Rock star adjacent

Henry DILTZ has to be one of the luckiest musical flops in history. In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, like thousands of other young people, Diltz was dying to get in on the folk-music boom. As a member of the Modern Folk Quartet, he got as far as recording a song written by Harry Nilsson, “This Could Be the Night,” with no less than Phil Spector producing and Brian Wilson looking on from the wings. It wasn’t, however, to be the MFQ’s night or day, as the recording never came out -- at least not until years later when it surfaced on a compilation of Spector-produced rarities.

Diltz’s luck? He happened to be here in L.A. amid a vibrant music scene, and as a musical insider, he was at the jam sessions, the parties, the festivals, the love-ins. Nobody paid much notice as he moved among them, snapping photo after photo of his cohorts, who soon became the cream of the Southern California music community: Joni Mitchell, the Byrds, Neil Young, the Doors, Linda Ronstadt, Stephen Stills, Jackson Browne, the Eagles and countless others.

Diltz’s photos wound up on the covers of such celebrated albums as the Doors’ “Morrison Hotel” (shot at a $2.50-a-night flop house across the street from the Convention Center), “Crosby, Stills & Nash” (on the porch of a rundown clapboard house in West Hollywood) and Browne’s so-called “Saturate Before Using” LP.

“[T]he fact is I like to watch people,” Diltz writes in his introduction to “California Dreaming: Memories & Visions of LA 1966-1975 -- The Photographs of Henry Diltz,” a high-quality art-photography book with hundreds of his images just published by Genesis Publications ( www.genesis-publications.com). “I like to find out where they’re at and why . . . . I feel myself as an observer. I talk, I laugh, but all the while I’m looking and noticing and quietly framing what goes on about me.”

For a coffee-table tome, it’s not going to be an impulse purchase: It’s about $450 each for the limited edition of 2,000 copies and close to $1,200 for the “deluxe” version.

Pricey, yes, but it provides a singular look at a pivotal time and place in this history of pop music.

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Randy Lewis