Rare Photos of Freddie Mercury, Mick Jagger, Eddie Van Halen, More Unearthed in Denver Art Show

On April 21, 1979, Van Halen performed at Balch Fieldhouse in Boulder. Tickets were $8, and fans showed up and out.

"That was probably the most epic concert I've ever seen," recalls Ben Perea. "It was their first time in Denver, and the crowd was rabid."

Perea, a Denver native and avid concert-goer, was in the front row. "Unless I get front row, I won't go," he says with a grin. Obsessed with rock and roll since hearing Led Zeppelin at the age of ten, he saw that seminal band live four years later. After that, he chased heavier and heavier rock: AC/DC, Judas Priest and, of course, Van Halen.
Perea was sixteen when he went to the Van Halen show, where a barricade was designed to prevent people from hopping on stage as the band played. But the crowd kept pushing. At the front, Perea remembers that "everyone was getting squashed. We were bent over like potato chips."

He admits he started "freaking out" as he saw some attendees faint. "I saw this guy jump over the barricade because there was no security on the other side. So I jumped over the barricade," he says. "And then everybody started jumping over the barricade, and we're slammed up against the stage."

Eventually, the barricade collapsed. Fearing they were going to be crushed, Perea and his friend managed to pull themselves up on stage, he continues, "and David Lee Roth said, 'Fuck it. It's a party, everybody!'

"There were two rows deep on stage, and I was right in front of Michael Anthony, who hands me and my buddy his Jack and Coke, and we were drinking his drink with him. And that set up my whole life for concerts."
A couple of months later, Perea met a photographer who had been at that riotous show. It was a lightbulb moment. "I ended up buying a camera," he says, "and that's what started the whole thing."

From then on, Perea took his camera to almost every show he attended; his first shots came from Van Halen's 1980 concert at McNichols Arena. While his photographs are some of the most pristine, crisp film images of this historic rock-and-roll era, he wasn't taking photos for profit. As a voracious music fan, his passion project only supplemented his live-music experience.

But when Perea turned 23, in 1985, he stopped shooting concerts. Although he'd occasionally pick up his camera for a show — Alanis Morissette in ’95 and Lenny Kravitz in ’96, both at the Paramount Theatre — his concert photos sat in a box for decades. "They've always been in my closet in a box in the corner wherever I've ever lived," Perea says.

Then, two years ago, he opened the box to show a friend some of the shots. "The hair on the back of my neck stood up," he recalls. "Oh, my God, these pictures are so good," he remembers thinking, as long-forgotten memories of wild 1980s rock shows washed over him. There were photos of a young, energized Mick Jagger playing guitar at the mic, and Freddie Mercury singing so passionately you can see his spit flying into the microphone. Images of the Who's Pete Townshend mid-air, leaping while playing guitar; of Eddie Van Halen and Michael Anthony leaning against each other as they bow back, wielding their instruments, with Van Halen's leg thrown up. You can almost hear the music springing from lively snapshots of ZZ Top, Led Zeppelin, Def Leppard, Judas Priest, Heart, AC/DC and more.

There are thousands of photos, all of them a time capsule to an era that many yearn to relive and that younger music fans wish they could have experienced. And now they'll be able to: Perea is mounting an exhibit with 27 of his favorite concert photos at D'art Gallery, which opens on Saturday, November 9. Incredibly, he still has the ticket stubs for the shows, which he will attach to the coordinating photos. Each image will have twenty copies available for purchase, including the original negative and ticket. The tickets are mind-blowing in their own right — $15 to see the Stones? It cost hundreds to see the now-octogenarian rockers at Empower Field this summer. The show is appropriately titled Rock Legends: Denver's Untold Moments in Rock History. And aside from Perea's friends and family, no one has seen these photos before.

"This exhibit's going to be one of a kind," Perea says. "I've been to so many concert-photography exhibits over the past forty years, and I've never seen anything of this quality."

Indeed, capturing the energetic rockers of the genre's most spirited era was tricky, especially with film. But Perea attests that after a show, he would be shocked to see that nearly every image on his rolls was in focus, which is "unheard of," he says.

"I could do an exhibit just of Queen if I wanted to, or the Rolling Stones or the Who, even just Jimmy Page — but I'm showing a little bit of...well, not everything, because that's impossible," he adds. "But I wanted to showcase my favorite shots."
Besides the challenges of taking photos on film, he faced other issues — particularly during Robert Plant's solo tour in 1983, when security caught him sneaking shots. Plant wasn't allowing photos, apparently. "Next thing you know, I'm on the ground and they're carrying me out," he recalls. "I pushed the neutral button on my camera so I could take the film out. Meanwhile, two guys are carrying me, and I drop the roll on the stairs.

"They tossed me out the door, and I was like, 'Noooooo!'" Perea continues, extending his arm as if reliving the moment. "I stuck my foot in the door so it didn't close. I told the guy attending the door that they took my film...and begged him to let me in."

When the good samaritan allowed Perea back in, he scooped up the film from the stairs and headed back to his seat. "My friend gave me an extra roll of film, and I was on the floor sneaking pictures the whole night," he says. "So pictures of Robert Plant on this tour, you will never see anywhere." Except at D'art.
Perea will be at the exhibit opening, sharing details about how he got those photographs. He would go to any lengths to secure his front-row seat to witness favorite bands — including camping in line for five nights to get tickets for AC/DC. "The Rocky Mountain News interviewed me and took a picture of the line," he recalls. "My friends would come and we'd hang out, have some beers and they'd bring me food."

Coupled with the photos, Perea's stories inspire reflection on how much the live-music experience has changed, whether it's how we get our tickets or how we act at the concerts themselves (no one was holding up cell phones for the entire show forty years ago, for example). These rock-and-roll forebears delivered the same visceral effect as today's mega-touring artists do, but without the elaborate productions, visuals and costume changes.

Perea misses long-gone venues like the Rainbow Music Hall ("That's now a Walgreens," he notes), or how people could take coolers into Red Rocks. "When I first started going to Red Rocks, I was fifteen or sixteen years old," he says, "and they used to allow people to climb the rocks. People would hike up to the top and watch the concerts from up on the rocks, and they would make little bonfires and stuff like that."
While Perea is now into EDM, rock will always have his heart. As he looks over his portfolio of photos, he smiles at each one. "This was the era to see the classic-rock icons in music history," he says.

He wants to create two more exhibits from his collection, one focusing on "the guitar gods of rock-and-roll history" and another on rock heroes who have passed away. "They're dying left and right," he says. But his show at D'art will bring them to life once more, resurrecting the emotions that he and others felt as they listened to their music.

"Seeing my rock gods performing right in front of me was a feeling of disbelief, pure elation — a next-level experience of joy and happiness," Perea says. "Actually watching Van Halen the very first time and sharing the stage with them, how do you explain that feeling? Or watching AC/DC with Bon Scott or the Rolling Stones? It's hard to explain the euphoria it brings — it just makes me feel so good in my soul. 

"Music," he concludes, "makes the world go round." Rock Legends: Denver's Untold Moments in Rock History, opening reception from noon to 5 p.m. Saturday, November 9, D'art Gallery, 900 Santa Fe Drive. The show will continue through December 1.