The photo that appeared in Interview

Today I found out that the company that owns The Georgia Straight and Toronto’s Now has gone bankrupt.

What this means is that arts coverage will be lessened even more. Some years ago Paul Grant was an excellent arts reporter for our local CBC Radio. When he retired his position was eliminated. What we now get on CBC Radio is plenty of road reports. 

So much of our city’s heritage has been its active theatre, dance, visual arts, music (including the avant-garde stuff that the Turning Point Ensemble plays), etc. Our memory for these activities are receding and as I often write here, Vancouver has a poor memory for its past.

I remember one day when my doorbell rang in our Burnaby home in 1984. It was Joey Shithead who when I opened the door asked me, “How would you like to have a photograph in Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine?” I took the photograph of D.O.A. and as Shithead promised it appeared (full vertical page) in Interview.

Early in my career as a magazine photographer shooting for Les Wiseman’s In One Ear rock column in Vancouver Magazine, I realized with Wiseman that anybody could take concert photographs but few ever bothered to go back stage or to photograph our Vancouver punk bands in locations of our choice. So for as long as Vancouver Magazine survived, as well as a then very thick Georgia Straight I photographed many local bands as well as bands from abroad.

I believe that my thick file of rock band photographs is an important legacy of a scene that was one of the most active and best known in the world.

At a photo lecture that I gave in Buenos Aires back in late December when my audience so my photographs of D.O.A. they demanded that we watch D.O.A. videos after my talk.

How many are now aware that Joey Shithead (AKA Joe Keithley) is now a Burnaby Green Party Councillor? He was a political punker like most other Vancouver punkers were and are (Art Bergmann is a good example). We who live in this city need to know all this. How will they find out?

Joe's wedding (one of the very few I ever shot).

My blog is just a modest attempt to do this as I am able to put my photographs here with my plebian writing. As we all know about that dog that… I do it because I can.

I borrowed the fire plug from the city to take this photograph in Yaletown

Marv Newland, Dave Gregg, Les Wiseman & Rick Staehling