Charles Daniels always had one or more cameras with him—when he was strolling local streets; when he was emcee at Boston Tea Party rock club in the late 1960s and early ‘70s as Faces, The Who and Led Zeppelin passed through on their way to stardom; when he accompanied his longtime friend Peter Wolf, of The Hallucinations and later the J. Geils Band, on Wolf’s overnight DJing at rock station WBCN-FM. Wolf nicknamed Daniels “Master Blaster.”
“I considered myself a street photographer,” Daniels told The Boston Globe in 2022. “At some point I realized I had an advantage to do stuff that no one else was doing. That’s when I started photographing the bands more seriously.”
Daniels, who had been getting treatment for a rare form of leukemia over the past couple years, died from pneumonia on Jan. 22, 2024, at age 81. The Somerville artist is remembered in the exhibition “To Be Continued: Photographs by Charles Daniels” at Nave Gallery, 155 Powder House Blvd, Somerville, from May 4 to June 2, 2024.
Daniels was born on Nov. 30, 1942, in rural Luverne, Alabama. His family moved to Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood in the early 1950s, when he was about 11, and he began photographing with a Brownie camera that he found in his parents’ closet.
“His kind, easy and open manner welcomed people to him,” the gallery writes. Daniels befriended rock stars Rod Stewart and Ron Wood when they performed in Boston before they quit the Jeff Beck Group to form Faces in 1969. Daniels danced and played tambourine on stage with them—and toured with them on their Lear jet. When Wood joined The Rolling Stones, Daniels accompanied that band on their 1975 tour. “We all hung out together,” Daniels told the Guardian in 2022. “So I had an intimacy with the bands no one else had.”
The show offers behind-the-scenes glimpses of Rod Stewart wearing headphones inside an airplane, Charlie Watts and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones in a parking lot, members of the Jeff Beck Group getting off a plane at Boston’s Logan Airport. Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones sings at the edge of a stage. Men and women play backgammon on what looks like a hotel bed (members of The Rolling Stones (?) are seen through a door). Peter Wolf smiles in sunglasses and headphones at WBCN. The show also showcases Daniels’s street photography: American Legion men holding flags as if waiting for a parade, a man smiling next to a car, nuns walking in front of a cathedral. In another image, a woman sits on a bed with dots painted on her forehead and arms. There’s a photo of Yippie activist Jerry Rubin.
Hosting at the Boston Tea Party, Boston Music Hall (now the Boch Center’s Wang Theatre), the Orpheum Theatre, the old Boston Garden, and the Cambridge Common, gave Daniels access to photograph Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, the Pointer Sisters, Aerosmith, The Cars. Later Daniels also shot dance and fitness videos.
Susan Berstler, Daniels’s life partner of some 35 years, runs Nave Gallery. The exhibition there is the fruit of a project funded by a Somerville Arts Council grant and then a GoFundMe campaign launched in January 2022 to develop Daniels’s archive of 3,400 rolls of film—often in unlabeled canisters, some stored in his refrigerator, others “stuffed in drawers, boxes and closets,” as the campaign notes.
“I didn’t need to see the final result,” Daniels told the Globe in 2022, “as much as I just thought I needed to pay attention.”
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