In Charles Daniels’ modest home in Somerville, Massachusetts, on the outskirts of Boston, lie tens of thousands of undeveloped photos, sitting in moldering canisters scrawled with cryptic markings and decaying instructions.
Most have been sitting there for over five decades, and while Daniels can’t be sure of everything that’s hidden in his trove, he knows for sure that much of it chronicles a pivotal moment in pop culture – when rock acts as impactful as the Who, the Faces and Jimi Hendrix made their first mark in America.
As a young man in the 1960s, Daniels took pictures obsessively, shooting whatever caught his eye, wherever it wandered. By 1967, he had an enviable vantage point for that obsession, courtesy of the great amount of time he spent hanging out, and working as emcee, at the Boston Tea Party, a key venue in the psychedelic rock revolution.
Despite his proximity to history, however, Daniels never took his bounty seriously. “Most of what I shot, I just forgot about,” he said during a Zoom interview from his home. “We took a lot of things for granted at that time.”
In fact, it wasn’t until the isolation caused by the Covid lockdown that Daniels’ longtime companion, Susan Berstler, finally prodded him to begin the daunting task of having his work developed. The relatively small number of shots that have been developed so far demonstrate Daniels’ rare perspective on the stars of the day. “We all hung out together,” he said. “So I had an intimacy with the bands no one else had.”
It shows in the rough-hewn character of the photographs. Unlike the carefully lit, finely composed work of rock photographers such as Annie Leibovitz, Henry Diltz or Jim Marshall, Daniels’ shots are more like the fly-on-the-wall snaps you’d get from a friend. As a result, they capture something more casual, close and real. “What’s unique about Charlie’s photos is that they show you what life was really like for a band on the road at that time,” said Steve Nelson, who booked and managed the Boston Tea Party during its peak. “Because he was a part of the crew, his pictures present the bands in a new light.”
The Tea Party was the perfect place to catch it. According to Peter Wolf, vocalist of the Boston-based J Geils Band, “the British groups would come to the Boston Tea Party to get their stuff together before they went down to Hartford, then to New Haven and then to New York, where the media was waiting for them. It was a testing ground.”
“It’s a shame the Tea Party never gets mentioned in the same breath as the Fillmores in San Francisco and New York because it was just as important,” said Ryan H Walsh, whose book Astral Weeks: The Secret History of 1968 centers on the Boston music scene of the time. “It was essential.”
