about Shot! and not my other obsessions…
Outtake: We can talk about Bowie and his acting career…a lot of your friends went on to acting….
Mick Rock: It’s very difficult. Not many, and, David relatively speaking, did have, the only singer as far as I can make out…that really had a big career as an actor was Frank Sinatra. I mean he was in a lot of films, a lot of serious films, whereas David did a few but he did them well. Mick Jagger, not really good in films, you know, he’s very brilliant at playing Mick Jagger, but not so good…I think it was easier for David because he was a shape-shifter anyway, always assuming different roles and different forms of music, whereas Mick really, it’s like, perfected that fucking Mick Jagger thing. He’s somebody, I remember an early on documentary he talks about acting, he’s played his role unbelievably well, but he’s essentially the same role. That’s why his best performance is in Performance...from the late sixties, he kinda plays a Mick Jagger role, and he needed to shift around and to assume different personas so, I mean I don’t consider film that maybe you’d consider an epic film that David was in, I don’t know, I mean…David was, above all, still a visual and sonic artist and in a way the acting was a sidebar, something he liked do to, though when he did it, he did it very well. Obviously he had a limited amount of time to spend doing that, because he was busy being the creative force that he was.
And, Lou Reed, he did a little bit of acting…
Outtake: What was he in?
Mick Rock: Well he was in that film Smoke, isn’t he, and he’d got a couple of other bits and pieces. Iggy should have been in more films.
Outtake: I agree. I actually, when I was very young, saw him in Adventures of Pete & Pete as the next-door-neighbor…which was this crazy Nickelodeon show.
Mick Rock: Ha! Yes, he has a great presence Iggy. And, of course, the amazing thing about Iggy is that back in the early seventies when that whole glamy-punky-thing blew up, and really the punk thing was there too because Iggy was more punk than anyone that’s ever been, no matter who you talk about. And of course, I shot him, I shot the Raw Power pictures…and his physicality was so punk but of course he’s very bright as well, and actually very articulate and now, what does he do now, he hangs about with Anthony Bourdain you know…which is very cool.
Outtake: Well, Anthony Bourdain is also a punk rocker…
Mick Rock: There’s a lot of punk rockers out there. I just did an interview with “Handsome Dick” Manitoba the other day…
Outtake: Oh I love him, I go to to Manitoba’s in New York…
Mick Rock:…I actually, in one of my visits to New York in the early seventies, I shot him when he had an afro when he was fronting The Dictators. So, yeah, a lot of amazing…I think Eamonn Bowles, who is president of Magnolia, well he still has a band, doesn’t he? Tess [publicist]? I think he was a punk rocker.
Tess: Oh yeah, he still does it all the time.
Outtake: How come I’m not invited to these shows!
Mick Rock: Got a lot of punk rockers lurking about out there. But there’s no doubt about it that Lou and Iggy, in their different ways, were the, even though Lou always denied it because he said, as he does in the documentary, “I’m far too literary.” And in many ways that was true. But he was still, in the stripped-down approach of The Velvet Underground, he was definitely seminal when he came to punk. And also his attitude, you know, but obviously the godfather was Iggy, everything else looked like amateur time after Iggy, whether you called yourself Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious or whatever, you know, with all due respect to those guys. So, Iggy, beautiful that he’s still alive, I love it. I’ve shot him a couple times in recent times too. He’s something else. He’s very genial these days and has been for a number of years, whereas early on he wrote a forward to my Raw Power book and he said he hated everything and everybody, including the Raw Power cover, at the time but, of course, he said, “I changed my mind over the years.”
And Freddie was a punk though, Freddie was actually a Parsi and he learned to sing by singing, I mean he was really, Parsi’s are, even though he grew up in Zanzibar, was it Zanzibar?, Freddie grew up initially, Farrokh Bulsara, of course was his real name and his given name, he became Freddie Mercury. But a lot of them, David Bowie: David Jones, Iggy Pop: Jim Osterberg, Lou Reed, he had another, Debbie Harry is Debbie Harry and I think Bryan Ferry was always Bryan Ferry. But some of those, Syd was really Roger Barrett, but everyone called him Syd.
Outtake: Freddie Mercury, Tanzania. 100% correct his birthplace.
Mick Rock: Yeah yeah, I mean, he came to England I think, I’m not sure what age, maybe in his early teen or mid teens or something.
Punk rock, yeah, well, I did choose the End of the Century album cover and Joan Jett, and I never thought Debbie Harry was punk, she was just too delicious you know, to be, okay yes she was, she could be, with some of the clothes and all but never photographed her as punk, I photographed her as a deliriously beautiful young lady. Not that she was so young, she was in her thirties really, or late-twenties, before Blondie broke. But she looked so young, and she still looks fabulous today. God bless her!
