“Rock Seen: 30 Years of Rock Images by Don Adkins” takes the stage in Redondo Beach
Motley Crue, 27 years after Adkins first shot the band. Photo by Don Adkins
It was another Friday evening in 1977. Don Adkins had just gotten out of one more electrical engineering class at Long Beach State University. Adkins drove home to his parent’s house in Cerritos to grab the Minolta SRT-101 camera that he had been borrowing regularly from his father, along with some freshly printed business cards that read, ‘Don Adkins, Photographer’. Equipment in hand, Adkins travelled the 26.5 miles from Cerritos to Hollywood’s foremost rock club at the time, The Whiskey, where he hoped to catch the set of some up and coming artist named Dyan Diamond. According to a friend of his, Diamond was ‘the next Pat Benatar’.
Adkins with his long dark hair sauntered into the Whiskey’s crowded room and planted himself center-left of the stage, next to some other longhaired fellows and a few spandex-clad women. This was his usual whereabouts on nights he didn’t find himself head high in engineering textbooks. Like most nights spent at the Whiskey, Adkins focused his camera’s attention on the stage, effortlessly snapping pictures of Diamond, until a man tapped him on the shoulder and asked him who he was. Adkins assertively handed the man one of his new business cards, and explained his freelance photographer credentials.
“All he said to me was, ‘Did you get any good shots?’” chuckles Adkins, the now Redondo Beach based photographer. “I told him I had gotten some photos and he invited me backstage, stating that he was with Dyan Diamond’s management. Once I was backstage it was like ‘Hey we’re playing a show at the Roxy on New Years, can you come shoot it?’ Sure I can do that.”
The Go-Go’s, when they were go-going strong, April 16, 1980. Photo by Don Adkins
I know this is starting to sound a lot like the start of Cameron Crowe’s 2000 coming-of-age film, Almost Famous, about one kid’s big break as a teenage journalist for Rolling Stone, but in all seriousness, it was all about being in the right place at the right time for Adkins to get his ‘big break’.
Elton John. Photo by Don Adkins
Adkins’ congenial aura and affinity to get along well with most everyone, specifically musicians, not only got him on the ins with club bouncers all around town, but harnessed an exuberant working reputation as the ‘go to guy’ for metal. “When doing these club shows, it was usually three acts a night, so I would start hanging out with the headliner, meet the opening group, pass out my business cards and work the room,” describes Adkins, who doubles as an engineering director for local engineering companies during the day. “Those days everyone wanted the publicity.”
Amongst Adkins’ innermost musical circle was a young bassist, named Nikki Sixx, who had much bigger plans than his then current status as band member of the hair/glam-rock band, London. Having been the photographer for London, Adkins and Sixx cultivated a strong friendship; one that would later permit Adkins to follow and capture every moment of the creation of one of America’s leading heavy metal bands, Motley Crue.
“I saw the formation of the group happening from the start, where Nikki was picking members to join him. They still didn’t have a name. But they were pounding some really heavy rock,” described Adkins, who continues to shoot both small shows and large-scale concerts regularly.
Don Adkins’ first shoot with Motley Crue
As Sixx conjured his lot of hard-hitting rockers, including a 17-year-old drummer named Tommy Lee from West Covina who sat behind a mountainous double bass kit, Adkins hung around taking pictures and basking in the purity and simplicity of it all. No one had money. In fact three out of the four Motley members lived in a small seedy apartment in Hollywood and lived off Costco-bought frozen corndogs before they had any clue they would be playing in arenas all over the world.
“I was fortunate enough to be there at the band’s basics, when they had their girlfriends sewing and making their outfits. There was no excess of rock and roll because they were all too poor to buy anything,” explained Atkins. “We just all got in a van, put all the equipment in, found some friends to be roadies, and that was it. Luckily what happened was that I got to know so many of these bands at their fundamental level at these small clubs, and as they became really popular, I was no longer shooting them at a club, but instead at places like the Forum.”
Rod Stewart and Tina Turner, Dec. 3, 1981. Photo by Don Adkins
Adkins has since shot artists such as Judas Priest, Elton John, and Queen.
After 30 years of shooting and touring intermittently, Adkins’ has fashioned a sizable archive of negatives and filmstrips meticulously cataloged in binders and boxes that fill the tall brown shelves of his office at his South Redondo home. With an inventory of around 200,000 images, spanning all genres of music, from Alice Cooper to Joan Baez to Peter Gabriel, Adkins is eager to share an exclusive musical history through pictures at his upcoming exhibit at Cannery Row.
“The South Bay has never seen a rock and roll themed exhibit before,” Adkins said. “I want my images to translate the spirit of rock and roll that I am so captivated by. Every image has a story, so next to each framed work I will have a little blurb about the concert I was at, and how I got there.”
As if an exhibit showcasing these memorable rock images was not enough of a treat, Don Adkins plans on providing bins of smaller, $20 prints for impulse buyers. “Rock Seen” opens this Saturday, with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. at Cannery Row Studios, 604 N. Francisca Ave., Redondo Beach. Through September 17. Call (888) 366-1988 or go to canneryrowstudios.com.