John Bauldie: Joel, you’re a musician, a guitar technician and a photographer – how did you get into those things?
Joel Bernstein: Well, I started off playing guitar when I was seven or eight years old, in 1960, and I was always interested in folk music. And I started to play around with my dad’s 35mm camera and learned how to take pictures. Then in early 1966 I heard Tom Rush do a song by Joni Mitchell, The Urge For Going, and I thought, That’s a very good song! Later, in 67, she came to town with her husband Chuck Mitchell and I heard them on the local folk music station and taped them playing The Circle Game. I’d never heard anyone playing in open tuning before so I stayed up all night playing the tape and by three or four in the morning I’d figured out how to play.
So I’d got interested in Joni Mitchell when I was 15 and I went to photograph her in a coffeehouse in mid ’67. In fact, they were the first shots that I ever developed and printed by myself. I took them along later to show her, took some more shots of her in the next few months and in 1968 she asked me to be her photographer. I went to photograph her first Carnegie Hall concert in February 1969, met her manager Elliott Roberts, and David Crosby and Graham Nash, and Graham and I hit it off very well. And that night I met Bob Dylan for the first time. It was Phil Everly’s birthday party and Bob was there, as were Leonard Cohen and David Blue.
Then I met Neil Young the next week – I photographed him and Crazy Horse at their first East Coast show at the Bitter End in February 1969. I was still in school at the time. Eleventh grade.
Anyway, I continued to photograph Joni and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young through 1970, and when they played the Fillmore East in June – the week l graduated from High School – I shot some pictures which were used in the centre of the squares on the CSNY Four Way Street cover. And that week I also did Neil Young’s After The Goldrush cover and the inner sleeve of Graham Nash’s Songs For Beginners – Graham reading the newspaper. It was a busy time for me!
I actually met Bob Dylan again at the same time. After the last CSNY show at the Filmore East – this was June 1970 – they emptied the theater and Bill Graham threw a party for CSNY and The Who, who had just done Tommy at Carnegie Hall, and there was a jam session between various members of CSNY and The Who and The Band, and Bob was there, and I found myself sitting next to him and I was taking pictures. I was sitting next to him on the organ stool and I moved back, wanting to take a photo of him, and one of his bodyguards put his hand on my shoulder and said, Don’t do that again! But I got one shot. He looked sort of owlish – round face, glasses. He said “I Just flew in from Venice for this.” I didn’t know whether he meant Venice, California or Venice, Italy. But he was playing a little bit, a little bit of organ.
Anyway, after I graduated from High School I went to college in Wisconsin. I’d been there a week when I got a call from Joni Mitchell who wanted me to photograph her out in California. I said, OK, I can do it, but only for a weekend. She was living in her wooden house out in Laurel Canyon, writing her songs for Blue. It was beautiful. It was 38 degrees in Wisconsin when I left and 85 degrees in LA when I got there. And I did these pictures and she said, Well, could you stay? Do some more pictures? And I thought, Well, this is pretty great! I thought, should I go back to school or what? And so – after talking it over with my parents – I moved to California, lived in Topanga and worked as a photographer. I did the cover pictures for Neil’s Harvest and Joni’s For The Roses.
John Bauldie: So where did Joel Bernstein – guitar technician come into it?
Joel Bernstein: Well, I went on Neil Young’s Time Fades Away tour as official photographer and I noticed that Neil would spend the last 20 minutes or half an hour before the show tuning his own guitars because he was very picky and he couldn’t find someone to do it. Well, when I did that inside shot on After The Goldrush, he had a new D45 top-of-the-line Martin guitar. He showed it to me – I’d never seen one before – and I asked if I could play it. He said, sure. I played a little bit on it and then I re-tuned it and handed it back just before he went on stage. And he said, Hey! Perfect! Now he remembered that, and on this tour he said, Do you tune guitars? Could you tune my guitars for me? I was the tour photographer, but I said, sure. No problem. So now I was a guitar technician.
John Bauldie: What about Joel Bernstein – musician?
Joel Bernstein: My first musical job was playing some Joni Mitchell songs – which she couldn’t remember – as demos for a publishing deal. That was in 1969. In 1971 I played piano on Military Madness on Graham Nash’s Songs For Beginners, a rinky-dink part I did while I was sitting next to Dave Mason. Then in 1975 I played on Wind On The Water, the song, with David and Graham, and I played live on their tour. After that tour I ran into Barry Imhoff – it was just after Bob Dylan had played the Houston Astrodome and they’d had a disaster where the guitar technician had miscalibrated his strobo-tuner so the entire set was totally out of tune – way out, apparently. So Barry said, Oh listen, we might have something for you. And sure enough they called and asked me to do the guitars for the second Rolling Thunder tour. And I’d heard about the first one – I had some friends who were on the film crew – and I thought, God, this sounds like the most exciting energy going on here. I was thrilled to be asked to do it.
John Bauldie: You’re credited with the video still that was used on the back of the Hard Rain sleeve. How did that come about?
Joel Bernstein: I think it was Howard Alk’s suggestion. Of course, when I went on the Rolling Thunder tour I was told that I couldn’t by any means take any pictures of Bob, even though they knew I was a photographer. Well, needless to say, after the first three shows it was, Joel, do you have your cameras? Bob wants some pictures taken tonight… Anyway, they wanted to have some shots of Bob from the video at Fort Collins for the LP sleeve and I had come up with this technique of photographing from video using still frame using a Hasselblad, ’cos videos weren’t good enough to give a still picture that was free from noise at the time, and Howard and I went through the video looking for various things we could shoot. I’d shot a lot from the front, but the background was very cluttered with all the scaffolding and the paintings, so it wasn’t a very pleasing thing to be looking at. The shot from the back just happened to be one that I stopped at. I never thought it would be used. As a matter of fact, that picture doesn’t look like a video still, it looks more like a pointillist painting.
