Photographer Bob Gruen’s images are among some of the most reproduced in rockdom: John Lennon, arms across his New York City t-shirt; Led Zeppelin posing in front of their private plane; a very cool Clash in an open-air ride, en route to their gig with the Who at Shea Stadium. And yet, Gruen says he never took those photos (nor any of the others in his gallery of thousands) with an eye on the iconic. “The New York City t-shirt picture was not planned at all,” he says. “None of them were planned.”

New Yorker Gruen never had any aspirations to make a career of rock photography. When he started in 1965, there was hardly any such thing. Taking pictures was a matter of survival for him. “I didn’t choose this as a business plan. We didn’t have those words back then,” he says. “It was more by default because I just couldn’t get up and do the nine-to-five job.”

As a young man without a plan, Gruen talked his way into the Newport Folk Festival of 1965, the first concert he attended with a camera. That it happens to have been the day Bob Dylan famously went electric was of no real consequence to him image-wise; he was really just there to hear the music. “I didn’t feel that special about it,” he says of the time. “I didn’t even have a place to exhibit the photo for almost 10 years.”

For the next 40-some years, Gruen would shoot them all, from James Brown to Boy George and Jesse Malin. If he has a specialty, aside from the spontaneous shot, it’s that he doesn’t stand on ceremony. He’s famously photographed the sublime (David Bowie, Bob Marley, the Rolling Stones) as well as the preposterous (KISS, the Bay City Rollers) without prejudice. His approach could be judged as everything from fanatical to opportunistic, but as Gruen freely admits, it’s a bit of both. The fact is that he’s passionate about rock in all its forms, but his irreverent reverence for it tends to fix on rock’s humor and heart (he loves the New York Dolls and Green Day). Let’s just say that only a good-humored person could’ve worn his hair the way Gruen did at the dawn of punk: In a ‘fro that rivaled Billy Preston’s own.

And yet, it wasn’t hairstyles or rock styles or even photo technique that drove the talk when Crawdaddy! reached him at his New York studio, a space he shares with “thousands of photos of bands that nobody is ever going to hear about.” We got on to themes of innocence and experience and the old world in light of the new; Gruen had plenty to say on those subjects, since he’s just spent the year looking backward. Reaching the culmination of his accidental life’s work, this fall has seen the publication of a book of his New York Dolls photographs as well as the launching of gallery shows in LA, Mexico City, and Toronto. He also wrote the liner notes and supplied photographs for the newly released Live at Shea Stadium disc by the Clash, and his work is featured throughout The Clash, a magnificent limited edition, image-intensive book by the Clash that’s arrived just in time for the holidays. Gruen was personal friends with Clashman Joe Strummer, as well as famously friendly with the aforementioned Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono, for whom he went to work as personal photographer in 1971 until Lennon’s death in 1980. I asked Gruen how he came to be so intimate with two of rock’s ultimately most beloved and revered men, figures who might’ve been wary of his profession and presence.

“I’m a pretty easygoing guy, I guess,” he said, though by California standards, we’d probably say he’s still got an edge.

Crawdaddy!: I love your photo of the Clash in the car on their way to Shea. Can you talk a little about the genesis of ideas for shooting them when they came to New York on that trip and was anyone in the band driving the creative or style side of things?

Bob Gruen: Well, the concept of a shoot as it is known today… we didn’t really have that concept back then. When I took the picture of them in the car it was not any kind of set-up photo shoot. They were driving to Shea Stadium, I was driving next to them, Don Letts was in the back of my car filming them, I took a couple of pictures out the window while I was driving. So I wouldn’t really call that, um… a planned photo shoot. But that’s the way I work. I don’t make storyboards three months in advance. I generally try to capture what’s going on in real time, when it’s happening. 

Crawdaddy!: And that can be said for all of your most so-called iconic work?

Gruen: They were all pretty spontaneous. Led Zeppelin in front of the airplane, someone said, “Get a picture of us on the plane before we get on it.” It was an afterthought, as we were getting on it. It wasn’t planned at all. The picture of John Lennon in the New York City t-shirt was an afterthought after we’d taken pictures on his rooftop for an album cover photo. And then we started to take a few more photos and I asked him if he had the shirt and he put it on and we decided to take a few more pictures. We weren’t there more than an hour, including the album cover picture.

Crawdaddy!: Did Newport ‘65 leave an impression on you, in that you caught a wild, historical moment with your camera and that you could conceivably do that again and again?

Gruen: At the time, no one knew it was a historical moment so I didn’t have the thought then. I didn’t have a place to sell the photo and I wasn’t working for anybody.

Crawdaddy!: Though shortly after people were buzzing about the moment, and you’d captured it.

Gruen: I didn’t feel special about it. There were a couple of photographers who were actually already working—Jim Marshall and Dave Gahr were there. I didn’t have any outlet. I didn’t know anyone at any magazine. Certainly there was no internet or any other kind of thing. If you weren’t in a magazine you weren’t in the media… there was a buzz about it, but the buzz was among an extremely small minority of the few people interested in folk music, know what I mean?