From Freddie Mercury To Joey Ramone, East Hampton Photographer Chip Dayton Documented The Golden Era Of Rock

By all outward appearances, Chip Dayton leads a fairly quiet life at the end of a quiet road in East Hampton Village.

But there was a time when his life was anything but quiet.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Dayton, a retired rock ’n’ roll photographer, was an avid aficionado of some of the biggest rock bands of the era. He saw a lot of concerts at a lot of New York City venues, many of them now long gone, and often had the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time, camera in hand.

Over the years, among the many bands he photographed on stage—and sometimes backstage—were the Ramones, Kiss and Queen.

Recently, Mr. Dayton’s wife was cleaning out a drawer when she came across a solo shot of Freddie Mercury, Queen’s lead singer. Mr. Dayton had taken the photo during the band’s concert at Madison Square Garden in November 1978.

Some of his other Queen photos found their way into a Japanese book published about the band in 1979. So when he learned that “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a movie about the life and times of Freddie

Mercury, was coming to East Hampton’s UA Cinema, Mr. Dayton knew he had to see it.

“I went to see the movie in early December,” said Mr. Dayton during a recent interview at his home. “The music and acting is spectacular.”

Apparently, audiences agree. “Bohemian Rhapsody” earned five Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture and another for Best Actor for Rami Malek, who starred as Mercury.

How the film fares against the competition will be determined during the 91st Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday, February 24, but what is certain is that, for Mr. Dayton, the film brought up lots of memories of his rock ’n’ roll days.

“I’m a garage rocker,” said Mr. Dayton when asked how it all began. Born in the early 1950s, his earliest memory of popular music dates back to Sheb Wooley’s 1958 novelty song “Purple People Eater.”

“I heard it on the car radio,” he said. “I would’ve been about 6 and riding around with my dad.”

In the years that followed, Mr. Dayton saw the Beatles play at Shea Stadium—“I was on the upper deck. I never heard one note of music, it was so loud with screaming”—and, in the summer of 1966, the Rolling Stones at Forest Hills in Queens: “I went in on the train at 15. I saw them with Mick Taylor.” He also saw David Bowie during the Ziggy Stardust tour at Radio City Music Hall in 1973.

While his love for music got him into the concert scene, it was higher education that transformed Mr. Dayton into a rock ’n’ roll photographer.

“I came back from California, where I had been surfing, and my parents said, ‘You have to go to college,’” Mr. Dayton recalled. He was in his early 20s and the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University was right up the road from his family’s home, so he enrolled and began taking photography courses.

“I originally had a Kodak 828 Bantam Special from the ’30s or ’40s. It was one of the best and most expensive cameras of its day,” Mr. Dayton said. “It had bellows and a good lens. I learned f-stops and shutter speeds. I’d take long shots at night of stars and won the science prize in eighth grade.”

But in college, Mr. Dayton got his hands on much newer high-quality cameras and soon learned how to develop black-and-white film. It wasn’t long before his passion for music and photography had merged.

“I was going to a lot of concerts and had access to the darkroom at C.W. Post,” Mr. Dayton explained. “The first time I saw those images come up in the darkroom, it got me hooked.”

Photography as a hobby soon turned into a serious avocation for Mr. Dayton, and he began shooting lots of bands and lots of concerts. Though not hired by the musicians, in some cases he befriended the bands he shot.

Many of his photographs of the band Kiss, for example, ended up being used on their posters, tour books and other merchandise. Mr. Dayton’s book “Kiss Outtakes” contains 250 images of the band, both live and backstage shots.

Another band he got to know, the Ramones, was the subject of a 2005 book filled with Mr. Dayton’s original photographs from the band’s early CBGB days. His black-and-white shots also were featured on the band’s live album “Road to Ruin.”

In terms of his awareness of Queen, however, Mr. Dayton recalled that he first heard of the band while shopping for new music at a record store in Hicksville.

