BOBBY GROSSMAN: 100% PUNK
Capturing Culture At Howl!Arts
After graduating RISD in 1976, Bobby Grossman followed his artistic muse to NYC, where he immersed himself in every downtown scene imaginable, including the Factory, punk clubs like CBGB, and the Chelsea Hotel (where he lived). He soon found himself in the center of things, and his photographs of the various scenes ran in Interview, Village Voice, Rolling Stone and elsewhere. He took promo shots for friends like Iggy Pop, David Bowie, The Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads (including the cover of “Psycho Killer’). A career-spanning exhibition of his work, Low Fidelity, opens April 16 at Howl!Arts in NYC and is up through May. We recently caught up with Bobby at his home in Beacon, N.Y.
“Some people played guitars, some sang. Bobby took pictures. But he was 100% punk.”-Glenn O’Brien, TV Party
Even as a kid growing up in Westchester County, New York, Bobby Grossman knew he’d end up in New York City. His love of pop culture, and his artistic nature and studious temperament all combined to lock him into his destiny. And from his summers at a camp in New Hampshire, where many of the other boys where from Providence, he knew he wanted to attend Rhode Island School of Design. These two urges combined with perfect timing to place him in the 1970s among slightly older kindred spirits like Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz and David Byrne (at RISD) and Andre Leon Talley (at Brown) and draw him inextricably to Downtown NYC in the mid-1970s, where he was immediately in the middle of everything: the rise of punk, the flurry at Warhol’s Factory, the magnet of Hotel Chelsea where he worked with Richard Bernstein, the Interview cover artist, and freelanced for Village Voice, Soho Weekly News, Rolling Stone and the New York Times.
Though he is now known for his iconic photographs from that period of time and later work with Iggy Pop and David Bowie in the 1980s, Bobby Grossman arrived in Manhattan as an illustrator, with cameras being just one of the many tools in his portfolio. His montages, collages, drawings and multimedia works made the rounds, garnering plenty of commercial jobs, but it was only when he began spending too many nights out on the town that he realized a camera was both a great icebreaker and scene capturer. With few restrictions or barriers to photographers in Downtown New York in those days, Grossman was able to point and shoot, watch, listen, and learn, as he moved from place to place on his nightly rounds along with others who were equally inclined, such as Roberta Bayley, David Godlis, Stephanie Chernakowski and Marcia Resnick. And, meanwhile, he snapped some of the now iconic images from those years and scenes.
Grossman also befriended Glenn O’ Brien, a former Interview editor and Factory habitue, and became the official photographer for O’Brien’s popular weekly cable access show TV Party (1978-1982), co-hosted by Blondie’s Chris Stein (himself a fine photographer) and directed by Amos Poe. As O’Brien later said, “Bobby’s pictures have a very special intimacy about them because he was one of the gang. He was in the car, on the stage, under the table.”
It was at one of the TV Party episodes, filmed on location at the Uptown club Hurrah’s, that he met David Bowie. “Bowie was there and everyone was gathered around him, but I didn’t want to be part of the crowd, so I stayed back,” said Grossman. “After a few minutes, they all left and David came toward me, gave me a friendly little shove and said, ‘you’re a snob’. And we had a very lovely conversation, I gave him my card and he always remembered me after that. It’s all true what people say about Bowie. He was just a genuinely nice person.”
In 1980, Grossman’s work was included in now legendary Times Square Show, organized by Colab and which the Village Voice declared “the first radical art show of the 1980s.” The following year, his photographs were featured in an important, scene-capturing exhibition called New York/New Wave at P.S. 1 Institute for the Arts. In 1996-1997, he and Roberta Bayley curated the traveling photo exhibition The Cool and the Crazy – Images of Punk which included over 40 photographers including Robert Mapplethorpe, Gerard Malanga and Andy Warhol. In 2000, Grossman collaborated on the book New York Beat that documented the film Downtown 81, starring Jean-Michel Basquiat.
His photographs are familiar to many readers, as they have appeared in biographies of Warhol, William S. Burroughs, Lou Reed, Blondie and Jean-Michel Basquiat, not to mention in the documentary film TV Party (2005). In 2006, Grossman was part of the three-year, traveling group exhibition – Bande a part: New York Underground 60s 70s 80s, which opened in Paris, traveled to London, Los Angeles, Portland, Tokyo, Hong Kong and NYC. Grossman’s “Andy Warhol Corn Flakes” photograph was used as a billboard overlooking Beverly Hills to promote the exhibition.
