In 1966 Phil asked Dennis to take photos of Ike & Tina Turner on the Hoppers’ porch holding one of Dennis’ sculptures. Phil subsequently asked Hopper to snap away at the Tina Turner “River Deep, Mountain High” recording session at Gold Star recording studio. Jack Nitzsche was the arranger on the date. Brian Wilson, Mick Jagger and Rodney Bingenheimer were in attendance. One of Hopper’s pictures appear on the River Deep, Mountain High Ike & Tina Turner LP cover.
“My father photographed our house for Vogue in 1965,” recollected Marin in a 2002 phone interview we conducted. “The editor, Diana Vreeland later said, ‘Dennis, you love music, photograph the bands you love.’”
“It’s all about his composition,” Marin stressed. “It’s about Dennis understanding the natural composition of what was going on around him. The way he frames his photographs. The book is about a period of time and him recording it. It’s an age of innocence. People, love-ins, hanging out at the beach, tennis parties, friends collaborating on projects.
“The most interesting thing about my father is that he is an actor. So, on many levels, actors can be very self-involved, but he is someone dedicated to his art and so many other influences and so able to wear the other hats so very easily and drive himself from something and really see the beauty of what is going on around him and divorce himself from it, yet be able to capture it. And he’s doing something he’s always been able to do.”
Dennis Hopper was born in Dodge City, Kansas, and after WWII, he settled with his family in San Diego. After studying with Lee Strasberg in New York, he went on to a career as a film director and actor for television, stage and film. From his earliest black and white episodic television roles in Naked City, The Twilight Zone and Surfside 6, to the movies Rebel Without A Cause, Giant, Night Tide, The Trip, Tracks, Hoosiers, The American Friend, Apocalypse Now, Rumble Fish, Blue Velvet, and directing credits, including Easy Rider, The Last Movie, Out Of The Blue, Colors and The Hot Spot.
Underneath all the cult hero, movie star, employed and unemployed actor, head, rehab, and renaissance man descriptions, Hopper is a photographer, painter, with a legendary art collection, and he has had numerous gallery exhibitions of his work mounted in the United States, Europe and Japan. From The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. A major retrospective of his work opened last February at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and is currently up at the MAK in Vienna.
There’s a wonderful documentary Dennis Hopper: Create (or Die) directed by Henning Lohner and Ariane Riecker made for ARTE TV, the European culture channel. https.//www.youtube.com > watch
In 1986, Hopper authored a photography book, Out Of The Sixties published by Twelvetrees Press, and during 2018 Taschen Books published Dennis Hopper: 1961-1967 Photos in a limited edition.
In the pages of 1712 North Crescent Heights Photographs 1962-1968, there is a stunning portrait of actress Diane Baker, born in Hollywood and a graduate of Van Nuys High School. The alma mater of Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, Natalie Wood, Robert Redford, Bob Waterfield and Don Drysdale.
Diane and I chatted in 2010 at the 50th anniversary screening of The Diary of Anne Frank. She portrayed Margot Frank. Baker now teaches at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Diane smiled sweetly when I praised her appearance in the final episode of The Fugitive, a seismic event at Fairfax High School in 1967. The star of the television series David Janssen was, like myself, a graduate of Fairfax. “That’s where my parents graduated from,” beamed Baker. She and I have back-to-back February birthdays. I told her I had Dennis’ book, and mentioned my pal, actor/poet Harry E. Northup, who was cast with her in The Silence of the Lambs.
In an interview with Stern Magazine in Germany 20 years ago, when asked if he remembered the origins of every one of the photos in the 1962-1968 period and the circumstances. “Yes. Unfortunately. When my daughter Marin came to me with the prints that she had just dug out. I didn’t want to look at a lot of them for that reason. I didn’t want to see my young wife again, not even my little daughter. I didn’t want to remember the lovely summers, the beach life and the parties. I would have preferred to go on with the memory of our terrible divorce in my head. Marin has made a wonderful book out of the photos; it’s become a kind of ode to the family. And I had cut all of that out of my life a long time ago,” reflects Hopper, now living in Venice Beach, California. “First, I was a Bohemian, then a beatnik, after that a hippie, later a punk, and finally a yuppie. I did everything.
“It was the time for protesting, the time of ‘Freedom of Sex,’ and ‘Freedom of Speech’ movement; there was a lot of LSD and even more marijuana. And there were ‘Love-ins,’ 25,000 people gathered in the Golden State Park in San Francisco, smoking joints, swallowing acid and screwing. I considered myself to be very clever and cool then. But in reality, we were very naive. We were like guinea pigs: Oh, a new drug! I’ll have to try that out straight away.”
