It’s one of the iconic photographs in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. The four members of the band Kiss, in full make-up, making snowballs as they sit in the white stuff with a cheesy Christmas scene behind them.
But like so much in showbiz, all is not as it seems. For a start it was taken in October in Los Angeles, so the snow isn’t real. Instead it was plastic polyurethane, a toxic compound that it is no longer made.
And while Gene Simmons, Peter Criss and Paul Stanley were happily mugging for the camera, the fourth band member, lead guitarist Ace Frehley, was so drugged up he could hardly walk.
Photographer Neal Preston knew he had to move fast or Frehley would be lost to the shoot, but as he went to grab a lens, he heard a thud. He rushed back only to find ‘Space Ace’ face down in the poisonous material, which was slowly turning red as he coughed up blood.
KISS 1977 This is one of the most iconic photographs in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. The four members of the band Kiss, in full make-up, making snowballs as they sit in the white stuff with a cheesy Christmas scene behind them
ACE FREHLEY ‘This is what it looks like when a real rock star is passing out. I knew that Gene (Simmons) and Paul (Stanley) were both 100 percent sober. The same could not be said for Ace who barely made it through the front door without help.’
AXL ROSE 1990 ‘I had taken some pictures of Axl and his then-wife Erin Everly and had heard all the stories about his good days and his bad days. But this must have been a good day because he was great. He said he was going to the Record Plant so I tagged along and got this shot of Axl at his peak.’
GREGG ALLMAN 1973 ‘Cameron Crowe and I were assigned to do a story on the Allman Brothers Band. This was in a motel room in Phoenix. Gregg was unlike anyone I’d ever met. He exuded an ethereal magnetism so strong it cut through the druggy haze that always seemed to envelop him.’
ROD STEWART 1996 ‘I don’t know what it is about Brits that they think the funniest thing in the world is seeing a man dressed as a woman. This is Rod being getting make-up for an appearance in drag. I told him he looked like an older Miss Moneypenny.’
Frehley was bundled into a limo before anyone could call 911. The shoot was over before it had barely begun — but Preston had got the one shot he needed for Creem magazine’s December issue.
It — along with another snap of Frehley face-down in fake snow with his six-inch wedges pointing at the camera — are among dozens of pictures included in Preston’s new book, Exhilarated and Exhausted, documenting his lifelong career as a rock photographer including his years as the tour photographer for Led Zeppelin.
Preston’s new book, Exhilarated and Exhausted, documents his career as a rock photographer
‘I’ve been beyond blessed,’ Preston, 65, told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview in his office right under the flight path of the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, California.
‘I had the opportunity to do what I love. If you’re a musician, what you love is making music. I’m a photographer, I love making pictures. Anyone who is able to do what they love for a living is lucky beyond belief.
‘I never planned on this. It was fluke that some pictures were shown to some people who turned out to be concert promoters and started letting me and my buddies into shows in Queens, New York, and all of a sudden I’m a published photographer.’
He spoke in a small room lined with filing cabinets containing at least a million photos he has taken in his near-50-year career. The first of his 122 cabinets is marked Abba-Aerosmith. The last is Young — as in Neil — to ZZ Top.
And he has photographed just about everyone in between — the one exception being John Lennon.
‘I did see him once,’ he said. ‘I was driving along 57th Street in New York about 1978 and I see John and Yoko coming towards me. They’re walking west and I’m driving east.
‘I try to race around the block so I could see them again and park. But you’d have a better time racing around Belgium in a quicker amount of time. By the time I had got around the block he had gone.
‘That is one of my great regrets as a photographer — and as a fan who reached puberty the night the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. If it’s possible to reach full puberty in the space of an hour that happened to me.’
THE TRAVELING WILBURYS 1988 ‘George and Tom both pulled me aside to say they will start the shoot when Bob is ready. They are walking on eggshells around him. The first shot I took, Bob is way in the background hunched over playing pinball.’ (l-r Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, George Harrison with Bob Dylan in the background).
