ON MAY 6, 1979, 18-year-old aspirant photographer Jay Blakesberg was hitching to a Grateful Dead show when he heard about the No Nukes rally in Washington, DC, where Joni Mitchell, Jane Fonda, Jackson Browne and other protestors appeared in the wake of the nuclear reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania.
“There were 65,000 people there,” he tells MOJO. “I’m up front, you know, 50 feet away from the stage, and I see all these photographers on-stage and in the pit. I’m saying to myself, That’s where I want to be. And I look on the ground, and there’s a press pass. That is a luck moment – but you have to show up, right?”
His shots of Mitchell and Browne are among the images in RetroBlakesberg Volume One: The…
