Michael Ochs, the obsessive collector whose one-man campaign to protect moments of music and leisure popular culture made him the preeminent photograph archivist of his and maybe any period, has died. He was 82.
Ochs died Wednesday at his Venice Seashore house in Los Angeles, his spouse, Sandee, instructed The Hollywood Reporter. He had been recognized with Parkinson’s illness 5 years in the past and was coping with COPD, kidney and coronary heart points as effectively, she mentioned.
In February 2007, he offered his Michael Ochs Archives for an undisclosed quantity to Getty Photographs. On the time, it included some 3 million classic prints, proof sheets and negatives of musicians and movie, TV and political personalities from the Nineteen Forties to the Nineties. Many pictures hadn’t been seen in many years; some had by no means been seen.
His 1984 e-book, Rock Archives: A Photographic Journey By the First Two Many years of Rock & Roll, put him and his assortment on the map, and his supplies have been licensed for album and CD reissues — suppose these from Rhino Information specifically — books, magazines, information websites, options and documentaries.
In 1987, Ochs, the youthful brother of folks singer Phil Ochs, found a number of rolls of negatives of Marilyn Monroe shot by Ed Feingersh for Redbook journal in March 1955. A yr later, he paid about $50,000 for the gathering of James Kriegsmann, who had photographed Frank Sinatra, Kate Smith, Buddy Holly and tons of of different stars.
Alongside the way in which, Ochs additionally acquired greater than 100,000 negatives shot by beatnik photographer Earl Leaf, the home man for The Seashore Boys, in addition to different collections from photographers Don Paulsen and Richard Creamer and magazines together with Hit Parader, Tiger Beat and Rona Barrett’s Hollywood.
THR featured a handful of pictures from his archive in an April 2024 difficulty.
“As I all the time say, had I deliberate this, I’d’ve failed,” he instructed The Austin Chronicle in 2009. “It was proper place, proper time. It was the form of factor that wanted to be performed, and fortunately, I had the luck and the ability to do it.”
The youngest of three children, Michael Andrew Ochs was born on Feb. 27, 1943, in Austin, Texas (he solely spent six months there). His mother and father, New York native Jack and Scottish-born Gertrude, met and married in Edinburgh, the place Jack was attending medical college.
His dad wound up working at a sequence of hospitals across the nation, and Ochs was principally raised in Far Rockaway in Queens; Perrysburg, New York; and Columbus, Ohio, attending three excessive faculties in 4 years whereas stockpiling albums.
“I’d go to high school, didn’t know anyone. I’d come house and play information,” he instructed the Los Angeles Instances in 1992.
After following Phil to Ohio State College and graduating in 1966 with a bachelor’s diploma in radio and TV writing, he served as his brother’s supervisor and got here to Los Angeles, the place he labored as a photographer and PR exec at Columbia Information.
“They didn’t pay you a lot, however [you got] all of the information you may eat,” he instructed The Boston Phoenix in 1984. “Each week I’d undergo a unique letter within the catalog. The primary yr I had 3,000 albums, the second yr about 10,000.
“I noticed them begin to throw away pictures of performers who have been dropped from the label and I went, ‘Wait a minute, I’ll wager the pictures will grew to become simply as uncommon, too.’ I solely started amassing them as a result of I used to be such a music junkie that I wished to doc all the things.”
Michael Ochs, then a publicist for Columbia Information, in Might 1969.
CBS/Getty Photographs
When individuals like Lester Bangs and Dave Marsh at Creem journal wanted pictures for retrospective tales, he equipped them, without cost. However when the Los Angeles Free Press credited one among his pictures to the “Michael Ochs Archives,” he thought, “That’s a great way to justify this obsession — let’s name it an archive.”
He knew he was onto one thing when he received a shock test for $1,000 for pictures he had turned over for one among Dick Clark’s Rock and Roll Years specials at ABC within the early Seventies. “I gave him the stuff for nothing, anticipated nothing,” he mentioned. “I assumed, hmm — this may very well be a enterprise right here. Then I started to take it actual severely and began fanatically looking for as many pictures as I might.”
“Scooping up materials from estates, photographers, ex-writers, defunct publishers, different collectors, the artists themselves and the garages of retired report firm workers, Ochs has generated an irresistible mass and momentum for his enterprise,” the L.A. Instances wrote. “The larger it will get, the better it’s to get extra.”
Rolling Stone used a few of Ochs’ photos in a 1976 e-book, Illustrated Historical past or Rock & Roll, with a photograph of obscure rockabilly singer Ersel Hickey main issues off. He actually broke by means of with Rock Archives in 1984.
“With out fanfare, Mr. Ochs presents the ruffliest bell-bottoms, the spikiest stilettos, the wildest pompadours and the strangest likenesses of singers who’ve been seen far more hardly ever than heard,” Janet Maslin wrote for The New York Instances.
“Mr. Ochs’ e-book is invaluable for its specific consideration to lesser-known Black performers and for its uncommon, conversation-piece pictures of Joan Rivers as a part of a folk-comedy trio, Sissy Spacek as a flower-child singer known as Rainbo and the hardly adolescent Paul Simon as a part of Tico and the Triumphs. It’s additionally the e-book for anybody who wonders, say, what Query Mark and the Mysterians seemed like. They seemed a lot, a lot stranger than their identify.”
Later, he hosted an Archives Alive radio present on KCRW in Los Angeles and taught a category about rock ’n’ roll historical past at UCLA Extension.
Ochs contributed to a number of Andrew Solt documentaries, together with 1979’s Heroes of Rock and Roll, This Is Elvis (1981) and Think about: John Lennon (1998), and was a music coordinator on such movies as Liar’s Moon (1981), Losin’ It (1983) and Christine (1983).
He additionally was a producer on the 2010 documentary Phil Ochs: There However for Fortune. (His brother died by suicide in 1976.)
Ochs housed a lot of his assortment in a temperature-controlled concrete fortress he constructed on his property. He had given away or offered most of his information.
Along with his spouse, whom he married in Maui in September 2002, survivors embrace his sister, Sonny; his nephews, Johnny and David; and his niece, Meegan.
Within the L.A. Instances piece, Ochs defined how he acquired a few of his materials. “I exploit this idea, which might come off as B.S., however I exploit it to speak individuals out of stuff,” he mentioned. “It’s the higher good idea: ‘It ought to be within the archives, and you already know it.’”
Ash Barhamand contributed to this report.