The PhotoFlashbacks Blog

Radio Free Phoenix celebrates its 4th year on the "air waves"... or rather, Internet waves!

To quote from their site:
"Radio Free Phoenix was created to provide the Phoenix area and the world with legitimate Free-Form Radio. Long lost to the FM Airwaves, this mix of music is alive and vibrant and on RadioFreePhoenix. You will not hear big-voiced pre-produced liners on this station, nor will you struggle through the repetitive madness that greets you at most commercial radio stations. Instead, you will hear Rock 'n' Roll with a heart and a conscience brought to you by those that understand the music and the connection it brings."

If you have never listened to the station (and assuming you like good Rock music), you really should give them a listen. I'm an old Bay Area guy and I have been exposed to free from radio formats (in the past at least) and it just does not appear to be happening on the FM band the way it once was.

The jocks at Radio Free Phoenix bring a lot of experience and an eclectic array of musical styles to their shows. Very refreshing!

PhotoFlashbacks is doing what we can to help the Radio Free Phoenix cause by donating 10% of the purchase price of our photos from customers who enter the code "RFP" on the PayPal "Review Your Payment" page at our checkout.

If you are interested, you may view the instruction HERE. Radio Free Phoenix will have more information & links regarding this service in the near future (Heck... we only thought of it this past weekend!).

Whether you buy one of our photos or not... if you enjoy fresh "non-corporate" Rock Radio... do check out the tunes at Radio Free Phoenix. We think you will be glad you did.

In the mean time...

Rock On!

Noel & Connie
PhotoFlashbacks

This story took place recently.

As I had not come to Arizona until 1972, I had never heard of The Beans. Doug had left notes with his photos implying he had photos of the band... but Connie did not remember what they looked like. So, there we were!

A while back I had stumbled upon a blog called KCAC Lives! I knew enough about Arizona music & broadcast history to recognize this site as a possible research resource. Also, I should mention another great resource, Radio Free Phoenix. Not only does this web station provide quality music, but it is also locked in to the audio history of Arizona. Some very good talent on the air.

I found an article on the blog named "The Valley's Tubes to be Inducted into the Arizona Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame-Share Your Local Tubes/Beans Stories" and it got me thinking.

The album cover the article was probably the first time I had seen a photo of the band and I thought one of them looked like a guy I had seen in the negatives of the Poco concert at the Arizona State Fairgrounds in December, 1969. I went through that roll of film and sure enough... the drummer, Bob Macintosh, looked like the blond long-hair on the album cover.

The next thing I did was put up a private viewing gallery of the photos we had that I thought might be The Beans. Then I went to the KCAC Lives! blog and invited the folks there to the take a look at the gallery and see if they could help us identify (or not) the photos.

Much to our joy, we received several confirmations that we did indeed have photos of Vince Welnick, Bill Spooner and Bob Macintosh of the original band. 3 out of 4! We have not found a photo of Rick Anderson as yet, but he may be in there somewhere.

So... as soon as we can get the Illinois Speed Press section up... we will start to work on a section for the Arizona band, The Beans.

Thanks to all who help us in our effort. There are just some things we could not do without your help!

Until next time...

Rock On!

Connie & Noel
PhotoFlashbacks

This is the story about how we identified the photos of Hamilton Streetcar.

We have a place on our site where we have listed all of the names of groups that we believe we have photos. This information is based on the notes that Doug left with the photos. You can view this listing here. One of the groups we believed we had photos of was Hamilton Streetcar.

Connie did not know a thing about them nor did I. On several occasions we tried to find something about them on the Web... but no photos of the players were available. One day in 2006 we receive an email from John Burge who identified himself as "Ian Hamilton" from the group Hamilton Streetcar. He had found us on the Web and saw that we claimed to have photos of his old group. We explained our situation and that our information (from Doug's notes) said that the group had played with The Doors and the Sunshine Company at the Phoenix Memorial Coliseum on 2/17/68. He confirmed that information.

We were pretty excited. We came up with a plan to put the photos up that were from that concert on a private viewing page so that he could identify his band. Of course, he agreed and the rest is, as they say, history!

Since then, another member of the group, Michael Georgiades, has been in touch with us and added some information to our gallery. We like to think that we have contributed a bit to Rock and Roll history with our efforts. As far as I know... we have the only live performance shots of Hamilton Streetcar on the Web. Pretty cool!

Next time I'll tell you about how we recently were able to identify photos of The Beans.

Until then...

Rock On!

Noel & Connie
PhotoFlashbacks

We started out with all of the 35mm negatives Doug had left his sister. He had a lot of notes on the envelopes that held the negatives... but not all the information.

Connie diligently placed each roll of negs into a proper protective sleeve and put all of Doug's information into a database.

Then we began the scanning process... every frame was scanned at 4000 ppi and burned to CDs. This started in 1993 and when we went back to check our scanned CD archive several years later, many of the CDs appeared to have damaged data (bummer)!

However, with the advances in the digital domain, as we have rescanned the negs, we have ended up with better scans... so it all does work out. Of course the emphasis here is WORK!

Meanwhile... the process of building the web site (which has gone through at least 3 major overhauls and many refinements) and image research began. A lot of the performers were easy for us to recognize and those headliners were the first to go up. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, The Doors, The Who, Donovan, Simon & Garfunkel, Iron Butterfly, Canned Heat, Blue Cheer, Blues Image, Jefferson Airplane, Lee Michaels, Delaney & Bonnie, The Rolling Stones, Blind Faith, Steppenwolf, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Chambers Brothers, Poco, Mothers of Invention and Quicksilver Messenger Service were easy. We had to research band members, discographies and such, but the identification of the act was easy enough.

In that process we were approached by Janis Joplin's brother. We were excited and we sent him regular prints of all the photos we had of his sister. Suffice it to say that nothing came of that contact. We were back into our little groove stumbling along on our own devices.

The Internet has obviously been a tremendous help to our research as well as the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll.

The first "obscure" band for us was Hamilton Streetcar. In my next post I'll tell you how that all came about.

Rock On!

Noel

As you may or may not know, PhotoFlashbacks is the photographic work of Doug Hartley.
You can read a little about Doug at the main site by clicking here.

Doug's sister, Connie, and I have been working for several years to get his work out to the public via the web site PhotoFlashbacks.com.

We sell archival prints of his photographs. We provide many links to information about each of the acts we have online including discographies and album covers of the albums the performers were promoting on the concert tour. Here's the link to the "Links Page".

We also have a new forum and welcome your comments and discussions. Here's the link to the forum.

Over time, I will attempt to provide a history of how we started and what ensued to where we find ourselves now. There have been many conversations with fans, collectors and even some of the performers.

What a long strange trip it's been!

Until the next entry...
Rock On!

Noel