As the popular Talking Heads chorus goes, this is not the Mudd, nor the CBGB. In reality, this is La Casella, an orange grove located 40 kilometers from Valencia. Here, invited by its owner, whom she met when he ran a record store in New York, Roberta Bayley spends her summers. Author of one of the most popular images in the history of pop music, that of the Ramones photographed in black and white, perpetuated as the cover of the quartet’s first album, Bayley could indeed be said to be the CBGB, the legendary New York club that saw Blondie or Talking Heads take their first steps, or at least, a fundamental part of its legacy. “Hilly [Kristal, the club owner] offered me to take care of the box office because he didn’t want to do that job. The club had been open for a short time and only unknown bands played, the only condition was that they performed original material, no covers. Soon I saw that something special was happening. I bought a second-hand camera and started photographing the bands.”
Read more Some European Athletics Championships That Are Almost World Championships
Bayley had already flirted with photography when she still lived in San Francisco, a city she left in 1971. She ended up in London, working as a waitress, and, for a couple of weekends, at the Let It Rock store, which Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren had before setting up Sex. New York was the next stop. She arrived in April 1974 and one of the first things she did was see a New York Dolls concert. That’s where it all started. She had a romance with Richard Hell, another star of that tiny scene “that hardly mattered to anyone beyond downtown Manhattan.” Shortly after, she became the photography editor of the newly founded magazine Punk, a term that would define that new musical wave. “They didn’t have money to pay me, we all survived as best we could, but I loved what they did.”
Read more Journey along the bed of a Danube stripped by drought: “Every year the situation is worse”
She worked for Blondie, accompanied the Sex Pistols during their US tour in which the band broke up, created delirious photo-novels for Punk and was even hired to take photos at Lou Reed’s second wedding. “With the eighties and the arrival of MTV, the music industry changed. I was never interested in studio photography, I preferred to focus on studying Public Health, to then dedicate myself to that.” In 1996, another of her images illustrated Please Kill Me, a decisive book for turning that past into legend. “My first solo exhibition came along with the growing interest in those bands, something I never imagined, because most of them, including the Ramones, never succeeded.” Fifty years later, the images Bayley captured are essential to understanding that cultural phenomenon.