RAT PACK 1988 ‘Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra were playing in Oakland and it was in the round which is never easy to shoot because you’re constantly chasing the shots. There is little structure to their show and they are facing away from me when suddenly Frank gooses Dean. What I love about this is that even though you can’t see their faces you can instantly make out who it is in the shot.’
ELTON JOHN 1979 ‘Elton John was at the Universal Amphitheater and it was warm. All of a sudden he passed out over the keyboard. I thought he was dead. A roadie came down and dragged him offstage. Ten minutes later he came back and finished the show.’
BOB DYLAN & JOAN BAEZ 1982 ‘Bob and Joan were a couple but had split by the time this picture was taken. It’s at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, a really nice moment. She is the only person who could get away with tousling Dylan’s hair.’
PETER TOWNSHEND 1982 ‘The Who were traveling and Pete shows up in a bowler hat and spats. He is listening to this Walkman that looks so dated now. The other band members are in T-shirts and jeans. I only noticed recently that Pete was giving me the finger in this shot.’
He has taken plenty of pictures of the other three Beatles — although none of Ringo made the book.
He remembers being called by a contact to go to a house in Encino, California, for some shots of Tom Petty and a few friends. ‘Tom’s gonna call you and he’ll give you the details,’ she said.
When Petty called, Preston asked for directions. ‘“Well, it’s er, it’s um, er… here, talk to George. So he hands the phone over to a guy named George, and this guy says “Hi, this is George.”
‘I ask what’s the address and it’s a distinctly Liverpudlian accent and I suddenly realize it’s George Harrison and he telling me what exit to get off the 101.
‘I’m in a haze now. I remember nothing about the rest of that phone call, but I managed to write the address.’
When he got to the house he found Petty not only with George Harrison, but also Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne. They were just forming the Traveling Wilburys.
‘I get to the house about an hour later, knock on the door and a roadie lets me in and I walk in and George is sitting at the table and I see Roy in the kitchen mixing some tea or something and I think this is pretty wild.’
But while Preston was in awe of Harrison — ‘in my world, a Beatle trumps anyone,’ he said — the musicians were more worried about Dylan.
‘George pulls me aside and takes me in this small room, closes the door and says: “Now, listen to me, Bob is in a pretty good mood. I’ll let you know when the mood is just right, I’ll give you a sign and then we’ll shoot, But we won’t shoot until Bob is ready.”
TOMMY LEE 1989 ‘It was in Detroit. Tommy came to the front of the stage in front of 20,000 people. He looks round mischievously thinking should I or shouldn’t I? Then he decides to drop his pants. They were only down for a couple of seconds, but “Boom.”’
FOO FIGHTERS 1996 ‘The Foo Fighters were rehearsing in a garage in Seattle. It’s so loud, it’s like a 747 taxiing through the room. From that day on, my hearing was never the same. I’ve seen a million shows and they’re all loud, but that day was something else.’
MOTLEY CRUE 1992 ‘Sometimes you have these grandiose ideas, great on paper but they don’t really work out once you put the shoot together. Shooting Mötley Crüe on a glacier in Canada was one of them. It was mind-numbing cold and to make matters worse the terrain was visually boring.’
‘Then Tom Petty walks in, gives me a hug and says: “Now, Bob’s in an ok mood.” It’s all the same thing. They’re walking on eggshells around Bob Dylan.’
He got the picture he wanted of the five Wilburys together, but not before another shot of four of the supergroup with Dylan way in the background, hunched over playing pinball before he would join his bandmates.
Many years later, after George’s 2001 death, his widow Olivia visited Preston with a documentary about the Traveling Wilburys. She had wanted him to see that it opened with a picture the roadie had taken of Preston’s shoot.
Of the five Wilburys, only Jeff Lynne and Bob Dylan are still alive and so many others that Preston snapped over the years are now gone, most recently Petty himself.
Other pictures in the book include many who died before their three score years and ten were completed. There’s Prince and Glenn Frey, for instance, and Linda McCartney and David Bowie and Gregg Allman and George Michael and Marvin Gaye and the list goes on and on. Frank Zappa and Keith Moon and John Entwistle and Marc Bolan and Greg Lake and Stevie Ray Vaughan and Warren Zevon and Johnny Winter and Sid Vicious and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Michael Jackson and Bob Marley and Freddie Mercury.
