Golden Years presents never-before-seen images of musical icons David Bowie, Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, AC/DC, Aerosmith, The Pretenders, Blondie, Peter Gabriel, and many others. These photographs were taken by Ed Rosenbaum at rock-and-roll concerts in the New York area in the late ’70s and early ’80s. The book, available only to Premium subscribers to Esopus, was released on October 25, 2016.

In 1977, Ed Rosenbaum, a teenager born and raised in Brooklyn, decided to bring a Pentax manual camera given to him by his brother-in-law to rock-and-roll concerts of his favorite bands at NYC venues like Palladium, CBGB, and Madison Square Garden. “It was a way to remember the shows you went to,” he recalls. The fact that Rosenbaum took these photos from the floor—in many cases, from seats far away from the stage—is a testament to his vision and his enthusiasm for the acts he was documenting.

In the early ’80s, Rosenbaum left music and photography behind, eventually finding a job as a doorman in an apartment building in downtown New York, where he has worked for the past several decades. After coming across the negatives of these photographs in 2015, he happened to show them to one of the building’s residents, a student at New York University. The student mentioned them to Esopus editor Tod Lippy during a lecture there, and their conversation inspired the publication.

In addition to the book, Lippy curated an exhibition of Rosenbaum’s photographs at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The show, featuring a selection of the photographs published in the book, ran from October 15 to November 13, 2016.