Sparkling Apple Outtakes Part 5 — Our first photo shoot!

It’s 1972, and agents, bookers and potential managers are all anxious for us to come up with 8×10’s of the band , widely known as promo pictures. (As Rodney Dangerfield once said, “If I had an 8×10, I wouldn’t need to be in show business!”) After researching rock group album covers, we scouted locations for a suitable photoshoot. “Let’s get us up in a tree; let’s get us up against a brick wall; let’s get us out in a field,” were among the suggestions, striving ever-so-carefully to walk the fine line between the Beatles’ album covers and something so embarrassingly kitschy that even Ed Wood would approve.

Accompanied by our old friend, photographer Jerry Murakami, we set off to an area near Art’s home. Back in the early 70s, he lived in an old house on River Road in Delta, so in our infinite wisdom, we chose the construction site next door as our shooting location. We donned the same clothes we would normally wear onstage, and Jerry was instructed to “shoot pictures that look they belong on an album jacket”! These are a few of the resulting photos (the rest can be found here), and as you can see, the shots were obviously taken on the shore of the Fraser River in Delta.

© Sparkling Apple 1972 — All photos by Jerry Murakami. (Interesting story about Jerry: he later became such a proficient photographer that he opened up his own photo studio/camera shop known as “Photo Shop”! He sold the business long before Adobe thought that this might be a cool name for photo-editing software!)

Back when we was lads! Rocky Rockamoto (Gord Higo), Captain Maniac (Colin Hartridge) and Art the Fart the Heavy Metal Kid (Art Kyllonen).

Sparkling Apple 1972 — Photo by Jerry Murakami

Sparkling Apple 1972 — Photo by Jerry Murakami

The above shot is historic in that the house behind us was where Art lived with his wife & kids, 5 years after the photo was taken! I distinctly remember the log bridge over the ditch, which was the scene of many a motor vehicle accident. One night, after consuming one or two adult beverages, Art & our old buddy Dennis failed to negotiate a turn (possibly the same one in the third photo from the top of the page), and ended up in a ditch which was the depth of the Mariana Trench. As in our story of driving the Coquihalla Highway in a snowstorm, Art and Dennis just sat in the car (now almost submerged in a muddy swamp), laughing their fool heads off!

“Sittin on the dock of the bay…” As we imagined ourselves as some sort of tourism boosters, we needed a shot of us on a wharf with the Mighty (or is that Muddy) Fraser River in the background. We were all Marx Brothers fans, so Gord & I did a Chico and Harpo pose!

Sparkling Apple used this promo shot in 1973 — until the next, more suitable and up-to-date photo could be found!

Here’s the photo we finally chose, featuring Art doing his “bunny ears” routine, and Gord & I trying our best to look like Foghat. We deemed the real background to be too boring, so we substituted a brick wall (interesting in the fact that my very first band in 1966 was called The Brick Walls). Time flies when you’re having fun — fruit flies like a banana!