There are some fascinating musical pictures in Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles. Dennis’ Vogue photo assignment on the Byrds in 1965, Jefferson Airplane in 1967, Dennis at the Monterey International Pop Festival with Nico and Brian Jones, and a March 1966 photo of Brian that Dennis snapped at RCA Studios during an Andrew Loog Oldham-produced session of the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath.
On May 9, 1974 in The Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden in New York City, Hopper did a performance with Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Arlo Guthrie, Melvin Van Peeples, Pete Seeger, Mike Love, Dennis Wilson, Dave Van Ronk, and the Living Theater promoting s Chilean solidarity event that Ochs organized when Victor Jara, a Chilean communist singer was kidnapped and executed by the Pinochet regime after a coup. Dennis gave a recitation, and read two pieces: “Allende’s Last Speech” and “Pablo Neruda Poem.”
I can’t think of a year from 1966 to 2000 where I hadn’t seen Dennis Hopper around Hollywood or the Los Angeles area. First introduction was in 1967 at Gower Gulch at the Columbia Studios on the set of The Monkees’ television series and later when their movie Head was being lensed. Dennis was always dashing around town, at art gallery openings, and a variety of Restaurant Row restaurants on La Cienega Blvd. my parents would take us to. In the seventies I would bump into Hopper on Hollywood Blvd. at the Musso & Frank Grill.
In 1978, I was working at MCA Records as West Coast Director of A&R. I initiated a meeting with director Wim Wenders about releasing the soundtrack to An American Friend, one of Hopper’s best acting jobs. The deal didn’t happen. It had something to do with me even suggesting purchasing a German-birthed product to the U.S. conglomerate, but I had marvelous chats with Wenders and Hopper. In the process I learned Dennis had grown up in the San Diego area, Lemon Grove, and acted at the Old Globe and La Jolla Playhouse. I had graduated San Diego State University. I later went to the Zopetrope Studios lot and saw a very early cast and crew screening of Apocalypse Now without the title credits.
In the early eighties I was invited to the premiere of Out Of The Blue, a movie Roger Corman’s New World was distributing that Dennis directed and starred in, with Raymond Burr and Linda Manz. A woman I was in love with worked for Roger and she invited me as her guest to their party on the 20th Century Studios lot. We had a terrific hang with Dennis, Russ Tamblyn, his wife Bonnie and record producer Denny Bruce.
The Doors’ Ray Manzarek and I spoke with Dennis at a Los Angeles Clippers basketball game at the L.A. Sports Arena in the nineties. Dennis had met Jim Morrison when he portrayed Billy the Kid in the “controversial” L.A. production of poet Michael McClure’s play, The Beard in 1968 at the Coronet Theater on La Cienega.
Earlier this century, my brother Kenneth and I wrote Big Shots: Rock Legends and Hollywood Icons on music photographer Guy Webster, a neighbor of Hopper in Venice in their bohemian enclave. I was seated near Dennis, often with his pal Jack Nicholson, at a few 1980-2000 Bob Dylan concerts. Jack and Dennis first caught Dylan in 1963 at the Hollywood Bowl with Joan Baez. Dennis was present at Donovan’s two 1968 concerts at the Hollywood Bowl.
Dennis Hopper always had a relationship with music and rock ‘n’ roll. He hosted the 1987 TV special Rolling Stone Magazine: 20 Years of Rock ‘n’ Roll, produced and directed by Malcolm Leo.
On April 6, 2006, Hopper joined the Gorillaz in New York on stage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem for a reading and collaboration on “Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head.” When Dennis passed in 2010, the Gorillaz at the Glastonbury Festival in the UK did a tribute to him with his narration and Easy Rider screen visuals. During 2020, the Waterboys released Good Luck, Seeker. There’s a tribute to Hopper, an ode to his pop culture legacy, “Dennis Hopper.”
Beginning in 1959 and well into 1963, Dennis was almost a nightly fixture at Ben Shapiro’s Renaissance club on Sunset Blvd. that regularly booked jazz acts. He dug the Paul Horn band with Manny Klein and Emil Richards. Lord Buckley, Lenny Bruce, Jimi Witherspoon, Sal Mineo, Kim Novack, James Coburn frequented the venue. To differentiate it from the other beatnik hang outs, Shapiro called it “a coffee house for aware bohemians.”
