In a word, Jim Marshall once told me what it takes to become a successful rock photographer — trust.
“All of these artists have given me their trust,” he said in his distinctive croak when I interviewed him in 2009 during a raucous book signing party in Manhattan for a photo book of his titled “Trust.”
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“Trust given and trust received,” he said. “And I’ve never violated that trust. I’ve never had a lawyer, a manager, an artist or an agent complain about a picture I used.”
A year after that interview, the man Annie Leibovitz hailed as “the rock ‘n’ roll photographer” died in New York at age 74, willing his estate and more than a million black-and-white and color negatives, his “children,” to Amelia Davis, his longtime personal assistant.
Davis combed through nearly 53,000 of those images for a new book, “The Grateful Dead by Jim Marshall: Photos and Stories from the Formative Years, 1966-1977” ($50, Aug. 5). Published in lavish hardcover by Chronicle Books, it features more than 200 black-and-white and color photos, a third of which we’re seeing for the first time. It comes out as the band celebrates its 60th anniversary with concerts Aug. 1 through 3 in Golden Gate Park, the site of many of the performance pictures that Marshall took back in the day, some of them while lying on his back on the stage.
It was that trust that Marshall spoke to me about that made him part of the Grateful Dead family in those early years, earning him the kind of unfettered access that would be virtually unheard of in today’s tightly controlled, corporate music business. As Davis writes in her introduction:
“Jim was there through the ups and downs, the on-again, off-again friendships, the breakups, makeups, girlfriends, wives, daughters and sons; the drug busts, losses and changes; the quiet moments and the explosive moments. The challenges of family. The Grateful Dead was family.”
Because he was an ultimate insider, a self-described “fly on the wall,” he captured band members and their extended family in the bloom of their youth and pre-rock star innocence. There are shots of an impossibly young Jerry Garcia and his then-girlfriend and future wife, Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, goofing around backstage at Monterey Pop or sitting sweetly together on the front steps of the Grateful Dead’s fabled digs at 710 Ashbury St. during the Summer of Love.
Bob Weir, the leader of Dead & Co., now bearded and gray at 77, was barely out of his teens in these pictures and looks like the peach-fuzz adolescent that he was in that nascent hippie era. Marshall caught the unguarded charm of the late bassist Phil Lesh and his then-girlfriend Rosie McGee enjoying each other’s company. We see hanging-out photos with other familiar faces on the emerging San Francisco scene — Carlos Santana; Janis Joplin, Neil Young; Jimi Hendrix; Buddy Miles; David Crosby; Grace Slick; Dan Hicks; John Cipollina; Al Kooper; and Michael Bloomfield.
About a photo of Garcia jamming with Bloomfield, Mountain Girl said: “There was a little rivalry going on with Michael Bloomfield. I know he had Jerry worried that maybe he wasn’t gonna be the best guitar player on the block if Bloomfield hung out too much. Bloomfield was awful good. They had very different approaches. They played different stuff, and that was lucky.”
The book is peppered with pithy comments by Marshall’s friends and intimates that provide sound bite insights into his consummate professionalism as well as his often aggressive and bellicose personality.
Fellow rock photographer Herbie Greene, who died in March at age 82, described him, with sincere affection, as “a gonzo, gun-totin’, coke-sniffing journalist.”
Grateful Dead historian and counterculture author Dennis McNally points out that Marshall’s bad boy reputation does nothing to diminish his legacy as one of music’s most revered photographers. It’s a lesser-known fact that before moving to San Francisco from New York in the ’60s, Marshall had already established himself as a respected photographer of jazz musicians, a reputation that preceded him into the rock world.
While this book focuses on the early Grateful Dead, let’s not forget that he’s responsible for many of rock’s most iconic photos: Janis Joplin reclining on a couch with a bottle of Southern Comfort, Johnny Cash flipping the bird, Jimi Hendrix setting his Stratocaster aflame at Monterey Pop and the Allman Brothers in gritty black-and-white on the cover of “At Fillmore East.”
“His art is remembered a lot more than his rough and rowdy ways,” McNally is quoted as saying. “There’s a certain automatic reaction when people talk about Jim Marshall, you know? It’s the guns and the drugs, but, man, those pictures are just something else.”
Many of the Grateful Dead’s most prominent scholars and writers wrote essays for the book, including Blair Jackson, Peter Richardson and David Gans, who co-curated the collection with Davis. In an afterword, Dead & Co. guitarist John Mayer recounts an evening with Marshall that evolved into a bittersweet lament for the inexorable passage of time, “the freewheeling days that had come and gone.”
Freewheeling is the operative word in that sentence. It’s ironic that most of the shots of the Dead performing on Haight Street and in Golden Gate Park that were so seminal in building the Dead’s loyal fan base and its everyman ethos were free shows. I can only imagine Marshall’s outrage at the prices fans are willing to pay for the upcoming Dead & Co.’s 60th anniversary concerts in the park’s sprawling polo field. General admission weekend passes were originally $635 with single-day tickets at $245. But good luck finding anything close to that now that secondary markets are involved. General admission from one ticket broker was $705 earlier this week, with VIPs ranging from $3,183 to $8,287 for the weekend. I saw one “Golden Road Super VIP” pair of passes for the three shows for $18,819, taxes, of course, included. That would be the equivalent of about $183,000 in 1965.
Marshall hated being told where he could be and what he could shoot by publicists, managers, agents or roadies. He once cussed out Barbra Streisand. So it’s no mystery why there are no photos of the Dead in this book after 1977.
“I shot them before they got big, before it got out of control,” he told me the year before he died. “I stopped photographing them in the ’70s, when it got too corporate. That’s not fun for me. If I can’t do it my way, I don’t do it at all.”
Contact Paul Liberatore at [email protected]