Photo Finish: Rock stars and their parents: Eric Clapton, David Crosby, Frank Zappa and The Jackson 5
Rock stars, they're just like us.
Photo Finish is an occasional series looking behind the lens to tell the stories of some of rock and blues’ most iconic images. Today, we take a look at John Olson’s fascinating 1970 project for Life magazine to photograph rock stars and their parents.
In 1970, Life photographer John Olson traveled to Surrey, England to photograph Eric Clapton with his grandmother Rose at her home. This was part of a 15-month project of shooting rock stars with their parents. (Rose raised Clapton.)
Olson arrived before Clapton. He saw Rose’s parrot, looked in the cage and was stunned by the bird’s response: it squawked, “Fuck you.” When Rose returned to the room, Olson asked what the parrot likes to say and she replied, “Gobble Gobble.”
“An hour later, Eric came,” Olson told author John Loengard in the 1998 book LIFE Photographers: What They Saw. “I walked him over to the parrot and said, ‘What's that parrot saying?’
“I know, I know,” he said. “Bonnie and Delaney stayed here for a month, and they taught him that, but my grandmother won't admit it.”
Bonnie and Delaney were, of course, the Bramletts, the husband and wife duo with whom Clapton toured and recorded. Olson’s photo of Eric and his granny captures a weary humanity in the guitarist then widely known as God, and who had already formed and broken up Cream and Blind Faith when this photo was taken. Olson told Loengard that even the most jaded musicians tended to soften up around their parents, which was why he so cherished shooting them in these unusual environments.
“The story on rock stars with their parents was a natural,” Olson said in the book. “A number of the same stars I'd found very distasteful and uncooperative were very cooperative around their parents. They were all scared of them—or at least wanted to act like human beings—in front of their parents.”
There is an excellent overview of Olson’s work here. He took some of the photos I looked at hundreds of times as a kid in my parents’ Best Of Life book. Below are a few more from this very cool series.
The paperback edition of my fourth book, Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, was recently released by St. Martin’s Press. It was the third consecutive one to debut in the New York Times Non-Fiction Hardcover Bestsellers List, following Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan and One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band. My first book, Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, about my experiences raising a family in Beijing and touring China with a popular original blues band, was optioned for a movie by Ivan Reitman’s Montecito Productions. I am also a guitarist and singer with two bands, Big in China and Friends of the Brothers, the premier celebration of the Allman Brothers Band.
Fun fact: Floyd Crosby was a noted cinematographer. Credits ranged from silent film Tabu, High Noon and the early Roger Corman-Vincent Price Edgar Allan Poe movies.
Croz looks like he's being scolded while Reg's family looks downright delightful. I've seen these before, but it's been a while. I grew up with Life and its stunning photographs as well. Thanks for reminding me of these!