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Where to see the light in rock

By Fredric Keoppel
keoppel@commercialappeal.com

After photographer Joel Brodsky got out of the Army and established a studio in New York in 1966, he took a picture that jump-started his career in enviable fashion. Elektra Records had brought a new group called the Doors to the city late in 1966 before the release of their first album. After a day in the studio, taking group and individual shots, Brodsky faced the shirtless lead singer, Jim Morrison, and produced what are called the "Young Lion" images. In the most famous, the "crucifixion" picture, Morrison resembles a sultry, androgynous and mindless Bacchus, an appropriate analogy since by the time the session was completed, the singer was so drunk that he was knocking over lights and cameras.

Brodsky, who died on March 1 at the age of 67, went on to become one of the best-known rock music and album photographers (finally turning to advertising photography), working with Country Joe and the Fish, MC5, Joan Baez, Harry Chapin, Judy Collins, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, KISS, Tom Waits and Van Morrison.

The title of the current exhibition at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music proprietarily refers to Brodsky as "Stax Photographer" -- he did more work for Elektra and Warner Bros. -- but the albums for which Brodsky produced covers were some of Stax’s most seminal, including Isaac Hayes’ Black Moses and Booker T. & the MG’s McLemore Avenue.

The exhibition of mainly color images links the photographs and out-takes to the albums they became. Brodsky provided cover art for Albert King (Lovejoy) and David Porter (Gritty, Groovy, and Gettin’ It), Rufus Thomas and Jean Knight (Mr. Big Stuff), the Staple Singers, Little Sonny and many more. Brodsky’s method, while imaginative (sometimes delightfully so) and insightful about the relationship between the artist and the music, was straightforward in point-of-view and composition. Unlike, say, Annie Leibovitz, whose depictions of rock artists sometimes forced them into wacky costumes and surreal settings, Brodsky never seemed to over-extend his subjects’ personalities.

Booker T. & the MG’s McLemore Avenue (1970) was named for the street in South Memphis where the Stax recording studio stood, and the Stax Museum stands today. The album was an homage to the Beatles’ Abbey Road and covered 13 of the songs from that album, condensing 12 into three medleys. Brodsky produced a photograph of the four musicians -- Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Donald ’Duck’ Dunn and Al Jackson -- crossing McLemore in imitation of the well-known image of the Beatles walking single file across Abbey Road.

One of the most spectacular albums, at least visually, was Isaac Hayes’ Grammy-winning Black Moses (1971). Unfolding in a series of six sections, Brodsky’s album cover displays Hayes in striped Middle Eastern robe, hood and dark glasses, his arms out-stretched in an embracing gesture. Here are the ego and charisma, the spiritual overtones, the messiah-like tendency that Hayes embodied in his music and stage shows. Inside the cover is Hayes in a different guise, bare-chested, draped with gold chains, the symbol of anger, sexuality, power and remoteness.

The black-and-white image of five young men dressed in the heavy brocade jackets that the so-called British Invasion made required wearing in the 1960s -- when rock and roll musicians were supposed to look like English dandies -- includes local restaurateur Thomas Boggs of the Huey’s group, drummer for The Box Tops in the late 1960s. Alex Chilton is there, too.

The pity is that this exhibition could not be larger than it is, either because it exhausts Brodsky’s work for Stax or because the two rooms that the museum uses for temporary shows are small. "The Art of Stax" is an instructive and entertaining effort, a summary of a brief moment in time when something about the style and sound and rhythm of Memphis reached out and touched the world.

-- Fredric Koeppel, 529-2376

More info:

’The Art of Stax: Essential Album Cover Photographs by Stax Photographer Joel Brodsky’

At the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, 926 E. McLemore, through Aug. 28. Call 946-2535.

There will be an opening reception for the exhibition tonight from 7 to 9 p.m., with hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar. Admission is free to museum members, $10 for others.

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