The Rolling Stones Icons

THE ROLLING STONES ICONS

INTRODUCTION

HARVEY KUBERNIK

Terry O’Neill was there at the beginning in 1964 for The Daily Sketch newspaper.

“There is a certain naÏveté about all of the pictures,” O’Neill recalled in a 2010 interview we conducted. “I mean, all this was a brand-new world. You must remember, at the time there had never been any pop pictures, as I call them, in newspapers. And I took all the first pictures of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and they ended up in this newspaper. It started a whole new world where every paper on Fleet Street started publishing pop pictures, because they found that they sold newspapers. And their music was too special. A lot of great music came out of the ’60s as a matter of fact, and the Beatles and Stones were the best.”

Other shutterbugs soon followed. In 1965, Michael Ward was employed by Decca Records, The Rolling Stones’ UK label. Some photographers emerged from fashion magazines, like Linda McCartney, then Linda Eastman, on assignment for the New Yorkbased monthly periodical Town & Country

In May 1965, Gered Mankowitz brought us inside the confines of the RCA Records studio in Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard, armed with his Hasselblad and Nikon, utilising available light for his insession portraits of the band.

One contributor to these pages, Bill Wyman, was in the group.

“Well, our first photos were usually in black and white,” explained the bassist in a 2002 interview we did. “The first six years of TV was all black and white because we didn’t have colour in England until 1968. All the shows like Ready, Steady Go! were all shot in black and white. The band were a black-and-white band. They were a mono band sound-wise so we always tried to mix in a mono feel.

“We practised. Then doing them little clubs in the beginning. Going through all of that learning process, that apprenticeship. Starting off

not thinking about being rich and famous, having a career, making a record or going on TV or touring America. You can see in those early pictures on stage we were all close together.”

Dominique Tarlé shot the Stones-hosted Rock and Roll Circus on a British television sound stage in 1968, and during 1971 captured the environmental graphic of the band’s Villa Nellcote 16-bedroom mansion in France when they were creating Exile on Main Street.

“I felt so lucky to be there and to be so welcome,” explained Tarlé to music journalist Phyllis Pollock in a 2008 interview with CounterPunch. “The Stones were all staying in the same neighbourhood. The only people they knew were also members of the band.”

In 1972, Ed Caraeff was invited to tag along with a friend to Mick and Bianca Jagger’s rented house in Bel Air, Ca., where he casually snapped Keith Richards indoors and poolside in the sunny afternoon glare on Oriole Drive.

When Ken Regan was asked by TIME magazine to photograph the band’s 1972 tour of America, promoter Bill Graham and Jagger himself approved him for the trek. Barry Schultz was working at a camera shop across the street from the Hollywood Palladium when the band did a small ballroom booking in 1972 and he caught the act. Former Look and Life magazine staffer Douglas Kirkland brought his unique history of on-set photography and hotel room shoots to a 1983 Stones’ music video location in Mexico.

As we view this multi-voice photographic collection, we are reminded once again that every picture tells a story, sometimes supporting the back story or illustrating the sonic live-show glory.

“In a way, maybe, when you write songs, without even knowing it you’re kinda saying, ‘Can I do this live?,’” Keith Richards told me in a 1997 interview. “And so you add that in. You don’t know if it’s gonna

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work, but I guess what you keep in the back of your mind is, ‘We’re making a record here. What happens if they all like it and we gotta play it live?’ So, in a way, that maybe in the back of the mind it sets up the song to be playable on stage.”

“The band was always great live,” emphasised Wyman. “The Stones were a better live band than any other band at that time. I’m not saying they were the greatest songwriters or the greatest recording artists, but they were the best live band wherever you went. You could go up on stage and blow everybody away no matter who they were.”

Initially the lensmen and women were witnesses with cameras. A few became trusted insiders and tour photographers whose work would be displayed on album covers, DVD packages, record label press kits, daily and weekly newspapers, magazines, fanzines, billboards and exhibited on the internet.

