PhotoPass: The Rock and Roll Photography of Randy Bachman

by Joel Selvin, Sammy Hagar (Introduction)

Book by Joel Selvin

128 pages, Paperback

First published December 2, 1994

About the author

San Francisco Chronicle pop music critic Joel Selvin started covering rock shows for the paper shortly after the end of the Civil War. His writing has appeared in a surprising number of other publications that you would think should have known better.

Reviews

[Martin Bihl · Rating 2 out of 5]

this was one of those books where you expect one thing and you get another.

on the one hand, it says it's a book of photographs of randy bachman, whose unusual access to the san francisco club scene allowed him to document all the acts that played there for two decades.

but the pictures are generally so small, and the text is so divorced from 1) the pictures or 2) randy's story, that you end up reading a completely different book - a book that catalogues the club scene in san francisco (with a distinct skew towards 70a stadium-rock).

and perhaps that's interesting to some. not so much for me.

[SUE MCLAIN · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well-done lay-out of the photography of Randy Bachman. He loved to laugh, sing and dance, and his photos reflect his sense of humor and his sensitivity. I called him Toulouse, for Toulouse Lautrec, the artist with the same physical disability who loved the Moulin Rouge. Sadly, Randy died the same way, run down in the street while doing his art. Toulouse by horse and carriage, Randy by drunken driver. San Francisco musicians and comedians loved Randy Bachman. Everybody did. He was always in the crowd dancing and laughing. The book has a nice collection of the good times he found in the clubs.