In the name of love
“I love this one for two reasons,” Michael Ochs chirps, stopping at a black-and-white photograph of the Supremes at their zenith, clad in diaphanous outfits that reveal a lot of leg for 1967. The first reason he loves this one is that it was shot by James Kriegsmann, a legend for his publicity stills of musicians. The second reason involves the chase.
It was the mid-’80s and Ochs, on his way to becoming America’s preeminent rock ‘n’ roll photo archivist, was “repping” Kriegsmann -- leasing his work to publishers for reproduction. He was in Kriegsmann’s New York office, combing the files, when he asked Kriegsmann whether anything was in a back room.
“ ‘Garbage,’ he tells me,” Ochs says. “So I ask him, ‘What do you call garbage?’ He says, ‘It’s garbage!’ I say, ‘I wanna go through the garbage.’ So, I go through it and I find a dozen 8-by-10-inch negatives from this Supremes session. And it turns out they were thrown away because the Supremes thought they were too risque!”
Ochs is telling this like he tells so many stories about the way he acquired between 3 million and 4 million prints, negatives and transparencies, his sentences enthusiastically swallowing each other. He’s 60 years old and while the hair is gray, the face and the timbre of the voice are youthful, reflecting the pleasure of turning an obsession into a career.
“If I had 500 pictures of Bo Diddley,” he says as an example, “I’d still want to see the next 10 I’d never seen.”
For more than 30 years, Ochs has been buying and leasing out small fragments of history, acquiring the collections of dozens of music and pop-culture photographers (including Kriegsmann) as they aged or died, as well as haunting the old files of magazine publishers. He stores it all where he lives, in a three-building compound on a narrow street in Venice that is now bursting at the seams. The collection has become so ubiquitous that the Voice of America’s TV operation just aired a program on it and Costco is about to begin offering framed copies at $99 to $200 a pop. Ochs himself is branching out with a fantasy-album-cover exhibit now touring the country.
A good place to grill Ochs about his detective work is the Universal Art Gallery, a few blocks from the archives, where 100 of his favorite photos are on display through July 10. Except that, as he good-naturedly admits while walking through the gallery, this is a success story built not on sleuthing (“I’m not a very good detective”) but serendipity -- a lucky break, an unexpected phone tip.
See this photo of a beaming Charlie Parker from ‘46? “Guy calls me, he lives in Austin, Texas, an amateur photographer, and he’s got this collection of two photographers, Ray Whitten and Charlie Minh, the first photographers that Capitol Records hired. He worked with Whitten in a warehouse when Whitten was an older man and Whitten said, ‘Lemme give you this ‘cause my wife will just throw them away.’ Now, Parker wasn’t on Capitol [as a soloist] but he was in a group that was on Capitol” -- creating a surprise find for Ochs, who was drawn to Austin by the possibility of acquiring publicity shots of Leadbelly.
Displayed next to the Parker photo is a 1943 shot of blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson, taken by Ivey Gladin at a “King Biscuit Time” radio performance, a big bag of King Biscuit flour leaning against the mike stand. Ochs remembers he bought that one from Gladin’s files in Helena, Ark. Which reminds him of another find he made there: an early photograph of country-western singer Conway Twitty, a Helena boy. Which, in turn, reminds him of another road trip, to Connecticut, where he was looking through the files of a rhythm-and-blues magazine for something to buy, only to find that other collectors had beaten him.
“The Johnny Ace file: empty. Shirley & Lee: empty. Almost all the key names were empty. But there was a file that said ‘Lafayette Leak.’ Now, I know who Lafayette Leak is” -- the house pianist at Chess Records, home of Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf. “And in there was a picture of the blues great [guitarist] JB Lenoir and Lafayette Leak on piano and Willie Dixon on bass.... I’d never seen a shot of the inside of Chess Studios that far back, and it shows how they got the sound. There’s Willie Dixon with his acoustic bass on a platform, so it was a natural echo chamber. They just put him on an open platform. I never knew.”
This is the lure that has made Ochs want every photo he could find -- those small details that fill in the blanks, “telling the story, better and better.” Sometimes it’s the image. Other times it’s the story behind the image: the way Kriegsmann told Ochs about shooting wartime family photos of Frank Sinatra to deflect criticism the singer encountered for not serving in the military. Or the request the Allman Brothers made of photographer Stephen Paley when he asked them to pose strategically naked in a swamp: We’ll take off all our clothes if you will. (And he did.)
Ochs walks from the Paley shot to a rare color shot of a cocksure Ritchie Valens, the Pacoima teenager whose career lasted less than a year. He’d bought some black-and-white Valens shots, one of which he leased to The Times when it printed a story about the singer around 1980. Then he got a call from the original photographer. ‘What else you got?’ Ochs asked him. Gene Vincent, the photographer, said: ‘Mary Tyler Moore.’ In a trunk somewhere. “He calls me a month later and says, ‘Hey, I looked in that trunk and I have Ritchie Valens color negs.’ ” Ochs knew Rhino Records had just gotten the rights to issue the Valens catalog, so he wangled a $500 lease payment from the record company and offered the same purchase price to the photographer.
