Sir Christian Bonington at his home in Cumbria, England, September 2010.

Chris Bonington is Britain’s best known mountaineer. He began climbing in 1951 and over the next 50 years did difficult first ascents in most of the greater mountain ranges of the world including:

1st ascent Annapurna II (26,041 ft)  1960

1st ascent Nuptse (25,850 ft) 1961

1st ascent Central Pillar of Freney 1961

1st British ascent North Wall of The Eiger 1962

1st ascent Central Tower of Paine (8760 ft), Patagonia 1963

Leader of successful Annapurna South Face Expedition 1970

1st ascent Brammah (21,030 ft) 1973

1st ascent Changabang (22,520 ft) 1974

Leader of successful Everest South West Face Expedition 1975

1st ascent, the Ogre (23,900 ft)1977

1st ascent Mount Kongur, Western Xinjiang, China (25,325 ft) 1981

1st ascent Shivling West (21,250 ft) 1983

1st ascent West Ridge, Panch Chuli II, Kumaon Himalaya, India, 1992

1st ascent The Needle, Greenland 1993

He has led and been on 19 Himalayan expeditions, including 4 to Everest which he summited in 1985 at the age of fifty. His partners were no slouches either, he frequently partnered with the likes of Ian Clough, Don Whillans, Tom Patey, Doug Scott, Dougal Haston and others. He’s also the author of 17 books.

Jim Whittaker, who summited Mount Everest 50 years ago today, May 1, 1963, making him the first American to do so.

I photographed him near his home in Port Townsend, WA in 2002.

Happy 80th birthday to Willie Nelson!

Here’s a photo I shot of him in the San Bernardino Mountains, east of Los Angeles, in June, 2004.

RIP Layton Kor, one of the greats. Here’s my photo of him in 2009.

—————

LEGENDARY CLIMBER LAYTON KOR DIES

By: Adam Roy

Layton Kor, the legendary climber who established some of America’s hardest and most frightening routes during the 1950s and 60s, died on Sunday night. Kor, 75, had been fighting kidney failure and prostate cancer.

Born in Canby, Minnesota, Kor began his climbing career in Colorado’s Eldorado Canyon, where he established bold free and aid climbs like The Naked Edge and T2. Beginning in the 1960s, he took his act to the deserts of southern Utah, where he made the first ascents of cutting-edge routes on Moab’s sandstone spires, including the Kor-Ingalls route on Castleton Tower and Finger of Fate on the Titan, both of which were later featured in the seminal book Fifty Classic Climbs of North America. 

Kor essentially quit climbing in 1968 when he became a Jehovah’s Witness, but came back to the sport later in his life. “Climbing is hard to give up,” he would say. “It’s just as hard as giving up cigarettes.”

In his later years, Kor struggled with medical bills, including daily medications and thrice-weekly dialysis. Despite the efforts of fellow climbers who organized fundraisers for his benefit, his biographer, Cameron Burns, said that Kor died “essentially in poverty.”


My photograph of Ralph Stanley is a double page spread in the new Garden & Gun Magazine, on newsstands now…

Mickey Baker - musician - Toulouse, France

© Jim Herrington

I’m very sad to hear that the great Mickey Baker has just died at 87 years of age. An incredible musician, and as I came to find out, a stellar human being. 

RIP, Mickey.

Here’s a story I wrote about him a few years ago:

The voice on the other end of the line repeats my name: “Mr. Herrrrrington… that’s English, isn’t it?” I’m hunched over a pay phone in the Barcelona train station talking to Mickey Baker, guitarist extraordinaire, and I’m plugging Euros into the slot as fast as possible to keep the connection going - a connection that with three years of effort has been rather difficult to make.

Mickey Baker lives in southern France, in a small village outside of Toulouse, and advance word was that “he doesn’t talk to anybody” and “he won’t talk to you” and “he’ll want money up front if he decides he’ll talk to you… but he won’t talk to you.” I had heard these words in the States, via friends in London, before I left for a month-long trip to Europe, and I’d already been in Spain for two weeks before finally getting the gumption to call the alleged recluse. Initially, I was hesitant to call; I wanted to get the wording just right to sell him my idea of photographing and interviewing him before he slammed the phone down in my ear.

