'Lifelong magic’ of NJ rock photographer Jay Blakesberg captured in new book, exhibit

Jay Blakesberg’s camera is magical.

It served as a transportation device across both time and space — taking him from a rebellious 1970s North Jersey youth to the world stage across 40-something years. And it's a pop culture treasure chest, containing generations’ worth of cutting edge fashion, music, mindsets and attitudes.

Blakesberg, a native of Clark in Union County and now based in San Francisco, is a heralded concert and portrait photographer best known for his work documenting the world of the Grateful Dead. A new book and Morris Museum exhibit chronicle the first four decades of his career, one that followed a path laid out by the work of the very artists he’s spent the majority of his life documenting.

“You listen to Bob Dylan sing ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ for the first time or ‘Positively Fourth Street’ or any number of songs and there are these adventures, these stories that these people are going on,” Blakesberg, 60, said. “And you’re wondering ‘Why am I in New Jersey? Why can’t I go on this adventure? How do I go on this adventure? What do I do to have an adventure?’ And so that was sort of the beginning of it.”

Writing by the likes of Dylan, Neil Young, Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter provided inspiration for Blakesberg, and it wasn’t long before he had begun his own long strange trip.

By the fall of 1978, he’d already had one instantly-iconic image — Jorma Kaukonen of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna fame flashing a late night, gold-toothed grin outside of a New York City deli follow a May 1978 show at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic — run in the jam-centric publication Relix magazine.

Around the same time he began his senior year at Arthur Johnson Regional High School in Clark, he was shooting the Grateful Dead on Sept. 2 at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford. He then headed to Madison Square Garden in New York City to shoot Young and Dylan on Sept. 27 and 29, respectively.

Photos from the Dead show can be seen in Blakesberg’s 2019 book “Jerry Garcia: Secret Space of Dreams,” while the photos of Kaukonen, Young and Dylan are among those collected in Blakesberg’s newest publication, “RetroBlakesberg – Volume One: The Film Archives,” both available from Rock Out Books.

“I didn’t have a grand plan," Blakesberg said. "I didn’t realize I was documenting pop culture history at the time. I just had a camera with me and was shooting things that I loved and were in front of my face that interested me."

Blakesberg will be the subject of his first solo museum exhibition with “RetroBlakesberg: Captured on Film,” on display Friday, Oct. 14, through Feb. 5, 2023, at the Morris Museum in Morristown.

The grand 126-print retrospective exhibition at the Smithsonian-affiliated museum is only 20 miles or so from where Blakesberg grew up, but the journey there took him a lifetime.

“We were classic 1970s stoners," he said. "We just cared about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll — except there was no sex involved, we were too young and nerdy. ... I always like to say that we lived by the rule of adolescent stupidity: How many stupid things can you do that would perhaps kill you but hopefully not kill you and still be left standing? And here we are, 40 years later, and that adolescent stupidity has turned into lifelong magic."

The book and exhibition are both results of the “RetroBlakesberg” Instagram page launched at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and curated by the photographer’s daughter, Ricki, bringing highlights of Jay’s shot-on-film era to more than 22,000 followers.

Ricki, now 26, can even be seen in the book, on stage at the age of 7 at a Flaming Lips concert in San Francisco. She curated the book, which also features essays and extended photo captions by Jay.

Featuring a foreword by Flaming Lips singer Wayne Coyne and an introduction by singer/songwriter Michael Franti, the book is at once sweeping and intimate, organically expanding from candid photos of Blakesberg and his friends as teenagers to historic concert photos. Images of Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, Ice Cube, Ice-T and Soundgarden on stage and backstage at the 1992 iteration of Lollalalooza are must-see, as are the confident, inventive portraiture of Tom Waits, Tori Amos and Joni Mitchell.

"RetroBlakesberg" also preserves moments of New Jersey music history: There’s John Belushi, on stage with the Allman Brothers Band at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic in April 1979.

Two months later, Blakesberg was at Alexander’s, a Browns Mills strip club where he started bringing his camera at the age of 16 to shoot concerts by Todd Rundgren, Bill Kreutzmann of the Grateful Dead, and Johnny Winter, for what would turn out to be one of the final public performances by Little Feat’s Lowell George on June 26.

Blakesberg said a key goal for his daughter, who co-curated the museum exhibition, was to introduce viewers to his work beyond the Dead.

So while there are images of jam and classic rock icons Phish, Warren Haynes and Grace Slick, there are also pics of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead, Dave Matthews, the Foo Fighters, Nine Inch Nails and Snoop Dogg.

“One of the reasons she started the Instagram page,” Jay said, “is that she felt like there’s a whole younger generation of music fans that don’t really know about me. … If you’re 50 years old and you’re a Deadhead, you most likely know of my work or have seen my photographs. And so she wanted to reach her generation. She’s 26 years old, so she wanted to reach people that didn’t know about me but were influenced by these bands that are still playing today.”

Go: “RetroBlakesberg: Captured on Film,” Friday, Oct. 14, through Feb. 5, 2023, Morris Museum, 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. Sunday, Oct. 16, includes exhibition viewing from 2 to 3 p.m., followed by an hour-long slideshow presentation by Blakesberg in the Bickford Theatre at 3 p.m., and book signing. For more information visit morrismuseum.org. For more on Blakesberg, visit blakesberg.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: RetroBlakesberg book, exhibit celebrates NJ rock photographer