In Charles Daniels’ modest home in Somerville, Massachusetts, on the outskirts of Boston, lie tens of thousands of undeveloped photos, sitting in moldering canisters scrawled with cryptic markings and decaying instructions.
Most have been sitting there for over five decades, and while Daniels can’t be sure of everything that’s hidden in his trove, he knows for sure that much of it chronicles a pivotal moment in pop culture – when rock acts as impactful as the Who, the Faces and Jimi Hendrix made their first mark in America.
As a young man in the 1960s, Daniels took pictures obsessively, shooting whatever caught his eye, wherever it wandered. By 1967, he had an enviable vantage point for that obsession, courtesy of the great amount of time he spent hanging out, and working as emcee, at the Boston Tea Party, a key venue in the psychedelic rock revolution.
