Philadelphia

Sunday, September 28, 1969

You want to know about what the next Joni Mitchell album will look like, you might ask Joel Bernstein of Elkins Park. His photos of her Carnegie Hall debut will constitute the front and back covers.

Within two years, Joel has become Miss Mitchell’s personal photographer, shooting her at Carnegie Hall, the Atlantic City Pop Festival and the Newport Folk Festival. That was one of his shots of Joni that got a half-page spread in the July 14 issue of Newsweek.

And through her, he has met and shot, and sold to composer-singers Laura Nyro and Leonard Cohen.

A fair day’s work for any of the hoard of paparazzi racing around Manhattan.

Joel is 17, a senior at Cheltenham High.

It seems that at every festival, there are 75 young men with three cameras apiece hanging from their necks, struggling against each other on the ground below the stage.

None are free-lancers, as they might seem. But many are accredited to no publication. Their work will never appear in any newspaper or magazine. They are, like Joel Bernstein, the personal photographers of the performers.

From their 20 rolls each, perhaps one or two shots will be taken. And that will find it’s way only to a manager’s office wall or a the mantlepiece of the performer.

Joel does it simply, with one camera, the same Pentax he started with.

Joel’s advantage is that he stayed clear of the Manhattan rate race where, among other things, you need permits to photograph in some clubs.

Joel shot his first in a tiny Philly club, and the first act he shot was an obscure folk duet from Detroit.

The club was The 2d Fret. The act was Joni Mitchell. It was March ’67.

“Manny didn’t mind,” Joel recalled, “As long as you didn’t use a flash.” Manny Rubin owns The Fret.

Joel was fortunate, because folk singers usually are trying to create a mood and resent whispers, coffee cups and camera clicks.

Bill Scarborough, manager of The Main Point, remarked last week: “I can’t let free-lancers shoot during shows. If they have credentials, maybe. But fast.

“It disturbs me, and I assume it disturbs the audience and the performers. The last time Tim Buckley was in, some chick kept moving around the stage, clicking away. And he walked off.”

(The Electric Factory, because it is loud and strobe-lighted anyhow, has no prohibition on photographers)

Joel took his Philly shots to Joni Mitchell’s November ’68 concert at Brooklyn College. “I showed her a whole batch and she decided that I could take better photos of her than anyone else had.”

Three months later, Joel received an invitation to Joni’s Carnegie Hall debut; on the letter paper, Joni had sketched a cowboy, a lion, and a cat and a girl with a cat in her hair.

This was how the 17-year-old found himself at an after-concert party on Riverside Drive, in the apartment of Harold Leventhal, manager of Peter Seeger, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie.

“Leonard Cohen came in, all happy,” Joel recalls.

“I didn’t know if it was right to start shooting there, and I looked at Joni. We have this rapport. And she laughed that I was hesitating. So I went ahead.

“I sent some to Leonard. He liked them and bought one that made him look happy. He usually goes around for weeks depressed.”

A week after Carnegie Hall, Joel recalls, “we all went over to Laura Nyro’s for supper, Joni and Graham Nash (from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young) and Elliott Roberts and me.

“It was the night of that big snowstorm, and all Central Park was white. Laura lives in one of those towers on Central Park South.

“All the lights were turned out, and for two hours Laura played the piano. All her own, lots she hasn’t recorded.

“It was one of the most spiritual experiences I’ve had, hearing this girl sometimes create as she went along, note down lyrics, all in the darkness with the snow falling outside.”

Laura Nyro now has a folder of Joel’s photos of her, many shot during her Academy of Music concert here last March. “She wants to use them for her next songbook,” Joel says.

“Graham Nash and I are doing the photos for Joni’s songbook.”

Joel has more than his photography going for him.

A couple years ago when Gene Shay at WHAT was playing tapes of Joni Mitchell’s nights at The Fret, Joel taped them off the radio and learned all her songs.

“Some of those she hasn’t done since her days with Chuck Mitchell,” Joel says. “Some she’s forgotten. Like she writes them down on scraps of paper and then loses the scraps a year later.”

So it was Joel who gave her recording company some 35 of Joni’s old songs for her forthcoming songbook.

The white walls of Joel’s room on Chapel road in Cheltenham Township are spotted with reminders of his trips to town.

And on his window sill sits an incense owl – light a candle in the body and the incense flows out from the empty eyes.

It was Joni’s, before she wrote “Chelsea Morning.”

“I’ll bring you incense owls by night” says the song, “by candlelight by jewel-light, if only you will stay.”