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Photos: New Book Offers Intimate Glimpse Of 'Rock Stars At Home'
By
Ben Yakas
Published Feb 20, 2019
Modified Feb 20, 2019
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Feb 20, 2019
Modified Feb 20, 2019
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It's always fun to get a sneak peek into the (often absurd, even more often decadent) domestic lives of rock stars—how else would we know that Keith Richards loves a hand chair?! The new book Rock Stars At Home was made for people who love that dynamic, with more than 200 photos of (you guessed it) rock stars inside their (wait for it) homes, from Frank Sinatra playing with his sheepdog Ringo to Mariah Carey in the living room of her NYC apartment.
You can see a few selections from the book up above, including a couple shots from the Chelsea Hotel in its infamous heyday, where Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Sid Vicious, and Madonna, among others, all stayed in at some point. It was also the site of numerous suicides: "The height of the building made it the setting for several suicides. One victim landed on the sidewalk from the ninth floor, right at the feet of Dee Dee Ramone, who was one day sober after hiding out at the Chelsea to go cold turkey."
There's a photo up above of Bob Dylan at the piano at Hi Lo Ha, his home in Woodstock, in 1968. Dylan bought the eleven-room Arts and Crafts mansion for $12K in 1965, and he spent a lot of time there in the last years of the '60s raising his four kids with wife Sara Lownds, hanging with his two nippy dogs (Buster and Hamlet) and taking up painting. The family eventually sold Hi Lo Ha and moved to a large, more private Woodstock mansion nearby. There's also a photo in the book of Dylan's Malibu mansion in Point Dume from 1976—the same mansion where Dylan hangs Christmas lights every winter.
You can see Jimmy Page in the living room of his Thames-side boathouse in Pangbourne in 1970—this is where he hosted Robert Plant before inviting him to join his new band Led Zeppelin. There's Keith Richards surrounded by a trove of books in the library of his home in Weston, Connecticut, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono on the Upper West Side in August 1980, just a few months before he was assassinated. Blondie's Debbie Harry & Chris Stein have four photos from inside their apartment—including a famous one of Harry and Joey Ramone in bed, as well as one of them showing off their polka-dot oven gloves—at 266 Bowery, where they lived in the late 1970s.
There's also a photo from 1975 of George Harrison wrapped up like a chrysalis at Friar Park, the 62-acre estate created by Victorian lawyer and botanist Sir Frank Crips in 1898. Harrison and ex-wife Patti Boyd bought the house for £140,000 in 1970, then spent years restoring it (he and Boyd initially slept on a mattress in the hall "huddling together in layers of coats, scarves and sleeping bags). He built a recording studio at the estate, which was used to record several of his solo albums and the Traveling Wilburys debut; he even put it up as collateral in order to help fund Monty Python's Life Of Brian. Harrison lived there until his death, and his widow Olivia Harrison still resides there working on the many gardens.
As for other highlights: there's Frank Sinatra's kitchen (he reportedly spent $100K to refurbish it in 1965); the media room with three TVs at Elvis Presley's Graceland; lots of pics of various Beatles inside various psychedelic-tinged mansions in the '60s (Ringo had a porthole-style entrance to his living room in his home); Keith Moon's "conversation pit" and many animal rugs; Elton John's ostentatious sneaker and art collection (including several giant portraits of himself); David Bowie napping in Berlin in 1978; Prince's "Foo Foo Room" (decorated with dozens of gold discs); and Noel Gallagher posing at his Primrose Hill home with his favorite food: "I love Liam," he once said of his brother and bandmate, "but not as much as I love Pot Noodles."
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chelsea hotel
Music
rock stars at home
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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