Glenn O’Brien has said of Bobby Grossman, “Bobby’s great pictures are a natural outgrowth of his delightful personality. People wanted to give Bobby good pictures because they liked him. He was more than a fly on the wall, he was a fly in the ointment, right in the middle of where the action was. He shot so much film that people asked if there was really film in the camera.”
We caught up with Bobby Grossman at his home in Beacon, N.Y. where he was preparing for his HowlArts exhibition and continuing to work on a long-term project and Kickstarter campaign for his book, Low Fidelity, to be published by Waverly Press.
PROVOKR: I just went to Howl!Arts website and found the release about your upcoming show which opens on Saturday, April 16 and runs through May. I’ve also spent a lot of time looking at your photographs and reading about your artistic journey. It occurred to me, while doing this, that the key to your art may have been—and correct me if I’m wrong—to make yourself invisible, in a way.
Bobby Grossman: That’s kind of what my thing was. When I was put in front of opportunities that other people weren’t given, I did my best to kind of stand back and be invisible. For the most part, it worked in those sorts of situations.
PROVOKR: You were born in Manhattan, but your family moved to Westchester. How old were you when they moved?
Bobby Grossman: I was six months old. I grew up in White Plains and then I was off to college at RISD. On my first visit home, my parents had moved up to Armonk. I kind of call that my home because it was home base for me for many years, off and on.
PROVOKR: How did you get from Westchester to RISD? Something must have inspired you to want to go there. It’s a pretty intensive art training type university.
Bobby Grossman: This is funny. I knew I wanted to go there all my life. My parents forced me to go to summer camp in New Hampshire and a lot of the kids were from Providence so I’d heard a lot about RISD. When it was time to tour colleges, I went to check out a few of the art schools but knew that RISD was where I’d go.
PROVOKR: I’m kind of surprised you didn’t hit Vassar, right in your own backyard. My son was a film major and he’s now at Wheaton, not too far from Providence, but we did check out RISD. He was pretty intimidated by it, though, because the students were all pretty far along as freshmen toward where they wanted to go. You practically had to have already made a film if you were going to be a film major. Same deal with NYU.
Bobby Grossman: I knew I wanted to go to RISD, but when I got there freshman year, everybody there knew everybody else. I didn’t know they had a summer session. I am wanting to be here all my life and everybody on my floor already knew one another. I felt like odd man out. I ended up an illustration major. My work was not conventional illustration. I wasn’t in graphic design. I wasn’t in photography. And I played a little bit with everything. Maybe people do pick the wrong majors but that’s where I was. And Freshman year was such a wake up call. All these kids were so friggin’ talented. Where I grew up, I was the best, winning awards, was written up in the newspaper, did billboards in downtown White Plains, but when I got to RISD …
PROVOKR: You found your niche, though. So, by the time you graduated, had you switched to photography?
Bobby Grossman: No, no. I played with cameras, Polaroids, whatever, for my art, but cameras were just one of my tools.
PROVOKR: So, upon graduation, you headed straight to New York?
Bobby Grossman: My senior year, I was so focused on New York City. I was already well connected with anybody that mattered in Manhattan. Publishers, Conde Nast, New York magazine, Sire Records, I met the whole thing. You went around, brought your portfolio, had a meeting with an art director. I met with the the editors of The New York Times Sunday Magazine, they also edited The Picture Newspaper —Steve Lawrence and Miguel Sanchez, which was really cool tabloid. I met with nearly everyone – . Ruth Ansel, Bea Feitler, all of the heavy hitters …
I met with Peter Lester at Interview and we became friends. He preceded Robert Hayes.
PROVOKR: Did the imprimatur of RISD open the doors?
