Joe Walsh, Todd Andrews,
and the Bass Line That Made Me Rethink
David LaChapelle's Influences

A bass line drags up a song I hadn't thought about in years

I was sitting with my bass a few weeks ago, not playing anything in particular, when I landed on a triad that made my hands remember a song before my brain caught up: "A Life of Illusion." I spent the next hour working out the opening bass line by ear, the way you do when a piece of music has lodged itself somewhere below conscious recall. Somewhere in that hour, the bass line dragged the rest of it up with it…. the music video, then the album cover it came from, Joe Walsh in a helmet on top of a tank, posed in front of the Century City skyline like the suburbs had just lost a war, a theme that would echo throughout the 1980s, influencing the next generation of artists.

A half-remembered pattern, not a researched fact

I remembered something else, too, but only as a shape, not a fact: that the video wasn't really a separate thing from the cover. It was either an illustration of the photograph or a document of how the photograph got made (I genuinely couldn't tell you which, and neither, it turns out, can the easily searchable record). What I could tell is that this wasn't a one-off trick. A static, staged image getting dramatized into a moving narrative was a thing music videos did constantly in that period, album art treated as a frozen frame from a story the video would go on to tell. And once I had that pattern in my head, my mind did what minds do, reaching forward, reaching back in time, and landing (forward) on David LaChapelle's "It's My Life" video for No Doubt twenty-two years later. It’s another static, glamorous image turned into a full narrative, complete with a fate the still photo only implied (Gwen Stefani as a 1930s femme fatale Jean Harlow).

What influence actually feels like from the inside

I want to be precise about what that memory chain actually is, because it's the entire argument. It is not research. It is not a citation. It's a bass line dragging up a video, dragging up a cover, dragging up a loose, unprovable sense of "this some kind of pattern," which then associated (with no logical step I can point to) with a completely different artist's very different video decades later. That is what influence actually feels like from the inside. It doesn't arrive as a footnote. It’s tangental. It arrives as a vague, half-formed echo that you can spend an hour chasing and still not fully pin down.

Todd Andrews has a name in print and no story behind it

This is also, not coincidentally, what happened to one of the two photographers attached to the original image. Jim Shea photographed Joe Walsh on the tank. A second photographer, Todd Andrews, is credited separately (by name, in print, on the actual record) for the sleeve photograph. That's a real production credit. It's checkable on Discogs right now. And after 1981, Todd Andrews disappears from the historical record entirely. No further album credits. No interviews. No biography anyone has bothered to write. We have his name attached to a specific, documented contribution, and we still can't tell you who he was or what happened to him.

If a printed credit can vanish, what hope does a half-seen memory have

Sit with that. A printed, named, verifiable credit degrades into a ghost within one generation. So what confidence should anyone have tracing the undocumented version of the same problem — the images a teenage David LaChapelle absorbed walking through New York in 1981, never credited to anyone, never written down, gone the moment the magazine hit the recycling bin? If Andrews can vanish despite a paper trail, the actual texture of LaChapelle's early visual diet — half-seen, half-remembered, the way my own bass line dragged up a video I hadn't thought about in years — was never going to leave a trail at all.

Postmodern theory already gave up on tracing the source

This is where it earns its keep instead of sitting in a syllabus. Cindy Sherman's staged self-portraits in the 1970s weren't citations of anything specific. They were assemblages, pulled from film stills and advertising and a visual culture too diffuse and too uncredited to footnote the same condition Andrews is trapped in, just with his name attached instead of erased entirely. The field had already moved past the idea that you could draw a clean line from one prior image to a new one. And that diet LaChapelle was absorbing had a specific, repeating texture: commercial photography has always taken whatever is dangerous or strange in the art world and turned it into something that sells. Surrealist darkroom technique was radical in 1925 and selling perfume by 1935. A rock album built around a staged apocalypse is the same habit running in 1981, dressed as classic rock instead of fine art. LaChapelle didn't need to study that cover specifically, any more than I needed to consciously remember a No Doubt video before my fingers found it. He needed to be alive in a city where this kept happening, constantly, half-glanced and never credited, building an eye out of material nobody was ever going to be able to source.

The honest answer was never going to be a name

So when a journalist asks LaChapelle who influenced him and he says Warhol, he isn't lying. He's just answering a question built to want a clean source, the same way an album credit looks like a clean fact until you try to follow it anywhere. Todd Andrews is proof the clean facts don't hold even when they're printed. The honest answer to "what influenced you" was never going to be a name. It was always going to be something closer to a bass line — a fragment that drags up more than you can account for, and lets go before you can cite it.

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