Monterey County Now [article about photographer had stuff about Mick's love affair with cars]
http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/...325a59a7c.html
Gearhead Nation - Photographer Michael Alan Ross shoots and scores with compelling photos of rockstars and their cars.
Posted: Thursday, August 13, 2015 12:00 am by Mary Duan
Word came to Michael Alan Ross, as it often does, from a famous musician’s management team. You can have a few hours with Mick Fleetwood, they told him, and you can have it on this particular afternoon.
On the appointed day, Ross threw his cameras, gear and some clothes into a bag and hopped a flight to Maui. He intended to photograph Fleetwood in his natural habitat – at and around his home on the windward side of the Hawaiian Island, with the Fleetwood Mac founder and drummer cruising in his vintage Austin 7, for the book Ross was working on titled Rockin’’ Garages: Collecting, Racing & Riding with Rock’s Great Gearheads. Fleetwood had the Austin since the 1970s and he loved the car the most of any he’d ever owned, even more than the Jags, Ferraris and Porsches.
Fleetwood was a teen when he found the British Racing Green jalopy parked on a street in London; he was so entranced by it then, he left the owner a note saying he wanted to buy it if it was ever for sale. A few years later, when Fleetwood Mac had taken off and Fleetwood was making some real money, the call came that the owner was moving and needed to let the car go.
“The car gene exists in musicians and that’s why we’re susceptible,” Fleetwood writes in the book. “Think of the poetry and the romance of hearing about driving through Italy with your lover. I identified with that notion even when I had no money at all. I would go through hell; I would starve myself to make sure that my car that was burning oil would have oil in it… it was like having a dysfunctional lover.”
So with the clock running, Ross flew to Hawaii for the shoot. When you fly anywhere for a shoot, you’re at the mercy of a few things: the plane departing and landing on time; your bags arriving along with you, for example.
And if you’re shooting outdoors, you’re also at the mercy of the weather.
“I landed and the sky is black and I had this one opportunity, that afternoon, when Mick was going to be available,” Ross says. “I got to his house, punched in the gate code and the sky opens up. It’s a deluge. He literally looked at me and said, ‘You’ve come a long way for this,’ and then he looked at his assistant and said, ‘What do we really have tomorrow?’”
Fleetwood rearranged his schedule, put Ross up overnight and spent the next day with being photographed with the car he calls a part of his family.
That’s the way it often goes, Ross says, and that’s the joy he’s found in working with intensely creative people, like Fleetwood, Arlo Guthrie, Billy Joel, Jimmy Vaughan and Aerosmith guitarist Brad Whitford. (He’s also worked with famous instrument makers like Jol Dantzig and Wayne Henderson, whose work was featured in the book Clapton’s Guitar, about legend Eric Clapton’s 10-year quest to acquire a handmade Henderson work of art.)
Despite the time limits the management team might try to foist on a shoot, the artists featured in Rockin’ Garages understood the creative process and gave themselves over to it.
“Creative artists understood the passion and know how to do this stuff,” Ross says. “And people bent over backwards, they were so cool. To have a cheeseburger with Arlo Guthrie, that’s pretty surreal.”
Ross is a former actor, musician and professional model represented by the prestigious Ford agency (“I was the face of Coke and American Express in the 1970s,” he says). He shows selections of his work during Car Week at the Winfield Gallery on Dolores Street in Carmel and in a show at the Weekly’s Press Club on Fremont and Williams in Seaside.