EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY

My friend Nanette was one of the first serious music fans I ever met. She turned me on to Jackson Brown and Nils Lofgren and Rod Stewart. Not spandex pants Rod Stewart but post Jeff Beck, singing with the Faces Rod Stewart. She also had a major thing for Bruce Springsteen that did not translate for me although I thought he was a total babe. (Years later when he walked in on me taking at pee at a party that fact was confirmed, but I had no idea how short he was.)

I developed big, big love for Rod, as Nanette called him, when I would babysit for the people around the block who had the album referenced above and an extra large stash of marijuana that my friends and I would smoke as we listened to it over and over. Maggie May, Mandolin Wind, and his cover of Tim Hardin's Reason to Believe sung in an amazing soulfull voice that we just knew had the cutest british accent ever when he spoke.

We ignored the rumors involving gallons of semen and multitudes of cylindrical pant stuffing stories and pursued him relentlessly through the hills of Beverly. Yes, that's right. Nanette and I stalked Rod Stewart although back in those days it was still innocuously thought of as groupie love. Not that we were groupies because that would require a level of hotness that two freckle faced girls from the suburbs didn't have. This did not deter us because we really just wanted to see him. Like up close and personal.

Over the years we did see him although I don't think he saw us because we were always in the bushes with our cameras. I have lots of shots of blurs in the distance behind crisp, sharp pictures of emerald green leaves. We knew where he played soccer on Saturdays and we would pack a picnic and go hang out on the nearby lawn to watch the game in sidelong stares so that we wouldn't appear to be stalking.

In the early 90s when he was dating, I can't remember which blonde, I finally met the man. He was pushing 50 then, a fact that became very apparent as I moved drunkenly across the very posh bar at the top of our hotel in San Francisco. I'd had enough vodka to think that it would be a good idea to finally go and meet the man whom I'd adored throughout the years. The singer who sold out with Do Ya Think I'm Sexy in the 80s and broke my heart because I used to think he was really sexy, but he put on spandex pants and made a video, and it was more scary than sexy.

He was very kind and stopped to say hello as I went on and on and got really confused because he didn't look at all the way I thought he would. He had make up on for Christ's sake and fake blond hair and more hairspray than I've ever used. And even though I was clutching my camera because I'd thought that at last I'd get my picture and maybe even be in it, I didn't ask for one.

I'd rather keep the pictures in my mind from the Faces concert at Anaheim stadium where he rocked my world.

I'm posting pictures I do like at Flickr and you can check them out at http://flickr.com/photos/imontome/.