‘I don’t want to do the tally of the dead versus the living in the book,’ said Preston. ‘Unfortunately, it ain’t stopping any time soon.’
One who is very much alive is Bruce Springsteen, and the picture Preston shot of him at Wembley Stadium in London during his Born in the USA tour over the Fourth of July weekend of 1985 is one of his favorites. He wanted something different and decided it should be Springsteen facing the camera with the immense crowd behind him.
‘I went to his dressing room during intermission and I said “I know you’re playing to 80,000 people but I’ve mounted this camera and there is a remote cable going down underneath the stage. So, when you’re up there if you can turn around and play to the back of the house we could get an amazing shot of you where I could see your face with the entire crowd of Wembley in the background.”
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN 1985 ‘When you are on the road with a band you hit the wall, creatively and you start to come up with different ways of shooting. I superclamped my Nikon to the back railing and asked Bruce Springsteen to turn around and play to the back of the house so I could see his face with the entire Wembley Stadium crowd behind him.’
SID VICIOUS 1978 ‘I was never a punk guy, I just never got it even though The Ramones went to my high school. But I somehow ended up at the Sex Pistols’ last concert in San Francisco. Three hours after the show the band broke up.’
‘He kind of looked at me, not disinterested, but he had stuff on his mind and he said: ‘Um, yeah, ok,’ I turned around and walked out of the dressing room. I was still never dreaming that he actually would do it.
‘So, I go underneath the stage and during Hungry Heart, the fourth song of the set, I see his boots coming through the little slats in the wood and I know he is right on top of me and I count to 10 and I just press the button, 36 frames and the camera fires right on top of me. I didn’t know what I had until I developed the film the next day.
‘He was completely mugging for the camera and I couldn’t have been happier. He completely nailed it.’
But things didn’t always go right. During a stopover in Vancouver, Canada, Nikki Sixx decided it would be a good idea for Preston to take pictures of Mötley Crüe on a nearby glacier. It would cost tens of thousands of dollars to fly two helicopters there but Sixx thought it was worth it.
The next day Tommy Lee and the band’s two other members turn up early, rarin’ to go. Two helicopters are fueled up, pilots at the ready. But Sixx had had a hard night and is awol.
The following day it was a go. As they flew, the pilot told Preston it was going to be cold. I said “How cold?” He said “Pretty f…ing cold.” It was something like minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit.
‘We land about 100 yards away from each other and it’s so cold the band doesn’t want to have to walk up to our chopper and we don’t want to walk to theirs.
‘We do the diplomatic thing and decide to meet in the middle which now means we can only shoot in two directions unless I want to get a helicopter in the shot — which in retrospect wouldn’t have been a bad idea.
‘It is just mind-numbing cold. I have to take one test frame on a Polaroid. I wait and I pull the Polaroid and it cracks in two. It is so cold it just cracked like an icicle. This is the uh-oh moment.’
Eventually Preston got three rolls of film off. ‘But all we could think about was saving our lives and not freezing to death.’
Making matters worse, the all-white of the glacier meant the pictures were virtually unusable. ‘I don’t know that they were ever used for anything. That was one expensive experiment.’
And Preston admits he almost killed Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks on an At Home shoot for People magazine.
‘She was living in Venice, California, at the time and she had a condo on the top floor of a six-story building right on the sand in Venice Beach and we had a great shoot, she couldn’t have been easier.
MICHAEL JACKSON & FREDDIE MERCURY 1980 ‘Queen were playing the LA Forum and suddenly Michael Jackson walks in. As the tour photographer I am there to get the pictures and this was just catching a moment.’
PETER TOWNSHEND & ROGER DALTREY 1976 ‘Pictures are like your kids or dogs. You don’t have a favorite one. But if I had to pick one it would be this one of The Who with Pete and Roger in midflight and mid-frenzy during a show in San Francisco. When people ask me what I try to capture, I say it’s not the motion, it’s the emotion, and this has both. I truly, truly, love this photo.’
STEVIE NICKS 1981 ‘I knew Stevie was beautiful and talented but I didn’t know how hysterically funny she is. To this day I tell her if this rock ‘n’ roll thing doesn’t work out you could be a stand-up comic. This was taken on the roof of her building in Venice, California. Because of the high wind my assistant is grabbing her ankle. That’s why it is not a full-length shot.’
BOB MARLEY 1979 ‘Believe it or not, Bob Marley was opening for The Clash at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. I was never into reggae and wasn’t there to shoot Marley, but I knocked off a couple of rolls out of boredom. It was only later that I realized what a strong image it was.’
‘But I still wanted that one last killer photograph and I said almost at the same time as she said: “Why don’t we go up on the roof and shoot as the sun is going down?” I thought it was a fantastic idea.
‘She had put on this white outfit with long sleeves of fabric that really caught the wind like a sail on a sailboat. The second I put the camera to my eye the wind starts kicking up. She is posing and the sleeves are going all over the place, and I realize about three frames in that the wind is going to be blowing so hard that one gust and she could be blown right off the side of the building, six stories down, which would have ruined Time Life’s insurance department’s day.
‘There was only one thing to do because we were getting great photos and the sun waits for no man and it was going down. So I made an assistant of mine lie on his stomach out of frame and I said “You hold on to that white boot — you do not let go.”
‘And that is what he did. She stayed in one place and we got great pictures. But that is why you don’t see her boots in the pictures. There could be no full-length shot.’
Preston grew up in Queens, New York. He went to Forest Hills High, the same school that spawned The Ramones. He was already photographing bands and set to go to the Philadelphia College of Art when he realized the career he had chosen didn’t need a degree.
‘I marched into my mom and dad’s bedroom and I said: “So we need a carton milk, a loaf of bread, I’m not going to go to college and can I pick something up for you at the other store.
‘I just slipped it in there and thankfully they were cool with it.’
One of the hazards of Preston’s job has been a loss of hearing. But it hasn’t been gradual exposure to loud music so much as one day in a Seattle garage with the Foo Fighters.
Preston grew up in Queens, New York. He went to Forest Hills High, the same school that spawned The Ramones. He was already photographing bands and set to go to the Philadelphia College of Art when he realized the career he had chosen didn’t need a degree
Hilton Hotel, San Francisco 1988 ‘That’s not a wrecked hotel room! That’s my traveling office. I was on the Amnesty International tour and I hadn’t been in the room for six hours. You can see the room service trays and 50 boxes of yellow Kodak and the green Fuji boxes, film, strobes, cables, equipment cases — I’m sure there’s a roach or two in the ashtry. But that was normal for me.’
His work space is lined with filing cabinets containing at least a million photos he has taken – the first of his 122 cabinets is marked Abba-Aerosmith, the last is Young — as in Neil — to ZZ Top
‘As I go in, the roadie taps me on the shoulder and says: “Here, you’re gonna need these. Earplugs.” I say, no, no, no, no. I don’t need them. I never liked working with them because I can feel my shutter fire but I can’t really hear it properly.
‘He said: “Trust me, you’re going to need them.” I tell him it’s really hard for me to use. He tries one more time, he says: “Just take ‘em.” By now I’m saying, “Hey, I work with The Who, I work with Kiss,” and I throw some more names around. He says: “As you wish,” and closes the door behind me.
‘Within 15 seconds my teeth are rattling. Within 25 seconds I’m sure there’s blood coming from my eardrums. It’s so loud, it’s like a 747 taxiing through the room. It’s beyond loud.
‘Thirty seconds in I had a migraine and 45 seconds in I was physically ill to the point of having to vomit — literally. And I didn’t want to vomit in front of the band or into my camera bag. I don’t know how these guys played. I shot out the roll, opened the door and got out of there and went to the bathroom.
‘From that day on, my hearing was never the same. I can never, ever, have a first date in a crowded restaurant. Last time I did that, I went out with this actress and we met in this bar and every question she’s asking, I’m going “Huh? What?”
‘So all I can say is: “Thank you Dave Grohl for that.’