While there are others who can claim to have attended both Woodstock and West Point, Henry Diltz is the only one who has captured images of Neil Young performing with nocturnal primates.
After more than eight decades of an extraordinary and unlikely existence, Diltz was on the phone in his North Hollywood, California, kitchen one Friday afternoon in August, arranging to photograph some friends who were musicians: the 1970s soft-rock group America, who were having a show the next night.
Among the great rock and roll photographers, Diltz was not the first. He will cite his professional predecessors, such as Jim Marshall, who also captured iconic moments from the rock era, such as Hendrix letting a chord ring, Dylan kicking a tire, and Johnny Cash turning the bird, if you ask him.
However, since Marshall passed away in 2010, Diltz, who started using a camera 57 years ago, is 85 years old and might be the first of the great rock photographers still alive. Without a doubt, he is the oldest person still employed.
Compact in stature, Diltz sports a gray ponytail and is reminiscent of the late actor Seymour Cassel, a fixture of John Cassavetes. He listens to George Noory rhyming with the paranoid faithful on “Coast to Coast AM” about lucid dreams, conspiracies, and immortality before going to sleep at night. He spends some time each morning doing a sequence of chakra-awakening exercises and spending some mental time wishing some of the folks he’s known who have crossed over hello.
He has survived numerous high-profile topics, including David Cassidy, whom he toured with for years on “The Partridge Family,” and Dan Fogelberg, whom he considered his greatest friend. Diltz has made it through all but one of the Monkees, Cass Elliot, and a handful of Eagles. Elizabeth Joy Grand, his spouse, passed away in 2001. Not so long ago, a girlfriend of almost twenty years passed away.
Diltz believed that they were the fortunate ones. He received a call the other day with the latest Robbie Robertson news. Good, Diltz remarked; he succeeded. He enjoys saying, “The party’s on the other side.” The rest of us who are stranded here are the ones who struggle.
Though he had no intention of attending West Point, he could go without a congressional nomination because he was the son of a deceased veteran. He enjoyed the pomp and ceremony there rather than detesting it. He claimed to be a member of the Columbia Record Club and to be listening to Pete Seeger.
One year later, he went out and grabbed a banjo. He was a touring folk musician by 1966. Following a college performance in Lansing, Michigan, he and his group, the Modern Folk Quartet, lost control of their motor home and fell into a thrift shop one morning.
Cyrus Faryar, Diltz’s bandmate, purchased an inexpensive Japanese camera. Diltz is still unsure of his motivation for doing the same.