Yet here I was, amongst the din of ten thousand heat-seeking tourists, coinage poised to slot, and having a dandy conversation with the man, right off the bat. “C’mon up,” he says, with nary a reference to any palm greasing.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. Who, you may ask, is Mickey Baker? You may not know the name, but you’ve undoubtedly been wowed by his guitar skills. In fact, if you play guitar at all, you’ve most likely been greatly influenced by his playing, either directly from hearing his own recordings or from hearing the records of someone else who had. A look at the short list of his session work—Ray Charles’ “Mess Around” and “It Should Have Been Me,” Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” Amos Milburn’s “One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer” and Ruth Brown’s “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” in addition to songs by Ivory Joe Hunter, the Clovers, the Coasters, Louis Jordan, Joe Clay, LaVern Baker, the Drifters, the Moonglows, Champion Jack Dupree, Nappy Brown and Big Maybelle—suggests that his guitar was heard nonstop on the radio from 1949 until the late ‘50s.

And that was just his session work. The 1957 hit “Love Is Strange,” recorded during his Mickey & Sylvia era, got him closest to becoming a household name. In addition, his late-‘50s solo instrumental records are masterpieces of reverb-soaked, double-tracked and occasionally jazzy, mambo-influenced guitar frenzy.

The man behind the sunglasses, standing in the crowded Toulouse train station, bears little resemblance to the gent on those Mickey & Sylvia album covers—he’s 82 now, heavier and walking with a cane—but you’d have to be blind not to pick him out of the crowd as the only American guitar legend present. His wife Mary is with him, and they whisk me out of the station and toward their home, with Mary behind the wheel of their Peugeot.

The Mickey Baker story begins in 1925 in Louisville, Kentucky. His grandmother operated a brothel there and she employed her 12-year-old daughter as one of the available girls. One day in early 1925, as Baker tells it, a Scots-Irish piano player stopped in, played some piano in the parlor and, taking a fancy to the 12-year-old, took her upstairs. Nine months later, Mickey Baker popped out.

When Baker was 11 his mother apparently killed someone, he got passed around a lot, changing homes and staying with “uncles.” There was always plenty of turmoil for young Mickey. He ran away often—heading east every time—but was always caught and taken back to Louisville. Finally, when he was 16, he made it to his destiny. He had done his homework this time; he’d been reading the Hobo News and understood the trains. This time, he was going and not coming back.

Hiding in a filthy coal car, he arrived in Union City, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, in late afternoon. Seeing the immense metropolis from his perch of coal, he thought, “What am I ever going to do with this?” He jumped train and after washing the black coal dust off in the river, he got a lift into Manhattan on a truck delivering oranges. He promptly broke into a store that night, stole a carton of cigarettes and sold them for spending money. It was a start.

He spent four years bumming around Harlem, doing a little hustling and some pimping, and he made a few bucks as a pool shark. None of it fit well. When he was 20, Baker walked into a pawnshop, intent on buying a trumpet. Most of the black guys in New York wanted to be Louis Armstrong, basically, and play jazz. The Southern style of gutbucket blues was too barnyard, too rural. The blues reminded Baker of Louisville, and, what’s more, there didn’t seem to be any money in it in New York. He preferred Armstrong, Benny Goodman and Woody Herman. He pointed to a trumpet on the wall of the pawnshop.

“How much?”

“$30,” came the reply.

“Uh, how much for this other one?”

“$25.”

After Baker looked at all of the trumpets in stock—and wasn’t able to afford any of them—the pawnshop owner said, “I think I have just the instrument for you.” He went down to the basement and came back up with a scrappy, disheveled guitar with a hole in the back and said, “I’ll let you have this for $14.”

Baker took that guitar, and within a few years—without any formal training—he not only had began his incredible string of session work, but also wrote the first of his Complete Course for Jazz Guitar books. “I wrote those before I really even knew how to play,” he confesses, even though every major guitar player in the ‘50s and ‘60s (and countless thousands of others) has at least taken a passing glance at them, if not studied them religiously. A man to the instrument born.

There was a time early in his New York days when the band he was with, attempting a Charlie Parker vibe, wasn’t quite making it, and Baker split for California, more out of frustration than anything. One night a girl took him to see Pee Wee Crayton’s band, and Baker’s predilection for jazz was tested. Seeing the crowd go crazy for Crayton’s brand of R&B-tinged jump blues made Baker, the ex-street hustler, think, “I can do this.” He got a job at Del Monte packing tomatoes and, as soon as he could buy a bus ticket, headed back to New York - this time with slightly different musical ideas.

After a 20-minute drive, Mary guides the car up the driveway of their modest but comfortable home at the end of a cul-de-sac. If the French did suburban ranch homes, this would be one of them. The small cement statue of Bathsheba, with her legs cut off, buried in the front yard, lets you know that you aren’t in Kentucky anymore.