Bobby Grossman: That helped, but I was already well connected. When I was at RISD and we were doing our social thing, I was friends with Andre Leon Talley, who was a graduate student at Brown University, right next door to RISD. He was finishing up his master’s at Brown and hung out with my clique. Some of these people were older than me. Tina [Weymouth] and David [Byrne] were part of the group, and they moved to NYC in 1974. I didn’t get there until 1976. But they were my connection to CBGB, once they [Talking Heads] started and began auditioning. I had stayed in touch with Chris [Frantz], so I imagine that I must have gone to the first Talking Heads show, since I was constantly going back and forth from Providence to New York to visit. I caught a few of their early shows. That was good. Them at their best.
Before Andre graduated, he knew I had a whole library of Andy Warhol books. I handed them off to him, maybe a dozen Warhol books, and he studied up and then moved to New York and worked at the Met for Diana Vreeland for a year or so. I don’t know how it happened, but he moved over to The Factory and became their gal Friday at first and then worked his way up fast. He invited me down to The Factory to meet Andy in 1975 when I was still a senior at RISD.
I went up there with my portfolio. I met Andy, Fred, Vincent and I guess Ronnie [Cutrone] was there, Brigid [Berlin] might have been there. I didn’t know that by the next year these people would be friends and acquaintances.
And Andy looked at my art. A lot of it was underground stuff, the scene, collages, drawings…my head was in that whole underground mindset. Andy related to it, liked it, told me to work large, I remember that was his advice. Work large. That’s hard to do for someone without any money.
PROVOKR: Was Warhol easy to talk to?
Bobby Grossman: Very easy. Contrary to what people say or think of him. He asked me about my family, my dad. I would come in with contact sheets, I’d go the lab, the bank, which were all nearby, and The Factory was a stopping off point, because I lived at Chelsea Hotel, and then I lived on south part of Union Square, so I was right there. Part of my routine. They didn’t turn me away. I was always welcome. And then when I worked with Richard Bernstein in the afternoons, I had to drop the completed cover art off at The Factory for him.
The day I first met Andy, when I was a senior, after we spent time together, he picked up the phone and called Lou Reed, who was staying at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Lou was in between where he was living and who he was working with and had just finished recording Coney Island Baby; it hadn’t even been released yet. And so, I taxied over to the hotel and spent the afternoon with Lou. Rachel was asleep in the other room. Lou played me the whole Coney Island Baby on his boombox. How cool is this? I’m lolling along. I don’t even know when I’m being handed an opportunity like this, I was just so overwhelmed. I showed him my work.. He saw that I incorporated Gerard Malanga photos into my drawings and collages. Lou spent a good amount of time trying to locate Gerard, phoning different placed he might be. Never found him. But that was OK. And then I left.
PROVOKR: Lou Reed was in a relatively placid state of mind at the time. I remember talking to Steve Katz about this period of time. He had just produced Sally Can’t Dance, which was a bit of a debacle.
Bobby Grossman: Lou Reed was still involved with Steve and Dennis Katz at the time. That was the transition point.
PROVOKR: Coney Island Baby was after Sally Can’t Dance, so he was coming out of a bad stretch. He seemed to be in a good place. That was a really good period of time for him.
Bobby Grossman: Yeah, he was in between things, and that could be his finest album. When I heard it on his boombox, it still had to be mixed. There we are in the other room of the hotel room. On his dresser was a lineup of cassettes, prescribed pharmaceuticals and VHS tapes, with a whole library of Richard Pryor. That’s all I could remember. I didn’t take any pictures. This preceded the Take No Prisoners live recording by a few years. It could have been an influence on him.
PROVOKR: Right. Between Pryor and Lenny Bruce, he really let his inner standup comic rip on Take No Prisoners.
Bobby Grossman: Henny Youngman, too! And then there was Rock and Roll Heart and The Bells. Each of those albums had their assets. I consider good albums.
PROVOKR: There was this side of Lou, the image versus the other person. Or maybe there were many sides to Lou, many personalities, several Lou Reeds.
Bobby Grossman: He was very nice to me. After that, when he started dating Sylvia, and we were out at different events and restaurants, I saw the other side, which was probably okay on his part because I was a bit drunk and probably bumped into the table and the boombox almost fell over. One night at CBGB, he was teasing us with some recordings from Street Hassle, which was soon coming out. I was very drunk, and he said, “If that fell over, it would not have been a cool thing, Bobby…” But, to tell you the truth, I never got a bad side of him. If you rub someone the wrong way, that’s going to come out of anyone, but we all know that Lou had that other side.
