Monthly Archives: February 2022

Long interview with Tony Levin on photographing King Crimson, Peter Gabriel and More!

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Tony Levin King Crimson Photography Interview
Conducted by Anthony Garone of Make Weird Music – September 2021

Interviewer [00:00]: We are here with Tony Levin in his workshop/studio. And Tony is the basis from King Crimson, Peter Gabriel, and about a thousand other bands he’s played with everyone, just everyone. If you have 10 CDs, you have a CD with Tony Levin on it. So, we are here to talk about Tony’s new collection of photographic prints. It’s a King Crimson box set. What is this set of prints?

Tony Levin [00:32]: Well I’ve been playing bass a long, long time, pretty much since the earth cooled. And most of that time I’ve been taking photographs and I wouldn’t call myself a professional photographer, but that’s because I’m busy playing my music, but I got pretty seriously into it as early as the eighties. And I tried to focus on taking pictures of the bands that I was touring with King Crimson, Peter Gabriel, and others, and in this studio also. And sometime in this last couple of years, I put out a few books of those photos, by the way. And sometime in the last few years, I felt the need to take the best, what I felt feel are the best of those and present them to the public in a really high-quality way and get the best prints possible made from them. It’s been an interesting adventure choosing them and then collating them and having Jon Lybrook do the excellent, super-quality print of them.

Interviewer [01:27]: Can you talk a little about your sort of interest in photography? Like, was it a hardware thing first or was it, did you see an artist that inspired you as a photographer that made you want to do it?

Tony Levin [01:40]: Interesting question. Always interested in photography as a lot of people are. And I kind of muddled around with it a lot of different cameras. I was very lucky that I went to Japan at an early age and this would be in the seventies and was able to get a high-quality Nikon back then when it was a very expensive item here in the states at a reasonable price in Japan, it was a very different economics situation in those days. And shooting film for those of us old enough to remember is a very different experience than shooting digitally on the road. And it was pretty problematic and tricky to shoot regular pictures on the road with bands and get them developed and see how they look, and then make the adjustments at other shows in other cities, in other countries. So, I got used to that, and experimented with it and tried different things. And occasionally I got lucky and got the pictures I wanted.

Interviewer [02:40]: Are you a full-frame shooter, you know, medium format? Like, what do you get in that level of Specifics?

Tony Levin [02:46]: I had a Mamiya RB 67 medium format, and I loved that camera. And I even lugged it around to take pictures. And I’m not talking about with the tripod I mean talking about while I’m playing the bass, picking up this big thing, and trying to shoot. Mostly, I did that with Peter Gabriel. I got some very good pictures which are in some of the books, but in the weeding down process for the pictures I’ve used for the collection those pictures didn’t make it for various reasons when you have, tens of thousands of pictures, and you’re going to get the best eight of them a lot has to go by the wayside.

Interviewer [03:23]: Can you talk about perhaps film versus digital, you know, as a photographer, do you feel like you know, some people say, oh, I only record music on tape, you know, and then there’s the pro tools crowd. They’re like, it doesn’t make a difference. Are you in that sort of a camp? Do you prefer one or the other?

Tony Levin [03:41]: I loved film and I love digital now. I made one of the biggest mistakes in my photographic career, the biggest mistake, switching to digital too early. So, there’s about five, six years of stuff that I’ve got, good photos but they’re not usable. They’re just too low quality because I switched to digital when it was very small. Yeah. So, I don’t have a preference, it was a wonderful process. I loved the smell of the darkroom and I loved that process. And even that smell brings me back to those years that I spent a lot of nights in my darkroom in New York City, my studio apartment, it wasn’t completely dark except at night. So, I would regularly nightly, I would spend the night developing pictures, and then sooner or later one would come out not looking right. And I would look out and realize the sun had come up and it was going through the studio apartment and just barely seeping into the kitchen, which I had curtained off with dark curtains. But it wasn’t enough. So, that was a great process, but so is Photoshop. And so is the digital world.

Interviewer [04:54]: And I imagine you’ve digitized your old film prints. But how many of them, like, were you select things, specific shots, or did you get everything digitized?

Tony Levin [05:06]: I did not get everything digitized, I have too many photos and I never cataloged them well, they are in one place actually here in the building we’re in. But for this, I went through a great number of them and I had already separated the ones that are better than others. And I digitized them as high quality as I could and got them ready for the job.