“It had an eclectic booking policy: Lord Buckley, Bessie Griffin’s Gospel Pearls, Dave Van Ronk, and lots of jazz,” explains music journalist Kirk Silsbee. “It was where Don Cherry met Miles Davis, where Art Blakey cut the Three Blind Mice album, and where Hugh Romney cut a live comedy album-long before he was known as Wavy Gravy-when he opened for Thelonious Monk.”
The Renaissance became the production office in 1967 of the Monterey International Pop Festival which Dennis attended. This century the location became a House of Blues.
It was at the Renaissance where Hopper first encountered Miles Davis. Hopper in 1990 would direct the neo-noir movie The Hot Spot. Jack Nitzsche did the musical score. Miles Davis is on the soundtrack along with John Lee Hooker, Earl Palmer, Tim Drummond and Taj Mahal. The sessions were done at Ocean Way recording studio on Sunset Blvd.
“I said to Dennis, “Let’s go with the blues. John Lee Hooker, Taj Mahal,” underscored Nitzsche in a 2000 interview we did. And Dennis replied, ‘and Miles Davis.’ And I said, ‘you motherfucker! It had to be you that said it. I was going to say it. I wanted to be the one to come up with that.’ And Dennis said, ‘don’t worry, you did.’ (laughs). So, I made the calls. I got Miles. The deal got made for the soundtrack, and Dennis said, ‘by the way, you have to call Miles tonight and talk to him about this score.’ The session was fine.”
In A Perfect Haze: The Illustrated History of the Monterey International Pop Festival, a 2012 book written and assembled by my brother Kenneth and I, Dennis Hopper reminisced about his 1967 epic weekend in Monterey.
"I went up there in a Land Rover with my sleeping bag and slept there, and when I woke up, there were flowers everywhere. Everybody seemed to have them. It was true Flower Power. The vibe was so beautiful. The music was fantastic. To me, that was the purest, most beautiful moment of the whole '60s trip. It seemed like everything had come to that moment. And if that could have continued, it really would have been Camelot. Monterey was a giant musical Love-In that galvanized the crowd of students, hippies, straights, soldiers from Fort Ord, the rock and the straight press, music industry execs, police, vegetarians, and weirdos like me. It was a perfect experience. To many of us it was the first time and the last. I can't think of anything as special as that moment in my life. It was a tremendous up on every level. We weren't laying numbers on people. we weren't making fun of the cops, either, who were amazed by it. It was a magical, pure moment in time. One year later, in 1968, I made a movie called Easy Rider that was a reflection of what I'd felt at Monterey."
Hopper’s own record collection played a significant part in the creation of the soundtrack to Easy Rider.
In my 2006 book, Hollywood Shack Job: Rock Music in Film and On Your Screen, songwriter, music publisher and record producer Kim Fowley, who was an acquaintance of Dennis, heralded the audio retail item.
“The real big moment for the music and soundtrack can be tied to 1968, when Easy Rider used individual singles and songs as elements of the soundtrack, along with album tracks like Jimi Hendrix ‘If 6 Were 9,’ and something by the Electric Prunes. That soundtrack was culled from the record collection of both Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. Hopper, who directed the movie, spent a lot of time in the editing room and ended up using a lot of the songs that were ‘temp tracks,’ like the Byrds’ ‘Wasn’t Born to Follow,’ and the Hendrix song. I know Fonda screened the movie for John Kay of Steppenwolf, who then gave him the approval for ‘Born to Be Wild.’
“The Easy Rider songs were sitting there, and a year later the movie came out. I sang with the Fraternity of Man, who had ‘Don’t Bogart that Joint’ on the soundtrack. Easy Rider was the first time that the record business and the film industry both discovered that they had a new outlet for old product. Everyone forgets a lot of the songs on the Easy Rider soundtrack had been previously issued. None of it was really introduced in the movie, except the title song that Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn co-wrote, which Dylan offered McGuinn after a rough cut screening, with some handwritten lyrics that became the title track.”
With the publication of Mark Rozzo’s Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, I’m reminded of a gathering in 2007 when I was invited to a party for progressive magazine The Nation at the home of author and political pundit Arianna Huffington in Brentwood.
After my chat with Gore Vidal about Oscar Levant, they were once neighbors in Southern California, Dennis entered the living room. I said to him that I had just been at rapper/actor Ice-T’s house for an interview. He wrote and recorded the title song to Colors, a movie Hopper directed.
We touched on David Bowie. In 1996, Dennis and David starred in director Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat. In 1981 Bowie had written a note to Hopper about the lack of good movie scripts he was receiving and expressed an interest in hopefully working with Dennis in the future.
