I met Childish Gambino aka the comedian Donald Glover at SXSW this year when the web editor of Village Voice Media was writing a story on him for the Village Voice. The Voice ended up having enough time to get Donald into a studio for the cover shoot but they had me shoot some images at SXSW just incase they weren’t able to more shots later. I met Donald again a few days later backstage at the Village Voice / Frank 151 SXSW showcase.  He and Community co-star Danny Pudi spent some time looking though my photos on my iPad before they (with me in tow) got pulled back to Wu Tang’s dressing room. I ran into Donald one other time at SXSW and since then he and I have kept in touch.

Since meeting him I have been listening to his rap EP under the name Childish Gambino and I really love it.  He was playing two shows in NYC in May, one in Manhattan on the 10th and the second in Brooklyn on the 14th. I missed the show on the 10th but I went to the after party with a few friends. He freestyled for over an hour and Questlove filled in for him on drums. It was pretty impressive.  After that he invited us back to his penthouse at the Thompson hotel for an after party. It was a pretty good time so I figured I needed to pay him back by getting my ass to his Brooklyn show and taking some pictures.

On Saturday I showed up to the Williamsburg Hall of Music with several hundred other people ready to see the IAMDONALD tour in action.  Donald came out and did 20 minutes or so of stand up and then played a video that closely resembled one of the old Derrick Comedy sketches.  The video led the audience to his live Childish Gambino performance.  He brought out a full band and did at least an hour set of hip hop jams that rocked the crowd silly.  On one song the band takes a break and a video is played of one of my favorite comedians Reggie Watts crafting a beat for Donald which he raps over live. It was pretty legit.

The whole show was being taped for something and one of my favorite moments of the night was when, before he played his encore, the lights shined on the crowd and it turned out that The Soup host and Community star Joel McHale was one of the camera man and was filming the show from the crowd. The kids all around him went nuts.  Childish came back on, and fucked the crowd up with a killer encore and then I went home and tried to get some fucking sleep.  Good times.

Click here to see all the shots from the Donald Glover/Childish Gambino IAMDONALD tour at the Williamsburg Hall of Music.

Right now I am in Louisville, KY with Prince Terrence and Dances With White Girls. We got the Kentucky Derby tomorrow and I am fucking exhausted.  We have been at it all day and we gotta go do some more stuff in a minute and I need to take my first shower in four days.  That being said I need to get these juggalo cruise photos up so let’s get it on… quickly…

The after party for The Insane Clown Posse’s NYC gig was on a fucking boat. Seriously. We were on the Jewel Rocks Off Cruise on the East River. We were on a boat for four hours with ICP and a bunch of juggalos. Mike E Clark and DJ Clay were DJing all night.  You might know DJ Clay as the male host of the Gathering of the Juggalos infomercials.  There was also free food. In fact at one point people started moshing and the bouncers had to stand in front of the food so no one knocked over the tables. I asked the biggest bouncer “When you were a little kid did you ever think you would be guarding hot dogs from insane clowns?”  He laughed and then shook his head and said “I just go where the money is..”

Anyway, as crazy as this whole thing was you have to give it to a band like ICP to do something like this for their fans.  All these kids got to hang out with ICP, get autographs, get pictures with their heros and a bunch of free food all $17.  You don’t see too many bands do stuff like that for their fans.

Anyway, click here to see all my photos from the Juggalo Midnight Cruise.

To check out my ICP photos from the Gathering of the Juggalos click here.

Insane Clown Posse played in NYC for the first time in over a decade. They finally found a place, The Gramercy Theater, that would let them put down enough tarp to protect their club from juggalo juice, AKA Faygo.  Normally when I shoot a band, I shoot the band and I don’t pay too much attention to the crowd, with ICP it’s just the opposite.  As interesting as ICP is live, they spray bottles of Faygo soda at the crowd and it’s very hard to take photos of them without getting covered in the sticky stuff.  I got my shots and then just shot juggalos.  And everyone loves juggalo photos!

I should mention that Saturday Night Live writers were there hanging out trying to get new material for their next juggalo sketch. Also there was only one fight that I saw but I got kicked out of the club for being in the middle of it taking photos. Luckily I called Psychopathic Records PR babe Andy who got me back in.  Now lastly, before we get to the pictures from Gramercy remember in the next day or two I hope to get up photos from the Juggalo Midnight Cruise which should of course blow your mind. Come back soon.

Click here to see all the photos from Insane Clown Posse’s first NYC show in a decade at the Gramercy Theater.

And if you want to see how magnets really work, click here to see all my pictures from last years Gathering of the Juggalos.

So on Friday Insane Clown Posse played in New York City for the first time in over a decade. I was there to take pictures as you all might expect from one of the worlds foremost juggalo photographers. After the show I then went on a god damned Insane Clown Posse cruise ship and road around with ICP for 4 hours in the middle of the night. It was clearly an intense experience.