Interviewer [05:30]: What do you look for aesthetically, or perhaps there’s some other way that you look for a shot that you like, and are there photographers that have inspired you and your aesthetic sense?

Tony Levin [05:44]: There are photographers who have inspired me. I’m not going to name them. I’d have to go through my books to see, but I have a lot of books on photography. And I try to, as with any art, as with music you try to up your artistic sensibility by looking at the best stuff. And somehow having it seep into your sense, especially with format with photos. In my case, because most of the pictures I take, almost all of them are on the road with the same band night after night, you’re doing the same show, maybe different songs, but you’re in the same situation, different dressing rooms. Yes. But dressing rooms night after night, month after month, year after year, even the same dressing rooms. Oh, yes. Four different times I’ve taken pictures of that same guy in that same dressing room through the years. So, one looks for different things than the first time. I can’t really put into words, all the things I look for but I think after all these years, it’s safe to say that I have an eye on the light on everybody and what they’re doing and whether they’re laughing or whether they’re very serious. And if I just see a look, that’s right, I want to have my camera nearby so that I can capture it.

Interviewer [06:55]: Does king Crimson photograph the box set, tell us about it. And you know, what is in it?

Tony Levin [07:03]: Well, its eight photos, eight prints, very high quality. I can’t tell you all the details about the technical bit about the printing, but we can find that from John and very high quality, which I insisted for this, it’s really part of the work of a lifetime of photos on the road and tens of thousands of pictures of King Crimson on the road. And these are my favorites and for reasons, and to me, they tell a story and they each represent that I was lucky to be in that place at that time with a vantage point that other people don’t have from one stage or from backstage being in the band.

Interviewer [07:44]: You’ve been playing for 50 years, right?

Tony Levin [07:49]: Yes.

Interviewer [07:49]: And you know, there’s probably not…

Tony Levin [07:52]: And I’ve been playing well for five years.

Interviewer [07:56]: Yeah. There’s probably not another 50 years, you know, left to go. So, are you looking at this as like a way of, you know, producing some legacy type artwork, you know, something to pass on to the fans or, you know, how are you thinking about it?

Tony Levin [08:11]: Interesting question I don’t think like most guys and women, I know that I play with most musicians. I don’t really think about this in relation to the future. So, this is not the summing up of my career to me or however, I haven’t thought about what I’m going to do for the next book either. I just don’t think about that. When I look through the photos, I recently did a photo book of 250 of my pictures of all bands through the years, I was struck that I really have the chance to present to the public, a very high-quality collection of the images that I like the best. And so, I felt as you sometimes do with music, I felt like this needs to be shared. This needs to get out there. And if I don’t do it in, if this was in the lockdown year, I felt if I don’t do it this year, I’ll get busy touring and doing things that I really love to do and take less immersion and it won’t happen. So, I spent that year trying to get all of these boats together.

Interviewer [09:16]: For me when I’m writing music I’ll have a collection of songs that I’ve produced over the years and some stick around more than others. Is that kind of what happened with this collection? Did you have these photos in mind and at some point I’m going to release it or did you make a decision and just start going through the whole catalog and, oh yeah. There’s that one?

Tony Levin [09:36]: The ladder going through the whole catalog. I never was organized enough with my music or my photography to keep a record of, okay, these are the best. These are, these, and these and these I did have, I had them on, I think the negatives organized by tour and by year. So, it wasn’t that huge a job, but no, it involved going through them all and finding which ones resonated with me in that way, some of them, which were very good images to me and meaningful didn’t warrant, being among the prints, just didn’t warrant. Some of them were color and didn’t want to be in black and white. There were a whole lot of parameters and the ones that were there were plenty that was good. I could limit myself to eighty. It could have been 80 and we’d have a stack of photos to talk about. But I limited myself and, I feel good about the ones we chose.

Interviewer [10:29]: Did you go from 20 to 15 to 10, or did you go from 1 to 3 to, you know, 8 you know, when you were selecting these?

Tony Levin [10:37]: I think it was about 12 to 15 and the decisions on what’s practical for a collection, what I want the box set to look like, and this special custom box for the box set and things like that of course, I think many people will want the individual photo that they like the best and that’s fine. And that’s the way it should be. Yeah. So, the weeding down wasn’t that bad after the point where I headed down to 12 or so.

Interviewer [11:04]: Have you ever done an art show or a gallery of your photography?

