If his life between 1978 and 1983 was indeed a five- or six-year party—shooting punk rock gigs five to seven nights a week with time off for sleep—then you’d forgive Edward Colver for forgetting a few details here and there.

“I swear to God—I’m not exaggerating—I went out at least five nights a week for five years, and I saw at least one band a night. That’s gotta be a thousand shows,” Colver says convincingly over birthday cake (he turned 57 two weeks ago). He has just spent the day preparing a retrospective of his photographs of the LA punk scene as it fermented into hardcore—plus examples of his sculpture and assemblages—for the opening Saturday at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana.

“It was fun. I had a beer bottle glance off my head at the Cuckoo’s Nest. I didn’t know what it was,” he says laconically, leaning back in the Arts & Crafts dining chair that he’s probably owned since before he could legally drink. “Could have killed me. Just glanced off.” He’s forgiven for the beer bottles—and caption information—that missed, because those that made an impact on his cranium, which he captured on Tri-X film with a cheap 35-millimeter camera body, a manual focus 50-millimeter lens and a little flash, are some of the classic images of the California punk scene.

These are some—many—most—of the bands that mattered, that came out of almost nowhere to kill the hazy, druggy, long-haired, 10-minute, raise-your-lighter jams that had become music industry standard: X, the Germs, Gun Club, 45 Grave, the Adz, D.I., Black Flag, D.O.A., Wall of Voodoo, Tex & the Horseheads, Christian Death, Social Distortion, T.S.O.L., Dead Kennedys and Flipper. Even haters give Colver his due.

“I hate hardcore music. Never liked hardcore. Didn’t like punk as it turned into hardcore,” says Sympathy for the Record Industry owner Long Gone John, who reprinted classic Colver images in his 1997 Gun Club compilation Early Warning. “But I think he’s an amazing photographer.” Some of the proof is on our cover this week, in the form of a man-child who has to be 18—he could be 15—but who, gleefully suspended in mid-air, that one time the crowd heaved him high enough to enjoy it, is suddenly 9 again. Colver doesn’t remember him, like he doesn’t recall any of the details of his luminous photo of John Lydon from when P.I.L. played the Olympic Auditorium in 1981. Much better, for some reason, to ask him about the Brian Setzer photograph—taken when the guitarist still cut all the sleeves off his shirts.

“That’s [the Stray Cats] onstage at the Roxy, the first time he was in LA. I wasn’t really into them, but they were really good,” Colver says, lapsing into an infrequent moment of analysis. “I talked to him about it and he goes ‘I didn’t give a fuck back then.’ Because he wasn’t working really hard at it then. He works at it now.” So does everyone—Henry Rollins, for instance—but Colver was up in front for Rollins’ first gig with Black Flag, when no one knew if it would work.

“I went to the Cuckoo’s Nest [in Costa Mesa] a lot,” says Colver, who confides at one point that he hates Orange County and once got lost in the fog on Highway 39 in Brea coming back from that very club. “That’s where Black Flag’s first show was with Henry Rollins. He knew the lyrics already.” Colver loved Black Flag, poster boys for LA punk’s transmogrification into hardcore, and so he shot them a lot—and Raymond Pettibon, the man who created the famous Black Flag logo.

“I love Pettibon,” Colver says. “His four-bar symbol has to be one of the best fucking logos of all time. It’s right up there.”

We’ll take his word for it; he lacks the self-promotion skill, but Colver’s aesthetic sense is legendary. The son of the forest ranger for whom Colver Peak in the Angeles National Forest is named, Colver was nearly 30 when he first read about the city’s burgeoning punk scene and began photographing it, but he made up for lost time when he got there. A lifelong sketch artist and painter, Colver had honed his eye for composition while still a teen, buying up Arts & Crafts furniture—Frank Lloyd Wright candlesticks; Gustav Stickley chairs, tables, beds—before even the guys at Princeton realized the stuff was classic and tipped off everyone else in 1974.

“He has all these sides to him,” says Grand Central’s Andrea Harris, who is curating the show—“Blight at the End of the Funnel”—and shepherding its companion 200-page exhibition book into print. “But he’s still the same person, like that crazy, wild guy and the conservative collector. I think he’s got this weird mix.”

The show, a blending of his photos and sculptures—politically-charged assemblages of found and purchased objects—could make that apparent, once people realize that this is who Edward Colver is. He’s not one to tell them.

“A lot of people are just tooting their own horns a little too much,” says Colver, who went on to shoot for I.R.S. Records and now makes his living photographing recording studios in loving, large, 4-inch-by-5-inch format. “I never did that. I never used [photography] to chase women either, like ‘Hey baby, let me take your picture.’ It’s just too lame.” His work speaks for itself, of hot nights trolling a fetid city that’s too in love with itself to take crap from anyone born in the ’50s: grainy frames of cop cars wherever the punks went—Gestapo spank.

“Most of those riots were started by the cops,” Colver says. “They’d show up and park, and somebody would throw something at them. Kind of rebel youth kind of stuff.” There was a lot of that. When Colver photographed the Red Hot Chili Peppers the first time—for their first record, before guitarist Hillel Slovak overdosed—he shot them in their own, er, clothing: fake, acrylic dreadlocks, oversized aviator glasses and a fuzzy reindeer ball cap. No shirts or pants visible.

“And I’ve got some funny ones of them up in a garage,” Colver remembers, “Cliff wearing a green Marines flight suit and a gas mask, going like this,” and he does the classic Egyptian-walking pose. After Slovak died, Colver shot the band again, and printed it in black-and-white—upside-down, so they seemed to be flying when they were really just bending over backwards.

“They’re just standing on the ground,” he says. “I sent a print of it to Rolling Stone with a big sign on it saying ‘This side down.’ And they printed it with their feet on the ground. And it’s like, ‘What’s that?’ It doesn’t do anything that way.” For a man who learned how to take good pictures in the available light, and by holding the camera over his head (Colver is a skinny 6-footer), he loves studio tricks. It’s ironic, for he is not one to overthink what he saw in the clubs, and much of what he captured on film in those six years was luck. Take the live shot you know you’ve seen of Circle Jerks bassist Roger Rogerson’s motorcycle boot in mid-air, at a 1981 Whiskey A Go Go show.

“I shot that without looking through the camera, just set it on the ground and shot up. Just got it by luck,” Colver says, sighing; like so many others he’s shot, Rogerson died: in 1996, from a drug overdose. And the original LA punk scene, once reviled, now has an entirely new audience of second- or third-generation fans—like Harris’ son Alex, who is 6 and loves Rancid.

“I’m amazed how many people are into it now,” Colver says. “I think it’s great.” And that’s about it. We’ll finish with Cheech & Chong, whom he shot, probably early ’80s, for BAM magazine: “They were dicks!” he says. And he didn’t get paid for the shoot for 11 and a half months. The good old days.



“BLIGHT AT THE END OF THE FUNNEL: EDWARD COLVER” AT GRAND CENTRAL ART CENTER’s MAIN GALLERY AND PROJECT ROOM, 125 N. BROADWAY, SANTA ANA, (714) 567-7233; WWW.GRANDCENTRALARTCENTER.COM. OPEN TUES.-THURS. & SUN., 11 A.M.-4 P.M.; FRI.-SAT., 11 A.M.-9 P.M. CLOSED MONDAY. THROUGH AUG. 20. ADMISSION IS FREE.

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