Ochs’ photo of James Dean, looking almost imprisoned in a tux at a movie premiere, brings up the story of Earl Leaf, who shot candid celebrity photos in Hollywood during the ‘50s and ‘60s. Ochs, in an earlier life as a record-company publicity exec, had hired Leaf on occasion. In the mid-’70s, he heard Leaf was dying and inquired about Leaf’s collection; Leaf told him he had willed everything to the teen magazines he’d shot for.
“Cut to 10 years later,” Ochs says. He gets a letter from the parent company of those teen magazines, which is going out of business. He rushes to New Jersey to survey the goods. “I said, ‘Do you have the Earl Leaf negs? I’ll double the offer.’ They told me they’d never seen the negs.” So Ochs buys the Leaf prints, and on the back of a proof sheet finds the name of a guy in Yonkers, N.Y. He calls and finds the guy had been Leaf’s photo processor. Leaf had willed the negs to him in exchange for processing services.
“I phoned him,” Ochs says, “and said, ‘Ever think about selling?’ He said, ‘Nah.’ I said, ‘Think fast, I’m on the plane.’ A hundred thousand negatives; I gotta have it.” And soon he did.
Nobody, including Ochs, would have predicted that a hobby that began in the late 1960s would produce a collection of photographs that, by his estimate, is worth $3 million to $5 million.
Growing up, he was a demonic rock and folk record collector. His older brother, Phil, blessed with musical talent, headed for New York City in the early ‘60s and became a leading figure in the protest-song movement fueled by the civil-rights era and Vietnam War. Michael managed his emotionally volatile brother for a few years, then in 1968 quit and headed for California, bought a house in Topanga Canyon and got work with record companies.
While with Columbia in 1969, he saw staffers disposing of duplicate publicity shots, thought it was a waste and made the photos his own, loaning them to rock writers. In the early ‘70s, the Los Angeles Free Press jokingly credited a photo to the “Michael Ochs Archives,” which then consisted of a few file drawers of pictures. A lightbulb went off: Ochs began asking for publication credit. A couple years later, Dick Clark mailed him a $1,000 check for some photos Clark used in a mid-’70s TV retrospective and another lightbulb went off: Ochs began charging lease fees. Rolling Stone used a substantial number of pictures from Ochs’ archives in its acclaimed 1976 “The Rolling Stone Illustrated History or Rock & Roll,” leading off the book with one of them, a one-hit wonder named Ersel Hickey coiled in a classic rockabilly pose.
That same year, Phil Ochs committed suicide. Phil, whose protest songs carried an unusually romantic idealization of America -- he could tell audiences he hated John Wayne’s politics but still loved his movies -- grew bitter after the violent 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago and the election of Richard Nixon. He gradually lost his creativity and then much of his voice after an assault in Africa. Michael says his brother suffered from untreated manic-depressive illness.
After Phil’s death, “as I regained control of my senses, I realized that this” -- collecting photos, not record-company publicity -- “was the real job. It was better than collecting records. There are an infinite number of photographs. That’s what I needed.” He laughs. “ ‘Cause I had this fear of completion.”
Ochs put his archives on the map in 1983 when Doubleday published “Rock Archives,” a book of 1,100 of his rock and R&B; photos from the late ‘40s to the late ‘60s. His growing prominence resulted in more tips from sellers and more chances to buy out other collections. He estimates he has purchased about 50 collections of varying sizes.
Author Peter Guralnick, whose books include a two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, says Ochs’ early zeal “offered an incalculable benefit to documenting a subject that, until Michael came along, very few people thought of documenting.... When we talk about the dustbin of history, Michael actually discovered the dustbin.”
Ochs doesn’t spend much time these days tracking down photos (although he says he dreams of discovering a new photograph of blues idol Robert Johnson, a fantasy shared by many collectors and historians). A six-person staff runs the day-to-day life of the archives, handling 15 to 20 requests a day. These days Ochs is concentrating on “Greatest Album Covers That Never Were,” the exhibit he created with artist Craig Butler, in which more than 50 artists were asked to imagine album covers for their favorite musicians. It premiered earlier this month at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland (where the Ochs brothers went to high school) and will move to the Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica on Oct. 11.
Ochs is newly married to his second wife, Sandee Lewis. They met in the early ‘70s when she worked for a music-business public relations firm, then bumped into each other at the company’s reunion in 1998. They chose to wed last Sept. 11 in Maui. (Ochs picked the date, Lewis says, as a way of saying, “Let’s change the karma.”) At her suggestion, he has hung some of his collection in the house, rather than keeping it separate, and junked his aging Toyota for a BMW convertible.
“Everybody thinks I’m so smart for having done this,” he says of the archives, “and as I say time and time again, had I planned this I would have failed. It really was: right time, right place. If I tried it now, there is no way in the world people would sell the photographs. Back then [before a wave of album reissuing began in the early ‘80s], everybody thought, ‘What’s the most useless thing in the world? Old rock ‘n’ roll photos. Who cares?’ It just grew because my motto is: If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing to excess.”
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Photo exhibit
What: Photos from the Michael Ochs Archives
Where: Universal Art Gallery, 2001 Lincoln Blvd., Venice
When: Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Information: (310) 302-8909