Sight and sound
Portland exhibit takes visitors backstage with the Beatles, Stones, and more
(Photo from Mark and Colleen Hayward Collection)
The Beatles are among the many bands captured in the 268 photographs in the ''Backstage Pass'' exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art.
PORTLAND, Maine - We listen to music with our ears, but we experience it with our eyes, too. That's especially true of rock 'n' roll. At it's best no less than at its worst, rock is a form of play-acting: adolescents pretending to be adults, adults pretending to be adolescents, Chrissie Hynde being a Pretender. It's air guitar with real guitars. Like any actor, a rocker needs costume, props, and pose. Elvis wouldn't be Elvis without his sneer. Dylan wouldn't be Dylan if he looked like a movie star. Bono needs those godawful glasses for true Bono-ness to obtain.
"Backstage Pass: Rock & Roll Photography," which runs at the Portland Museum of Art through March 22, bears abundant witness to how important visuals are to the rock imagination. How abundant? It includes 268 photographs by some 50 photographers. Think of the show as a Woodstock for the eyes.
The analogy isn't just a matter of quantity. Woodstock became the most famous of rock festivals because of how difficult it could be to experience the music as well as the music itself. "Backstage Pass" is hung more for impact than close looking. Many of the photographs are poster size. This may be rock-world appropriate - the poster is almost as important a part of the music as Stratocasters and creative hair - but visually the effect is crude and overbearing.
Gallery walls have been painted a burnt-creamsicle orange and aged-avocado green. This is at first amusing. The joke falls flat with any prolonged attempt to look at the pictures, which are overwhelmed by the Populuxe colors.
Worst of all, two-thirds of the 40 pictures hang outside the exhibition galleries, in the museum's Great Hall, and they're so high up they're hard to look at. Viewed as a whole, the display makes a terrific impression. But the contents of the display are meant to be seen individually. Certainly, Nat Finkelstein's jaw-dropping 1965 photograph of Dylan and Andy Warhol flanking one of Warhol's Elvis silkscreens is. If there were such a thing as Byzantium rock, mosaics would have a place in a show like this, but there isn't and they don't.
Such complaints could be said to miss the point. Why take an Aperture approach to what's really a Rolling Stone show? A couple of major photographers show up, Lee Friedlander and W. Eugene Smith. But the way their work in no way stands out is instructive. Smith was a lion of photojournalism. Yet his one image here, of Dyl an at the piano during a mid-'60s recording session, barely registers against the many nearby portraits of the singer by such lesser photographers as Barry Feinstein and Daniel Kramer. Rock photography really would appear to be a specialized calling.
The relationship between rock photography and fine art photography can get tricky, though. Bob Gruen's "Sid Vicious, Airport Bus, Baton Rouge, USA, 1978" so immaculately blends the weird and mundane it might be mistaken for the greatest black-and-white photograph William Eggleston never took.
The photographs in the exhibition tend to be from early in musicians' careers. They are all also, if you will, civilian pictures: We don't see the subjects in performance. The musicians are more human this way, more natural, more like us (if that last term can be said to apply to a George Clinton or Iggy Pop).
The collector clearly has eclectic musical tastes. There are also photographs of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, lots of jazz musicians, and Edith Piaf.
The Beatles get an entire wall. So do the Rolling Stones. The Who share one with Led Zeppelin. Dylan gets three half-walls. There's also a Kramer picture of Dylan and Johnny Cash showing them backstage in 1965. The image touchingly conveys the men's friendship. No doubt it's been set apart from the other Dylan pictures because, for once, he doesn't look like a jerk.
In fairness to Dylan, one man's jerkiness is another's inscrutability. Except in that Cash picture, he doesn't give an inch to the camera - which makes him all but irresistible to it. Conversely, Madonna and Debbie Harry (seven pictures each) all but offer to polish the lens for the photographer.
Just because someone loves the camera, doesn't mean the camera loves that someone back. It's not unlike the microphone that way. The camera feasts on Cash and Patti Smith (four pictures each) Conversely, Janis Joplin (four) and Eric Clapton (three) barely seem to make it out of the darkroom.
There are a few famous photographs here. In Alfred Wertheimer's wildly lubricious 1956 picture of Elvis, he goes tongue to tongue, as it were, with a member of the opposite sex. Or there's Harry Benson's shot of Cassius Clay (as he then was) mugging with the Beatles in Miami while in training for the first Liston title fight.
Most of the pictures, though, will be familiar only to aficionados - and even they might find themselves surprised. Marianne Faithful still wore knee socks in 1964. Brian Jones was more photogenic than Mick Jagger (honest). James Brown in repose - playing the piano, in Laura Levine's 1984 profile shot - could be more compelling than James Brown doing a split (in his driveway, no less, as recorded by Benson in 1979). David Bowie's favorite actress in the mid-'70s had to have been Glenda Jackson. Forget the outfits and cosmetics - it's the attitude and eyes. Levine's 1982 portrait suggests that if anyone makes "The Boy George Story" Joan Cusack should be a lock for the lead.
Maybe Cusack's brother John could do a cameo reprise of his "High Fidelity" role. You can bet that Rob, the rock-purist character Cusack plays, would find lots to complain about in "Backstage Pass" - and that he'd come back to see it at least twice.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
