Photographer Lynn Goldsmith - The Mural '78 - Interview

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The Mural Shots. I believe these were from 1978. The guys still had platform shoes.


Can I show you my favorite shot from the book?

Please.

I made it through grad school psych writing papers on rock & roll, dissecting the dynamics and talking about personalities. There’s a picture of Van Halen posing on a limousine. Eddie and Alex are up front, looking a little smug, obviously in charge. Mike Anthony is smack in the middle, torn, trying to keep the peace. Sitting forlorn on the trunk is poor old Diamond Dave, looking a little vaudeville, kind of lonely, but mugging for the camera still. This one picture tells the Van Halen story better than any bio I’ve read.

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Wow, really?

Yeah, it shows you all that dysfunctional chemistry, the tension. But that’s what made Van Halen work.

You’re right. It did.

Did you know that at the time?

Not at all.

Did you stage this shot?

I did stage it. But I’m very intuitive and that plays a part. I guess conventional thinking would have been to put Eddie and David up front. But I put Eddie and Alex. David on the trunk. And I did put Michael in the middle.

But then there’s the photo of Dave and Eddie holding hands and smoking cigarettes, roller skating down the hotel hall. As a Van Halen fan, I really love that one.

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Yeah, me too. I wanted to show people that they didn’t fight all the time. Eddie and Dave were young, they were good friends. They loved each other. Part of my job was to help them remember what it was like to enjoy each other.

So a great photograph tells you a story.

Yes. You got it.

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A mural is a way for the walls of a building to leave behind volumes of love letters to a neighborhood.

ABOUT THE MURAL -

This romantic inquiry began with a tweet from Greg Renoff, Associate Professor of History at Drury, who is all about scholarly discourse on pop culture, specifically Van Halen from the early 1980s. Now, the arena rock band behind lust ballads "Everybody Wants Some" and "Hot For Teacher" may limit romance as defined by teen males of the era, but Renoff's research led him to a retro photo of the boys sitting on a late model caddy in front of an unmarked mural.

The publicity photograph left enough clues to be identified as "St. Charles Painting," the Venice Beach masterwork of the late Terry Schoonhoven, completed in 1979. It was the artist's own love letter to the street, a mirror image of arches of Windward Circle's architecture, given a romanticized view past Pacific Avenue. A white chapel was in the immediate background, looking past serene homes, and the San Gabriel Mountains pushed closer to the beach in Surrealist scale of distance.

Schoonhoven's mural has since faded away from 21 Winward Avenue. His wife is on the record stating that her husband accepted decay and didn't want his work to be restored.

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