The rock photographer who didn’t develop his film

Do you ever look back and wish you had taken a photo of something or someone? Or, maybe you ran across an old film canister and wondered what was on it?

A man named Charles Daniels did.

Daniels has about 3,000 rolls of undeveloped film. And not just any film. At 79, he has rolls of rock history from 50 years ago. In his amazing youth, he was hanging out with the Rolling Stones, Jeff Beck, The Who, and Jimi Hendrix.

In the 1960s, Daniels was an emcee at the Boston Tea Party, a rock venue that opened in 1967. The artists that performed there are legendary: Sly and the Family Stone, The Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Joe Cocker, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, and Santana, among others.

At the club, he became friends with rockers like Ronnie Wood, Keith Richards, and Rod Stewart and later toured with many of them, always snapping his street photos of stars in casual moments.

But it turns out that although he didn’t have many of them developed at the time, he did keep the film — thousands of rolls that could add up to 60,000 photos of early rock history.

During COVID-19 lockdowns, he began thinking about whether to develop the photos. But the cost would be staggering: More than $40,000 just to look at the pictures, much less organize them.

Last year, Daniels set up a GoFundMe campaign that raised enough money to do the project.

Although he has health problems, there is a good chance that the untold history of rock will now come to life.