John Bauldie: So what came after the 1976 tour?
Joel Bernstein: Well, we come then to The Last Waltz. I’d been on a Neil Young/Crazy Horse tour which finished in Atlanta the day before The Last Waltz, and I’d got a call, a frantic call, from the producers of the show. Apparently, nobody who was working there had worked with Bob and they were afraid that he was going to not have things together and maybe decide not to play at the last minute. So they asked if I could come and set up his gear and take care of everything for the show. I’d been up all night, took the red-eye into San Francisco and set up a small rehearsal in a room, a banquet room, at the Miyako Hotel for Bob and The Band. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the T-shirt – I still have mine – it was a silkscreen of the rooming list at the Miyako Hotel which is where they put everyone up for The Last Waltz, and it’s just an incredible list – everyone who was there, all the guest artists plus Bob under his pseudonym and Joni under her pseudonym…
John Bauldie: What was Bob’s pseudonym?
Joel Bernstein: I forget. I thought it was not so great for Q magazine to publish his pseudonyms, especially while he’s still on tour, but in any case Bob and The Band were going to have this rehearsal that I’d set up and Bob came in that afternoon and I was the only one there and what was funny for me was that when he came in it was like he was my long-lost friend. He was like, Oh Joel! How’re you doing? You been working with Neil? He said more to me in that one afternoon probably than on the whole Rolling Thunder tour.
Well, they played for hours. Actually, Neil Young came in later on and just sat and watched with me. And it was just a great thing to witness. They tried a number of different songs together. And I had brought my camera equipment but I wasn’t allowed to shoot at the rehearsal of course, and I had to move all the gear over to Winterland for the show. So I did that and I then set up my tuning station, ‘cos I was also going to be taking care of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, and in fact I finished up doing all the guitars for everyone except for the initial tuning of The Band and Eric Clapton. Anyway, during Bob’s set I was crouched behind one of the Fender amps on stage and you can see me in the film.
That show for me was probably the best I’ve ever been involved in. I played at Live Aid with Neil Young and I was at the Farm Aid shows, at No Nukes in New York and at a lot of multi-artist concerts, but The Last Waltz – the spirit was excellent. Incidentally, I’ve heard Elliot Mazer’s truck tapes – the two track mixes that he made in the recording truck at the time – and they’re far superior to the album version of the concert.
John Bauldie: You were asked to work with Bob again the following year…
Joel Bernstein: Yes. I think it was because I had helped out at The Last Waltz and we’d got along together that I was asked to set up rehearsals in 1977 at what became Rundown Studios. He had just rented the place, at the time it was an office building where they’d made Saturday Night Specials downstairs and there was a computer manufacturer upstairs. And he wanted to change it into a rehearsal space, so we rented a piano, amps and all of that and there was just me and another person working there at the time. I wound up actually living there from about September 1977 until we left for the Japanese tour early the following year. Bob actually had a room too. I turned one of the offices into my bedroom and he had an office that was set up as a bedroom too. So that was when I spent the most time with him, because there were auditions and rehearsals all the time. There were members of the band that he knew that he wanted, like Steven Soles and Rob Stoner, but he was looking for other players, he needed a drummer and he auditioned a number of drummers, maybe 10 or a dozen. It was an interesting experience for me, watching all these different musicians trying to play Bob’s songs.
John Bauldie: So what else do you have stashed away in the Joel Bernstein archives?
Joel Bernstein: Well, I have an alternate take of Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar that was given to me by someone who was working with Bob at the time. Someone else gave me a recording truck tape of an entire Dylan and Petty show from Melbourne – or is it Adelaide? – that’s very interesting. In the world of Dylan collectors, I don’t have the Bob Fass transcription discs – I do have a copy of the Warner Bros/7 Arts demo that Crosby gave me in fact. I have that LA 45 of Crawl Out Your Window. I have four out of the five red vinyl releases…
Cameron gave me a set of his original liner notes for Biograph with Bob’s corrections and comments in the margins. Those are great. Some of the things Bob wrote about the early days especially are just really incredible. There are many many incredible things in circulation among collectors. I mean, just looking at Michael Krogsgaard’s book – for him to have heard or have in his possession so many things is a real tribute to his dedication but there’s so many other things that exist in the hands of engineers, producers, managers, publishers – all sorts of things that have never come into circulation.
John Bauldie: Well, there are lots of tapes in the hands of collectors that aren’t in circulation- things that dare not be spoken of, even in The Telegraph!
Joel Bernstein: In those ‘78 tapes there are some great performances of some great things That reminds me – Repossession Blues. Bob just came in and played it. I said, Does that have a name, Bob? He said, No. I had to put something on the tape box so I put Repossession Blues. And so it’s really funny to see it on lists, ’cos I just made it up.
John Bauldie: So at the end of the Far East 1978 tour…
Joel Bernstein: I was laid off right after we came back, much to my surprise. I don’t know why. They were just going to set up the studio for Street-Legal… before I forget, I did the shot on the inside of Street-Legal, which is Bob and George Benson at a nightclub in Melbourne. They both happened to be in the same restaurant and I shot it in much less light than there is under his table… anyhow, that was the last time I was hired by Bob.
