Roberta Bayley: Official Punk-Rock Photographer

Ricky Powell: Here we are, Ricky Powell interviewing the legendary Roberta Bayley at Café Orlin. Hello young lady.
Roberta Bayley: Hey Ricky. How are you?
RP: Good. Loving this meeting. It’s a privilege. Being a Village kid, I love people who photograph the Village, especially in the ’70s, and that’s one of the things that drew me towards you. One of the things.
RB: One thing I want to mention, because here we are in Café Orlin, I just recently saw Smithereens—which stars Richard Hell—that Susan Seidelman of Desperately Seeking Susan-fame directed. And there’s a very hilarious scene of Richard taking a free meal off this annoying publicist while he’s chomping down the food, going, “Uh-huh…uh-huh…uh-huh,” and it’s filmed in Café Orlin.
RP: Really? Wow. Speaking of Richard Hell, I looked at your website last night and it looks like Richard Hell was your homeboy.
RB: It’s funny, because we lived together briefly in 1974, but I wasn’t taking pictures then. It was after we broke up, in late ’75, that I bought a camera. We’d maintained a great relationship so he always called me to do the pictures.
RP: Wow. That’s dope.
RB: I did most of his record covers—his singles, his LPs, and we just did a collaboration of the rerelease and rerecording of Destiny Street, which he’d made in 1982. He rerecorded a lot of the album because at the time he was pretty much on drugs and he didn’t like a lot of the music.


RP: I saw on your website you graduated from San Francisco College in California.
RB: I didn’t graduate. I dropped out of San Francisco State University in ’71 and I moved to England where I lived for two or three years off and on.
RP: When did you pick up the camera and decide this is what you wanted to do?
RB: I did it in high school a little bit.
RP: Where was that?
RB: That was in Marin County, which is 20 miles north of San Francisco. I took two semesters of photography. I really liked it. We used a little Yashica view camera. But then when I went to college it was next to impossible to get into the photography program in San Francisco State. This was ’68, ’69, ’70. I was there during the heyday of the student riots. We were second only to Berkeley and Columbia in terms of all that closing down of the campus and that political stuff, which I wasn’t involved in. I was very sympathetic, but I wasn’t really political at that point and I certainly wasn’t violent. It really upset me going to school and seeing a lot of students being beaten by the police.
RP: How about the hippies and the beatnik scene on Haight and Ashbury? Did you cover that, as well as live it?
RB: I didn’t. My sister lived in San Francisco and I used to stay a lot with her. She had an apartment just on the edge of Haight-Ashbury and the Fillmore District on Oak and Divisadero. We went to all the Be-Ins, we went to the Monterey Pop Festival, we—
RP: What?! You were at that concert?
RB: Yeah, all three days.
RP: Wow.
RB: It was seven dollars a ticket.
RP: Did you have a camera at that point?
RB: No. Isn’t that silly? I was 16. When I was like 14 and following the Beatles, Rolling Stones and all that, I did have a little camera, like an Instamatic, so I actually have pictures of the Rolling Stones from 1966 from the front row. They’re crappy.
RP: At what venue?
RB: The San Jose Civic Auditorium. I saw the Beatles at the Cow Palace three times. I saw the Rolling Stones I think six times.
RP: Whaaaat?! Were your parents cool?
RB: “Cool” wouldn’t be the word. They were kind of oblivious. But my father was really into the whole Beatle thing and he actually rented a room for us in the Beatles’ hotel in 1964, so we were on the floor below the Beatles at the Hilton in San Francisco. It was $24 a night, so it wasn’t a big splurge, but it was pretty exciting at the age of 14 to be staying near the Beatles.


