Kickstarter

About This project
Capturing the nascent moments in California punk, glam and roots that was torn from the streets, internationally acclaimed shooter Scarpati made his reputation revealing the intensity, beauty and artists as they were. Revealing and iconic, from the man who lived it with them, Cramp, Slash & Burn celebrates the bands that defined an era -- Social Distortion, Janes Addiction, Fishbone, LA Guns, The Clash, the Ramones & the Cramps -- as they exploded into cultural forces as well as compelling musicians. These images -- interlaced with the punk club girls, the iconic portraits, the apex of performance -- are lightning bolts of a time gone, but still as electric in reflection as they were in the moment, taken by a man who was there, in the moment, a peer and an artist evolving into a career that includes covers for some of the 80s biggest selling acts. It is the charge of the music, the inherent charisma of the artists, the singularity of the creativity that defines CSB, pictures from the most combustive time of pop creativity since the Beat Generation.

The end result:
A book marking the time. [circa 1980 - 1990] Keeping these bands, this emergence, from being lost to the ages.

The need:
Culling thousands of rolls of film, which has been carefully preserved but exists only in raw negative form -- and cannot be viewed or edited as is.

The goal:
To raise the funds to underwrite the hard costs of turning these raw negs into viewable form, devote adequate time to a comprehensive edit, cull the images into an appropriate survey of the time, place and personalities, then prep the selected images for inclusion in the book. It will take an assistant between 4-8 weeks to scan the film & create proper contact sheets. During that time, Scarpati will be dedicating significant blocks of time to editing, fixing and balancing the story of what was... and beginning the process of not just selecting pictures, but weaving the narrative thread that will anchor the images and deepen their resonance in terms that relate to the moment, as well as the impact on so much of the music that came after. There will be design costs, type-setting, lay-out -- as well as re-vetting releases and sundry clerical tasks in addition to tremendous commitments of the artists time for a book that will stand as a document for the birth of something so explosive.

Cramp, Slash & Burn is a document for anyone who's ever turned up the volume, hit the gas and been consumed by the primal rejection of machined music. It is real, it is raw and it's time is now. Rather than raise corporate funds, which could skew the insurrectionist edge of the images and the time, Scarpati turns to the DIY ethos of kickstarter and music lovers to keep the edge and integrity of the work intact.