Dennis and I discussed The Hot Spot movie. He was delighted that I knew Jack Nitzsche and profiled him in my book, This Is Rebel Music. Hopper grinned when I told him I was waiting for a DVD of Night Tide, the Curtis Harrington helmed 1961 movie which was his first starring role. Harrington and Hopper are heard in the commentary on the Night Tide laserdisc. We reminisced about the food at the MCA/Universal Studios commissary and studio head Lew Wasserman. Over the decades, Hopper had been on the Universal lot on many occasions. During 1978-1979 I worked for MCA, now Universal Music Enterprises.
Dennis introduced me to Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher, part-owner and the editor of The Nation. Her grandfather was Jules C. Stein, the founder of MCA (Music Corporation of America). Lew Wasserman had begun his career as a booking agent for Stein. Dennis was a close and loyal friend of Katrina’s mother, author Jean Stein.
There is a photograph of producer Phil and singer Ronnie Spector in Gold Star recording studio in Hollywood, formerly located on Santa Monica Blvd. and Vine St. in Hollywood displayed in 1712 North Crescent Heights Photographs 1962-1968.
“Phil and Dennis were such good friends and inspired each other,” Marin reinforced in our conversation. “The home also provided a great backdrop for an Ike & Tina Turner photo session. The residence had a theatrical and dramatic nature to it plus it had natural lighting. As my father said, ‘I didn’t have a light meter. I used my hands to see how the light hit my hands.’ The Phil and Ronnie photo was done in a recording studio and has good definition.”
The presence of Phil Spector in Marin’s 2002 book is telling. Phil receives a special thanks in the tome. He had a cameo in Easy Rider, and almost financed Hopper’s The Last Movie.
In 1966 Phil asked Dennis to take photos of Ike & Tina Turner on the Hoppers’ porch holding one of Dennis’ sculptures. Phil subsequently asked Hopper to snap away at the Tina Turner “River Deep, Mountain High” recording session at Gold Star. Nitzsche was the arranger on the date. Brian Wilson, Mick Jagger and Rodney Bingenheimer were in attendance.
Hopper and I talked about Phil at The Nation reception. I comically suggested “maybe you should go back to being a photographer if you’re not on the call sheet,” when I commented on his photo in the collage done for Spector’s River Deep, Mountain High Ike & Tina Turner LP cover.
Dennis laughed when I brought up a very popular local 1957 television program, Rocket to Stardom, which was on two TV channels, KHJ and KTTV, sponsored by salesman Bob Yeakel, who used to hawk Oldsmobile cars during the broadcast from his showroom. Yeakel’s wife Betty hosted the show which pre-dated American Idol by a half a century. I faintly remembered when Fairfax High School senior Phil Spector won a talent contest, and along with his future Teddy Bears’ member Marshall Leib, sang "In the Still of The Night." Dennis Hopper, Lenny Bruce, Jack Sheldon, Duane Eddy, Jim Keltner and the Wilson sisters, later known as the Honeys, also appeared on Rocket to Stardom.
Hopper happily confessed at one time he was going to run the video division of Spector’s production company. Dennis then grabbed my hand, and gave me heartwarming parting words, “Give my love to Phil.” I handed my keys to the valet at Huffington’s front door, and jumped in my car.
(Harvey Kubernik is the author of 20 books, including 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon and 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972. Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In 2021 they wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble.
Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters, featuring interviews with D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, Albert Maysles, Murray Lerner, Morgan Neville, David Leaf, Dick Clark, Curtis Hanson and Michael Lindsay-Hogg.
Kubernik’s writings are in several book anthologies, including, The Rolling Stone Book Of The Beats and Drinking With Bukowski. Harvey wrote the liner notes to the CD re-releases of Carole King’s Tapestry, The Essential Carole King, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Elvis Presley The ’68 Comeback Special, The Ramones’ End of the Century and Big Brother & the Holding Company Captured Live at The Monterey International Pop Festival.
In 2020, Harvey served as a consultant on the 2-part documentary Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time directed by Alison Ellwood that debuted on the M-G-M/EPIX cable television channel. During 2021, Kubernik was an on-screen interview subject and consultant for the rock & roll revival music documentary about the Toronto Canada 1969 festival at Varsity Stadium spotlighting the debut of the John Lennon and Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band and an appearance by the Doors. Klaus Voorman, Geddy Lee of Rush, Alice Cooper, Shep Gordon, Rodney Bingenheimer, John Brower, and Robby Krieger of the Doors were interviewed by director Ron Chapman. A summer 2022 theatrical release).