PROVOKR: Meanwhile, were you totally freelance as a photographer and illustrator at this point?
Bobby Grossman: Yes. My day job was to answer phones and ship things out for my dad who was a shirt manufacturer at the Empire State Building. He was a one-man gig with a secretary and I helped him to pay the bills, so I was lucky I had that, and I could say that the Empire State Building was my headquarters.
Going back to the freelance part. I did my illustrations for a year and was going out to the clubs at night. I had my RISD friends and I was meeting my new set of Downtown friends. Through Andre I got to know the Warhol side of things and through the Talking Heads that was my introduction to CBGB. It took a while to meet people. You got a camera and it’s a great icebreaker. I am a very shy person, but with a camera, people will want to know you, so through Chris, Tina and David, that’s how I got into that world.
PROVOKR: How hard was it to get into a club with a camera? Did they not care, or check if you had press passes?
Bobby Grossman: They didn’t care. Either I was on a guest list or knew people at the venue. Little by little, though, meeting these deadlines for Rolling Stone or Village Voice or whoever I was on assignment for stressed me out too much and I decided that I wanted to have fun. I only intermittently did an illustration here and there, but it didn’t become a main focus. Bringing the camera out with me every day, though, was a good thing. At first it was just Polaroids and point-and-shoots, then Nikon and all that. Some of my best photographs were taken with a point and shoot. The Debbie Pepsi one was a point and shoot.
My book that’s launching this spring, with Kickstarter, the cover of that is my Debbie Pepsi shot.
PROVOKR: Was this book previously published and you’re doing a new expanded edition?
Bobby Grossman: No, that was misinformation in the press release. Maybe ten years ago, I had a catalog called Low Fidelity in Boca Raton and some of the content was what’s in the new book. But back then I was planning for a future book, and scrambled and came up with an 80-page catalog produced online. I forget that’s out there.
PROVOKR: I can’t imagine that the new book idea wouldn’t garner Kickstarter support.
Bobby Grossman: I got in touch with a lot of the people I photographed and worked with, to ask if they would write essays or captions for the book and it ended up that the first on my list, Lisa Jane Persky, wanted to write my introduction. And she did. She worked as an editor at a literary paper in LA. She moved to LA as an aspiring actress just as Blondie was between the first and second albums and she was Gary Valentine’s girlfriend. And Gary, Blondie’s bass player, left around the second album. She wrote my introduction, at the same time I was having routine weekly phone calls with Richard Boch who was working on his Mudd Club book. Richard helped as my editor and proofer for the next 5+ years.
PROVOKR: In its final version, it will be a big tome, won’t it?
Bobby Grossman: It’s not done. But when it’s done, there should be 240 pages. The cover of the book is the Debbie Pepsi shot and the back cover – me at 16 with my Pentax a bathroom mirror selfie.
PROVOKR: Wow, you were on a roll right from the start. Did Debbie Harry ever take a bad photograph? Is it possible to take a “bad” photograph of her?
Bobby Grossman: Some are more interesting than others, for sure. Composition helps. I wasn’t trained in photography and I knew the basics in high school, but never took it any further than that. I played around in the darkroom, I always had photographers around me who could guide me through the processes.
PROVOKR: Maybe the less you think about things the better, so maybe your openness to all art formats worked to your advantage. You weren’t going in with the mindset ‘I’m going to be a photographer and anything other than that will be failure’.
Bobby Grossman: Earlier you asked me about magazines and TV as a kid, how they might have shaped me. I was so inspired even as a kid, 4th grade, 1964. We subscribed to Time magazine and they put [Roy] Lichtenstein on the cover with the smoking gun and there might have been Wow and Pow, and they used Warhol sometimes. Look magazine had John and Yoko, Warhol was in the New York Times Magazine cover. I was taking this all in. I had an Instamatic, a Brownie, and I played around with my dad’s cameras. But I so appreciated pop culture and it has never changed. It was less about having a favorite photographer as it was just the pop culture that really hooked me, even as a kiddo. Beatles in the Saturday Evening Post. Dylan in the Woodstock photo, with the tire and guitar. I would beg my Mom and Dad to buy me early Beatle magazines. If went from Superman comics to Famous Monsters of Hollywood, MAD magazine on to 16 Magazine, etc. All those images left an impression and shaped me. All the while, I always knew Warhol was out there and it was going somewhere. At RISD, really gained an appreciation of Warhol, everybody was listening to Velvet Underground, I was collecting books. Billy Name was another photographer who influenced me.
