BUT~these photos are also priceless! Imagine being a teenager or in your 20s or 30s and falling in love with the hard driving rock sounds of the Groove Kings. You want pictures! You can't afford a 35mm Nikon or Pentax (and digital cameras are decades away & the high tech phone photo was unimaginable). So what could fans do to snap a photo of their favorite band?
Dance and concert halls, clubs, and nighttime outdoor concerts posed lighting problems. Flashing stage lights of red, blue, & green messed up many a photo! Many fans had the small 110 camera that needed a flash cube for indoor shots. Flash only traveled 15 ft; photos turned out dark & fuzzy.
Then 35mm cameras became more affordable as we grew up & became responsible adults with jobs! We bought cheap Vivitars, or the KMart brand, but a few of us could swing for a Nikkormat or Canon. Figuring out f-stops & shutter speeds was stressful but finally, the automatic setting became available.
Then we had to deal with light, usually the lack there of. 35mm film had a range of light sensitivity so flash was not as important if you were willing to pay for an upgraded roll of film with an ASA over 400, but still, photos were not as tight & true to their color as they could be in daylight.
When digital photography evolved, the core of Groove King fans were well into their 40s, maybe 50s! And still, many of us are learning how to finagle a tricky shot, use effective flash, compensate for poor lighting or busy stage lights, and then we have to learn how to download and transfer those carefully captured shots onto a computer to edit and possibly print!
So, in a nutshell, please understand the pure love involved in some of these photos. They have been through hell. Many have been found in old shoe boxes with moth-eaten corners. Some have been stuck to a yellow sheet of plastic for 30 years. Even Toots Pavlica bundled up what she could find in Gary's old room in Temple, TX, & lovingly mailed them to San. Once we received these "borrowed" photographs, we reproduced them as best as we could for this website.
We don't even know who took some of these photos, so if your name is not listed, please send us a friendly note via email to Managing Editor Margie, aka the HBIC, at Margied333@gmail. It will be a pleasure to add your name to this list of elite Groove King photographers.
MARGIE MASHEK DAVIS
GLORIA LANGFORD
JANIE PEDERSON
MOLLY CIRE
KEN FERGUSON
BRUCE BYARS
KOREY MARSHALL HUGHES
MIKE "RED" LANGFORD
PAT LANGFORD
CRAIG WHITE
DORIS JEAN BAILEY HORNE
BRENT WINN
