I first saw the photographer Josh Cheuse in action at the club the World in downtown Manhattan in the fall of 1985. I was pressed up against the stage for the first shows by Big Audio Dynamite, the groundbreaking band Mick Jones formed after being fired from the Clash, and there to my right, up on the tiny stage, was Cheuse, firing away with his camera. He wasn't much older than me, but he was completely in command.
After the show, the long, narrow dressing room was crammed with all sorts of musicians and assorted hangers-on from the scene. Johnny Ramone asked me to hold up a wobbly Joey Ramone while he got another drink. As I pressed my hand into Joey's chest and he mumbled incoherently, I thought I was going to crush him. The Beastie Boys — who were then just Adam, Mike, and Adam — passed around a joint. Then I spied Cheuse. He was whispering something into Mick Jones's ear and they laughed. In an instant, Cheuse had his camera up. To say it was memorable is an understatement.
"Why is my show called Grooving Years?" Cheuse says to me when we talk about his upcoming show at the Morrison Hotel Gallery, opening tonight, which features some of his most iconic shots of the Clash, the Beasties, Run-DMC, and Madonna, among others. "Because they were. Fine art rock photography isn't just Crosby, Stills, and Nash, or Neil Young and his dog, or Bob Dylan wheeling a tire down the road. That stuff has paved the way, but now I think there's another generation who appreciate the punk stuff and the hip-hop stuff. Now it includes Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys."
"Josh came into shooting these artists around the same time that music was finding ways to reinvent itself and at the same time become more authentic," as Peter Blachley, the owner of the Morrison Hotel Gallery, puts it.
"I was talking to Mike D [of the Beastie Boys] recently about old times, and really we were just kids looking for beer and girls," Cheuse says. "But instead of picking up an instrument, I picked up a camera. Once you joined the circus you were in and you just went for it. I used to go back to School of Visual Arts and I'd put up pictures for critiques of the band on the road in Scotland, not pictures of my parents in their underwear like my classmates, and my teacher would ask, 'When were you in Scotland?' And I'd say, 'Yesterday.' I was just using the place as my darkroom. Meanwhile I was on the road with these bands, during this amazing time."
In the years since those wild days in the underground, Cheuse has built a reputation both as a photographer and an associate design director at Sony Music Entertainment as one of the most honest and gifted people in his field. His book Rockers Galore is a collectors item, and his recent shows in Japan and Russia drew raves.
But, as with the boomers before us, it's hard for Cheuse not to reflect on those times and the larger-than-life artists who inhabited them.
"Nowadays we're all grown up and we have kids and those of us who were there look back really fondly. It's also good to ask ourselves, 'What did we learn and how can we bring that to the next generation and share that in a positive way?' We didn't have cell phones or computers, but we still made these things happen. We were just following our instincts. It was a different time, but maybe if you look at these images and listen to the music, it will take you away from the whole 'Do you have the right watch or are you skinny enough?' way of thinking. I mean, Run-DMC were about having fun, not about 'I have this and you don't' aspirational culture we now inhabit."
As for his friend Joe Strummer, the leader of the Clash who died suddenly in 2002 at age 50, Cheuse admits he was the real inspiration for the title of his show.
"Joe had written in a book he gave me, of photographs by Julian Udall, 'Thanks for the grooving years,' and I thought, 'Well, that's a good title,'" Cheuse says. "Not to be Joe, Joe, Joe all the time, but he did have a good message. He hoped we would keep asking ourselves, 'How are we going to live in this world together?' With everyone wandering around with their earbuds in and everyone else just an obstacle in our personal video games, I really believe we'd be better served by sitting around a campfire or listening to music with our friends or going to a concert and actually watching it instead of staring at it through our phones."
