Say that name, “Opal & Nev,” and it’s likely a picture of chaos that pops to mind—specifically, Marion Jacobie’s iconic 1971 shot, of Opal riding Nev’s bent back as they escape their calamitous set at Rivington Showcase. After its initial publication, six columns wide inside the New York Times, The Photo, as we’ll henceforth call it, appeared in both its black-and-white and color versions in Life, Rolling Stone, and Aural. It flashed across the evening news and on chat-show programs, even stood as a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize alongside other visual representations of that uneasy era. The precise contextual details reported around it may have fuzzed over time—who hurled what slurs the night of the concert, and who threw the first punch, and in what exact manner did Opal destroy that flag, anyway? Still, The Photo endures, screaming helter-skelter louder than words ever could. These days it’s deployed as political provocation and identity statement, recontextualized on posters and T-shirts above hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter, #HeForShe, #TheFutureIsFemale.
Its subjects, though, get notoriously touchy when talking about it. During our hastily arranged interview on his private jet, for example, Nev shooed away, with increasing peevishness, most of my questions about the minutes leading up to the shutter’s click. After that, I was determined to better prepare for what could be the most pivotal interviews featured here—including my third face-to-face with Opal, to explore the role she played as an agitator that night; and my first with Chet Bond, whose buddies responded to said agitation by beating the breath out of Jimmy Curtis.
Each interview I dreaded for different reasons. I was still at a loss as to how to crack Opal open about her affair with my father, and I feared she would shut down on me completely if I said the wrong things about how he’d ended up dead. Chet Bond posed the opposite risk—I knew, as soon as I got him on the phone to firm up my travel plans and he drawled his thanks “for letting a regular guy like me share his side of the story,” that he would delight in spouting off shamelessly.
But beyond any general trepidation I felt, I swore strategic reasons for putting off both of these interviews. Saving the toughest confrontations for last is an old journalist’s hack—a way to ensure you’ve got at your disposal all the facts, all the different perspectives, before you go poking at explosive subjects. As groundwork for talking to Opal and Chet, then, I asked my team at Aural for help. I was seeking a variety of thoughts on The Photo, and what associations it evoked for different people. “Either when you first saw it,” I said in our main conference room one day last summer, “or sitting here looking at it right now.”
“You’re putting a staff meeting on the record?” asked Phil Francisco, Aural’s most popular columnist/contrarian and a thirty-plus-year vet of the magazine. His last back-page rant had been about the nuisance of cell-phone recording at concerts; now, he glared at the iPhone I’d set on the tabletop to capture our conversation.
“I know it’s a bit unconventional,” I said. “I guess the whole project is. But I’ve got a room of captive rock-and-roll enthusiasts and experts here, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to get some honest perspectives before I bring it up with Opal. If anyone’s uncomfortable talking to me about it, though, if anybody feels like they can’t be honest, it’s okay, you don’t have to stay. I promise it won’t offend me.” I felt several sets of eyes nervously slide toward me, but no one stood to go. To my right, Phil leaned back in his custom Aeron chair and tapped his fingers, heavy with silver rings and crawling with tattoos, against the armrests. “So yeah,” I said, “what exactly is it about this picture? Ben, any thoughts?”
I’d picked on my managing editor, Ben Hinneman, first—not only because he was typically the most thoughtful, measured voice in the room, but also because at an office trivia night years previously, back when he and I were still colleagues and our jobs were more fun, he’d won an Amazon gift certificate in the bonus round by recalling an extraordinary bit of minutiae: the designer name and size number etched onto the bottom of Opal Jewel’s platform shoe, outstretched in the foreground of The Photo like the business end of a battering ram. (And okay, maybe I’d picked on Ben because I was still busting his chops a little: When I’d first confided in him that I was the daughter of James “Jimmy” Curtis III, he’d looked at me and asked, with such guilelessness that I nearly spat out my lunch, “Who?”)
“Welllll,” said Ben, “I’m not sure you’re supposed to pinpoint the magic exactly. That’s the thing, right? It’s got mystery on top of drama. I mean, of course we know the basic facts of what happened, but how did the two of them feel in the moment? Neither of them really goes into much direct detail about that, and—no knock to your reporting skills, Sunny—I worry that they never will.”
“Yeah, I couldn’t get too much out of Nev about it,” I confessed.
“Probably because giving up too much would ruin the effect,” Ben said. “I mean, just look at her face—wow, that expression! It’s like, so tense but open at the same time. Is it a look of power? Rage? Triumph?”
