Gary James' Interview With Photographer
Thom Lukas



The artists Thom Lukas has photographed reads like a Who's Who of Rock! We're talking Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Jeff Beck Group, and the list goes on and on. How did he do it? Thom Lukas explains.

Q - Thom, the obvious question; what are you doing living in Japan? Are you photographing bands that came through the country?

A - No, no. I was only a photographer for a short time, when I was in high school, for three years. That's when I did most of my work. How did I wind up in Japan? I was working in a job in New York as a market research kind of focus manager and I got laid off from that job and took a vacation to Thailand and got interviewed by some kids who wanted someone to help them with their English homework when I was waiting for a train. I also got invited to an English lesson by a monk who was a teacher. My degree had been in Education, so when I got back to New York I thought maybe I could get back into teaching again. So, I took an ESC course and wound up moving to Thailand for three years. I met a Japanese lady and kind of followed her back to Japan and got married in Japan. I've been here since 1998, working as an English teacher, ESC, English as a second language. Photography is still a hobby. I had two sections of my life where I shot Rock bands: '68 to 1970. That was most of the classic shots. Then from about '76 to '86 where I had a room mate and a friend who interviewed bands and I would photograph them when he interviewed them. So, I got to see New Wave and Punk. I shot The Sex Pistols' last gig.

Q - Have you ever had an exhibition of your artwork in a museum?

A - Just one. It was part of a group show at the Brooklyn Museum when I was in high school. My teacher submitted two of my works and I was selected for a group show called "The Young Eye." Then recently I was in a group show in Stockholm, Sweden at a Rock 'n' Roll Art Gallery. I'm pretty much undiscovered.

Q - Maybe someone will see this interview and that will change.

A - Of course.

Q - You started taking photos when you were fifteen at The Fillmore East?

A - Exactly, yeah. The first artist I photographed was Jimi Hendrix.

Q - I take it Bill Graham and his staff left you alone. They didn't bother you.

A - For the most part. In the beginning when I was trying to photograph Big Brother and The Doors... like the first three months before I started getting press passes. Once I got a portfolio of photographs that were decent, I showed them to the people in the box office, the ticket window, and they liked them. They brought them back to show Bill Graham and his right hand man, Kip Choen, and they liked them. They invited me into their office and said, "You should contact us when you want to see a show and we'll get you a photo pass and we'll also start using some of these shots in a program guide we're going to start having very soon." So, I felt great. I felt legitimate after that. That was nice.

Q - You could almost have been the inspiration for that movie, Almost Famous. The difference being the character in the movie was a writer and you were a photographer.

A - Yeah. The idea that I was doing a lot of bluffing. I'd call up someplace and say it was somebody from some magazine and I wasn't really. I was just a high school kid with a camera who loved music and loved these bands and I just wanted to be close to them. The reason I got the camera was so I could legit being close to Rock bands without being treated as a kid or a groupie. The camera I bought was a news photographer's, a working news photographer's camera and the lens. The hood of the lens had a piece of metal chipped out of it. It didn't affect the quality, but I looked like I had survived Vietnam or something. At least the camera had. So, it gave me some credibility.

Q - You saw Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison. Did you get a chance to interact with them? Did you know how special they were at the time? And how about the audience. Did they know?

A - Everybody knew how special they were. You could feel it in the auditorium, the heat, the electricity. I mean, I knew Hendrix was great from his records, from the one record I had. I just bought the second record when I saw him for the first time. With Joplin, I had the first record before they (Big Brother) got famous on mainstream. The Doors, of course "Light My Fire" was everywhere. First time I saw them was in '67. For Joplin and Hendrix, first time was '68. When I saw Jim Morrison for the first time in '67 I got very close and interacted with Ray Manzarek, but I didn't have a camera then. It was so unfortunate. I was privy to a band meeting before they went onstage, like five minutes before the curtain opened. Morrison gathered everybody together and said, "We need to talk. I have an idea." What I had done was I basically pretended that I worked at the theatre. I would knock on the door and lead a band down this alleyway to the stage door. I would knock on the door and say, "The Doors are here." They'd open up and I would just follow the band in. The theatre thought I was part of their entourage and they thought I was part of the theatre's. That was my gimmick for the summer of 1967. I did that a bunch of times.

Q - What was said at The Doors' meeting? Do you remember?