At this point, Mickey Baker has lived in France longer than he lived in the States. He moved to Paris in the early ‘60s, like many other black jazz and blues players who were soured by the racial situation in America. He speaks of the Mickey & Sylvia days more with disdain than anything; he had a top hit on the radio, played sold-out shows all over the country and appeared on TV, yet he would still have to watch what he said and where he went, eat only at certain restaurants and stay only at certain black-friendly hotels. He’d “made it” in the music business, but only as far as a black man was allowed to make it in those days. Bullshit, he thought, I’m out of here…

No doubt, those final years of the ‘50s were the culmination of his American achievements. He’d met a young Sylvia Robinson a few years earlier, in 1954, when he’d backed her up on an early Cat Records release (she was known as Little Sylvia then). She also became his guitar student, and that’s how they performed together onstage, both up front at the mic with guitars, Mickey playing those devastating licks, Sylvia playing rhythm, and the two of them singing infectious, flirty harmonies. The idea was to try a Les Paul/Mary Ford thing, but Mickey & Sylvia found their own original sound soon enough. Later, they got signed by Rainbow Records and then to an RCA spin-off label called Groove, where they had their biggest success with “Love Is Strange.”

During most of the ‘50s, Baker had also been recording some of the coolest instrumental guitar records of all time. “Guitar Mambo” and “Riverboat” were recorded a mere seven years after he first touched a guitar. Using loads of reverb, echo and double-tracked guitar techniques, these records pushed the boundaries of the studio guitar sound, much like his hero, Les Paul, had been doing. The songs run the gamut from early R&B and jump blues to, as time went on, more jazz-inflected and mambo-flavored tunes, but always with an edge, an incredible tone and his unmistakable style.

Baker takes me into his house, and Mary brings me tea in the living room. I look over to discover his classical guitar and reams of sheet music. He’s been interested in classical music for some time: Bach fugues and, lately, “Mickey fugues”. His playing has recently deteriorated (in his words), so he’s taken in a young player who originally wanted to learn the blues from Baker, but has been realigned into a classical-guitar prodigy who plays and records Baker’s compositions. (“He would’ve never been able to play the blues,” Baker says. “Just didn’t have it.”)

More than anything these days, Mickey loves to read, and it shows… his bookshelves are stacked with volumes about ancient Roman history, psychology, art and architecture. He’s a forward-looking man, but I guess he’s always been. He’s happy enough that the music he made has excited people, but he seems more interested in talking about other kinds of history, hanging out with his wife and generally relaxing and enjoying life.

Mickey Baker never asked me to pay him, and after a day spent at his house I departed back to the train station. When I arrived back in Barcelona late at night I had to punch a gypsy in the face to avoid losing my Leica camera… the one that still had the Mickey film in it, but that’s another story…

Text and photo © Jim Herrington

This is what it looked like at 6th Avenue and 20th Street in Manhattan last night - pitch black.

Chimpanzee sitting poolside, Palm Springs, CA

In 2006 I ran across a news item - the chimpanzee that portrayed Cheeta in all of the Johnny Weismuller-era Tarzan movies from the 1930s was turning 74 years old, and not only that, the article stated that he was the world’s oldest living non-human primate as verified by the Guinness Book of World Records. I found it incredible that he was still alive… he must have outlived everyone else involved with those movies, cast and crew. Not to mention the fact that he had lived more than 20 years longer than the average lifespan of a chimpanzee. This was one fantastic specimen of simianity and story-wise it was right down my alley. I immediately put a call through to Palm Springs, CA where Cheeta was living out his retirement years with Dan Westfall, the nephew of Tony Gentry, Cheeta’s original owner and trainer. I told him I wanted to fly to California as soon as possible to do a portrait of Cheeta, which he agreed to, and two days later I was pulling my rental car up in front of the modest ranch-style house in a nondescript neighborhood on the edge of Palm Springs that Cheeta called home.

Westfall greeted me at the front door and gave me a tour of the house. First I was shown the refrigerator that Cheeta would open to help himself to ice cream and soft drinks, both of which he enjoyed. I was also led to the couch in the den where Cheeta would sit and smoke cigars, maybe even have a beer, while staring at his face on the the TV screen where the old Tarzan movies were on frequent replay for just this purpose. I was then taken into another room and shown numerous paintings that Cheeta had done, all abstract, non-representational, a style in which he seemed fluent. I kind of liked them. He would sign the paintings, fans would buy them, and the proceeds would go towards his own care and upkeep - in a way he was selling pictures to pay his rent and it was then that I felt on equal footing with the monkey.

