BANDS: MEAT PUPPETS and the GO-BETWEENS, 1987
The Go-Betweens' "Cattle and Cane" might be one of the greatest singles of the '80s - one of those songs I remember hearing early in the decade that made me optimistic for what was to come. I photographed the band when they came through Toronto in 1987 mostly because my favorite local band, The Lawn, was opening for them at the El Mocambo; their lead singer Gord was a huge fan, and he got me hyped about the show. I don't know if I managed to place these pics, however, so their publication on my old blog might have been their first appearance anywhere, though that was enough to get a couple of them in The Go-Betweens: Right Here, a 2017 documentary about the band.
The band were not prepared for a photo shoot when I showed up at soundcheck, so my single roll of portraits was done with five slightly put-out people. What I remember is that they seemed like adults - moreso than almost any other band I'd photographed up till then - though several of my frames were spoiled when drummer Lindy Morrison couldn't stifle a giggle. I was, as with everything else around this time, working against the limits of my competence with my Mamiya and a flash bounced into an umbrella, so I'm amazed that anything turned out at all worth reprinting over 35 years later. One thing I wish is that I'd asked guitarist and singer Grant McLennan (the man who wrote "Cattle and Cane") to take off his sunglasses. Bassist Robert Vickers would leave the band after this tour. Grant McLennan died in 2006 of a heart attack.
My first regular subject as a photographer was our local hardcore scene - basically the place my editors at the Nerve sent me when I showed up and asked for assignments. But hardcore punk was undergoing a metamorphosis at the time, embodied in two bands I shot early on - the Minutemen and the Meat Puppets. Between their first record in 1982 and their third, Up On The Sun, in 1985, they'd gone from being one of the more abrasive bands in the SST stable of bands to the grooviest - a transformation that contined with the two records they released in 1987, Mirage and Huevos, though I couldn't tell you which one they were promoting when they arrived at RPM, the cavernous warehouse-turned-club on Toronto's waterfront where I photographed them.
My shoot with the Meat Puppets would have been called ambitious by me at the time, mostly because I brought a backdrop. They were a southwestern band from Arizona, so I was inspired to bring a Mexican blanket from my apartment - a souvenir my sister and her husband had been given by her in-laws, which by that point mostly lived on my futon couch; give me a break for at least trying something. It wasn't a very big blanket, though, so I had drummer Derrick Bostrom and the two Kirkwood brothers, Curt and Cris, jam themselves together next to my flash and umbrella. The biggest challenge was managing the band's mugging for the camera - almost inevitably a problem when photographing a band. The Meat Puppets would go through a lot of lineup changes over the years, with two breakups, but they're back together with the original trio along with a keyboardist and Curt's son Elmo on guitar.