“My VW 411 wagon had a brand new cassette player installed under the dash,” recalled Mr. Dayton, who was on the hunt for something to play on it. “The guy at the store said, ‘If you like Zeppelin, you’ll love this band.’”

It was Queen’s first album, which came out in 1973, and while at first he wasn’t sure about the band, Mr. Dayton soon came to appreciate their talents.

Though he never met Freddie Mercury, he did see Queen perform three times—at Madison Square Garden, Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall and the Academy of Music (also known as the Palladium) on 14th Street, a venue that was razed after New York University bought the property in the late 1990s. “I probably saw hundreds of shows there before NYU tore it down,” he said.

Sadly, it was Queen’s performance at the Academy of Music that Mr. Dayton has probably come to regret most—not because it wasn’t a great show, but because he doesn’t have the evidence to prove it.

For that concert, Mr. Dayton was using a brand new technology, a Sony Portapack video machine, that he had borrowed from C.W. Post.

“It was the first commercial video camera and was really heavy with the reel-to-reel tape,” explained Mr. Dayton. “It was 1975, and you couldn’t get them in stores—only colleges had them.

“I went to the middle balcony at the Academy of Music and shot the whole Queen show without cuts,” he continued. “I didn’t use my still camera because I was taping.”

Several years later, as he was helping his mother clear out her house, Mr. Dayton found the uncut videotape of that Queen concert and, figuring he’d never do anything with it, simply tossed it out with the garbage.

“Everyone has regrets about things they’ve sold, lost or traded,” he said. “I wish I still had that tape.”

While as a photographer Mr. Dayton captured some amazing concerts by some of the most important and influential bands of his time, perhaps the most amazing thing is that he did it all without a press pass or backstage clearance.

“What I did have was a telephoto lens from 30 rows back,” he said.

In this era of hyper-vigilance and tight security, it’s hard to imagine that a long-haired kid with a nice camera and a giant lens could just walk into any major or minor performance venue without a second glance. But the ’70s was a different time, when drugs and alcohol were more readily available at concerts than security guards and metal detectors. Today, in this era of cellphones and YouTube, it would be virtually impossible for someone like Mr. Dayton to photograph a live performance without prior approval.

But in many ways, those days are behind him. Mr. Dayton—who has lived in East Hampton for 32 years and, for the record, is not related to the multi-generational East End Dayton family—now spends less time going to concerts and more time watching them at home, thanks to his Amazon Fire TV Stick, which allows him to call up vintage clips of some of his favorite bands.

“I saw The Who performing on the Isle of Wight, and the cameraman stayed on Keith Moon the whole time,” Mr. Dayton said with a tinge of awe in his voice.

But lest you think Mr. Dayton’s days of seeking out new and upcoming rock ’n’ roll acts are totally behind him, he is eager to offer up the name of a current group that he would love to photograph: Greta Van Fleet. The band out of Frankenmuth, Michigan, features twin brothers Josh and Jake Kiszka on vocals and lead guitar, respectively, their younger brother Sam on bass and keyboard, and drummer Danny Wagner.

In January, the band performed on “Saturday Night Live,” and their sound has evoked comparisons to some of the biggest name bands from the golden era of rock, primarily Led Zeppelin, though he hears others.

“In their song ‘Lover, Leaver (Taker Believer)’ they do a 20-minute jam, just like some of The Who jams from ‘Live at Leeds,’” Mr. Dayton said. “They really have renewed the feeling I had about rock music when I started to go to big-deal concerts, like Led Zeppelin in ’68 at Carnegie Hall when I was 17.

“They’re amazing, with the best new young guitarist I’ve seen, and the vocalist is incredible.”

It would seem that as an elder statesman of rock ’n’ roll, Mr. Dayton is onto something. But don’t take our word for it. On Sunday, February 10, Greta Van Fleet took home the Grammy Award for best rock album for their EP “From the Fires.”

Some people just know their rock ’n’ roll.