I had two updates planned. I was going to post one on Sunday and then one on Monday. However as I was on my way home to get the first of the two updates up I found out that Osama Bin Laden was up and I spent an hour watching the news before heading down to Ground Zero.  I ended up getting those pictures up late last night and my plan was to get the first of the two posts up today.  Well it turns out for some reason I agreed to head out of town with Dances With White Girls, Prince Terrence and their ladies and now I am about to head to Indianapolis on my way to Kentucky on my way to Cleveland and I will be back in NYC by Monday. Evidently we have to drive 12 hours right now which seems insane.

Whatever the case, I am on the move and the pictures get delayed another day.  Hopefully I will have a moment on the road to get this shit up for you guys but in the mean time I do have a video someone made from the photos I took on the Juggalo Midnight Cruise that were posted on the Village Voice.  Ill get the rest up ASAP. Enjoy and Whoop Whoop.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhwwPuAQ9GQ[/youtube]

Back in jury duty after trying to catch up on sleep and hanging out with a friend visiting from Atlanta.  I didn’t get any real work done but I did mostly clean out my inbox.  One more week of slow updates and jury duty will be over and it will be nice enough outside again that I will be wanting to party daily.  Expect some good rooftops parties and summer time madness coming very soon…

In the meantime I am trying to come up with reasons to post and I decided to post some shots from a sweet 16 party I shot a few weeks ago.  Normally I wouldn’t post shots like this, but it wasn’t your normal sixteen year old’s birthday.  This girl Leaf celebrated her birthday at the Red Bull Space in Tribeca and she had performances from Hyper Crush, Dev and my homie Shwazye. Leaf also performed and is a talented musician in her own right. Oh, and did I mention that Usher showed up and was just hanging out?

I edited this gallery down to mostly just shots of the performances since it’s a little weird to be posting a bunch of shots of 16 year olds on my blog, but I left in a few fun crowd shots and of course pictures of the artists and Usher hanging out in the roped off VIP area.  Why didn’t my 16th birthday party have a VIP area?  Actually maybe it did… I certainly don’t remember it…

Anyway, I should get back to judging people right now, but you guys should click here to see some of the shots from Leaf’s Sweet 16 Party at the Red Bull Space.

Let’s get this out of the way right now. I am a terrible singer and I have no business singing in the shower much less recording a song. You may have heard me mention this punk band I started and I am in fact the singer of that, but I decided to front a punk band specifically because my terrible singing can be overcome by intentionally hurting myself on stage and entertaining angry kids with mohawks. I am honestly completely without any musical talent what so ever.  Fortunately for me I have some very talented friends.

When my friend Ross Harman killed himself last September I kept thinking about how many amazing musicians showed up to his memorial.  An hour into the service I knew what I had to do.  I manged Ross’ band The Gaskets for five years and it was time once again to put on my managerial hat and get to work.  I started asking all his musician friends at the memorial if they would be interested in contributing a track to a tribute album in his honor. Everyone there could not have been more into the idea.

Six months later I was wrapping up the CD and making sure everyone was getting in their music.  I think in total the CD is going to contain 18 tracks and I was very impressed with all the music.  As happy as I was to be working on this album I suddenly had the great desire to be a part of it but I wasn’t exactly sure how. I was going to ask one of my friends if I could record some back up vocals or something to a song but most people had pretty much finished already. Luckily I had another idea.

I reached out to my friend Patrick Albertson to see if he would be interested in helping me cover the song Posture which Ross wrote for his solo project Ballpoint Pens. It only had a few lines of vocals in it and I figured I could get throug them.  Patrick was honored to be part of the album and quickly recorded the full song complete with his own vocals.  It sounded amazing and I hated that I was going to have to ruin it with my voice.

Patrick sent his music over to Teddy Blanks who was Ross’ band mate and one of my closest friends. Teddy patiently helped me record my vocals over and over again until he thought I had given him enough takes. They all sounded terrible on their own but Teddy went through each take pulling a word here and a word there until he assembled several vocal tracks that sounded okay and he put them on top of each other and then added Patrick’s falsettos underneath.  He also added some hand claps and mixed the whole thing together into and almost listenable song.

I am really proud of this album, but I am also very proud that I got to contribute to the actual music on the CD.  I am going to be blogging about this album again once it is complete but I wanted to give you a little preview now and let you hear my contribution to the Ross Harman tribute album. So listen to my song below and then head on over to TheGaskets.com where you can download nearly every song Ross or The Gaskets ever recorded for free including the original version of Posture which is taken from the album Calcutta.