Once I had my camera set up, Cheeta was brought out of the large enclosure in the backyard where he spends a lot of his time. He looked his age as he loped towards me, moving slow but purposefully with grey streaks through his hair and a seen-it-all, rheumy-eyed countenance that I’d observed on more than one retired showbiz face, yet I was told not to be fooled by his seemingly resigned behavior - he still had the strength of 5 men and in the rare event that he made a move for me I was told to dive into the pool behind me. Cheeta hates the water. This was a few years before Charla Nash had her hands and face removed by Travis, the berserk Connecticut chimpanzee, otherwise I may have kept one foot in the pool.

The shoot went fine, I got what I wanted, I flew back home. The following year there was mention in the papers again about his birthday, same angle - Tarzan, cigars, Oldest…

Then, in December of 2008, an article appeared in the Washington Post by a man named R.D. Rosen. Rosen had been retained by Westfall to write the “authorized biography” of Cheeta. However, during his research for the book proposal that he and Westfall were going to present to publishers, Rosen started discovering some unsettling facts. For starters, there were many chimpanzees that portrayed Cheeta in those early Tarzan movies, sometimes different chimps within the same film even, each performing bits that they were especially suited for. There never was one Cheeta. But it got worse. After extensive research, Rosen discovered that “Cheeta” was only in his 40s and wasn’t even alive when the early Tarzan movies were made - he had, as it turned out, appeared in exactly none of them. Also, Westfall was Gentry’s distant cousin, not his nephew. It continued from there with the the entire story of Cheeta - when and where he came from, what he did, various lies and embellishments either purposely created or lazily perpetuated - all unraveling. A telling moment from Rosen’s article is when the famed primatologist Jane Goodall paid a visit to the legendary chimpanzee in 2008 and remarked to Westfall, “Why, he doesn’t look any older than 45.” Rosen’s detailed article debunking the Cheeta story is here and it’s worth reading.

I was understandably disappointed to find out this news. Not so much for the time and money spent to get the photo or even for the vague feeling that I was duped, but mostly because it was a good bar story, the one about Cheeta anyway, one that got better each time I retold it, not unlike Gentry’s, perhaps. But by now it had lapsed into a very short and dull telling of me flying across the country to photograph a nobody monkey.

Over time I started thinking more about “Cheeta”, this imposter ape upon who’s hairy back fame had been foisted, spending a life not of reaming out termite holes on a damp jungle floor but of cigar smoke, cold beer on poolside chaises, whiling away his well earned “retirement” in the Palm Springs sun when not crouched in his studio popping off another, I’m sure I can say this here, primitive abstract. And what must he have thought about being exposed to, for decades on end… there he is again, that naked ape in a loincloth… Johnny Weismuller’s face and Tarzanic caterwaul, replayed on the TV eternally… and on every publicity 8x10 that “Cheeta” would sign for fans. If I continue to pretend to be a part of this narrative, the cigars will keep coming… Most likely he didn’t know the difference… he’d lived this way so long he probably figured that opening the fridge and helping yourself to the strawberry ice cream is what every ape did. But I wonder if in the back of his mind he didn’t realize that he was getting away with a pretty good thing and just decided to sit back and stick to a simple mantra:

“I’m not saying a word.”

Johnny Wright and Kitty Wells - musicians - Nashville, TN

© Jim Herrington

Very sorry to hear that Kitty Wells died today. What a great woman and her husband Johnny Wright wasn’t a slouch either. Here’s my photo of them in late 2001 (he died last year).

I have a double-page spread in Film Comment Magazine, my photograph of Bette Davis’ snubbed out ciggy, on newsstands now…

The caption here explains how this tarred and nicotined artifact landed in my possession:   http://jimherrington.tumblr.com/post/19730701116/bette-davis-cigarette-late-1980s-upon-entering

Jimmy Sutton and JD McPherson - musicians - Chicago

©Jim Herrington

I saw my pals JD and Jimmy play again last night here in NYC… they were twice as good as the last time I saw them. Here’s a photo I took of them last year in Chicago, in the studio where they recorded Signs & Signifiers, JD’s amazing first album. That’s JD on the right, he writes them, sings them and plays guitar.  Jimmy on the left, he plays bass and sings some too. Both the album and their live shows of late are not to be missed.  A taste: North Side Gal

Me and Morgan in the current Esquire, on newsstands now…

At the beach today I noticed a ‘68 Oldsmobile Cutlass, almost the same year as my first car, a ‘71 Cutlass. I was walking around it, missing my ‘71, then, hello, I noticed my portrait of Merle Haggard peeking at me from the dashboard…