Tony Levin [11:07]: I’ve had a few exhibitions through the years and I used to keep a box of the two exhibition sets of photos and I lost them. I lost both boxes. I have the feeling I sent them to be an exhibit somewhere and I forgot about it. And I never asked for them back. I think that’s what happened. I had one from the Woodstock festival, the second one, not the original one, just a wonderful set of prints from the audience in the mud and things like that. And that’s gone.

Interviewer [11:42]: Oh man, that’s tough. So, in your exhibitions, obviously, people know you for the bass and the stick, your music work. But how are people responding? Who doesn’t know anything about, you know, what you play?

Tony Levin [12:00]: I don’t know. I have not been to exhibitions of my photos.

Interviewer [12:04]: Okay.

Tony Levin [12:04]: What I hear a lot from is, are bands of the bands and the, of course, I put the photos on my website and on my web diary, right? My road diary and I have for many years. And I hear a lot of feedback that people love the photos, of course. And I’m probably happiest that I can finally offer it to them. Oh, you, maybe you wanted that photo on your wall. It’s nice to finally have that option. But I don’t really have too much experience of people seeing the photos, who don’t know the band or know me and what it is. I do musically.

Interviewer [12:36]: And for me, I don’t know, perhaps you’re like this, you’re an early adopter of technology, you know, you’re using digital cameras. I see you using a 360-degree camera?

Tony Levin [12:46]: Abusing it.

Interviewer [12:47]: Abusing it. And I’m curious, is this kind of like, maybe you get sick of looking at a screen and you just want to see these things on paper?

Tony Levin [13:00]: Oh, yes. I had mentioned before the tactile joy of having something that you can say, this is it, but also my life, my home, and my life are enriched by the very high-quality paintings and photos that I have on the wall. And so I have, I think, like most people, I have a high, I place a high value on the one picture that’s very special to you. And if it has a double meaning, because it, it, it involves a band that you’re a fan of, or a concert that you are at or something like that, then all the better.

EPIC King Crimson Photogravure Box Collection by Tony Levin

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by Anthony Garone  

Bass legend Tony Levin performed with King Crimson for more than 40 years and took countless photographs on and off stage. He spent the last few years selecting his eight favorites, and is now releasing them as a high end commemorative set of archived quality handmade prints. They’re being produced by printmaker and publisher Jon Lybrook of Intaglio Editions located near Boulder, Colorado. And for the past several months, I’ve been working with Jon and Tony on getting the word out about this special collection. The eight selected prints are:  King Crimson Asbury Park 1982, Bill Bruford, Bristol 1981, Adrian Belew, Backstage 1981, King Crimson, Faro, Portugal 1982, Robert Fripp, Krakow, 2019, King Crimson at the Royal Albert Hall, 2019 Perkins Palace, marquis 1981, and on the Shinkansen 1981. I interviewed Tony in November 2021, about his history with photography and his work with King Crimson. Check that video out if you haven’t seen it because he gives a great background on this print collection. And on his own photographic approaches, which involve foot pedals, squeeze boxes, his early foray into digital photography and more.

The King Crimson photogravure prints are beautiful. And I’ve actually had various proofs of them here in my studio for several months. Jon Lybrook sent them to me in these big black ribbon tied portfolios. But I recently received the special edition print collection box with all eight prints, white gloves and the works. It is absolutely gorgeous and one of the nicest material objects I’ve ever had in my own home. Now, I’m not much of an art collector, but I can tell that people who really care about owning art and archival photographs are going to love this set. I originally got involved with Jon because, Paul Richards from the California Guitar Trio had a couple of collections of his own photographic prints by Intaglio Editions, and they’re wonderful. Most interesting is his broad chalk collection of prints from his time living with Robert Fripp, in the 16th century reddish house in England. There’s a whole Wikipedia page about that house if you want to read about it, and maybe someday I’ll release the footage of Paul talking through his photos.

 So once I saw Paul’s prints, I wanted to learn more about the guy making them and how his crazy brain works. It turns out that Jon Lybrook is a big music fan, especially of King Crimson, and he makes prints for several artists, including Jerry LoFaro, who painted the modernized Tarkus cover of the Keith Emerson tribute concert DVD. Pretty cool. 

