When Bass players take photos ...

New Photo Books from Tony Levin and Leland Sklar

While we continue to wait in private for a photo book by and with Nick Beggs, two other bassists from the extended Genesis family have recently each published a book with a selection of their photos from the last decades. Both books are big and heavy and not quite cheap, but apart from that they don't have that much in common.

Tony Levin, Peter Gabriel's house bassist, has featured lots of excellent quality photos of every tour he has been on his website since the 90s (especially with Gabriel and King Crimson), and if you were there in the front row, you hoped (or feared) that you would see yourself in the front row of one of his photos.

The book now available, entitled Images from a Life on the Road, offers exactly 247 of his best or most interesting photos on 240 pages. It is thematically divided into impressions, e.g. of the venues on stage, backstage, as well as cities, at railway stations, etc., i.e. everything that travelling musicians get to see in connection with their work. There are some surprising, enlightening or entertaining impressions to be seen. You can get a fairly comprehensive insight into the book at https://tonylevin.com/photobook, where you can also order it. Only the regular soft bound edition is still available for USD 89, while the hardback edition shown here was limited to 250 copies and has long sold out. For USD 189, there was also the calendar and the CD, on which the track Fire Cross The Sky was previously unreleased. I paid a good USD 50 shipping to Europe for the hardback edition, as it can only be shipped from the US. The shipping is taken care of by MoonJune Records, who also have an interesting range of titles by smaller bands from the prog and jazz field.

Leland Sklar first played with Phil Collins in 1985 and most recently on the Not Dead Yet tour, but has played with probably thousands of musicians since his youth, especially in the studio. Officially, he has played on 30,000 songs on 2,600 albums. Since Phil's First Final Farewell tour in 2004, he has also been 'collecting' photos of people showing their middle finger to him, which he describes as having come about rather by chance and has since become his trademark.

So when you give him the finger in front of his camera, it's automatically a gesture of support - proving once again how much context matters in life! In any case, he has taken over 11,000 photos of this kind since then and has now published some of them in this book, called Everybody Loves Me. Most of the people you see are either fans or other musicians, most of whom I don't know either, although there are probably some pretty well-known names in there. But with very few exceptions, there is no text to go with the photos. It doesn't say how many photos there are in total, but there are so many that counting them would be rather unreasonable - there are also quite a few pages, but they are not numbered.

There is only one version of this book, and it is very heavy, hardback and with a padded cover, but you can choose to order it unsigned for USD 60 or signed for USD 80: https://lelandsklarsbeard.com

The shirt with the beard is also available there - unfortunately it ships within the USA only, as opposed to the book. On the website, there are also other ways to support him and get something out of it yourself with Lee's Clubhouse.

So, having thoroughly enjoyed both books, we can now go back to privately waiting for a comparable Nick Beggs book with the prospect of masterpieces like this one: