#harry howard

[madflies]

Rowland S. Howard and Harry Howard in 1986. Photographed by Phil Nicholls for Melody Maker

[vsirsa]

rowland's mic fights back x

[jt1674]

Visit Original Link

[aaronstjames]

DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS

[thatrickmcginnis]

ROWLAND S. HOWARD, Toronto, April Fool's Day, 1988.

Rowland S. Howard was one of a handful of my guitar heroes (a list that includes Andy Gill, Ricky Wilson, Keith Levene and Robert Quine.) This is probably why I made the effort to photograph Howard and his band when they came through town, despite not having an assignment or a venue where the photos would be published. I brought along my studio in a bag and found the same helpfully empty space behind the bar at the Silver Dollar Room, the same place where I'd photographed Lydia Lunch two months earlier. These three shoots I did early in 1988 were crucial and coincidentally connected as Howard worked with Lunch throughout his life (their collaborative "concept album" Honeymoon in Red had been released the year previous), as had Henry Rollins, the next subject in my ad hoc studio at the Silver Dollar, who would also work with Howard.

I found Rowland S. Howard to be polite and friendly, with impeccable manners - very different from the haunted-looking man who would stalk the stage chain-smoking in concert videos I'd seen of The Birthday Party of Crime & the City Solution. He was in town with These Immortal Souls, the band he'd formed with his brother Harry Howard, his girlfiend Genevieve McGuckin and drummer Epic Soundtracks (born Kevin Godfrey), but for some reason McGuckin didn't make the Toronto show, part of a tour supporting their first record, Get Lost (Don't Lie). I spent most of the three rolls of film I ran through my Mamiya C330 trying to get a decent portrait of Howard, but shot the band together on the last half of the third roll, where Epic is wearing a Black Flag t-shirt; These Immortal Souls were the first non-American band on the Flag's label, SST.

Rowland S. Howard smoked all through my shoot with him, which I spent trying to get something that captured his somewhat wasted elegance. My white backdrop, a painter's tarp, had taken on some impressive wrinkles while stuffed in the gym bag it lived in between shoots, and it's taken considerable skill and digital magic to get these shots to look as slick as I had imagined them while doing this shoot nearly forty years ago. In the end I think they capture a few different facets of Howard, who would be in poor health for many years after I met him, afflicted from Hepatitis C that would lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer and ultimately kill him in 2009, at just fifty. Epic Soundtracks would die suddenly in his London home in 1997, after recording several acclaimed solo albums. Autoluminescent, a documentary about Howard, would come out in 2011.

[boxforblackpaul]

Rowland S. Howard

[plutoniuminjection47]

IM CRYING WHY IS HARRY HOWARD A CRYPTO BRO NOW???

[all-rock-and-roll-is-homosexual]

This is from a cut scene from Wings of Desire showing Rowland S. Howard and his brother Harry looking in the window of the BMW dealership while Damiel watches them.