“As far as photographing The Rolling Stones in 1963 and ’64, they seemed more like five individuals,” underlined Terry O’Neill in our 2010 interview. “And Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed them and produced their recordings, understood. When I worked on a newspaper, if I couldn’t get over to his office to photograph someone, he’d bring them over to The Daily Sketch office and I’d photograph them there. Marianne Faithfull came over one afternoon. Can you imagine that happening today?”

Over the last 60 years, these photographers had unlimited access or restricted entry to the world of The Rolling Stones. They snapped their subjects in a variety of stage-centric settings or for traditional publicity company glossies, which established and reinforced the visual identity of a touring brotherhood.

“Something very powerful is happening in those photos that’s way beyond a shtick or a badboy pose,” suggested novelist Daniel Weizmann in a 2023 email correspondence. “See, until then, all of

showbiz was really built on this basic unspoken agreement: the entertainer is there to wow the audience, please the audience. And The Rolling Stones, in those photos, they mercilessly break that contract… the same way Dostoevsky broke the basic reader/ storyteller connection, the same way Picasso shatters our visual centre. The Stones manage, by calling the terms of the exchange, to reverse objectification. Even in black and white, The Beatles we meet are something fun for us to look at. Whereas The Rolling Stones are staring right back at us, as if to say. ‘You define us? No, no, we define you.’”

“Somebody, somewhere, once claimed that The Rolling Stones were the most photographed band… ever!” volunteered author Kenneth Kubernik in a 2023 missive. “Blessedly, much of this madcap behaviour was captured by some of the decade’s most canny photographers. Terry O’Neill was there early, catching Brian in his youthful air of decorum, the vested suit and proper knit tie displaying a coy regard for sartorial convention even as the music edged subversively forward. Gered Mankowitz pointed and clicked at that critical flashpoint.

“Every week brought forth a new sound, a new fashion statement, a new drug; it was all of a piece and the images were deliriously narcotic. Brian reached his Dionysian zenith at 1967’s Monterey International Pop Festival, strutting about the fairgrounds in a princely Chinese robe, bedazzling and bewildered by turns, befitting pop’s leading aristocrat burning out on the psychedelic du jour. Ed Caraeff was there to document the moment; Jones, luminous and lost, seated next to the equally sensorial Nico, two bottle-blonds, cultural totems, about to be swallowed whole by their inner torments as fans cheered them on. A photographer’s dream subject.”

One common goal was achieved by the documentarians housed in this volume: they preserved images we collectively get to visit and see again.

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Bill Wyman and Harvey Kubernik, 2002. Santa Monica, Ca. Photograph by Heather Harris. Keith Richards and Harvey Kubernik, 1999. San Diego, Ca. Photograph by Robert Sherman

TERRY O’NEILL

Terry O’Neill’s storied life in photography was only just beginning when he received a call from the rock and roll mogul Andrew Loog Oldham, asking him to come and shoot The Rolling Stones.

“I was the youngest photographer on Fleet Street, and my editors knew I loved music,” O’Neill, an erstwhile jazz drummer himself, later recalled. When he visited the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond to watch the young five-piece perform, he knew instantly that both they, and he, were onto something big: “You could tell right away: these guys were different. They were just incredibly cool.”

In these fledgling years, the band were still figuring out their image. Following bands like The Beatles and The Dave Clark Five, they started out with a clean-cut look, suited and booted, sporting tidy haircuts. But as a glance at their early press shots will attest, clean-cut didn’t suit them. Under the guidance of Oldham, they began to embrace a rakish, non-conformist look that brought out their individual personas. The way O’Neill put it, “the more successful they got, the more comfortable they felt being themselves”.

On the morning of their first session, O’Neill took the Stones to Regent’s Park for a laid-back shoot on the grass, then onto Soho’s Denmark Street. The home of many record shops, studios and publications like the New Musical Express, the street was known as England’s “Tin Pan Alley”, and had been the home of the British music scene since 1911. “I made sure there was a recognisable piece of the city in the background each time,” O’Neill said. “These were casual, outdoor shots that screamed ‘London lads!’”