“Grief?” I asked, because I was genuinely curious to know if he saw it.
“Absolutely, could be. The point is, if they ever said too much about what went into this moment, it wouldn’t be as evocative, would it? As it is, you or I can take any number of opinions we have about the Confederate flag, about politics’ place in art, about Opal and Nev’s careers separately, about, um… the victim….” He paused; I nodded for him to continue. “And we can project those ideas onto it.”
“I always thought she looked like a star,” mused Hannah Cleary, a photo editor. “A punk warrior goddess.”
“An Afro-Punk warrior goddess,” clarified our new social media director, Pooja Banerjee, to a few murmurs of agreement.
My staffers went quiet as they studied The Photo, which I’d blown up and affixed to the same wall of corkboard where we pinned the contents of each issue in production. It was the version that had first run huge in the Times—I’d always preferred the black and white. Something in its starkness, I thought, made the details more dramatic:
Opal’s Mohawk wig, catching the wind and trailing behind her. The furrowed brow, the tensed mouth open wide, the bulging vein running down the right side of her angled neck. The burst of white light popping off the sequins glued to her lash lines. One leg stretched out to do damage, the other one bent with kneecap scraped raw. A bare foot. Her long black arms, crossed at the wrists like the X she annihilated, draped around a white neck.
“So if Opal’s the Afro-Punk warrior goddess,” I said, breaking the reverie, “what does that make Nev?”
“Warrrr Horrrse,” somebody intoned, in the rumbling British accent we liked to imitate from a Broadway commercial that had once been in unbearably heavy rotation on NY1.
We all snickered for a moment at the office inside joke, but I didn’t want to let them off the hook just yet. “Seriously,” I prodded, “what do you make of Nev in this photograph?”
The white neck. Lean frame stooped, stumbling forward underneath the weight of her. Black rivulets streaking his cheeks, black blooms of blood staining his button-down. Arms hidden, eyes blank, mouth slack as a fish.
“I think that’s what an ally looks like,” Pooja said.
“Oh, come on,” said Phil, rolling his eyes. “What does that even mean?”
I saw Pooja shrink into herself a little. I held my hand up in Phil’s direction to stop him from interrupting. “Go on,” I told her.
“I guess… I guess it just means he was there in the battle with her. And if you strip away what we know about them now… In terms of visual symbolism, isn’t it a powerful reversal of narratives? The traditionally privileged and the traditionally marginalized switching roles, just after she’s totally canceled a symbol of white supremacy?” Nobody answered. “I mean, there are levels of race and gender stuff happening here,” she continued. “It’s like ground-zero woke. There’s a whole TED Talk about it. It went viral last month. I’ll send the link around later.”
“Here’s what I see,” said Phil, leaning back so far now that the Aeron creaked. “He’s hauling ass, his and hers, after some bad shit went down. End of story—that’s it. Oh, and he looks fucking miserable about it. Fucking whipped, man. I mean, I know we were joking earlier, but doesn’t Nev Charles strike you as the poor bastard Mick and Keith were thinking of when they wrote ‘Beast of Burden’?”
“So you’re saying he looks like a victim,” I said.
“Kinda, yeah, but mostly I’m saying he looks like a pus—”
“All right, Phil.”
“Sorry,” he said, throwing up his hands, “but I thought we were being honest.”
“What I want to understand,” said Hannah, “is why you think her strength automatically must mean his weakness.”
Phil sighed. “Jesus Christ, Sunny, what is the point of this again?”
“There’s no right or wrong answer,” I said. “I’m just curious to know what impressions different people take away, because it’s obviously gonna be crucial to the book, and it obviously inspires strong feelings, even now. So everything’s valid, everything’s helpful.”
Just then Jonathan Benjus Jr.—Aural’s young publisher, our big boss, JBJ for short—slid open the conference room door. “Don’t mind me, guys,” he said, crouching low as if finding a seat in a darkened theater. In one quick move he hopped atop one of the cabinets lining the back wall of the room and sat cross-legged. “Just thought I’d pop in a minute to see what cool stuff you guys are working on.”
