That's a difficult one to qualify with any depth because it's no more than a feeling.
He was really - based on the visual information available on the site - into photography per se, having worked at it professionally, too. That's an experience that forever changes one's attitude to it, and to the groups that can sometimes grow around anyone with that experience and subsequent exposure like a kind of fungus, photo groupies, if you like. The pressure of remaining calm and polite in the face of what my granddad used to call damfool questions; the need to encourage when you may, instead, just want to scream... but that's no more than projection on my part, and could probably be a hundred nautical miles off course. I just don't see him as having an infinite patience or even the mindset that chases every buck.
LuLa apparently needs income to stay alive: I have no idea whether that was always the case; whether it was, but got absorbed as the cost of doing a labour of love; whether the operating situation outgrew the ability for that sort of operating strategy.
I never went on any trips with LuLa, first of all because they would draw too much out of retirement resources but even were that not true, nothng would get me into a situation where I had to spend time doing time with a bunch of camera freaks; it would be a version of hell for me. Did Michael really dig those gigs? Maybe he loved 'em - how would I know otherwise? - but I can't lose the feeling that for any creative soul it would become one mother of a chore and obligation, especially if not essential to one's actual fiscal survival, but something that developed of its own momentum.
You may or may not know the answers to all or any of the above, and I think you'd be nuts to come out and say anything to confirm any of it if it were so. This is a commercial venture, after all!
But, you did ask, and to the best of my ability, I have offered an opinion based, as I said at the start, on nothing but a feeling which may be quite mistaken. If it makes any difference, I often am.
Sonny & Cher are just singing I got You, Babe and The Beach Boy just did Good Vibrations before that: the joys of Radio Caroline back, but on the Internet this time. How amazing to have these memories to soothe the savage, empty beating breast. Before I joined the Tony Stone stock agency I had a little side venture of my own called Wild Honey. Guess I really dug those guys, that sound, the places I heard it as I worked. Barbara Ann takes me to a nightclub on the beach at Fregene, just outside Rome, where I did my first solo shoot for a travel brochure before fashion photography became my reality. Sometimes it feels like a distant dream.
You see where your Dad has taken me tonight? Thank him for me.