Jump to the early 1970's. I used to read all the rock magazines and couldn't believe how bad some of the pictures were. These photographers had close access and still came away with boring or poorly-timed shots.

Like most people, I thought if I ever had the chance, I could do better - even though I had no photographic training....................or a camera, for that matter.

I got my chance in 1973 (see story under Led Zeppelin...........I even got in their movie!) and was absolutely hooked. I started buying up-front seats and shooting any show I could. I got good stuff that I liked better than most of what I saw in the mags, so I had to share this somehow.

I worked at a college and put together some musical slide shows, complete with a soundtrack that had hidden signals in it that changed images on a beat. I blasted that nice and loud for the students (and the poor Biology lab professors who were trying to conduct classes down the hall).

I got such good reaction from the students, I invited a guy named Dave Hart, who worked for John Scher, the promoter for the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ, the second-longest-running concert venue in the US at the time (after the Fillmore West), to come to check out my show and see if he thought it might be something they could use as between-acts entertainment at the Capitol.

It turned out that it wouldn't work logistically, but Dave invited me to shoot some shows he was booking. I also began shooting for a regional weekly music publication called The Aquarian. Soon I became house photographer for the Capitol and other Scher venues, such as Giants Stadium and the Meadowlands Arena.

Meanwhile, the Aquarian publisher was trying unsucce$$fully to lure me from my college job to be their staff photographer. I stayed freelance throughout my career - best move I ever made.

I hooked up with a riotously funny local TV show called The Uncle Floyd Show that featured everyone from Paul Simon to Monty Python members to bands like the Ramones. Having the advantage of being published nationally, I became the show's photographer and shot the photos for their Mercury album. The show was briefly nationally syndicated in 1982 and ran in NYC on NBC after Saturday Night Live.

I also hooked up with rock powerhouse WNEW-FM in NYC and later became their photographer for a while. John Scher, WNEW-FM, the Aquarian, and the Uncle Floyd Show were all tied together in the area music scene, so everything was falling nicely into place. My fondest memory in that regard came in the bowels of Giants Stadium one day when I was walking with John Scher. We encountered some of my new friends - some WNEW-FM deejays.

'We had him first!', John playfully yelled at them as my head swelled.

Since all these activities were conflicting with my college job, I had to make a decision - stay where the money was or go with my heart.

Goodbye, academia!

By now, I was freelancing for most of the major rock magazines and was ultimately published in over 100 US publications. Then a Springsteen shot of mine was used on the cover of the 'No Nukes' video. Suddenly, the agencies started calling, asking me to sign with them. There was one week when 3 different ones pitched me..............a nice feeling. One of them ultimately got me in magazines like Time and Newsweek and others all over the world.

MTV came along and I shot (and also got in) their first Christmas video. In 1984, I shot the first MTV Video Music Awards and got so much published from it, they hired me to be their stage photographer for the 1984-->1985 New Years Ball. I was MTV's boy for about 6 months until a new publicist and regime came along.

I got to shoot the first Farm Aid concert, the '83 Us Festival, the '87 Texxas Jam, Lollapalooza II , awards shows, television shows, video shoots, went on the road to cities and states I might have never gotten to otherwise, met lots of people from all over, and even walked into the bedroom of a young lady in Texas whom I had never met before and saw one of my posters on her wall............another nice feeling ("YES!").

I got to share a small recording booth with Dizzy Gillespie; I sat at a long dinner table with just 2 other people - Tony Bennett and George Benson, as Tony told stories; I shot Phil Collins in cap-and-gown at a local college graduation ceremony...............all in the same 2-day weekend.

I got to ride on a Coast Guard cutter and a Richard Branson Virgin speedboat. I shot a band on an aircraft carrier. I got to photograph a governor, an NBA Hall of Famer/US Senator-to-be, a NYC mayor, Muhammad Ali, movie stars, Mickey Mantle at New York Yankees Spring Training camp (where I saw Lou Piniella's naked butt in the locker room................I'm still recovering from that), and best of all - over 1,100 concerts/music events.

Oh yeah..............Yoko Ono and I both took pictures of John Lennon's last public performance with my camera!!! (see her photo and story under Elton John, John Lennon, or Yoko Ono)

Back to my original gripe/impetus: there are thousands of mini-moments within a moment.........if you hit the right one, you can get a really great shot. If you don't, you can get something really grotesque. These are the bad shots I was complaining about earlier. I felt I could get those right mini-moments more often than my competitors. I wanted shots that not only were different, but different in an interesting way - something you'd remember.

I felt I was on to something when I received a letter from a guy in Massachusetts who told me he always bought one particular magazine that I used to have a lot of photos in. He said he would go through the magazine, pick out his favorite pictures (without looking at the photo credits), and then go back to see what they all had in common. It turns out that I had taken them all!

Does that indicate a "style"? I haven't a clue..............that's for you all to have fun with. And if the 2,000 or so pictures I'm starting off with aren't enough, I've also written a lot of long, boring stories (much like this one!) for you to slog through while you're waiting for the pictures to load. Good, bad, funny, descriptive, instructive, even touching...............I've left no turn unstoned.

Besides the music photo archive, I'm also including various non-music aspects of my photography on the site. You'll see them here and there as you scroll through the gallery list.

What you won't see is studio photography. I never did or wanted to do studio photography because it's too controlled - if you can't get a good shot in a studio, YOU should be shot! That's where the money is, but it's boring. My concern was music, not modeling.

Shooting concerts, you control nothing. Everything's moving, lights are changing ...........it feels like a real accomplishment to get a live shot that's good enough to be published. And now I have tens of thousands of them in the music archive, which I've kept off the market since I stopped shooting concerts.

There are no thumbnails and no blowups. All images are 300 pixels on the long side and are compressed to create small, quick-loading files. Because of the small file size, the images may not look as sharp as the original slide or negative. Group shots or non-closeups are a particular problem because the faces are too small to have enough pixels to give them proper detail/sharpness. Sharpening brings its own set of problems, such as jagged guitar strings.

My advice? Look at closeups first then imagine them on the others.

All of my images are US steel-cage copyrighted and I WILL defend my copyright vigorously, so please look...........but don't touch. Any purchased photo is strictly to have and hold, meaning that it's not yours to reproduce - you can't do anything but look at it (Geez, what a grouch!).

Gallery listings with more than one photo are shown sequentially by year. Some shows, like Farm Aid and the 3-day Us Festival, show the artists in the order in which they performed. None of this occurs when using the search box, however.

Images are best viewed in a dark room on a monitor with a screen resolution of 800 x 600 and at a monitor color temperature of 6500K (important!), because that's how I edited them. Other than sharpening and color adjustments, there are no computer alterations/enhancements or special effects in my images.

Or, as Queen used to write at the bottom of their albums:

NO SYNTHESIZERS!

Enjoy,