JAMES CHANCE WAS CLEARLY NOT WELL WHEN I PHOTOGRAPHED HIM. He was in town touring to promote a new record, and I had brought along my portable studio hoping to get him to sit for a portrait. I have talked about this shoot on my old blog, so I won’t go over it again, but he was kind enough to agree despite being in some visible discomfort, and I thanked him copiously for his time – and the obvious effort.
Chance (born James Siegfried in Milwaukee, WI) had been something of a hero when I was a teenager. In the context of Toronto at the turn of the ’80s, if Devo and the B-52s were my Rush, James Chance would have been my Rod Stewart. I was an angry misfit kid, and I played two of his records – Off White by James White and the Blacks and BUY by the Contortions – constantly. I bought a white dinner jacket like the one he wore on the cover of Off White and even managed to acquire a broken alto sax.
But I had somehow never managed to see Chance live or photograph him when he came through town. This was my chance, and after talking with Gary Topp, the show’s promoter, I showed up at the Rivoli before soundcheck and set up my two light stands and mini white backdrop to try and get one of the tight head shots that I judged within my competency, back when I was tentatively returning to portrait work.
Chance was (in)famous for his angry, confrontational shows, and I was prepared for him to turn me down. When he didn’t show up for the soundcheck this looked the likely possibility, but his guitarist told me that he’d talk to James and see about doing the shoot after the show. I took down my little studio and stowed it beneath the soundboard at the Rivoli’s back room, hoping for the best.
The shoot was brief but James was gracious. He was clearly in some considerable pain – too much to disguise in my photos. He had lived with loss for as long as I knew about him; his first partner Anya Phillips died of cancer in 1981, and his partner at the time I took these photos, Judy Taylor, would die in 2020, a year after Chance’s last live performance. Chance had never made what he did as a musician look easy – pain was a constant theme in his work – and I can only hope that the man, one of my earliest musical idols, has found something like release.
Rick McGinnis Photographs 