PROVOKR: I can remember when I was in grade school in suburban Atlanta, I would retire to the school library and they subscribed to all these magazines, even the Village Voice, believe it or not. I would just go hide at a back table and look through the concert listings and movie ads and just dream about wanting to be at every single one of those events.
Bobby Grossman: That’s part of my book, too. My dad would come home with each new issue of the Voice and I would go through it from cover to cover, study every single page. By ninth grade, I began to take the train into the City to go to concerts, but there were concerts I could hit up here in Westchester, too, at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, Westchester County Center in White Plains.
With Andre’s passing [Andre Leon Talley died in January of this year] it came back to me how important he had been to me, helping me with different connections, with different friends of his. He introduced me to Richard Bernstein, which led to my first job in New York. I went to Richard’s studio, who gave me a list of art directors to take my work to, which was a huge help. I had graduated RISD in 1976, that was the Bicentennial with the boats on the river, I didn’t know how to look for an apartment or have the patience to do that, and I didn’t want to live at home with my parents so I went to the Chelsea and signed a lease with Stanley Bard. I guess it was mid-July 1976 that I moved into the Chelsea for a year and a half.
PROVOKR: How much did it cost to rent a room there?
Bobby Grossman: I was in Suite 911, across the hall from Virgil Thomson and Charles James. How cool is that? Me and these famous old guys. I had a kitchen and two rooms. And it wasn’t cheap. I used the desk phone or the pay phones in the lobby. The number was 243-3700. And they’d ring my room. Rent was $400 and change. I didn’t take a lot of photographs when I was living there, unfortunately. I wish I had. I had so many chances. I used to ride up and down the elevator with Tom Waits, because we kept the same late-night rock ‘n’ roll schedule but we never said more than ‘how you doing?’.
I was over it after a year or so. I went from one cool neighborhood that wasn’t developed to the next cool neighborhood that wasn’t developed, to Union Square. At that time, the weekend farmers market in Union Square was maybe a couple of tables. Nothing was happening there. I had my bank on one corner, I could cut thru the park to get to Max’s Kansas City. I saw many shows upstairs at Max’s, but it was too packed, too crowded, not my comfort level, so I spent a lot of time downstairs in a booth or out front shooting on the street and sidewalks.
PROVOKR: But those are the best photographs! David Godlis would just sit out there and take shots on the sidewalk.
Bobby Grossman: Sure. That’s how I got to know David. He was a hand-held, no-flash photographer and maybe he’d loan me a roll of Tri-X. Stephanie Chernikowski was around, too, and she would have a flash and would give me AA batteries if I ran out. We all knew each other back then.
PROVOKR: That’s nice to hear, like a little circle.
Bobby Grossman: In the 1990s, I reconnected with a lot of those people. In 1983, I was hired on by Iggy’s publicist and maybe that was my last event. An Iggy/Bowie photo that I took in the dressing room at an Iggy concert during his “I Need More” “Zombie Birdhouse” tour ended up in Kurt Loder’s MTV News. And that might have been my last job. The next year, I went to a Victor Bockris/Gerard Malanga book party for their Uptight book. Then I dropped out for 5-6 years.
PROVOKR: Where’d you go?
Bobby Grossman: I had to recover! I just didn’t have any fuel left in the tank. I stayed in the city. And in 1990, left the city and moved up here. Got into recovery. I needed that for a few years. And I started getting back into the city. I enjoyed driving back and forth and not having the garbage trucks wake me up in the morning.
PROVOKR: And not waking up with a hangover you can’t get rid of.
Bobby Grossman: That too! My main thing for fun was Jackie 60 [a club opened in 1990 by Chi Chi Valenti, Johnny Dynell, Richard Move and Kitty Boots; it closed in 1999]. Went to a lot of spoken word events, down to the Sin-é [a music venue on St. Marks Place opened in 1989], where I’d see Jeff Buckley.