From there, the relationship bloomed. O’Neill photographed early live performances, and even followed the band backstage for their seminal first TV appearances. Britain in the ’60s had been galvanised by the energy and enthusiasm of its youth. Producers knew that rock and roll bands could draw young viewers en masse, and televised performances were opportunities for the Stones – who until then had only played jazz clubs – to reach an audience of many thousands instantly, prompting huge spikes in record sales and sold-out gigs at larger venues.

Their on-screen performances were electric, but the relaxed shots O’Neill took backstage are some of the photographer’s personal favourites. “I got some great shots of them getting ready to go on, having a lastminute haircut, eating, drinking tea or downing a big glass of milk in the canteen – just acting like a bunch of twenty-something-year-old boys.”

By this time, O’Neill’s career was taking off too; he was called away to photograph other emerging superstars of the era. By the time he reunited with the Stones in Hollywood in 1964, they were receiving major international attention. “There I was photographing legends like Fred Astaire,” he said. “And all anyone wanted to talk about was The Rolling Stones!”

These London lads were on their way to becoming the biggest rock band in the world – but O’Neill had known it from the start. “1963 was a pivotal year; there was a whiff of it in the air,” Keith remembered. “I think Terry O’Neill felt it as much as I did, but from a different angle. Terry was behind the lens, everywhere, always.

Terry O’Neill’s archive features 20th-century political giants, singers, supermodels and big-screen stars. Besides The Rolling Stones, he photographed legends such as The Beatles, David Bowie, Marianne Faithfull and Chuck Berry. His images have adorned historic rock albums, movie posters and international magazine covers all over the world.

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DOUGLAS KIRKLAND

In 1983, The Rolling Stones travelled to Mexico to shoot the music video for their forthcoming single “Undercover of the Night”. The song, written chiefly by Mick and inspired by the William Burroughs novel Cities of the Red Night, is one of the band’s few overtly political numbers, with lyrics that reference social unrest under dictatorial regimes in Argentina and Chile. “All the young men, they’ve been rounded up, and sent to camps back in the jungle,” sings Mick over a feverish disco rhythm.

There was unrest brewing within the band, too, with Keith later stating that he and Mick were “starting to come to loggerheads” around that time. The real-life conflict between the two is taken to absurd, campnoirish extremes in the music video, which stars Jagger as a moustachioed private detective hired by a young Latin-American woman to track down her lover, who has been kidnapped by a gun-toting gangster played by Keith. Car chases and shoot-outs race towards a finale that sees Keith put a bullet through Mick’s heart.

There was only one photographer on-set for the entirety of the shoot – and a renowned one at that. By 1983, Douglas Kirkland already had a celebrated career, having worked for Look and Life magazines during the golden age of ’60s and ’70s photojournalism, and taken some of the most famous photographs of Marilyn Monroe in existence. Michael Rand, then art director of The Sunday Times Magazine, hired Kirkland to spend two days out in Mexico with the Stones. The remote, scenic location of the set, and the absence of prying fans and other press, produced a laid-back, relaxed atmosphere.

With the band at ease, Kirkland was able to capture intimate, candid shots, and even a few warm moments shared by the then fractious Mick and Keith.

It was the only time Kirkland ever worked with The Rolling Stones. He was a man in high demand. Later the same year he would be the sole photographer on the set of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” – perhaps the most famous music video of all time.

Douglas Kirkland captured some of the most alluring and intimate images of Marilyn Monroe in existence, photographed the legendary Coco Chanel, and shot the stars of over 100 motion pictures. His work resides in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian and the National Portrait Gallery in London. He was the recipient of lifetime achievement awards from numerous bodies, including the highly valued Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement. He died in 2022.

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THE ROLLING STONES: ICONS brings together the greatest photographs of one of the greatest bands in history. The result is the most important anthology of Rolling Stones imagery ever compiled, featuring the iconic, the unseen, the candid and the surprising. This stunning portfolio, comprising work from many of the most eminent names in photography alongside their own memories and reflections, is a unique collection and the ultimate homage to this band of icons.