JBJ had inherited Aural Media from his father in late 2014, and was a twenty-eight-year-old Harvard Business School graduate who’d made many of us skittish with his first “town hall”: He’d gathered us in a rented movie theater, fed us popcorn and Twizzlers, trotted out Vin Diesel to say hello for some unknown reason, and then launched into a slick presentation about the need for more seamless collaboration between our editorial and ad-sales divisions. I’d scarcely known him at the time he called me up to his office to gauge my interest in becoming editor in chief, and my surprise promotion was touted as the first major move JBJ had made as publisher—the scion finally emerging from his father’s shadow, the Wall Street Journal had trumpeted, alongside a portrait of JBJ sitting at his desk with his Star Wars toy collection lining the shelf behind him. Now that I was his direct report, I was still struggling to manage. On one hand, the fact that JBJ rarely wore suits, opting instead for black jeans and vintage concert tees underneath expensive slim-cut blazers, suggested he was a cool, laid-back guy who simply loved everything Aural, and hovered out of a desire to feel closer to that rock-and-roll spirit. That he strenuously focus-grouped every cover subject I had proposed so far and emailed me constant examples of “innovations” from other magazines—that is, the kind of lucrative advertising integrations that made me, as an editor, feel incredibly queasy—suggested otherwise. More frustratingly, JBJ’s hovering often sucked the air out of the room. My staffers would freeze when he was around, whether he was peering over their computers on late nights or showing up unannounced at meetings like these.
Well, most of them froze, anyway.
“Don Jon!” said Phil, rising from his chair. “Take my seat, dude.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean to disrupt,” said JBJ. “Sit, Phil, sit! Sunny, continue.”
I flipped through my notebook. “Let’s move on to what we’ve got planned for the September issue….”
“Oh, but were you talking about the new Aural History?” JBJ said, looking over his shoulder at The Photo. “Opal & Nev, yeah. Wow. What an incredible shot. Isn’t it incredible?”
“We were actually just discussing what specifically it evokes,” I said. “It’s kind of like a Rorschach test. What do you see in it, Jonathan?” Humor him a minute, I was thinking, and he’ll leave you alone.
“I mean, I’m not really an art guy, but something about it just…” JBJ shook his head and let out a long, slow breath. “No pressure, but I cannot wait to read this part of the book.”
“I don’t mean to burst the bubble,” Phil said, creaking again in his chair as he leaned back, “but I was just telling Sunny I don’t really get it.”
“How do you mean?” JBJ asked.
“End of the day, I just wonder about its significance,” he said. “How long did Opal & Nev even last? They put out two semi-okay records and then they were done. This thing”—he gestured toward The Photo—“it’s irrelevant to what we’re trying to be about, you know? What you’ve said yourself, Jon, when you talk about our brand promise.”
I cleared my throat and tried to speak. “Let’s not—”
“Is Aural really gonna be about the music?” Phil interrupted, parroting our official mission statement as he glanced back at JBJ. “Because if it is, to me that means no gimmicks. Rock and roll that’s classic, that has legs outside a niche of cosplaying idiots who flit in and out of political fashion. Hell, everybody here knows I’m no fan of Nev’s solo shit, but a book focused on that, I could see. He’s gone platinum, he’s managed to kick around and tour forever—I gotta admit, that speaks to a certain… timelessness. But this brief moment with Opal? Okay, yeah, it might be a piece of his story, but do we need to blow it up bigger than what it really is? I just don’t see how we can justify this as the heart of a full Aural History.” He held up his hands and turned to me as if pleading innocence. “There, I said it.”
“No, no, that’s cool,” I said, smiling. Burning inside. “I get that not everybody here is as invested in this story as I naturally am.” I was going to leave it at that, but I could feel JBJ observing my performance, seeing how I would squash this rebellion. “So here’s my thing,” I said. “If there have been numerous books and films about Stuart Sutcliffe—”
“Well, yeah, because he was the fifth fucking Beatle,” said Phil.
“—and if people still are fascinated by Edie Sedgwick, and revere the Faces, even though Rod Stewart solo eclipsed them, charts-wise, and… Oh, wait. I also seem to remember someone in here pitching me a story about the making of Minor Threat’s one and only album. Who was that, again?”
“A six-page magazine feature,” Phil said, reddening as the rest of the room snickered. “Not an entire book.”
“Okay, okay. My point is that our idea of what’s important, what’s influential, we have the authority to open that up,” I said. “So I’m glad you brought up the brand promise, Phil, because there’s another aspect of it I think we should all be focused on: how Aural is evolving. How we need to reflect the spirit of the times and of our audience, and remain inclusive of all aspects of music and the conversations people are having about it.”
