Looking through a box of prints when I photographed Grasshopper from the band Mercury Rev. September 1998 feels like forever ago. Grasshopper was releasing his solo album Orbit of Eternal Grace on the Beggars Banquet record label. I instantly became a Mercury Rev fan after I heard the song Chasing a Bee. Their seminal album Deserter’s Songs was released a month after I took these photos.
Grasshopper was the first portrait session I had with a musician. The preceding year and a half, I was photographing Jane’s Addiction, The Cure and Radiohead while they toured. In July 98′, a friend told me that Beggars Banquet had put up a post on a chatboard searching for a photographer to take promotional shots of their artists. At the time, the internet was primitive and chat boards were the common way of connecting to people. Email just began to take hold of how young people communicated. Most people were still using phones attached to a wall.
I was photographing the Smashing Pumpkins tour, Adore. I drove up to NY with my 8×10 portfolio to show Leslie, the head of Beggars. My portfolio consisted of live band photographs. I told Leslie I had no clue how to photograph portraits but I wanted to try. I was practicing by photographing friends with a fisheye lens and cross-processing slide film. Cross processing was a fad in the 90’s that produced vibrant and unpredictable color shifts. Despite having no portrait experience, Leslie took a chance on me. This was an opportunity to return home and restart my young career. Eighteen months of touring bands had run its course. I wanted to photograph portraits of people while they were in their element.
After photographing my last show of the Smashing Pumpkins tour, I drove up I-95 in my dilapidated two-door 1984 Toyota which had logged 200,000 miles. The thick summertime air blew through the open window because I had no air conditioning. I was the only car sputtering on the highway at 2am until I got near the NY exits. It was a new start at 24-years-old. A real portrait assignment paying good money and a return to NY- the center of the economic boom the empire was experiencing!!! It was a different era than the NY blight that I grew-up in. In 98′, NY probably felt like what Rome did at its height.
I didn’t have much to unpack. A few days later, I spoke to Leslie about the photograph. The only problem was Leslie had lost contact with Grasshopper for weeks and the deadline for his album’s publicity loomed. This was before cell phones, so messages were left on answering machines after the beep. Leslie was ready to give-up and my opportunity was fading away. Luckily, Grasshopper returned.
We photographed for hours around SOHO and NOLITA. The area wasn’t as commercialized yet and interesting patches of backgrounds still existed. He brought a large grasshopper made of wire. I shot some of the portraits with a fisheye lens and color infrared film that made green and red jump off the film. I thought the experimental look matched his unique album. The B/W print underneath the color print was dipped in watered down bleach which wore away the midtones. The first prints dipped were eaten away.
I shot a lot of film. I always feared going back to a client with blank rolls of film. I dropped my color film off at the lab on Broadway and Houston. Then I held my breath until they handed me a contact sheet two days later. After I saw that there were images on the film, my worries shifted to finding a good photo on the contact sheets. Twenty-five years later, it’s the same experience.
I haven’t seen Grasshopper since he disappeared into a sea of people on Broadway. Weeks later, Mercury Rev’s album Deserter’s Songs became a critically acclaimed album. Every music magazine heaped well deserved praise on the band’s masterpiece.
