Historic rock ‘n’ roll photography at ‘Scene From Inside’ in Carmel
Many of us from the pre-digital camera age have a stash of old photos and assorted negatives just waiting to be sorted, maybe even scanned onto a computer and burned to a CD … some day. No rush, right?Fortunately for one photographer, tackling this rainy-day project has brought to light never or rarely seen images of music icons such as Mick Jagger, Joni Mitchell, B.B. King and Jim Morrison, plus other stars from the late ’60s and early ’70s. “Scene From inside: The Historic Rock ‘n’ Roll Photography of Tom Gundelfinger O’Neal,” an exhibition of his serendipitous discoveries, opens Dec. 3 at Mountainsong Galleries in Carmel.O’Neal was based in Los Angeles and shooting under his birth surname of Gundelfinger in the days when he hung out at Peter Tork’s house with Mitchell, shot Ray Charles and Jefferson Airplane during rehearsals for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” and worked on album covers for the Rolling Stones and Canned Heat, just to name a few. but in the mid-70s he left the area and the rock arena, later adopting the surname of his wife, Mollie, with whom he runs a commercial photography company in Monterey.”I’m not one of these guys that sits back and rolls a big doobie and reflects, ‘Those were the days,’ ” said O’Neal from his studio in a recent phone interview. “I do corporate stuff, and I’m pretty excited about what I still do.”That includes heading a photo team at the U.S. Open golf championship for the Pebble Beach company and shooting the Concours d’Elegance for Rolex, who will send him to Florida in February to cover its prestigious 24-Hour Event, “the equivalent to LeMans in America,” O’Neal noted. He has also has Pebble Beach landscapes on display at Images Gallery in the Lodge at Pebble Beach.still, he said, he’s been “fascinated” by what poring over his old proof sheets and negatives has turned up. “This morning I found new stuff, last night I did too — it’s been going on for a week or so, and we’re just trying to dig deeper,” O’Neal said. “Imagine thinking that you know you’ve got something and you’ve saved it up on a shelf, and then when you go to get it, the whole shelf comes down and all these things fall down and you say, ‘Wow, I’ve got this, and I’ve got this, and this.’ … I’m walking two feet off the ground because I have all these new images I want to print.”The journey into his past as a chronicler of rock legends began last year, after an exhibition of a few such photos in O’Neal’s former studio in Carmel Valley attracted the attention of the much-larger Mountainsong Galleries. The expanded show at the Carmel-by-the-Sea gallery, planned for just a month, “basically stayed up for 10 months because the reception was so sustained,” O’Neal said.”I didn’t even really want to bring my son to come down from the Bay Area, because I thought maybe 50 or 60 people would come down (for the opening), and instead about close to 600 people showed up,” he recalled. “For about three hours, it was just a steady stream of bodies and faces and open eyes and lots of ‘Wows!’ “In August, Mountainsong’s planned gallery-wide exhibition of original California Impressionistic paintings meant the rock photos had to come down for a spell, but that has only given O’Neal time to find more overlooked images, most with stories attached. Joni Mitchell, in his portrait of her with a kitten, is wearing a fur hat that David Crosby wore at the Monterey Pop Festival, O’ Neal said, adding, “They were in a significant relationship at the time I met her.”Mitchell’s first album had not yet been released when O’Neal met her, at Crosby’s behest, for a photo session. “She said, ‘Would you like to hear my album?’ She picked up her guitar and started to sing, ‘Michael From Mountains,’ ‘Both Sides Now’… I just about lost it. I had tears in my eyes and had to put the camera down,” O’Neal recalled.He also interviewed Jagger at his home while the Stones were still working on a then-unnamed double album that became “Exile on Main Street”; took King and his famous guitar Lucille into the desert outside of Las Vegas for an unusual photo shoot; and captured Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Neil Young, Dallas Taylor and Greg Reeves in a retro shot that became the cover of CSNY’s landmark “Deja Vu” album. but if O’Neal didn’t have these arresting images, he might not believe he had actually been there.”I got inside the glitter, inside the reality, yet I spelled (the exhibition title) ‘scene’ from inside because it was like a movie,” O’Neal observed. “I look back now and I go, ‘How did this happen, how did I do this?’”"Scene From inside: Historic Rock ‘n’ Roll Photography of Tom Gundelfinger O’Neal,” Dec. 3-Jan. 30, 2012, at Mountainsong Galleries, Ocean Avenue (between San Carlos and Mission), Carmel-by-the-Sea. Reservations required for Dec. 3; see gallery Web site for details on VIP, elite and general admission receptions. Regular gallery hours 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily; no reservations required Dec. 4-Jan. 30.
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