It was an exciting time, and that melded into the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, which melded into the psychedelic bands.
RP: So you had a good start, as far as like a track record from that scene going into New York in the ’70s.
RB: Because I knew the late, great Jim Marshall, who is—along with David Gahr—I think one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll documenters ever.
RP: You knew him personally?
RB: Oh, he asked every 16-year-old girl in San Francisco to marry him. I mean, Jim was a letch. I interacted with him more recently. I saw him at Bob Gruen’s wedding and we met in New York a few times, and I’m not sure if he remembered me, but he certainly inspired me. He was a crazy man and very cool guy when he wasn’t on drugs and shooting guns at people.
RP: That reminds me of me…without the guns. A lot of girls have certain things to say about me.
RB: We were in that world and it was free love, and so you’d take your chances. I told him when I met him more recently that he’d asked me
to marry him, but the offer wasn’t good still.
RP: What do you think about his Allman Brothers cover-shot for At the Fillmore East?
RB: It doesn’t come to mind ’cause I wasn’t—I hate to say—an Allman Brothers fan till quite a bit later. But he did all the San Francisco bands and of course he did the Bob Dylan pictures and the folk pictures, and all of that was really part of his repertoire. I didn’t know how great he was at the time. Actually, we thought he was kind of annoying, but it turned out, if you look back, he was one of the greats.
RP: I wrote a list of things here. Let me just say them and see what you say, alright? Blondie, Deborah Harry, Chris Stein.
RB: It’s amazing how much I still totally love that band. They’ve been playing live a lot in Europe, especially.
RP: Maybe she’s having a renaissance.
RB: She’s 65, she looks amazing, and they’re still coming up with great tunes. I love Debbie and I love Chris and Clem and all the Blondies, but their music resonates, and when you hear “The Tide is High” or “Rapture” it still sounds really good.
RP: Didn’t you shoot them at Max’s and CB[GB]’s?
RB: A little at Max’s, a little at CB’s. As you can imagine, they attracted a lot of crowds, mainly for Debbie, so it was hard to get near the front. I shot them at a few sound checks, but mainly I went on tour briefly with them in 1979 when they were having the hit with Parallel Lines, “Heart of Glass.”
RP: You were on tour with them?
RB: Yeah. I worked for them.
RP: As what? Doing luggage?
RB: Publicity. They were already big in Europe and Australia and those other countries, but they hadn’t broken into America until “Heart of Glass,” so they weren’t selling anything here. I was also the stills photographer on the “Heart of Glass” video.
RP: Wow.
RB: I actually think Debbie might be at her peak of beauty now, but in 1978 a blind chimpanzee could not have taken a bad picture of her and I was lucky enough to have a lot of access to the world’s not only most beautiful, but most photogenic woman, right up there with Marilyn. On top of that she’s just a really good person. That’s shocking, but it makes a lot of sense because it’s her heart that made that success continue.
RP: How did you connect with them?
RB: I worked the door at CBGB’s from 1974 off and on through 1978. I was the person that, if you went to CBGB’s, I said, “Give me your two dollars. It all goes to the band. No guest list.” Well, there was always a big guest list. At the early days of CB’s all the money did go to the band, and the band would bring in extra people who would drink, and that was the arrangement, which changed later, obviously.
RP: Hilly Kristal gave you that job?
RB: Initially Terry Ork, who was Television’s manager. The band Television was one of the first, but not quite the first, to play at CB’s. They wanted the place to almost rehearse live in front of people, so they got the door, and they played Sunday nights, two sets. And Terry said, “Roberta, why don’t you do the door?” because he somehow felt that to have a cute female on the door was less confrontational and more people would wanna give me their money than if he sat on the door.
RP: Interesting psychology.


Ramones. The Ramones.
RB: It’s funny because just two days ago I did an interview for a South American documentary where they’re filming in New York all the places that the Ramones are known for having been in, gone to, etcetera. So I took them to the place where I shot the Ramones first album cover, which is on East Second Street just off the Bowery. It’s now called Joey Ramone Place. It’s a community garden and has been since 1977. We went in and were able to determine exactly where the photo was taken. It’s been built up by at least four feet to accommodate the dirt and the bricks and everything for the garden, but it was like an archaeology expedition to find and trace the steps of the Ramones from February 1976, when that picture was taken.
RP: You met them on the scene?
RB: First I went to see them at Performance Studios in 1974 when they were just doing little showcases. It was a recording studio where Tommy Ramone worked, and that’s where they first started rehearsing, and then they’d do little showcases for their friends during the afternoon. Debbie Harry would be there, Richard Hell…different people would be checking them out because the scene was very, very small then. They’d been in the glitter bands around that scene for a long, long time. There weren’t a lot of people, so everybody knew each other and they’d check everybody out as they were coming up.
RP: And how’d you do these famous photos with them? They asked you to take pictures of them, or you offered, or it was a mutual thing?
RB: That was for Punk magazine. For the third issue they wanted to put the Ramones on the cover ’cause that was one of their very favorite bands. The cover of the magazine was a drawing of Joey by John Holmstrom, the editor and publisher. But we wanted to do an inside interview with a lot of photos, so I went and shot all the pictures. Then Sire Records hired a “professional” photographer to do the album cover, and the pictures absolutely sucked. Everyone hated them. The record was coming out in like six weeks and they didn’t have a photo, so they freaked out. Their manager, Danny Fields, was calling everybody, “Bring all your pictures of the Ramones! We’ve gotta find a picture! We’ve gotta find a picture!” They saw my contact sheets and they said, “That’s the picture we wanna use, but we can only pay you $125. Take it or leave it.” So luckily I took it. It was a good decision.
RP: I hear you.

Do you remember, the East Village was kind of raw dog back in the day.
RB: Oh yeah.
RP: Do you remember that gang the Dynamite Brothers?
RB: No.
RP: Did you stay away from Alphabet City?
RB: I went there later, probably. It would be a scary thing we would do. We’d all decide, “We’re gonna put all our keys and all our money and lock it in the mailbox, and then we’re gonna go over and try to cop something.” We’d give a little kid our money and he’d run away, and then he’d come back and he’d have something, and we thought that was exciting. But I wasn’t into heroin and I was not really into coke in that way, but sometimes you just sorta do that for a little cheap thrill.

RP: Did you ever get down with any of the photo agencies?
RB: My best experience was with Redferns, which was an agency in England that specialized only in music, run by David Redferns. He’s in his 70s and he retired and sold to Getty, so now I’m with Getty.
RP: He must have made a nice penny.
RB: Yeah, and he deserved it ’cause he had a real good agency and they were very on top of it and sharp.
RP: And not shady at all?
RB: No.
RP: That’s big.
RB: I have never had any experience like that. So I’m with Getty now, but because Getty’s so big, my checks have gotten so small.

RP: Well, we’re gonna wrap up this interview.
RB: It’s been an absolute pleasure. I think we’re on a lot of the same wavelength, which is a cool thing.