https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePttd6OH0As
HIGHLIGHTS OF THAT SUMMER OF '69
A segment from a CBC-TV program profiled a gallery exhibition of Godfrey Jordan's photojournalism during the legendary Summer of 1969. He started as a 16-year-old freelancer for the Toronto Star: first assignment, Jimi Hendrix at Maple Leaf Gardens.
The year ended at the O'Keefe Centre watching Led Zeppelin angrily kicking chairs around in their dressing room...
In between there were many other subjects including James Brown, B.B.King, Chuck Berry, Eric Clapton, Johnny Winter, Lou Reed, Al Kooper, Sly & the Family Stone, plus a score of others
(... and a few years later covering Neil Young on his 1971 gig at Massey Hall - where Neil stopped playing to ask myself and another photographer to keep our clicks in time with his music, or else - Dylan & The Band, Creedence Clearwater, The Who, The Rolling Stones... including an encounter with Mick & Bianca Jagger who were asked to vacate seats assigned to myself & a friend during the Montreal Olympics! i.e. 'You can't always Sit where you want' )
An August '69 trip visiting relatives in NYC to see the ticker tape parade on Broadway welcoming home the Apollo 11 astronauts... later that week hitchhiking upstate from the Major Deegan Expressway to Max Yasgur's farm for the Woodstock Music & Arts Festival.... Backstage with a press pass from the Tely's "After Four" section (I was our high school's A4 news rep) where Abbie Hoffman mistook me for a volunteer medic responding to a call for first aid workers.... then being asked by Abbie to accompany a girl diagnosed with appendicitis on an emergency helicopter flight from the site, to land upon the roof of the Monticello hospital, piloted by a U.S. Marine on leave from Vietnam!
It gets more crazy ......a month later during the Toronto Rock'n'Roll Revival, on the back of a Harley as a motorcycle club escorts The Doors from the airport, riding up alongside Jim Morrison just as he turns to face me for a classic photo; cue: 'Keep Your Eyes on the Road and Your Hands upon the Wheel'...
... and later that night being in a room with Yoko and John Lennon after he played his first live concert without the other Beatles... (years later, I wrote an article published in the Toronto Star titled "The Moment Everything Changed for John Lennon." Read it on the John Lennon page )
...all this, just as I started the first term of Grade 12 high school (where a very cool English teacher agreed to let me pursue an independent study program on James Joyce and 'Ulysses.' More on that later.)
Fortunately nearly all of these events were shot with a now-antiquated pre-digital device: the Pentax S3 fully manual camera shooting Tri-X B&W 35mm or Agfa colour slide film. Thankfully.
A segment from a CBC-TV program profiled a gallery exhibition of Godfrey Jordan's photojournalism during the legendary Summer of 1969. He started as a 16-year-old freelancer for the Toronto Star: first assignment, Jimi Hendrix at Maple Leaf Gardens.
The year ended at the O'Keefe Centre watching Led Zeppelin angrily kicking chairs around in their dressing room...
In between there were many other subjects including James Brown, B.B.King, Chuck Berry, Eric Clapton, Johnny Winter, Lou Reed, Al Kooper, Sly & the Family Stone, plus a score of others
(... and a few years later covering Neil Young on his 1971 gig at Massey Hall - where Neil stopped playing to ask myself and another photographer to keep our clicks in time with his music, or else - Dylan & The Band, Creedence Clearwater, The Who, The Rolling Stones... including an encounter with Mick & Bianca Jagger who were asked to vacate seats assigned to myself & a friend during the Montreal Olympics! i.e. 'You can't always Sit where you want' )
An August '69 trip visiting relatives in NYC to see the ticker tape parade on Broadway welcoming home the Apollo 11 astronauts... later that week hitchhiking upstate from the Major Deegan Expressway to Max Yasgur's farm for the Woodstock Music & Arts Festival.... Backstage with a press pass from the Tely's "After Four" section (I was our high school's A4 news rep) where Abbie Hoffman mistook me for a volunteer medic responding to a call for first aid workers.... then being asked by Abbie to accompany a girl diagnosed with appendicitis on an emergency helicopter flight from the site, to land upon the roof of the Monticello hospital, piloted by a U.S. Marine on leave from Vietnam!
It gets more crazy ......a month later during the Toronto Rock'n'Roll Revival, on the back of a Harley as a motorcycle club escorts The Doors from the airport, riding up alongside Jim Morrison just as he turns to face me for a classic photo; cue: 'Keep Your Eyes on the Road and Your Hands upon the Wheel'...
... and later that night being in a room with Yoko and John Lennon after he played his first live concert without the other Beatles... (years later, I wrote an article published in the Toronto Star titled "The Moment Everything Changed for John Lennon." Read it on the John Lennon page )
...all this, just as I started the first term of Grade 12 high school (where a very cool English teacher agreed to let me pursue an independent study program on James Joyce and 'Ulysses.' More on that later.)
Fortunately nearly all of these events were shot with a now-antiquated pre-digital device: the Pentax S3 fully manual camera shooting Tri-X B&W 35mm or Agfa colour slide film. Thankfully.