Thanks for humoring me I hope you like the song or at least the idea of it. I would love to hear what you think…

Igor & Patrick Albertson – Posture

A month ago I was a pretty big fan of the TV show Community.  Today I am a pretty big fan of one of Community’s stars Donald Glover. I didn’t really know anything about Donald Glover other than he and his partner in crime on the show (Abed, played by Danny Pudi) were my favorite parts of the show, which is impressive since the show features Chevy Chase and the always hilarious Dr. turned comedians Ken Jeong.  But while I was at SXSW I was asked by the web editor of Village Voice Media if I could take some photos of Donald for a story he was doing on him.

The story was on Donald’s versatility. Not only does Donald do stand up and act, but it turns out he is actually rapper that goes by the name Childish Gambino. When I found out I was going to be shooting him I googled him and listened to a song real quick. I thought it was entertaining enough. I also found out he was one of the main guys in Derrick Comedy a web video comedy team who’s videos I am sure you have seen.

So I headed down to the Austin Music Hall a few hours before Donald was hosting MTV U Woodie Awards there. The original idea was that I was going to shoot him getting ready for the show or something but when I got there I found out that I had 15 minutes to shoot him outside.  It was super bright out and I had no location so we walked around for a bit and couldn’t find anything good. They told me that I should go find a location and that we could try to shoot again right before the show if I was willing to come back. I told them that would work but I wanted to get some shots just incase so we shot for about 3 minutes up against a fence and then up against a truck. They weren’t very inspired but I figured I would get another chance.

Unfortunately they got behind with the Woodies and I didn’t get to shoot him that day, but he showed up to the Village Voice Media music party and I ran into him back stage. He and Danny Pudi spent like 20 minutes looking at the photos on my iPad and we hung out by Wu Tang’s dressing room talked about shooting again in a few days.  Both of the guys seemed like rad dudes. Plus I got to see Childish Gambino live and he absolutely killed it. Seriously, he was amazing. I was not prepared for that.

A few days later Donald had this comedy show at SXSW and I was going to meet up with him before it. Unfortunately I didn’t get there in time to shoot again but we made plans to meet up later to shoot. Unfortunately that didn’t happen either.  Luckily he was going to be in NYC and it was looking like this article was going to be for the cover of the Village Voice and I might get to shoot it.  Again, luck was not on my side and the art director of the Voice wanted studio shots which is not what I do.  All of this was a bummer.

Now all that aside it turned out to be a good experience anyway.  First of all, Bill Jensen’s cover on Donald came out today and it is really great and they used a few of my photos. You need to read it now. Secondly, I got turned on to Childish Gambino. I understand why he goes by the pseudonym. If you hear about a comedy rapper you might think it’s a joke, but Childish is seriously awesome.  Download his free EP now. Thirdly, Donald and Danny both said they will let me shoot them in the future which should be fun, plus Donald might by a photo from me which I cannot complain about, and lastly and most importantly the shots I took came out pretty great and that is the whole point of this damn post.

Click here to see all my shots of Donald Glover AKA Childish Gambino.

Everyone and their mother on Twitter is talking about how today is the anniversary of Kurt Kobain’s death.  Half of those people probably weren’t even aware of music in 1994. I wasn’t going to just send some comment in a Tweet about it because Kurt Cobain’s death was probably the single most important event of my life.

In 1990 I found out about Nirvana through my friends older brother. I heard Bleach and I hated it. I only listened to hip hop and hair metal. I was 10 years old. Nevermind came out a year later and I liked it but I always sort of liked Weird Al’s version of Nirvana a little bit better. It wasn’t until 1992 and the release of Incesticide that I really became a big Nirvana fan.  But once it took hold it took hold hard.  By 1994 Nirvana was pretty much the only band I listened to. They at least informed all my musical choices. I liked Hole and I liked the Meat Puppets and stuff but Nirvana was pretty much my world. I was as obsessed as you could be with a band. I never in my life fell half as love with a band as I did Nirvana.

When Kurt Cobain died I was 13 years old, about to turn 14. I would enter high school a few months later so that summer was a pretty important time for me. I was in this guy Mikey Banks’ van when I found out. He had a TV in his van and we were watching MTv. I thought was pretty sweet to be watching TV in a van until Kurt Loder came on and told the world that Kurt Kobain was dead. Cobain had been in a coma a few weeks before and came out of it okay. Somehow I was hoping this would all be okay too. Maybe he was faking his death.  We drove back to Mikey’s house right away. I was never really friends with that guy even though I went to school with him for 9 years. My only real memory of him is sitting at his house watching MTV totally in shock.  My friend Keith went to the bathroom and cried.  I just stared blankly. I didn’t fucking know what to do.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y18okpx0mjY[/youtube]

I was never going to see Nirvana live. I couldn’t fucking get over that. I wasn’t surprised that Kurt Cobain killed himself. He had so many people in his family kill themselves and the Nirvana poster above my bead that said “I hate myself and I want to die” was a pretty big warning sign so I wasn’t surprised. But I was angry. I was never going to get to see Nirvana play and I was never going to have any new music to listen to. I was fucking blown.

