Rock ‘N’ Sole

Although Greg Papazian describes himself as a “stoic kind of guy,” his voice reveals real pleasure in the fact that, after 35 years, he is now enjoying acclaim for one of his early passions: rock concert photography.

Papazian, a Los Angeles native, traces the origins of his pursuit back to the age of 14, the year his parents got front-row center seats for him and his sister to see Cream and Deep Purple at the Forum. After a night of dancing, his parents returned to the theater to pick up the kids and a friend at the Forum’s ticket booth invited them to watch the end of the show from backstage. This gave Papazian and his sister a chance to meet the bands. “I think they planted the seeds there for the type of work I was going to do,” he says.

The photography connection came the next year when the Rolling Stones came to town. Papazian went as a spectator and watched the concert from right alongside the stage. “Afterwards, there were a couple of people at my high school who had photos. That’s when I fell in love with rock concert photography,” he recalls. “I decided: I have to take that photography class [in high school] and get a camera. And that’s exactly what I did.”

For his first concert photography outing, Papazian went to the show with a 135mm telephoto and a flash. “I learned really quickly that the pictures weren’t any good—with a flash, they just don’t look right,” he says. “After that, I went without flash and shot a couple of the concerts and the L.A.’s Great Western Forum that I’m well known for now—Rod Stewart & The Faces and Led Zeppelin—with a 135mm lens.” Later, as his work progressed, he switched to an 85mm as his longest lens.

It wasn’t long before the young Papazian’s images started attracting attention and his pursuit became more than just a hobby. The major turning point came when he photographed the Allman Brothers at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Two days later, when the same band was playing at the world-famous Whisky A Go Go, he went backstage with a box of photos. “I handed the photos out to the group members, and we talked, and afterwards I had three photos left. As I was leaving, I handed them to the girl behind the ticket booth and told her she could pin them up if she wanted to. After that, I walked out front and tried to figure out how to get home. Then, Elmer Valentine, owner of the Whisky, came up to me. He showed me the marquee and said, ‘Look, everyone that’s anyone has played here. Would you like to be our photographer?’ Of course, I said ‘yes.’ Then, he walked me over to the manager and said, ‘This is our photographer, let him have access to do whatever he wants.’ That went on for about three years—until the Whisky closed.”

As Papazian’s career advanced, he went on to become the house photographer for the Roxy Theatre (1975), guest photographer for many of The Midnight Special television shows in the 1970s, and a staff photographer for Photograph Record Magazine. Papazian was also able to shoot backstage at many venues, getting to know the musicians and, in many cases, arranging to photograph group pictures of the bands at the Hyatt House on Sunset Boulevard, where most of them stayed. “Most of the guys, I have to tell you, were really down-to-earth—not like all the stories [you hear]about all the wild parties,” recalls Papazian. “It was just so much fun being there. It was just one concert after another, and every week there were different venues to go to. When you’re that age and you have unlimited access, you just try to blend in and do your job.”

After about six years of shooting rock concerts, however, Papazian found that the music world was undergoing a major shift. “The bands that I was photographing at the time were starting to go away. In 1983, I came back for a year—photographing bands like The Eurythmics, Berlin and Peter Gabriel—and that’s when I started to notice that things were really changing. The managers were trying to get control over the groups and form an image for them—and the photographers were something that they wanted to control. They would say, ‘You can photograph the concert, but you can only photograph two songs.’ I think that’s the general rule now for most of the major venues.” For Papazian, this took a lot of the fun out of covering a concert.

Fortunately, he had a backup plan in place. While photographing concerts, Papazian had also been working after school at the shoe-repair shop founded in 1946 by his grandfather, Joseph Papazian, and then run by his father, Eddie Papazian. “In the late 1970s, my father asked me if I wanted to come and take over the business,” Papazian says. “I hadn’t found anything else I wanted to do, so I thought it was a good thing to do in the meantime. I ended up taking that business and turning it into something I really liked. We remodeled the whole store, bumped up the standards of work, and now we have the top shoe-repair store in Los Angeles.”

Still, his photographs, and the nearly 10 years of his life they represented, were never far from Papazian’s mind—although he never thought he’d do anything with them. That changed a few years ago when he got together with an old high-school friend, Greg Mastrogiovani, who produced a batch of prints Papazian had given him three decades ago. Papazian says, “I looked at one of the pictures of Led Zeppelin and thought, ‘This picture’s incredible! This is mine? I remember this—this is my picture!’ ”

With his friend’s encouragement, Papazian began the long process of printing a portfolio and setting up a website, an undertaking that has been one of both nostalgia and discovery. When he was actively shooting, Papazian’s practice had been to return from a concert, develop his film, and review it with a loupe rather than making a contact sheet. Then, he printed what he felt were the three best images. As a result, most of his images were never printed, and it was only once he returned to working with the photos today that Papazian realized what a remarkable collection he actually had. “Now it’s like going to a brand-new concert—I’m always amazed by what I’m coming up with that I’ve never seen before,” he remarks. While he continues to print, mount and frame all of his own images by hand, he now scans all the negatives on his computer before determining which images to present.

Recently, Papazian has also repurposed his shoe repair business as a gallery to display his images. “We’ve got 11-foot ceilings, so it’s a pretty good display space. We’ve also got a 50-inch plasma television in the front window that plays about 100 images. There’s also a television inside that displays the horizontal images,” he says. “Believe it or not, our business as a shoe-repair shop has doubled—I’ll also see people walking down the street, who then stop and watch the display on the television for half an hour.”

After more than three decades, Papazian’s decision to share his images in this unique way is paying off. Judd Apatow, writer and producer of films like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, purchased two images for use in the new Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen movie, Funny People. The LA Times showcased his work in an article that graced the cover of the paper’s California section. The Kennedy Center bought six George Carlin images for the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor ceremony, which aired on PBS.

Papazian has also had calls from publishers and has even been interviewed on CNN. “The phone has pretty much been ringing off the hook,” he says. Who ever said nothing good ever came from listening to rock music?
If you’re in the Los Angeles area, you can view Papazian’s images at his shop, Eddie’s Shoe & Handbag Repair/Eddie’s Rock & Sole Gallery, located at 13716 Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, CA, (818) 789-1792. You can also learn more about Greg Papazian—and check out an impressive online portfolio of images—by visiting his website at www.gregpapazian.com.

Michelle Perkins is a writer, designer and photographer from Buffalo, NY. Her latest book, titled 500 Poses for Photographing Women: A Visual Sourcebook for Professional Photographers, is available now from Amherst Media.