Outtake: That’s true. I’ve seen her recently — gorgeous. But I think she was just friends with everyone, everything happening at CBGBs at the same time, it was a melting pot with her, Talking Heads, and The Ramones, Lou Reed…
Mick Rock: Well she’s a great lady, she’s a fabulous human being, she’s just, she was always like, she never played the girly thing even though, you know, she’s super female in her persona, she was always one of the boys, you know. And to this day, she has a, there’s a modesty to her demeanor which is very charming. She’s like the anti-Madonna, not to knock Madonna, who, what she did in the music business was amazing. I am more impressed by her business chops than I am by her music, God bless her. But the music business is brutally sexist, I think it’s less so today, but the world is less sexist today, not to say that there isn’t, you know, the “boys will be boys,” and boys are organically sexist, keep a bit of a lid on it because they’re going to get a thick ear…
Outtake: Do we need to beat it out of them?
Mick Rock: Yes, you have to chain them up and whack the living fuck out of them.
Now I learned early on, I think because of my mother, that if women ran the world it could stop all the nonsense that’s been going on and that I always thought “yeah, I think that’s true.”
Outtake: Can we put Blondie in charge?
Mick Rock: Debbie, definitely. You know the other one I love, Joan Jett. Of course, I did the I Love Rock ‘n Roll cover. And so I always saw them as being two sides, even though Joanie really broke out a bit later than Debbie, but you had the blonde and you had the brunette, and you had the very femme lady, although when you meet them as people, they’re pretty, you know, Joanie is quite soft in person, but obviously her persona is more masculine, but a beautiful face. I’ve always loved Joanie’s face. But of course faces have always been a big thing for me so, gimme a face and I can explore one face for eternity. I think that came from my acid experience, which turned me on, too, if you labored through ninety minutes of that documentary obviously that’s an important thing that I touched on.
Outtake: What did acid teach you about an artist’s face?
Mick Rock: Well, I just picked up a camera on an acid trip and enjoyed it and thought of the explosions every time I clicked, and the way people’s faces were changing and evolving and rolling and rolling. I could look at one face and see a thousand different faces — young, old, scowl, blown up — you, know, I still remember it, even though that’s so many years ago. Yes, I did take LSD after that and yes I would sit and stare at people’s faces and do heavy breathing and really love to do that, which is a bit unnerving I think for some of my friends. But nevertheless was seminal, I think, in what I came to do in life, mainly crop people’s faces out of the environments that I found them in, you know, just grab little bits and pieces. I can’t explain any of it. As long as you’re not looking for explanations…
Outtake: No, I love this conversation. But I’m thinking like your PR-lady is going to wrap us soon, because you’re almost at twenty minutes. But I could talk to you for a good twelve hours. It’s true.
Mick Rock: If it had been twenty years ago we would have stopped talking and been to a lot of mischief well before twelve hours worth, however, of course, in my maturity and in my senility, it’s a different age today, isn’t it?
Outtake: It’s true. But it’s always the same and it’s always different I feel, in the rock and roll world. I don’t know if these boys ever grow up or change. It’s an internal creative force.
Mick Rock: I’m at the ancient rockers, you know, I mean that whole thing at Coachella [Desert Trip], people said that, “are you going to that?” And I said, you know, “I can’t go watch a whole other people in wheelchairs. I don’t care how good they were.” But actually the main reason I couldn’t go was I’m agoraphobic. I can’t stand out in the middle of a fucking desert and watch rock and roll. I don’t like raw, open spaces. That doesn’t work for my brain. I’m a city boy.
Outtake: Since I listen to old punk rockers, especially like English Oi!, I see a lot of old men on stage. But not in wheelchairs yet.
Mick Rock: Not quite. But we are teetering on the brink. And there’s a lot of corpses out there, let’s be honest.
Outtake: It’s true.
Mick Rock: However, I meditate for ten minutes every day and done so for over forty years, through all kinds of sins, so I think that may be helping me….I think it’s an attitude. So, here I am, and they’re hustling me around today and tomorrow chatting to everyone and anyone they can find who thinks…
Outtake: I was very interested.
Mick Rock: Then they wheel me to L.A. to talk to a load more people and then we’re going to, what are they talking about, a red carpet launch thing, okay…
Outtake: You deserve it!
Mick Rock: Can we have a purple carpet launch instead.
Check out the following films — about punks, rockers, and rebels — all now streaming on Tribeca Shortlist
