Author: kim

I had the pleasure last week of playing host to Baron Wolman, who was Rolling Stone‘s first staff photographer, helping to found the magazine with Jann Wenner 40 years ago. Wolman was an “old guy” back then — 30 freakin’ years old! — and he turned 70 last Monday, the day he arrived in Berlin from an exhibition of his work in a tiny German town called Nordhorn.

The reason he was here was that this is where his career started. As a young soldier stationed in Berlin and assigned to Military Intelligence, he’d taken some pictures of the Berlin Wall being built and on an impulse sent them to the newspaper in his home town of Columbus, Ohio. They printed them on the front page and sent him $50 — and he was astonished that he could get good money — and that was good money in 1961 — for doing something he’d fooled around with since he was a kid. After he mustered out, he became a photojournalist for big-name magazines like Life and Look. Living in San Francisco, he gravitated towards the exploding music scene there, and already had a good book of photos when he and Wenner joined up.

In the years that followed, he became one of America’s top music photographers, and, after he and Wenner quarrelled after Wenner shut down Earth Times, the ahead-of-its-time environmental magazine Wollman started under the Rolling Stone umbrella, he, along with several other former staffers and some rebel fashion writers in New York, started Rags, which was, improbably, a hippie fashion magazine. If that seems an oxymoron, consider this: the day Rags was shut down — I was present when it happened, although I’d only recently come to the magazine — it was, in the words of either the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal — I can never remember which — “the fastest growing magazine in the history of American magazine publishing.” I’ll never forget the business manager, Phil Freund, coming out of his office to read those words and then declare that because the bills from advertisers weren’t being paid fast enough to pay the printer, he was, after consultation with Baron, shutting the magazine down, effective immediately.

I lost touch with him after that, but he continued to photograph, gradually getting out of music photography because access to both performances and musicians was increasingly being limited by record companies and artist management. But because he still owned his images, he’s continued to make a good living, because the photos he shot have become icons of their subjects. Check out the gallery on his website, or the one Rolling Stone put up recently, and I’m sure you’ll see what I mean.

At any rate, he hasn’t lost his verve or his sense of humor, as he demonstrated all last week, and he was avid to explore the side of town his last gig here prevented him from visiting, and we had a great time. True to his maxim of “mixing business with pleasure,” he sat down with the folks at the /pool gallery to talk about their then-upcoming show of photos sponsored by Gibson Guitars, called Gibson Through the Lens. He’s got three shots in the show, including one of Jimi Hendrix playing a left-handed Flying V at his debut performance at the Fillmore Ballroom in 1968 which was being used to promote the show.

The vernissage was last night, and, since the gallery’s only a couple of blocks away, and because I told Baron I’d report on it, I went down. Given the large number of photos and the gallery’s limited wall-space, they’ve done a good job hanging the show. It takes a little work to look at: the photos don’t have quite enough room to breathe, for the most part, as can be easily demonstrated by looking at the few which have their own chunk of wall to hang on. The rest have to be concentrated on individually, because they’re chock-a-block up against one another, and because inevitably, mixing color shots with black and white means that the colors draw your attention quicker. Once you learn to isolate them, though, they’ll come into focus a lot better.

The show should also be looked at for what it is, not what it’s not. What it’s not is a “rock photography’s greatest hits” or a history of the guitar in rock and roll, where Fender’s Stratocaster and Telecaster would have at least equal footing. It’s Gibson showing how many of rock’s important guitarists used their products, plain and simple. Elvis? In his Vegas period, with a Gibson acoustic. Look at the early shots and you’ll see he was playing a Martin acoustic — and almost never played electric. The Beatles? Also the later period, because, as everyone back then knew, they played Hofners and Rickenbackers, which were cheap, and, in the case of the Hofner, not all that good. You’re on solider ground with people like the Stones and, especially, Eric Clapton, who took Gibson’s biggest flop, the Les Paul, notorious for feeding back and being way too loud, and turned those “defects” into features that defined his style. He made the Les Paul so famous, in fact, that 24 out of the 66 photos in this show feature them — if you include the knockoff that Kurt Cobain’s diving with in the parody of their Nevermind album cover. (There’s even a picture of Les Paul with a Les Paul!)

The photographers themselves are a who’s who of rock lensmen (yes, men: Jill Furmanovsky and Kate Simon have one shot each, but that’s the rock press for you). Besides Baron Wolman, there are pictures from Henry Diltz, Bob Gruen, Jim Marshall, Neal Preston, Barrie Wentzell, Mick Rock, and many others. Plus, there are two autographed guitars (one by Slash, and I couldn’t figure out who the other one was from), and one lonely amp in the corner.

The gallery itself is sort of the new kid on the block (almost literally, given that the block also contains one of the neighborhood’s eminences grises, Wohnmachine, which used to occupy the space next door), and seems to be an outgrowth of a magazine, also named Pool, which seems to be targeted towards the fashion industry. But it’s also already given something back to the neighborhood: during the course of the meeting Baron and photo-rep Dave Brolan and a Berlin-based photo rep and Gibson’s German guy had in the gallery’s basement, Baron noted that he’d had a remarkable meal the night before at a strange Chinese fusion joint just up the street. “Oh,” said Sascha, the gallery’s manager, “do you mean Toca Rouge? I designed that place.”

