CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/26/2017

Cameron Crowe on 'Exhilarated and Exhausted' author Neal Preston

“As Neal Preston continues to document … essential artists and the world we love, his work only seems to grow more vital,” Cameron Crowe writes in his Foreword to Exhilarated and Exhausted. “The powerful brew of what was once dangerous and thrilling is often reduced to a term now—‘classic rock.’ But once upon a more clandestine time it wasn’t just a download, it was a life … rock. Many an artist has squandered their original importance, flying into the arms of less substantial work. But these images live on. You can feel the music, the audience, the desperate need to find a place in the world, all of it in these photos because they were curated by the guy who felt it all when he pressed the button on the camera. They’re snapshots of what is most elusive—truth and fun and for that one moment, on that one night, the thrill of belonging.” Pictured here, Freddie Mercury, in 1978.