Hidden inside a Boston photographer’s 3,000 rolls of film are unseen photos of 1960s-70s rock gods, reports The Boston Globe. As a club emcee back in the day, Charles Daniels and his camera had backstage access to the likes of The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Velvet Underground, and Jimi Hendrix. He’s finally ready to process his film.
For decades, a singular photographic collection has lain nearly unseen in the Somerville home of photographer Charles Daniels - a half century’s worth of undeveloped film crammed onto shelves, stuffed into Ziploc bags, or, if he thought it was special, stored in the bottom drawer of his fridge.
Some canisters have turned green with age. Others bear cryptic, decades-old descriptions. Still more lack any label at all.
But if the film has been kept under less than museum-quality conditions, the images themselves are the stuff of history: a rare window into the late 1960s, when one of the country’s first rock ballrooms, the legendary Boston Tea Party, helped launch the likes of Led Zeppelin, The Who, Faces, and other groups that would become the mega-bands of the 1970s.
Known then as the “Master Blaster,” the club’s stylish emcee, Daniels kept his camera close as he befriended touring acts, gaining unguarded access beyond the stage and a unique perspective on what turned out to be a germinal moment in rock history.
“An act could be unknown on a Thursday night and be hugely popular by the time they left on Saturday,” said Don Law, manager of the Tea Party from 1968 till it closed at the end of 1970. Now president of Live Nation New England, Law described Daniels as an “iconic figure” of the club who was “right there for so many of the big moments in the early days of these bands getting launched.”
Now, more than five decades later, Daniels and his supporters are seeking to bring these images to life. They started with a small grant from the Somerville Arts Council, but earlier this year his friends launched a $30,000 fund-raising campaign to shore up his legacy, as Daniels, 79, undergoes chemotherapy for a recently diagnosed blood disorder. The campaign’s aim: to process more than 3,000 rolls of undeveloped 35mm and medium format film - a sprawling visual history that could include never-before-seen images of musical acts such as The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Allman Brothers Band, The Velvet Underground, The Jeff Beck Group, and, if he’s lucky, Jimi Hendrix.
Read the full story at The Boston Globe.
