Friday, June 02, 2006

Nazareth

Jammed all the way through the M's of my black and white neg sheets today, cataloging the bands on my excel spreadsheet and googling to make sure eveyone is alive and well.

Then I got to the N's and that meant Nazareth. A sheet with a mere 4 negative strips. I googled and went to their official web site. Wow. Another band from the seventies that's still together and touring. I click the button labeled "History" and immediately had a 'feeling.' I read slowly, every word, not wanting to get to the end. The part I knew, for some reason, was coming. And there it was. The inevitable..."As the Naz machine began climbing to the top again, tragedy struck! On April 30, 1999 founding member and drummer Darrell Sweet died suddenly from a major heart attack."

Fire up the scanner. Turns out I only shot 22 frames of Nazareth. And drummers were always the hardest to shoot. I'm glad there are a couple of good ones of Darrell I can put in the book. In the meantime, here's one of the alive and well lead singer, Dan McCafferty:

Which leads me to an important book question:

My book is Everybody I Shot Is Dead. Would it be appropriate to put photos of musicians that are alive in the book? For example, the other members of Nazareth? And shots of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin in addition to the John Bonham shots? I appreciate your input!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think original guitarist Manny Charlton is dead too isn't he?

wcdixon said...

If you choose to put in photographs of surviving members, it seems like it would change everything...you would just be compiling a book of pix of musicians you photographed over the years - some alive, some deceased. Not to say you don't have a lot of great shots, but for what its worth, I say stick by your original concept...it got my attention - and I assume there's a story of some sort to go with each photo...and perhaps some kind of overriding theme/commentary about the death of a certain era of music/musicians...all cool stuff.

Kirsten said...

I agree with wcdixon. I would only put in photos of live people if they are in a photo with someone who is now dead.

On the plus side, that saves all the live people for another book, either when enough of them die to do a second dead people book or with another theme entirely.

aggiebrett said...

It might be cute if you blacked out the faces of the living in shots where now-dead and not-yet-dead are co-mingled. You could mention these unshown folks in the captions, but in a preface you could explain that the living have their own press agents and can do their own damned PR on their own damned dime.

Bastards.
.
.
.
B