@drivenbyboredom
My top three people I would want to photograph is 1) John Waters 2) Werner Herzog and 3) Dave Grohl. The third one is interesting because I don't like the Foo Fighters and I have had the opportunity to photograph him twice and didn't so I feel like that's all a slightly interesting storytime for today...
Real quickly, John Waters and Werner Herzog are two of my favorite directors of all time. I have seen nearly everything either of them have made which in Herzog's case was very difficult and quite expensive as I had to purchase some incredibly rare DVDs to do it. They also happen to be incredibly interesting people. I have read multiple books by both of them and they are extremely photogenic. I have watched them both speak and technically I have taken Herzog's photo but he was on stage and I only had a little point and shoot camera.
Okay, and now the Dave Grohl of it all. I was 13 years old when Kurt Cobain died and Nirvana was by far my favorite band at the time. I honestly didn't really care about any other bands so when he died I didn't know what to do. I ended up rereading this book about them called Come As You Are and every time Kurt mentioned a band I would write it down and try and find their music. I would get cassettes from friend's older brothers and buy CDs with my allowance but for my 14th birthday I got a Black Flag CD and it instantly changed my life forever. Punk was the best education I ever had and by the time I was 16 I ran a small DC record label and had published multiple punk fanzines. The reason I even picked up a camera, or started my first website, was all in the service of punk rock.
As much as I loved Nirvana I wasn't particularly a Dave Grohl fan because their early music before he joined was my favorite. It's not like I wouldn't have lost my mind if I had met him when I was a kid, but he was Ringo Starr not Lennon or McCartney. When the Foo Fighters came out I had zero interest in the band the only reason I ever paid attention to their music was because of Michel Gondry's video for Everlong.
But there was one thing about Dave Grohl that interested me... He was from DC. Well technically, like me, he was from northern Virginia, and at some point he moved back home.
When I was in the middle of putting out punk records and zines he bought a house five minutes away from my parents. When they were building it my friends broke in and stole small trinkets like a receipt that had his name on it and some garbage the realtor had left there. Everyone would see him around town, or at least would lie and say they had. My best friend saw him at 7-11 and a friend of a friend got drunk and knocked on his door in the middle of the night and ended up getting arrested for it.
Fast forward decades and I see my friend's band The Bronx is playing in Brooklyn a few blocks away from my apartment. I didn't even know they were in town until an hour before the show so when I got there I wasn't on the orignal guest list. My name was scrawled at the bottom next to one other last minute edition: Dave Grohl.
My buddy Jorma was friend's with him and I think Dave was in town for SNL or something and so halfway into their set he walked in and stood right in front of me. Now that I think about it, I might have a cell phone photo of the band with the back of his head in the shot, but I don't think that counts as taking his photo.
Anyway, after the show we are all hanging out in the green room and I am sort of involved in conversations with him but we didn't get introduced and I didn't talk directly to him or anything. It was less than ten of us including the band so at any point I could have talked to him and I could have taken his photo, but honestly I just didn't care that much and I didn't want to bug him.
After the band loaded out we were all standing outside and people were taking selfies with him and as more people gathered you could see him getting a bit annoyed. He was waiting on an Uber and as soon as it showed up he straight sprinted to it. To this day I have no idea if he did this intentionally, or he actually did run full speed into a parking payment machine. It was so fucking funny and over the top that it felt like this Chevy Chasesque slapstick bit, but either way it was one of the craziest things I have ever seen a celebrity do. It felt like a movie.
Shortly after that I am inspired to finally the DC episode of his HBO show Sonic Highways about different music cities. I had been meaning to watch it because I knew it would dive into the DC punk scene a bit, but I kept putting it off until I had run into him.
I instantly regretted not watching it sooner. I could not believe how similar his upbringing was to mine. In my brain he was so much older than me because he was in my favorite band as a kid, but he left the DC punk scene in basically 1991 and I joined it in 1994. We knew so many of the same people and had so many of the same experiences and it's just so weird how the reason I got in to that same scene was because of him leaving it. If I had seen that documentary a couple weeks earlier I would have been so excited to talk to him about it and that's honestly the main reason I want to photograph him, is just to talk to him about 90s DC punk rock and the weird ways his life intersected mine.
I should also mention that I have had two chances to photograph the Foo Fighters at music festivals and both times I have turned it down. The first time was because they had a contract saying they owned the rights to any photos I took, which, fuck that. And the second time, just a couple of years ago, they didn't make us sign a contract, but we did have to shoot from the soundboard instead of near the stage. I hate photos like that because every photographer's images look exactly the same so I never bring my long lens to festivals because if I can't get close I don't want the shot.
That being said I do wish I had photographed them once because I am working on this licence plate zine where I match funny license plates I have found with my photos and at that same festival I didn't photograph him at in 2023 I found this license plate and man do I wish I had a photo of him to go with it... The end.