There was a time and cultural window when famed and veteran rock/pop culture photographer Henry Diltz seemed to be everywhere at once. He snapped mythic images, and many a classic album cover, for the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young contingent, Joni Mitchell, the Doors, Eagles, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and countless other celebrities.
Fast forward five or six decades from his luminous early days, and Diltz can often be found in the 805, specifically as the volunteer videographer of the Tales from the Tavern series at Santa Ynez’s vibe-caked Maverick Saloon, for nearly 25 years.
On Saturday, May 31, Diltz heads over to the Lobero Theatre for an evening with Hale. Milgrim, that is, another pop music vet and former president/CEO of Capitol Records and longtime champion of musical culture in his readopted town of Santa Barbara. One of the irrepressible and deep-diving rock historians, Milgrim’s ever-popular and living room-ish-ly intimate Quips & Pix & Flix series at the Lobero — with profits benefiting that legendary venue.
Go, indeed: The man knows from whence he speaks and listens and from whence comes his golden résumé.
On these Lobero evenings, Milgrim spins tales of his life in the heart, bowels, and brain of the rock world, and screens carefully curated music videos (cherry-picked by himself and his pal/ally Richard Salzberg). For this edition, Milgrim shares the stage and room with his old friend Diltz in what promises to be a night of nostalgia and personal accounts from the front lines of pop culture of yore.
“I don’t even know how this happened,” Diltz shrugged, as he reflected on his career at a recent Maverick show. “I was just a hippie folk singer, smoking God’s herb, and I randomly bought a camera.” The rest is history, his and the collective unconscious memory.
Befriending and becoming neighbors with the Laurel Canyon crowd transformed him into a right place/right time chronicler of artists on the rise. He shot the Lovin’ Spoonful, The Hollies, Linda Ronstadt in her Stone Poneys days, and Mama Cass — “the earth mother, the Gertrude Stein of Laurel Canyon,” Diltz told the Tales crowd. Casual images of Joni Mitchell, as the lady of the Canyon, include one of her peering out her window on Lookout Avenue with a beatific grin, and another snapshot on her lawn with Eric Clapton, Crosby, and a baby, and with “God’s herb” in the scene.
Diltz commented that shooting live shows has less appeal than the personal one-on-one approach. “Onstage,” he said, “all the pictures are the same. I like to see things as they really are, and get to know the people I’m shooting,”
A relatively recent iconic shot in the Diltz oeuvre depicts Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain in a bath of red light, flailing with abandon in a live show at the Forum in Los Angeles in 1993. Diltz hadn’t even planned on shooting the show but found himself within close range and clicked at the right time. “That was a magic picture,” he says. “That was a gift.”
The Lobero show will also be a gift. See lobero.org/events/quips-pix-flix for details.
