Clearly, many of these surreal slices of life couldn’t have occurred as actual events. Or at least we hope not.
Take the Rush cover featuring a kid aimlessly kicking a human skull past a wall of giant dice. Or the nude woman who seems strangely placid amidst hundreds of live scorpions, even as some make their way across her bare thighs (done for the German band Scorpions, naturally). Then there’s the plasticine-walled room he did for the New York Dolls, a cover so unabashedly pink that Apple used it in a worldwide ad campaign promoting new iPod colors.
“I wake up and see reality every day. I get plenty of reality. Show me something I don’t see every day. Something that takes me places. Show me something that transcends.”
I really wanted to be a painter. I really wanted to be a rock star. Ultimately, my career ended up allowing me to be neither of these things – and both.
I take photographs. Mostly of musicians.
It’s a pretty good life, for the most part. Assuming you don’t have any qualms about setting up cameras in a graveyard at midnight. Or being surrounded by 300 angry scorpions who don’t like studios. Or trying to keep a lead singer’s energy level up when she’s just come off a seven-month world tour with the worst case of dysentery in recorded history.
All in a day’s work.