A - I do remember what they said during this band meeting. Here I was. I followed the group in. They get dressed, whatever. I was just looking for a place to be out of the way, so nobody discovered my ruse. I just saw a folding chair and I sat down. Then this guy in a striped, white suit comes over. It's Ray Manzarek. He says, "Hey man, you're in my seat." And I said, "Oh, God. I'm sorry." I got up and that's when Morrison comes over to him and then he turned to me and said, "You can have it for now. Just excuse me." They just moved about a foot over to have this private conversation. And Morrison said, "Listen, I want you," to Manzarek who was some kind of musical director, "to just vamp the beginning of the opening song and you can just keep playing the beginning." I think it was "Backdoor Man". "Just keep that over and over again until the curtain goes up and I'm going to hold onto the curtain as it goes up, as high as I can go without killing myself and drop off the stage." That's when John goes into the drum roll kind of thing. That's what they were talking about. I could hear this and I'm thinking I'm such a lucky kid. I couldn't believe it. After the show, Morrison was frenzied. It was like he was not the same guy anymore. He wasn't like this intelligent film director, theatrical producer. He was like a crazed alcoholic. He led like an entourage of people outside of the theatre, searching for an open bar, an open restaurant that served alcohol. There were like twenty people following him down the street. It was just so different. It was weird. It was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Q - You said you felt "the dark energy of Jim Morrison up close." What did you mean by that, the alcoholic trance he was in?

A - Yeah. When he crashed through the doors of a restaurant he just slammed the door open and went in and when he found out they didn't serve beer or alcohol he crashed right out, just like a furious guy, like a bull in a china shop. He charged down the street, looking for another open place. I thought to myself, I don't want to be any part of that. The third time I saw The Doors I was backstage, talking to The Who, and The Doors were onstage. In the middle of their concert the backstage door crashes open again and there's a girl being carried in with a cracked open head and blood dripping down and six people were holding her up, trying to take her someplace to lie her down. Morrison follows her in. It just seems like it was dark energy to me. Jimi Hendrix didn't do things like that. Janis Joplin didn't do things like that.

Q - What did Morrison do that night?

A - He incited a riot basically and the cops surrounded the stage. People started throwing chairs and she got hit with a thrown chair. Morrison didn't like cops. He had an incident with a cop in New Haven a few months before that. He wound up getting maced by a cop backstage 'cause he wouldn't listen to the cop's direction. He wouldn't leave that particular area. So, it just seemed like trouble followed him and of course he was busted in Florida for supposedly exposing himself.

Q - You shared an elevator ride with The Rolling Stones and got to go to their press conference?

A - The first part is correct. I didn't make it to the press conference because the bodyguard, it was his first week of being hired. He makes the mistake of letting me on the elevator and excluding the new guitar player, Mick Taylor. That must've felt terrible to him when he's not making a great impression. Then Mick Taylor hangs on the elevator door. "Let me in! Let me in!", and there's hundreds of people around, girls pulling on his hair. He gets in and they're all laughing at him. Not the bodyguard, but The Stones are laughing at him. I'm in the corner trying to be invisible and the bodyguard looks at me and says, "You stay in this elevator when this elevator stops." Really threatening. You don't need that much for a 17-year-old. It was November, 1969. They knew I was intimidated by everything. So, I didn't really give them eye contact in this elevator ride, which was more than sixty flights up to The Rainbow Room. But I did check out their clothes pretty closely and I realized they were wearing pancake makeup. I thought, "The Stones wearing makeup?" (laughs) I never saw anything like that in my life. But then they got off the elevator. The bodyguard looked at me again. He was a guy named Tony Funches, I later found out. He was also a bodyguard for Jim Morrison. He looked at me threatening me menacingly. Keith Richards paused when he got off the elevator and he turned around and crouched down and did like a Jimmy Cagney thing with his fingers out like a pistol and took off. So, he interacted with me. That was very nice. He made a joke of it.

Q - How many people would have loved to have had that up close, personal contact with The Stones and Keith Richards!

A - This was way too close. Almost in every situation I got way closer than I ever imagined because usually when I went to photograph these bands I took my telephoto lens because I thought I'd be miles away and yet here I am in an elevator. I can't use my telephoto lens in an elevator. Backstage with Jimi Hendrix I can barely get back far enough to get a couple of decent shots.

Q - Since you photographed so many of these Classic bands, wasn't it a bit of a downer to go into teaching?

A - It's funny. I try to rationalize it not following through, but my heroes started dying off. A friend of mine joined a band and he died of a heroin overdose. I just knew something dark would happen to me because I had kind of an addictive personality and I was shy. And when people tell you how great you are, you're shy and you don't have to do any of the work, they do it for you. They give you this and they give you that, I'd be dead in a bathtub or in a New Orleans hotel room. I just know I would have. Annie Leibovitz, who went on tour with The Stones, or even earlier, wound up being addicted to heroin as did many people. That was my dream, to go on tour with The Stones.

Q - The people that you photographed were not only talented, but had some mystery around them, some kind of aura. I don't see anybody like that around today.

A - I don't know why. God knows there should be a Renaissance. We're overdue.

Q - Taylor Swift is getting a lot of attention and has had a lot of success, but you can't compare her to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison.

A - I can't imagine Janis Joplin wearing a bathing suit onstage either. I asked this young woman, "Why does Taylor Swift wear a bathing suit onstage?" And the young women said, "Because she can." Whatever that means. I'm glad she can. Jim Morrison didn't wear a bathing suit on stage and neither did Jimi.

Official Website: ThomLukas.com

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