Murray Bowles Photobook Showcases The Tender Hooligans Of Bay Area Punk
“I feel like Murray created the legend of the East Bay,” says Berkeley-raised punk and editor Anna Brown. “I’ve been wanting to make this book since I was about 15 years old.”
Brown is speaking of Murray Bowles, a legendary photographer whose images of Bay Area punks — including many pictures taken in San Francisco and beyond — are being culled and published for the first time. “Hail Murray! The Punk Photography of Murray Bowles, 1982-1995” features hundreds of images of now-famous bands and locally beloved but never big-time groups screaming, moshing, laughing and drinking inside the influential all-ages venue 924 Gilman, at Mabuhay Gardens and Tool & Die, and on Sproul Plaza.
Operation Ivy’s pioneering ska-punk exuberance is on display, as are early shots of Green Day — among them a 20-year-old Billie Joe Armstrong playing guitar midair at Gilman and an earlier show in Pinole where teenage Armstong and bassist Mike Dirnt are both blond (one sports a big lipstick kiss on his cheek, the other a smattering of acne). Elsewhere, Crimpshrine, the Dead Kennedys, Jawbreaker, AFI, MDC, Special Forces, Gwar and Soundgarden are photographed among throngs of young punks — each black-and-white image a reminder of the vibrant, visceral and spirited Bay Area scene. Bowles often found himself in the center of it, his camera aloft.
“There were some people that were sort of treating punk like an anthropologist, and he was never like that. He was just one of us, and he always had his camera,” says Brown, who met Bowles in the late 1980s at Gilman when she was a teen and developed a lifelong friendship with the elder photographer. “He photographed my whole life and all my friends’ lives. He had this way of seeing us that was very tender and sweet.”
“Documentary photographers pass fast through the scenes they’re known for,” says Aaron Cometbus, publisher of Cometbus fanzine and a member of Pinhead Gunpowder. “But Murray stuck around. It wasn’t just a single period of the Bay Area punk scene he captured but countless classic eras and clubs and bands, stretching over decades.”
Bowles died in 2019 at age 68, leaving a massive archive of tens of thousands of images — four decades’ worth of work — which have never been collected or “formally” shown (except one zine in 1986 and a 2001 DIY gallery show). Yet generations of punks have seen his pictures; they were used as album covers and press shots and were regularly sold for less than a buck at shows. A local rite of passage was to be shot by Murray, and he’d often gift that image to his subject. Murray himself was so integral to the scene that he’s featured on the cover of Green Day’s seminal “Dookie.” The Grammy-winning group paid to print “Hail Murray!” Brown says.
“Murray was a mainstay in the ’80s punk scene well before and well after the Gilman era he’s probably most famous for documenting,” says Op Ivy vocalist Jesse Michaels. “His unique photo style of thrusting his arm up out of the middle of the pit and pointing and shooting, without looking through the viewfinder, was legendary. In a just world, it would have received more recognition.”
Bowles’ work was further disseminated in the Bay Area and beyond through the San Francisco zine Maximum Rocknroll. “So many people saw his pictures in Maximum Rocknroll and packed up their vans and moved out here, which just made the scene grow and become richer and more diverse,” Brown recalls, adding that Maximum Rocknroll’s Paul Curran (who was also one of Crimpshrine’s bassists) did the book’s layout.
“Hail Murray!” is truly a labor of love, one Brown and Bowles worked on together until his death. “My dream was always that we put out this book, and Murray would spend his golden years promoting the book and having shows and doing all these things that he never really did before,” she says. “When he was gone, I kind of started from scratch and just started scanning negatives.”
The result is what Brown calls a monograph — not a book about Gilman or Lookout Records (either of which could’ve easily been made from Bowles’ archive) but a collection of distinct and idiosyncratic images. Brown selected photos with historical significance, shots of bands people loved and others she simply found moving. One such image shows a couple of friends eating cake.
“It’s clearly somebody’s 16th birthday, and they’re celebrating it in the back room at Gilman, and you can see all these old Neurosis and Christ On Parade shirts on the wall,” Brown reflects. “Those moments kind of juxtaposed with like The Feederz or whatever is just a reminder that there were these two sides to it. We were very young, and there was a lot of tenderness, but there was also some crazy transgressive art happening too.”
“I rank Murray with legendary street photographers like Garry Winogrand,” adds Cometbus. “It wasn’t just bands he was taking pictures of — it was the whole crowd. Each shot had a crazy array of emotions and expressions all happening in one frame.”
Bowles’ images are sacred to a generation of Bay Area music fans, which makes the fact that his family and co-workers knew little of his extracurricular passions somewhat astounding. Bowles’ own story is unpacked in essays by Brown and Cometbus, as well as an interview with the photographer himself in Maximum Rocknroll.
“He was a really interesting guy on a lot of levels; he’s kind of a genius,” Brown says. When he wasn’t shooting punk shows, Bowles was a “superprogrammer” who worked at the cutting edge of Silicon Valley and coded Dell’s early operating systems. He was also a classical musician and played viola for the Peninsula Symphony for 26 years. Brown says Bowles was extremely sentimental and held on to birthday cards and letters from his scene friends for decades.
If Murray Bowles had distinct and separate worlds, it’s hard to imagine that he put as much passion into those other avenues as he did punk photography. After culling his archive for years, Brown notes that she can see her friend’s evolution from “standoffish and kind of shy to being an absolute insider.”
“The most important thing about Murray to us though was his personality and attitude. He just truly, truly loved all aspects of punk,” Michaels says. “He was always at the party, always had a beer and a smoke for you, and he was always just a nice easy-going guy.”
While Op Ivy was among Bowles’ favorite subjects — Brown estimates he had hundreds of images of the influential group — over time, his images got more personal and featured fewer bands. “Everyone was so comfortable with Murray that he got incredibly intimate pictures,” she recalls. “He just learned how to capture people in moments of release and people in moments of joy.”
Bowles didn’t take bad or mean-spirited images, nor did he focus on fights or the darker side of the scene. It just wasn’t in his nature or interest.
“Through another person’s eye, it could have been real dark,” Brown says. “There was a lot of heavy stuff going on too, but I think everyone comes to punk and finds this second family and finds this welcoming community where they feel free, no matter what kind of terrible stuff was going on at home or in their other lives. I think that was the most interesting part to him: this absolute uninhibited freedom and joy, which is just such a nice way to think about what we were all doing there together.”
Without Murray Bowles, “literally thousands of moments would have been lost to total obscurity,” Michaels adds. Still, the musician is “glad there is still an element of obscurity to the larger body of his work because that makes it still our little corner of the world — which is exactly the spirit he managed to capture.”
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