Jay Blakesberg has spent most of his life photographing rockers and rappers and punks and pop stars.
And, in a category all its own, The Grateful Dead.
You can see what a long, strange, wondrous trip it’s been, on display at the Morris Museum in Morris Township through Feb. 5, 2023.
RetroBlakesberg Captured on Film: 1978-2008 features 126 images, including Red Hot Chili Peppers, David Bowie, Neil Young, BB King, Soundgarden, Carlos Santana and Tom Petty. Blakesberg will lead walking tours of the exhibit on Feb. 4 and 5.
“It’s about the spark. It’s about the inferno. It’s about magic. It’s about adventure,” the Clark, NJ, native said of his life’s journey.
“He’s a great storyteller, visually and in person. That’s what makes this interesting,” said the museum’s departing director, Andrew Sandall, a punk guitarist in his youth. “He’s got Jerry Garcia staring at Snoop Dogg. How do you beat that?”
Blakesberg started shooting bands in 1978, with his dad’s Pentax camera. His vantage point was a fan’s, from the audience at Madison Square Garden and Passaic’s Capitol Theatre.
At first, snaps of his rock heroes simply fueled his high school fantasies, adorning walls of his bedroom, where he strove to emulate their wild ways.
“We were young, stupid, impressionable kids that did a lot of drugs. We smoked a lot of weed,” he told admirers at the exhibition’s opening weekend.
“We lived by the rule of adolescent stupidity. How many dumb things can we do that will almost kill you, and hopefully you don’t die?”
Blakesberg’s first published photo came at age 16. The next year, The Aquarian Weekly paid him for a pair of Grateful Dead images.
When he discovered a press pass on the ground at a music festival, he knew he had found his calling.
Blakesberg’s daughter Ricki curated the exhibit–his first museum show– along with his Instagram page, which begat a coffee table book, RetroBlakeserg.
The museum show stops at 2008, the year Blakesberg switched from film to digital photography.
“Now I love (digital). I didn’t at first,” he said.
These days he shoots with a Nikon D850. Over his career, he has used everything from Polaroids to toy cameras, scoring cover shots for Rolling Stone and numerous other magazines.
If a band or solo artist got radio or MTV airplay in the last half of the 20th century, they probably were captured by Blakesberg’s lenses.
There is Kurt Cobain, and Courtney Love. B.B. King. And Iggy Pop, Prince, and Lenny Kravitz. Johnny Cash and June Carter. Keith Richards and John Lee Hooker. And on and on.
Blakesberg’s action shots threaten to launch from their frames.
Crowd surfers! Stage divers! Mosh pits!
He is most recognized for documenting The Grateful Dead, and the loyal Deadheads who made the band’s concerts celebrations. He calls his work “visual anthropology.”
“Most rock and roll is a very personal experience. But with the Dead, it was a group experience, and that group of people were my people! I found them, and never wanted to leave. I’m still here,” said the longtime San Franciscan.
Blakesberg’s candid shots are exceptionally intimate; his portraits, provocative.
Bjork snarls at a Tibetan freedom concert. An iridescent Les Claypool of Primus plucks his bass on a diving board. Bono spray paints “Rock” in a Bay Area plaza. LSD guru Timothy Leary… Merry Prankster Ken Kesey… charter Deadhead Wavy Gravy…Blakesberg has compiled a veritable hippie hall of fame.
He taught himself about F-stops and lighting. What’s really set him apart, though, can be summarized in two words:
No gushing.
“You’ve got to make them be human,” he said of his subjects.
“Some of these artists have been rock stars since they’re 17 years old, and they’re 75 years old now, and they’ve only had people catering to them and handing them everything and doing their laundry and feeding them and telling them where to go. And you try to do your best and get on a level with them, somewhere in between, that you can all relate to as human beings.”
DAY TRIPPER
Following the Dead around the country, Blakesberg became intimately acquainted with hallucinogens. He spent months in prison for selling them.
Psychedelics aren’t for everyone, he cautioned. But their therapeutic value for treating depression, alcoholism and the terminally ill is gaining acceptance, and he believes many people can benefit.
“Taking LSD or mushrooms, it rearranges the molecules in your mind and your body in ways that hopefully transform you, to be able to transcend the current situation and sort of enter a divine symmetry, enter a space where you can experience a beautiful moment, a mind-opening moment, a mind-blowing moment, an enhanced moment,” he said.
Luckily for him, he got busted just ahead of the mandatory drug sentences of the Reagan era.
“Even though I went to prison for psychedelics I still think it’s one of the best things that ever happened in my life,” Blakesberg reflected.
He credits his brief stint behind bars with accelerating his career.
“I never wanted to go back. And that’s why I worked so hard at being a photographer, to be successful,” Blakesberg recounted.
“You know why I’m successful at photography? Because of fear. Fear of having to get a real job. So I worked harder than anybody. I took every single job I could possibly take. And I created a career of it for myself.”
Blakesberg has very few boxes to check off, professionally.
He wishes he could have hung out with John Lennon. (Photographer Bob Gruen, showcased at the Morris Museum in 2019, had that distinction.)
“I would love to do a portrait of Bob Dylan. I would love to do a portrait of Mick and Keith together,” Blakesberg said of Rolling Stones’ glimmer twins Jagger & Richards. “I would love to do a portrait of Clapton.”
He could not have imagined such adventures back in his boyhood bedroom in Union County. A long, strange trip, indeed.
For anyone aspiring to eke a living stalking celebrities with a camera, Blakesberg has wry advice:
“Get a real job!”
RetroBlakesberg Captured on Film: 1978-2008 runs through Feb. 5, 2023, at the Morris Museum, at 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morris Township, (973) 971-3700. Admission: $8-$12. For closing weekend, Blakesberg will lead gallery tours, sharing stories behind the photos. At 11 am and 2 pm, Feb. 4 and 5.
