During the making of The Madcap Laughs, Barrett’s post-Pink Floyd debut, Rock shot him on the hood of his new possession. “Syd swapped his Mini for this massive American Pontiac car,” Rock said. “He couldn’t drive it, but he rocked it… He’d left Pink Floyd, a huge change from playing the same songs in the same way every night.”
Starting in 1972, Rock and Bowie had a life-long creative bond. “A true friend, a hero, and someone you couldn’t take a bad photograph of, even if you tried,” Rock said. “And why try? David figured out that he had to create something amazing to hit the stratosphere. I took the pictures, but he understood — perhaps more than anyone — their impact.”
Along with Bowie, Reed (seen here at the Blakes Hotel in London) loomed large in Rock’s work and even his personal life. “Lou and I got on from the first. Bowie introduced us,” Rock said. “Rebellion was part of his image, but it was real. Photographing Lou, I responded to what was right in front of me. He had an edge, and it was endlessly fascinating to watch.”
For the cover of Queen II, Rock wanted an image that would match the band’s ambitions. “I felt it needed to have a certain grand quality, you can see this from the contact sheet,” Rock said. “I’d come across a photo of Marlene Dietrich on the set of 1932’s Shanghai Express, and she was under a top light, with hooded eyes, arms crossed, fingers spread. I showed Freddie the image, and he loved it, so that was it.”
Toward the end of the Seventies, Lou Reed took Rock to CBGB’s to see a new trio, Talking Heads; Rock shot them soon after they’d expanded to a quartet with the addition of Jerry Harrison. “It was all punk and safety pins then, but they looked so weirdly clean cut,” Rock said. “I told them they were straight out of The Village of the Damned.”
Rock shot the downtown New York punk goddess just as “Heart of Glass” and the accompanying Parallel Lines album were about to transport her and Blondie from the underground to above ground stardom. “Debbie was just distinctive,” Rock said. “Unique charm, charisma, a downtown icon. Debbie, in a sense, changed the landscape of rock & roll. People say she’s the greatest blonde that ever rocked.”
Rock shot Madonna shortly after she’d arrived in New York, several years before her first record. “I used to snap aspiring singers who hung around at Bleecker Bob’s [record store] in the Village,” Rock said. “One summer evening in 1980, Madonna turned up. She seemed very young but ambitious. You can see it, though, that she knew even then how to get attention. I didn’t ask her to stick her tongue out.”
Monae’s ambiguous aesthetic was a natural fit for Rock’s lens, and he seemed particularly proud of working with her. “She’s been described as a pop android, never conforming to what’s expected of the way she looks or sounds,” Rock said. “And she does it with style.”
Icons of two different generations, with Gaga “not giving a fork,” in Rock’s words. The two were photographed at the Spotted Pig, the downtown New York restaurant (which closed in 2020) whose investors included U2 manager Paul McGuinness.
The year before he died, Rock shot the cover for Cyrus’ Plastic Hearts album, clowning around with her during the session. “I knew one of her producers since he was young, and she had just done a track with Joan Jett and a Blondie cover,” he said. “So, it was inevitable, the connections between my then and my now. Miley’s not someone who has to think about her image too much — she’s definitely an agent provocateur, with talent to match.”
Years in the making, the book is out August 30 through Simon & Schuster.