“Guys, I cannot stress Sunny’s point enough,” said JBJ, and laced his fingers together. “Inclusivity.”
“Personally, I’m proud of the fact that all of us in this room are passionate music fans, and that none of us can say we got here the same way,” I said. “Pooja, what’s your first memory of really loving an artist?”
“Um… I guess when I was a kid, I was really into Gorillaz?” she said, and I could feel the older staffers in the room struggling to hold in their titters.
“Right,” JBJ said, nodding. “I remember that song… ‘Clint Eastwood’!”
“They were, like, this intersection of rock and electronica and anime,” she said. “All kinds of stuff I was into. It felt ambitious to me… like, futuristic.”
“Phil?” I said. “What was your formative listening experience?”
“Easy: Zep,” he barked. “Physical Graffiti.”
“Monster of a record, yeah,” I said. “Ben?”
“Me? Oh, I was kind of a geek,” he said. “My mom passed on her love for Billy Joel. The Stranger, though—not the doo-woppy stuff. I’m not that bad.”
“And speaking for myself,” I said, “not to get too goopy about it, but I discovered Opal & Nev when I was fourteen, and I will say unequivocally that loving their music is the reason I’m here. I was lonely in school, only Black girl in my class. Lonely at home—no brothers or sisters or, as you know, a dad. And I saw these two misfits, and despite everything—well, maybe because of everything—I felt an instant emotional connection to them. I know, I know, partly that was the power of taboo; being drawn to shit that’s supposed to be off-limits…. But I swear, I looked at her face, that fierce expression she’s got, and for the first time I felt like I could have some power too. Like I had a model of a Black woman who was more than just a survivor—she was, like, the bravest, fiercest bitch alive. And then Things We’ve Seen… my God: When I heard the rage and wildness pouring out of that record, Opal & Nev sounded exactly like a little piece of me that lived on the inside. Isn’t that the kind of story we should aim to be telling—how it is that this rock-and-roll music could reach a sheltered Black girl like me, and make her feel not just seen and heard, but empowered?”
Again, there was a silence in the room. A few of the younger women smiled shyly at me, signaling their support. But among the men—the majority of this staff I had inherited—a palpable discomfort thickened. Even my old friend Ben was studiously enhancing a doodle in his notebook. I looked over at JBJ to see that his mouth had formed a thin, tight line, the same concerned look he got lately when our newsstand numbers came in. Had I been too candid? Simply by relaying my own American story, did they think I was playing a race card? I couldn’t put my finger on exactly how I’d lost the room, but somehow I’d done just that. And it was imperative that I get it back.
“Anyway, enough about all that,” I said, with what I hoped was a self-deprecating chuckle. “The thing to really know is, Opal & Nev are playing Derringdo 2016.”
This was the ace I’d dropped when pitching JBJ, the piece of news that had made him go all-in on publishing this project as our next Aural History. And in this moment it had the same effect, but multiplied.
“Wait,” said Phil, cutting through the surprised chatter. “The Friday-night slot? Headlining?”
“Yep,” I said. “They’re the big reunion show.”
“Oh my God, that is perfect,” said Pooja. “I’m shook!”
“I trust we can keep that between these four walls,” JBJ intoned over the noise. “It won’t be announced for a little while yet. Aural’s got the exclusive. So from the beginning we’ll own the story, and when the book comes out, there’ll be really strong interest. There’s a whole rollout plan Sunny’s working on—some really fantastic synergies with Nev’s next tour.” He smiled and gave me the thumbs-up. “Guys, this is a massive win.”
“Well, then,” Phil said to me. “You could have just said that in the first place.” He mimed zipping his lips, and for a moment I felt victorious, back in the position of authority this asshole continuously tried to steal from me. But that night in the office, after everyone had gone home for the weekend, doubt overwhelmed me. I realized just how much pressure there’d be on nailing this part of the book, about what had gone wrong at Rivington Showcase. Through these interviews I was searching for my father, of course, but for all the Aural History readers, the faithful Mercurials and Phil-level skeptics alike, I had promised to deliver more. To squeeze out the juicy, page-turning details of the riot, and to get at why Opal & Nev—as a singular musical duo, not just as an empty image or the precursor to a solo superstar in Nev—deserved such rigorous attention in its wake. Was I capable of pulling that off? As persuasive and vulnerable as I’d tried to be in that meeting, speaking my truth in front of everyone, it still seemed I was considered dubiously other. And how could I lead the way on anything, if even my soldiers kept questioning me?