Bent Rej captures the sullen side of Frank Zappa with live photos from 1967
The famed counterculture photographer Annie Leibovitz once said: “I’m always trying to capture the emotion and personality of my subject, whether it’s a model or someone on the street”. In order to capture that deeper level, it helps if you get to know your subjects first. This is something that Bent Rej excelled at.
The Danish photographer’s career began in earnest when he was a 25-year-old working for the newspaper Ekstra Bladet. A rather laissez-faire editor sent him off to snap The Rolling Stones when they were on the Scandinavian and German legs of their tour, thinking that young Rej could strike up a connection with the band and get more intimate photographs as a result. He could not have been more right. Following this assignment, he became a fixture on rock ‘n’ roll tours in the region and rub shoulders with everyone from Bob Dylan to Jimi Hendrix.
Rej brought his own artistry to the counterculture movement. He wasn’t just an observer, he was interacting in a sort of cinematic symbiosis with the bands and musicians he collaborated with. This brought a great deal of respect from both ends of the lens. And Frank Zappa is a notoriously difficult man to earn a firm handshake from. Rej received one with aplomb.
When Zappa was in Copenhagen in 1967 with his band The Mothers of Invention, Rej was on hand to capture the acerbic guitar wizard firsthand. That night the witty iconoclast played at the city’s famed Falconer Salen. Opening with ‘American Drinks’, the band – as ever – both enamoured and puzzled their crowd. This mix of jubilation and discombobulation in equal measure was, of course, always the band’s intent.
As Frank Zappa famously said: “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” We can even see this in Rej’s pictures from the show. A shot of Zappa sat down on a chair with freshly pressed trousers and polished brown oxford shoes might not seem remarkable, but in ’67, when the rockers were turning up the amp on cartoonish antics, his demurring appearance is noteworthy in itself. Rej captures this reflective moment with crystalline perfection.
This is a shot that Zappa would have loved—it frames a moment and brings boundary to his individualism. As Zappa, a photography fan himself, fittingly proclaimed: “The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts; figuratively – because without this humble appliance, you can’t know where The Arts stop and The Real World begins.” Rej was forever giving boundary to boundaryless moments and ensures the art therein said something about the fleeting Real World.
As part of our current Bent Rej Retrospective, we have curated his images of Frank Zappa below. From the introspective to the typically daft, these snaps offer an inside look at The Mothers of Invention at their most unguarded.
As Ny Rej said of her late father’s work: “Even though we were just (barely) born at that time (in the early sixties), we are still passionate about his work, vibrant, intimate and sometimes vulnerable moments of some of the greatest rock legends in their very early beginning of a great career.”