The thing about Nirvana was that for a 14 year old kid who didn’t know shit about music outside of the radio Nirvana was underground.  Yeah they were this huge band and all but they were alternative. They were non conformist and as punk rock as top 40 got back then.  So when Nirvana died and everyone in my school acted like they were these huge Nirvana fans it really fucking got to me. When Unplugged came out and everyone was listening to it I was pissed.  These kids never listened to Bleach. They only cared about this watered down acoustic Nirvana.  So I said fuck it.

I was done with Nirvana now. These poseurs could have Kurt. The only problem was I didn’t know what else to listen to.  I had to get some new music.  So I went back and reread Michael Azerrad’s book “Come As You Are”.  I went through it page by page looking up every band that Kurt mentioned listening to in it and I went out and bought CDs. I tried out Flipper, Mudhoney, the Melvins and the Vaselines.  I didn’t like any of it.  I eventually grew to love Mudhoney couldn’t fucking believe how bad the Vaselines were and how much better the Nirvana versions of their songs were. But I kept buying albums and on May 29th, 1994 on my 14th birthday my friend Eric Dahlberg bought me a Black Flag album and it changed my life in an instant.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yJIdLFzatw[/youtube]

That summer all I listened to was punk rock.  Black Flag instantly changed my life but I was listening to bands like the Sex Pistols and the Misfits and Fear and the Circle Jerks. Rancid came out around that time so I was listening to them and some popy shit like NOFX and Bad Religion.  I loved the Descendants, the Dead Milkman and the fucking Ramones.  This new punk rock shit opened my eyes.

My freshman year in high school my friend Tom and I started the punk rock club. We had these meetings at school that were totally pointless because no one else liked the music. It was just the two of us and this senior girl named Mary.  The school made us actually do something so we decided we would start a magazine.  The first issue was the most embarrassing fucking thing ever. But Mary started taking us to shows. My mom would let me go into DC with Mary cause she knew her mom and Mary was 18.  A few months later my parents were letting me take the subway into the worst neighborhoods in DC to see local punk bands.

As we met these bands we came up with and idea to put out a record. We hit up our favorite bands and then borrowed money from our friends and parents until we had raised about $1600 to put out a record. And in July 1996 just over a month after my 16th birthday Raise The Flag: harDCore Volume 1 came out on our very own record label. It sold 900 copies in about 3 months just in DC and with no distribution other than a couple record stores. Pretty much every single copy was sold personally by Tom or I.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRxazBjHAUw[/youtube]

Over the next two years Tom and I put out four more issues of our zine. We released some tapes and a CD and started booking shows. We were big names in the DC punk scene at 17 years old. I started photography to shoot the bands on our label and it turned out I was pretty good at it.

By the time I graduated high school Tom and I had dissolved our partnership.  We became close friends again later in life but for a while we hated each other. I wanted to skip college and keep working on the record label but Tom spent all our money and my parents were ready to kill me if I didn’t go to school. So I went to school and I majored in photography.

In 2003 I met a band called The Gaskets and I spent 5 years managing them.  I booked their shows, got their music pressed, took all their photos, had their t-shirts, buttons and stickers made and ran their company.  When they broke up I started taking Driven By Boredom seriously and started my own business. And for the last two years I have been making a full time living running my site and taking photos and I couldn’t have done any of that without punk rock.

Punk rock was the best education I ever had.  It taught me so many skills from photography to event planning. It taught me that even a 15 year old kid could run a business and do it successfully. It taught me how to make stickers, buttons, t-shirts, zines and records. It taught me how to talk to people and network and promote. It instilled in me the love of photography. And above all it ingrained in me the do it yourself, DIY or die mentality that has lasted me my entire life.

So Kurt, wherever you are, I fucking love you and your music, but if it wasn’t for your death I wouldn’t be half the person I am today.

Kurdt D Cobain rest in peace.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv96yJYhk3M&feature=channel_video_title[/youtube]

One night at South By Southwest I was meeting my LA Weekly counterpart Shannon at IHOP.  On the way to meet her I ran into Rocky Business, their tour manager Weez and their documentation Tone.  All of those guys are friends of mine so I invited them with me to IHOP. They were about to get food anyway so it all made sense.  There were now 10 of us going and we sent Shannon ahead to make a reservation. We got there after taking forever to roam downtown Austin but we still had a 20 minute wait at IHOP.  We finally ate and it was delicious. The whole time I was taking pictures but I didn’t have my flash on me so everything was taken without flash but with a wide open lens that causes the lack of depth of field that everyone seems to love so much.  I didn’t really plan on using these shots for anything but a bunch of them came out really well so you get this bonus SXSW gallery.  Get excited.

Click here to see all the photos of Rocky Business’ trip to IHOP.