In this week’s episode of Pawn Stars, art appraiser Brett Maly called Rick Harrison into his gallery for a fantastic find. Jimi Hendrix‘s personal photographer, Ron Raffaelli, brought in dozens of unpublished photographs of the rock guitar demigod and his bandmates. The images were absolutely gorgeous. What struck us most was the playfulness in many of the pictures. Jimi looked happy and was clearly having a lot of fun. He would probably have been smiling even more if he knew 40 years hence he knew he’d be receiving recognition from Rolling Stone magazine as the greatest guitarist of all time.
Rick set aside several photographs and offered $10,000. Ron was hoping for $20,000. They settled on $15k or $16 … can’t remember. We would love to see those pictures again. If anyone has screen shots of the ones that were shown in the episode, put them out there. We’ll link over to your site. Ron is releasing his collection of over 40 years of work. His photographs include hundreds of pictures commissioned for rock musicians plus dozens of album covers. Check out more details on Ron Raffaelli ‘s Facebook page.
UPDATE 12-7-2011: Watch the whole episode online.
UPDATE 4-7-2012: It looks like the user took down the video. We’ll link over to Amazon.com once the 5th Season has been released.
This is one of the images from Ron Raffaelli’s collection. Apparently, Ron hates spiders but Jimi thought it would be a clever shot. It is. Click on the image to see a press release about Ron.
Also cool was the test run of a purchased sand rail off-road vehicle. The thing was a monster. At the end of the show Rick and Corey raced each other. The sand rail Rick was driving beat out the Polaris RZR Corey was driving. Sand vehicles are crazy. We feel torn, though. Yes, the desert contains very little wildlife but whatever is there is destroyed. Still, we suppose if the impact is isolated, it would be a hell of a lot of fun to scream around the dunes at 50+ miles per hour.
Picture credit for RZR | Picture credit for Sand Rail
Synopsis of the Pawn Stars show.
********************UPDATE on 2/10/2012*************************
One of our readers pointed out that the photographs have actually been published before. Shame, that. Well, at least those of us that hadn’t seen them before became aware of they existed. See the comment below for a link to some nice B/W images.
comicsagogo.com
I think the Pawn “Stars” should do their homework. Those images have been published hundreds of times. And Raffaelli sold the negatives some 20 years ago.
http://www.gettyimages.com/Account/MediaBin/LightboxDetail.aspx?Id=21635189&MediaBinUserId=4385489
Hmm. Interesting. Takes a bit of the veneer off the story. Well, that’s pop culture for you. To be transparent, we don’t bother checking our facts either, but our blog isn’t usually very serious and we often note that we’re lazy and lie a lot.
Thanks for the heads-up. We’ll insert a note into our blog.
Hi,
I would like to send you a copy of one of them to see what you know about it.