Birthday cakes, indie bands, the San Fernando Valley—all are fascinating in the eyes of Dan Monick, an equal-opportunity photographer if ever there was one. Monick, who sports a fantastically bushy beard, has taken photos for most of the magazines you’d ever want to read. And as cover lensman for music monthly the L.A. Record, he’s been responsible for some of the most innovative—and amusing—portraits of bands to emerge from the LA underground. Here, LA-based Monick talks to us about being cold in Minneapolis, the work of Nan Goldin, and why birthday cakes are beautiful.

YOU GREW UP IN MINNEAPOLIS—WHAT WAS THAT LIKE?? It was awesome. It was cold. Very, very cold.

BEYOND BEING COLD, WHAT ELSE CAN YOU REMEMBER ABOUT LIFE THERE??It’s Minneapolis. The Mid West in the eighties. It was really f**cking cool, now that I think about it. We were New Wave kids and we wore tons of eyeliner and wanted to write songs like Heaven 17—if we didn’t get called queens at least once a day, the day wasn’t complete. But it was so small that everyone would go to everyone’s shows. Hip hop kids at death metal shows, for example. It was great. Minneapolis in the eighties was nuts. It’s different now—people are into their specific kind of music and specific kind of scene, but when I was growing up it was like “OK you are totally in to this, and I am totally into that, and we're both just sitting here and its f**king cold”.

SO WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO GET INTO PHOTOGRAPHY?? Nan Goldin’s book, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”. I was working as a bus boy at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis right after high school and I used to sneak out of the restaurant and go hang out in the book store. There was a lady who worked there who I had a crush on—she was older and had red hair and smoked cigars, and I was like ‘wow, she’s f**king crazy”. I never talked to her, it was just observation. I would go down there and flip through books and watch her out of the corner of my eye. Then I opened up the Nan Goldin book and it was like “holy sh*t”. I started sneaking downstairs just to look at that book.

YOU SHOOT ALL THE COVERS OF THE MUSIC MAGAZINE, LA RECORD. TELL US HOW THAT CAME ABOUT.? Sean Carlson (founder of LA’s F*ck Yeah Fest) called me up and said “we are doing this weird magazine, will you do a photo of The Rolling Blackouts looking like the New York Dolls?” and I was like “yeah, sure”. I thought all the covers should be remakes of classic album covers, so that’s what we did for a long while. It was bonkers, because it came out weekly—I was still shooting film and there was no money and we would shoot a roll of film, maybe two rolls, get them processed real quick then they would have to be scanned—and we had to do all this within a week. We were cranking these things out...they were so bootleg.

WHAT ARE THE STORIES BEHIND SOME OF THOSE COVERS?? Dios Malos as Queen—that was the second or third cover we did. We were going to do the Beatles “Yesterday and Today” cover, the one where they look like butchers that never came out. Then I found out that my friend Piper Ferguson just did the same thing for a story in Swindle magazine. So the band shows up and I was like “um…I have bad news.” Everyone was super bummed. We went online and started looking for album covers that would work—and we came up with the cover of Queen II. They were already in black turtlenecks so we knew it could work. Freddy Mercury and Joel are physically very different, but somehow it ended up really working.

WAS THERE ONE ALBUM COVER THAT EVERYONE ALWAYS WANTED TO DO?? Yeah, bands were always wanting to do Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band—for us it became like someone yelling “freebird” at a concert. Our policy was like—“you bring it, and we’ll do it”. But Sgt. Pepper was too complex, we never did it. Mika Miko set the standard for every band—they wanted to do “The Incredible Shrinking Dickies” album cover, and they came up with all the props and everything. Then there was Giant Drag doing Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors”, Arabian Prince as Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain”, Jim Smith (of LA music venue The Smell) recreating Patti Smith’s “Horses” cover. Nels Cline (Wilco) as Annie Lennox. And Andrew WK and David Cross as Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo from Bob Dylan’s “Freewheelin’” album.

SO YOU’VE PHOTOGRAPHED PRETTY MUCH EVERY BAND IN L.A.? Yeah, it’s pretty rad. I am not really part of the music scene at all. I know them mainly because of this.

YOU’RE REALLY INTO PHOTOGRAPHING BIRTHDAY CAKES RIGHT NOW—WHAT’S THE FASCINATION?? A cake is super temporary…a brief and awesome statement on a moment. Plus I love baking and I love cake. I mean—I don’t actually bake myself. I am just obsessed with baking and I want to open a bakery. I think its one of the most noble and beautiful professions. I love the “best wishes” and the rainbows and that it’s all cut up and I took this picture and put it on a t shirt, then I started doing them all the time.

YOU ALSO LIKE THE VALLEY.? Yes, the San Fernando Valley is the most perfect mistake in the world. It is a valley and everything from LA ran into it—all this weird damage. The whole thing was mapped out by people who had no intention of living there. And it never became hip.

WOULD YOU PUNCH AN ALIEN?? That depends. I mean, why would you punch anybody? Forget that it’s an alien. Why would you punch a mechanic? I don’t know—if an alien showed up and if it was trying to punch me, I would probably try to punch it back. --By Caroline Ryder??