Shot! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock

Subtitles by explosiveskull

It's an energy thing. It moves around a lot.

The process of identification is I'm right there with you.

In the height of the moment, I say, "Assassin."

Because that's what I feel like.

I'm locked in, I got my sights on you,

and I'm gonna take you out.

Early on, I tapped in to that instinct,

and that's where I want to go every time.

I want that feeling.

'Cause I'm just after that one thing.

I'm not after your soul.

I'm after your fucking aura.

Four-one-six, I need a notification to Bellevue.

I have a male patient in his 40s, Mick Rock.

Robert Oscar Charlie King. Patient is conscious.

Rule out acute M.I. Vital signs 140/80...

People often ask about, you know,

"When you nearly died, Mick, do you regret?"

I mean, technically, you know, on a karmic level,

I kind of regret

that I got myself into that state,

but the other part of me says,

"Could it have been any different?"

And every time I ask myself that question, I say, "No."

Mick! Mick! Mick! Mick! Mick! Mick!

I don't want to get too mystical about it,

but I do believe that everybody has a destiny,

but that not everybody grasps that destiny.

Mine was pretty clear when I look back,

and especially in the fucking name, Mick Rock.

Is that your real name?

It is Michael David Rock.

That was your dad's name?

Rock was his name, yeah.

It was just good timing, wasn't it, really?

Photographer, Mick Rock, joins us.

His photos make up a large part of David Bowie...

I just followed my instincts. I knew what I liked.

I was drawn, you know, to the good,

the bad, and the wicked.

I've lived a very wild life because, you know,

I've been hanging out with a lot of very wild people.

And the camera just kind of led me by the nose almost,

and I never looked back.

Just kept going and going and going.

Legendary Mick Rock.

This is just, I mean, come on. Freddie Mercury and Queen.

There it is, Lou Reed, my man.

I learned a lot from Lou, yeah.

Absolutely, yeah.

Not all my best habits, I might add.

I always knew

that this was the life I was meant to live.

I just had to, you know, make sure

in the final analysis that it made some kind of sense.

Yeah, I came back here in my dreams.

I even teleported once or twice

in a certain state of psychedelic inebriation.

Yeah, this place gets into your skull.

No doubt about it. It's a beautiful place.

In this environment, you could be in any century.

I think that enabled my imagination to run,

shall we say, a little frantically.

My mother fueled a certain insecurity in me

that the only way I could get an identity

was to get into Cambridge.

It wasn't easy to do for someone born of extremely modest means.

It did teach me something about projection.

If you project strongly enough,

and I sometimes in my early days, you think,

"Well, I got there 'cause my mother projected it."

That's where I got my head fuller with all these,

you know, great poets,

zoomed out of their brains, coming up with great art.

The symbolist poets.

The English Romantics.

And, of course, the American Beat poets.

Arthur Rimbaud was, like,

the ultimate realization of the symbolist poet.

He would go, like, for several days

without food and sleep

and then he'd whack a little bit of chemical inside himself.

He worked in a purely associative way.

The idea, the idea of these people

and the idea of the kind of lives they led

started to confirm my suspicions that,

indeed, there was...

There was a more interesting life

than the one I'd had as a child.

It wasn't a bad life.

The lysergic experience opened up my third eye,

you might say.

I remember the first time I went up to see this guy.

He was an artist.

He had a bottle of the liquid stuff with a dropper.

And he got out the blotting paper.

He couldn't have known how strong,

but this stuff, I remember.

Once it kicked in, the entire universe,

like, rushed through my body. I saw everything, everything.

It definitely, I mean, intensified all the colors,

intensified the frame. It intensified everything.

The altered state was something that was there.

I mean, it had become part of me.

The yoga fortified.

The practices of Yogi Bhajan enabled access.

You know, you could be in a non-chemical state

and you could still start

to get traces of this perception.

And then when you combine the two,

of course, whoopsie daisy.

Photography wandered idly into my life.

There was a chemical experience.

The chemical overload.

Well, I got the excitement of the...

Every time I pressed

that shutter, it was like an explosion.

It looked different every time I clicked it.

So, there was this world of entertainment in the camera.

And then about three days later, I was back in my friend's room

and I saw the camera, 'cause it was his, not mine.

And I said to him, "Oh, I think I, you know,

shot some film the other night. I bet that's interesting."

Apparently, there was nothing in the camera.

But still, that's when this word,

you know, you can put it in quotes,

"magic" started to get into my mind.

'67, that's the summer of love.

And here I am, you know, Fanny Golightly.

I had a habit of staring

at friends' faces under certain circumstances

'cause you could see the whole of the universe

since the beginning of time.

It would revolve and roll. I remember that so vividly.

I would take pictures

of lady friends or girlfriends of friends,

and it wasn't that long, and somebody offered me

a fiver to take photos of a local band,

and my brain went clunk.

Hello, hello, hello.

In the beginning was Syd. Psychedelic Syd.

Like nothing I'd ever seen before.

In fact, like nothing, really, anyone in England,

certainly, had ever seen before.

Had a band called Pink Floyd.

Syd had actually left Pink Floyd

and was living in relative obscurity.

He asked me to take the cover photo for his solo album,

The Madcap Laughs.

I didn't really have any plans. It was simply to shoot El Syd.

And Iggy opened the door in the all together.

All together, now, Miss Iggy.

She was holding company with Syd.

But, of course, the gift was the floorboards.

He had moved in not long beforehand

and he was painting the floorboards.

He used to paint over all the...

I mean, there were dog-ends buried in there.

He didn't clean the floors before he slapped the paint on.

I only had daylight film,

and that had to be push processed.

That's why they have this kind of painterly look about them,

because technically, they're fucked.

See, that should really have been the cover

of Madcap Laughs.

See the crop? That's what me and Syd wanted.

I saw him like a soft poet.

Like a Baudelaire or Rimbaud or these characters

that I'd been studying at Cambridge.

Not long before those sessions,

I took a fucking acid trip with Syd.

Just me and Syd,

listening to music, lot of laughing about.

I remember he'd roll around. He'd piss his knickers.