Clayton Call was capturing musicians on film long before he became a professional photographer. “I saw every classic band between ’66 and ’76, without taking a photo,” he said. “My mom bought a new Pentax in the fall of ’75. I borrowed it and took it to a Todd Rundgren concert, to take color slides. When I got them back, I put on a Todd album and projected the slides on the wall. I was hooked. I never really enjoyed the process of taking photos, but I loved looking at them and editing.”
In the ’80s and ’90s, Call’s photos appeared almost every week in the review pages of the East Bay Express. “In 1981, I showed one of the Express editors a few pictures, and they took a chance,” Call said. “Until then, I only shot occasionally, and for fun. When I got published, things got real. My hobby became a job. The Express was key to building my photo archives. The huge range of artists they assigned me to shoot helped, and the exposure to jazz legends, close up, expanded my musical and drumming horizons.”
In all, Call shot 256 shows for the Express over the next 16 years. “I also started shooting for other local papers, BAM and the [San Francisco] Bay Guardian,” he recalled. “Eventually, I hooked up with Guitar Player magazine. Being a musician myself, I would shoot the drummer, the guitar player and the equipment as well.”
Call grew up in a small Long Island town, just outside of New York City. His family loved music: lots of Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Judy Garland, Julie London, all the Broadway show albums.
“AM radio was great back then. My first concert was The Byrds and Young Rascals at 11 years old, in 1966. I’d also become obsessed with drumming. I got a pair of sticks after seeing Ringo on the Ed Sullivan Show and Dino Danelli, drummer with The Rascals, at that first concert. I played on furniture until I had real drums, when I got to high school, at 15. They must have been borrowed, since I had no money to buy drums,” Call remembered.
While in high school, Call started playing with his friends. They had a pretty eclectic song list in their first band: Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead, Procol Harum, Todd Rundgren.
“After moving to Berkeley in ’76, I started playing in bands,” Call said. “I lived in a band house and was part of a fusion project that seldom played outside of our living room. Around 1980, I started playing gigs with The Unreal Band in Berkeley bars, like The Starry Plough and Come Back Inn. I was also in a Berkeley new wave group called The Gyrations. We played clubs like Berkeley Square and The Mab.
“Even though I had cheap rent, I realized that I couldn’t count on photo income, or drumming, to come up with rent every month,” added Call. “Making music was a passion and obsession. None of us thought about making a living doing it. Photography soon became an obsession too, but materials and equipment were expensive, so making money was a necessity, but not my prime goal.”
Call’s photo business card back then read, “Music To Your Eyes.” “That’s what I wanted to transmit: the energy at the peak creative moments of an artist who’s not thinking about anything but the music,” said Call. “I never had any control over the lighting, and sometimes was told where to stand, but knowing the music, and being a drummer, meant that I could anticipate onstage moves and choose the right framing. I had good reflexes to grab an action shot, but time can go fast when you’re shooting a performance.
He acknowledged that it’s a different experience shooting Paul McCartney in a stadium with 80,000 screaming fans, or sitting at a table in Yoshi’s, sipping a cappuccino and capturing Max Roach behind his drum kit.
But he slowly lost interest in photographing rock bands. In 1990, Call started going down to New Orleans to capture images of the jazz and R&B greats who played at the annual JazzFest. “I shot for Offbeat Magazine, a local music monthly down there. As usual, it didn’t even cover my expenses, but I ended up with an archive of about 30,000 images of JazzFest,” Call noted. He is now represented worldwide by Getty Images.
Call also became interested in the audio and production end of the concert business. “I needed to hear good sound, and somebody had to do it, so I multitasked. It was all in the service of the music,” he said. “I’ve been a night person since I was young. Which is good if you’re playing or working a show, loading out gear at 2am.
“I was a stagehand with Local 16 and had to be on call 24/7, but the pay was good, even though the hours were unpredictable,” he continued. “You might have to show up at 6am and come back at 11pm to tear down the show. There were some crazy hours, but an incredible education to help put together events, from small clubs to stadium shows. You learn a lot.”
Call worked various day jobs over the years, preparing lighting and grip trucks for TV and movie shoots, and working in the field for IATSE Local 16 (the stagehands’ union) in San Francisco, helping set up audio for conventions at Moscone, stadium shows and Outside Lands festivals.
He also worked as a drum tech in the Bay Area, providing his skills and drums for pro drummers like Zigaboo Modeliste (The Meters, Dr. John), Bernard Purdie (Aretha Franklin, James Brown), Stanton Moore (Galactic), Nikki Glaspie (Dumpstaphunk) and more. Call videotaped many of these legends for his YouTube DrumCam page.
Since retiring from his day job, he’s been working on his archives and updating the impressive collection of photos he has on his website: Clayton Call Photography at claytoncallphoto.com. “It’s mostly an online portfolio, though I do sell a few prints now and then,” he said. “ I didn’t make much money on my photos back then. It wasn’t the goal. But now I’m starting to make a little bit, 40 years later.”
