When Glen “Spot” Lockett pointed his camera at something, he intended to capture what was there, not what he wanted you to see. “I paid attention to my subjects and what they were doing,” he told Vice in 2014 while discussing Sounds of Two Eyes Opening, a book collecting his work. Between 1979 and 1985 he brought the same instincts to bear on dozens of records as the in-house producer for punk label SST, recording classics by Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Descendents, Minutemen and many others.
Spot, who died aged 71 on March 4, was inducted into the febrile world of hardcore after a chance encounter. In the mid-1970s he was a jazz head who rollerskated and wrote record reviews for the local paper on the side while working in a vegetarian restaurant. Here he met Greg Ginn. “He was just an awkward nerd who was very opinionated,” Spot said in the book Our Band Could Be Your Life. “Couldn’t imagine him ever being in a band.”