Damn, this is a small town…

Because my mind only works intermittently, particularly as the weekend approaches, I often find myself having to buy one or two grocery items on Sunday, having spaced them out in the Saturday shopping, which I still approach with the same panic as when everything shut up at 2pm on Saturdays, as it did when I first moved here.

This means a trip to a train station, as generously defined by Deutsche Bahn. There’s an Edeka market in the Friedrichstr. station which has a lot of stuff my regular supermarket doesn’t, but is often so jammed that security guards close it down until it empties out some, resulting in a huge line in the station. The other alternative is the Kaiser’s in the Hauptbahnhof, which doesn’t have as much stuff, but isn’t such a mob scene most of the time.

When I go there, I usually walk down Invalidenstr., but after I do my shopping, I generally walk back another way, a discipline I learned long ago driving through Italy with a friend who repeated the mantra “never go back the way you came,” which I find excellent advice. So since there’s always something to see, I generally head back by way of Reinhardtstr., the lonliest street in Berlin. I also use it when I walk to the ARD studios on Reichstagufer to record my stuff for Fresh Air, so I’ve been watching it for a while.

All in all, it’s a pretty depressing walk, particularly if you approach it from the Hauptbahnhof. You cross the (re-channeled) Spree via a bridge, and then approach an intersection which gives you the option of heading south towards Unter den Linden or east on Reinhardtstr. Right there at the corner is a large, modern office building with a huge poster on it offering, as it has for over a year, offices for rent. “Here’s where decisions are made!” it says, not forgetting to mention the stunning views of the government quarter, the Reichstag and the Spreebogen complex. But mostly, it looks like the decision has been made to rent somewhere else.

The first block is desolate, even during the week. It’s kind of an orphan, not too accessible by public transportation, and with one empty apartment and office building after the other. One or two of the streetside apartments appears to have a tenant, but I also know that real-estate folks hang curtains in empty apartments to make it look like they’re inhabited. There’s a nice store selling 20th Century antiques, Art Deco and Art Nouveau, from Vienna, a tiny car-rental company, and a “design center” with occasional exhibits. Then you hit the corner of Luisenstr. and there’s a restaurant called Kanzlereck, “Chancellor’s Corner,” serving up German cuisine in a room in which photographic transparancies of past and present Chancellors of Germany are printed onto the window glass. This is probably a ploy to keep people from overeating.

On an island stands a statue of a naked guy wrestling a dragon down, in honor of Rudolf Virchow, who, with Robert Koch, put the adjacent Charité Hospital on the map by pretty much inventing the germ theory of disease and the science of pathology.

Keep going and you’ll see that the Kanzlereck was the gateway to Little Bonn. Actually, the whole area south of Reinhardtstr., particularly along Albrechtstr. and continuing to Schiffbauerdamm, can bear this title. Most of the restaurants are branches of popular ones in Bonn, and they and the bars hang out signs for Kölsch, the beer of choice for transplanted Bonners. Those Bonners are supposed to be living in these apartments, but as you continue to walk to Friedrichstr., it becomes evident that not very many are. The parade of empty buildings and “For Rent” signs just continues.

Which is not to say that nobody’s rented. There’s a store specializing in ostrich products (non-edible ones) like novelties made from ostrich eggs. There’s a very tiny musical-instrument repair shop. There was a brave Persian restaurant, with an authentic-looking menu, but it closed for lack of customers and is now a “Thai” restaurant. There’s the headquarters of the FDP, Germany’s Liberal party, and branches of a dozen or so media companies from around the world, Switzerland, Japan, and Frankfurt among them. Probably weirdest of all is a huge store that sells nothing but glowing balls. How they pay the rent is beyond me. And almost at Friedrichstr. is another mind-twister, a cellar store selling Luxembourg wine and Persian groceries. I didn’t even know Luxembourg was big enough to support a vineyard. And, inevitably, there are a few businesses that have hung on, probably since the DDR: a couple of cafes, a keymaker, an ancient stamp shop.

But mostly, Reinhardtstr. is about failure. The “Residence at the Deutsches Theater” was one such grandiose project, a gleaming white complex of luxury flats which is now, at least partially, an apartment hotel. It’s depressing to see the dust bunnies through the plate glass windows of the stores which remain empty despite every effort to rent them, the way their For Rent signs have yellowed around the edges. The sad fact is, a sizeable percentage of government workers never wanted to move to Berlin in the first place, and those who did go home for the weekend. They don’t like Berlin and they don’t like Berliners. They have their own restaurants, bars, and clubs, but mostly, I suspect, they do their jobs and pine for retirement.

It’s almost a relief to get off the street and start heading home, although as I pass the corner of Oranienburger Str. I always remember that line about tourism being like prostitution, in that you make your most attractive features available to all for a price and hope you don’t invite disease or destruction.

But that’s a rant for another day.