I spent a day in the summer of 2021 with Jon in his studio learning about the entire printmaking process, and it’s pretty astounding. Intaglio printmaking is a very time consuming work of manual labor and is almost entirely analog. He starts out with a digital photo and does all his mixing and mastering and then etches the image onto a steel backed photopolymer plate. It’s a photographic process with an insanely bright light bulb and some complex computations and Old World machinery to get the tones just right. And once the plate is ready, the manual labor begins. Jon takes an inked up roller and smothers the plate to prepare it for the print. He then wipes the plate smooth with cheesecloth, so the ink sticks to the dark parts of the image. He then takes a large sheet of paper which has been soaking in water for an hour. He blocks it so it’s just the right dampness and runs it through his printing press a bunch of times to flatten it perfectly smooth. Then finally he takes the inked up printing plate on the press bed where it’s now ready to be printed. And what I’ve just summarized in a few sentences takes at least 20 to 30 minutes of work to prepare. 

Once the paper is placed carefully on the plate. Wool blankets are put on top of the paper and the plate and then turning what looks like this giant captain’s wheel from a large boat. The entire press bed glides under the big metal cylinder applying thousands of pounds of pressure on the paper and the plate. And this process transfers the image onto the paper. And voila, there is a beautiful archival print at the end made only of low-acid, traditional etching paper and oil-based ink. Now each of Tony Levin’s eight prints will be made 500 times which will take Jon several months to complete. Each comes numbered hand titled and individually signed by Tony along with a signed and numbered certificate of authenticity, which is also signed and stamped by Tony and printmaker Jon as I mentioned, I’ve seen these prints in various states from pre-production to final editions. And these final editions are gorgeous. They’re 500 bucks a piece, or you can buy the whole set of eight with the collector’s box for 3700 bucks. When I started this project with Jon and Tony, I knew next to nothing about the printing process. But now I can say I’ve seen the work from start to finish, including the final product. And it’s seriously impressive. If you’re a fan of King Crimson, and you want some really nice collectibles on your wall. This is the set you need. So check it out at tonylevinprints.com. 

Now let’s take a look inside the box. Maybe that’s what you’re waiting for. So I’m just going to open it up carefully, because this box is like it’s really beautiful. And I just, it’s not mine. I don’t want to do something to it. So it’s pretty heavy. Actually, before I open it, let me tell you picking this thing up, I’m going to guess it’s five to seven pounds. You can see it’s pretty thick. I mean, it’s got to be. Yeah, like I said five to seven pounds. And it opens really beautifully. It’s really a solid construction, I’m going to guess this is wood. And there’s wood lining the whole thing, including this back panel and the top. And then it folds open like this, but I don’t want it to fold all the way back and crease. So you can see the white gloves here that come with the box. I’m just going to close this before I do something stupid. So the gloves are, you know these nice fabric gloves. And then inside this folder here, is a letter from Jon about the prints and the collection. And then here are the certificates of authenticity. So you can see here. I think you can this is the certificate on the lower left is a signature from Tony, on the lower right is Jon’s signature with the stamp. It’s like an embossed stamp. 

I’m not going to take all eight out there pretty heavy stock paper pretty thick, which is great. Then let’s take a look at the prints themselves, which you’ve already seen in this video. But I’ll just show you live. Now this one is my favorite. This is the Royal Albert Hall print. I love this one because it’s. I love the aspect ratio. I know that sounds funny or silly or trivial. But just like with Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, you know, he uses just certain dimensions. And I just love the aspect ratio on this image. I love how the light is cast on the whole crowd and the venue. I don’t know how Tony did this, but the light in the center of the crowd. And the whole band is right up front. It just feels like you’re part of a scene. Like a lot of the other prints are, they’re great. And you do feel like you’re there in a one on one scenario. But I feel like this print in particular, is just immersive. It’s like you are at the venue you’re on the stage, you see everything that’s going on. And anyone who knows King Crimson knows that. If there’s a photograph being taken by the band, it’s at the end of the show. And you can see Robert holding his camera out taking a photo. So this is Tony taking a photo of the whole band. Although Tony’s not in this one. He is in other photos. But yeah.

I love this print. And then inside the box, all of the prints just have wax paper between them. So there’s the print, there’s a sheet of wax paper behind it. And then there’s the next print. I don’t want to screw anything up here. So I’m just going to close the box. Just so precious, I just and they’re not mine, so I want to take good care of them. Anyway, so that’s the box. That’s the collection. It’s gorgeous. I think of it is like 3700 bucks is like a really high end instrument. And this is like a really high end set of pieces of art and you get eight of them. So I think it’s well worth the price. But yeah, check them out at tonylevinprints.com. And if you pick one up, let us know leave a comment and let us know what you think of it. Cool. Hope you enjoy it!