At one point, I reconnected with Roberta Bayley and David Godlis. It’s the mid-1990s, up in Westchester, and I’m working in Connecticut. One of my neighbors was Anton Perich, and his wife was opening a photo gallery in Ridgefield, Conn. She asked me if I’d consider curating a show…and I didn’t want to do the curating thing by myself so I contacted Roberta and we made a good team. We called that show in Ridgefield The Cool and the Crazy—Images of Punk. We started off with 12 photographers. Lee Black Childers, Mick Rock, Joe Stevens, Danny Fields, Marcia Resnick, Godlis, Anton, and a few others. We were taken on next by a New York gallery that doubled its size.
PROVOKR: You traveled with it?
Bobby Grossman: It went to three galleries. Earl McGrath’s gallery .. The 57th Street show was insane. How cool was it to be at 57th and 5th Avenue? From there we had a show at Chris Murray’s Govinda Gallery down in Georgetown, a rock ‘n’ roll photo gallery, we added on Allen Ginsberg, Mapplethorpe, a really nice run.
PROVOKR: Did anything come out of that? A book? It seems to me that would have been the perfect opportunity to publish a nice book.
Bobby Grossman: Not then. By the time I got to Florida, Roberta Bayley went on and her next show, “Bande a part” and that show had a catalogue..
The only thing in Beacon is the Dia Museum. I go there for lunch, hit the bookstore, go to the Warhol Shadows room and meditate for an hour. That’s part of my routine.
PROVOKR: That’s good. You’re out of harm’s way!
Bobby Grossman: Definitely! I saw Marcia’s books the last time I was in the Dia bookstore. I skim books for ideas.
PROVOKR: Do you feel recharged now?
Bobby Grossman: Yeah, but not having an assistant is kind of overwhelming at the moment. But I’m working well with my editor on the book. Everything is going in a good direction.
PROVOKR: And the Howl!Arts thing is good?
Bobby Grossman: Yes. Jane [Friedman, founder and executive director of Howl!] has wanted me to show there for years. When I came up from Florida, she said, ‘Why aren’t you showing with us?’ and at that point a gallery in Chelsea, through Fab 5 Freddy, wanted a show but that ended up just being part of a Fab 5 Freddy show and went nowhere. So I went back to Jane. It all worked out well.
When I was at the Dia bookstore the other day, it’s like I own everything there already. My home is like a library. Though I saw Marcia’s book and a new thing about Jonas Mekas that interested me. I went back to an old book about Warhol and they had an un shrink-wrapped copy and I started skimming it. When people ask to see my contact sheets, I don’t like to share them, unless it’s one on one with a person. But publishing my contact sheets is not my jam. I always feel like it’s going to dilute my stuff. On the other hand, Andy does print his whole contact sheets. So I open up this book and am looking, night after night, mostly events that I didn’t attend because they were at places like Studio 54, posh events that weren’t my thing. I turn to the beginning of the book and a contact sheet page of a Christopher Makos show somewhere in the West Village. I remember that evening, taking pictures, Bobby Miller was there. The first frame of the contact sheet, frame 0, is a photograph of me with my friend Vincent Freemont behind me. I posed for Andy before, Gerard took a photograph, which is in my book. Chris Stein took one, too.
PROVOKR: This is why your photographs are unique. From my brief experience, of course, you were part of the scene and yet not. There was an element, not really Zelig-like, but people were comfortable around you.
Bobby Grossman: Yeah, I guess that was a gift. I have a lot of good friends. And the ones who weren’t friends were kind acquaintances.
PROVOKR: You don’t rub people the wrong way! There were too many other egos in the room.
Bobby Grossman: For all those years, if Glenn O’Brien could tolerate me, anybody could. I love Glenn and miss him so much. I really need him for creative ideas sometimes when I’m reaching out and can’t get an answer.
PROVOKR: Maybe when you meditate, he will appear.
Bobby Grossman: That’s what I hope for. He was always there for me.
Low Fidelity: Bobby Grossman Photographs will be at Howl!Arts, 250 Bowery, 2nd Floor, April 16-May 29. Opening Reception is April 16, 6 p.m.-9 p.m.
https://www.howlarts.org/
Link to Low Fidelity Kickstarter campaign: