One of the pleasures of running a music blog is that it gets us in touch with our heroes. Robert Matheu, whose pictures I've loved since his Creem days (wanna know why?:http://www.robertmatheu.com/home.html) got in touch to thank us for our words about his first pix of the reunited Beach Boys. He also mentioned he was well represented in an exhibition of Adam Ant snaps at the Proud Gallery.
We asked Robert, one of the great photographers, how he got here. His reply is reprinted below. And I might just add that co-editor Helen Bach, an Adam Ant fan and a Chrissie Hynde fanatic, must be dying about now!
"Well, who knew? Grew up in Detroit reading MAD and Hot Rod, then CREEM came into my life, that with free form FM radio which played MC5 of course, Cream, Hendrix, the first Zeppelin album and later The Faces, don't
"I don't remember WABX ever playing The Stooges, although we'd see them play almost ever weekend. I started to take a camera as I had a desire to be a bigger part of it, there wasn't much "rock" press, This also served a need in school. When I enrolled in college it was in the Communications program at Wayne State, there wasn't much the photography classes could offe me, and my original intent was to get .into radio.
"WWWW, same station Howard Stern worked at later, I worked as an intern and did some fill in on air before taking my photography seriously. Contrary to popular belief CREEM wasn't the first to publish my photos, they were a pretty tight knit bunch, Zig Zag in the UK, then Melody Maker in late '77' photos of my boys Fred Smith and Ron Asheton from their Ann Arbor bands, I was spendingq more time in Ann Arbor, took some classes at UofM. CREEM and Rolling Stone both started publishing me around the same time, actually after choosing LA over NYC, I shot much more assisgnments for Rolling Stone than CREEM, Blasters, John Hiatt, stuff I'm not known for, my first photo that ran in CREEM was Mitch Ryder onstage with Lou Reed, that opened the door there, my first that ran in RS was Carlene Carter, quite a contrast in my taste.
"I went after most of the artists that I had good relationships with, Cheap Trick are still great friends, I told the CREEM editors about The Pretenders almost a year before the first album was out. On another note, I keep taking pictures of Iggy even when interest in him wained, can we say Zombie Birdhouse? It seemed like a responsibility that I had to be there for all of it, crowning archivement was The Stooges book of course. I've been working on a tome of my own, The Perefect View for over a year now, but still shooting, I had the honor of being the first to shoot The Beach Boys in reunion mode, so still creating new images…."