Whatever Happened to Captain Snaps?

John Lennon in his granny glasses smiling from a throng at a street rally. Robert Plant on stage and off, golden curls of hair cascading around a hard face. He caught musicians at their peaks and he caught them when they were just getting started: he's got early pix of Bruce Springsteen or Tom Waits, in scruffy, unfamiliar beards, or Chaka Khan in a disco outfit in the 70s. Who knew her mouth looked that big? And I said he's a rock photographer, but he shot rappers too, right when that kicked off: Grandmaster Flash. Kurtis Blow. He also caught the first and last Sex Pistols gig. He also shot Woodstock. Stevens understands how us locals react to these photos, and to his stories. He calls himself a "bigshot photographer," but he doesn't act like you should be impressed. And some people in Portsmouth don't buy his stories. They're too good to be true.

But the facts add up. That's his consultant credit on Sid & Nancy, which he earned by sharing his first-hand experiences with Sid Vicious. Those are his bylines in the NME and elsewhere-- although sometimes he went under the name "Captain Snaps." And oh yeah, he still has all the negatives.

As the rock writer Chris Salewicz, his friend and collaborator, puts it: "He's undoubtedly one of the very greatest of all rock and roll photographers. But I suspect he's somewhat underrated. Which might be his own fault, of course."

Unlike many of the folkies who found their way to Greenwich Village in the early 60s, Joe Stevens was a native New Yorker. He was born in 1938; his mom raised him all over Queens, and "we lived in basements," Stevens recalls. "She was a waitress, she raised me on tips." His dad, who divorced his mom when Joe was five, was an art assessor. Stevens saw his dad on weekends, and "we'd walk around Manhattan to the tune of 100 blocks each trip, each Sunday. He'd point out stuff on each streetcorner. There'd be a gargoyle sticking out of the corner of the building with this big Satanic face, and he'd tell me all about how he'd gone to Paris, and he'd tell me about the Louvre...he turned me onto art, he turned me onto using my eyes."

Sufjan Pens Essay on "Friend Rock"

While the rest of us were running amok at SXSW, good old Sufjan was calling himself a "failed writer" and penning more content for Asthmatic Kitty's Sidebar.

This time we get an essay on the concept of "Friend Rock", which Sufjan defines by example: "You are going to a show not so much as a fan of the music, but as a fan of your friend, the musician, on stage." From the sounds of it, Sufjan's been doing the Friend Rock thing quite a bit lately, and he sounds a little annoyed by it.

As he concludes, "It's just that you were our friend first, and an aspiring musician second" and presents a list of friend-ish activities he'd rather engage in with such a person: flying kites, dodge ball, falafel sandwich, holding hands, and the like (the lack of grammatical parallelism clearly intentional). So we're wondering which acquaintance is riding the Suf-man's coattails hard these days? It's that guy in the chicken suit, isn't it??

Peruse Sufjan's complete "Friend Rock" essay here, and revisit more of the failed writer's winning prose here, here, and here.

Believe it or not, Sufjan still does that music thing too. Watch him do it live at Calvin College in Grand Rapids on March 30

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