Photographer snapped shots of some of rock ‘n’ roll’s biggest names for ’Rolling Stone’ magazine
Janis Joplin belting out a private concert for one. A serpentine Mick Jagger yowling into a microphone. A pensive Pete Townshend fiddling with the controls as the Who recorded “Tommy.”
Baron Wolman lived every Baby Boomer’s ultimate fantasy.
Forty years ago, Wolman was a freelance photographer who had settled in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district because it was cheap. Wolman was passionate about rock ‘n’ roll, just like a 21-year-old journalist named Jann Wenner. The two men met in April 1967 at a Mills College rock ‘n’ roll symposium. Wenner told Wolman about his idea for a new magazine and asked him if he would work for free.
“Who knew what it was going to be?” Wolman said of the gestation of Rolling Stone magazine. “It just felt like a good idea.”
During his nearly threeyear-stint at Rolling Stone, Wolman shot and hung out with rock royalty: everyone from Jimi Hendrix to the infamous artists/groupies the Plaster Casters.
“They weren’t stars yet,” Wolman said of his subjects. “They were all living in the neighborhood. We were all hanging out together.”
Rock ‘n’ roll junkies can see Wolman’s 21 Rolling Stone covers paired with original silver gelatin prints at Andrew Smith Gallery, 122 Grant Ave. The rogue’s gallery of musicians includes Tina Turner, Frank Zappa, Pete Townshend, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell and Jerry Garcia, among others.
The Grateful Dead drug bust was his first assignment.
“I got pictures of them post- ing bond,” he said. Later, he moved to their press conference.
“They had this big bowl of whipped cream on the desk in front of them,” he explained. “Their plan was the first reporter who asked a stupid question, they were going to throw it in their face.”
Wolman lived a few doors down from Joplin, her dog and cat, and around the corner from the Grateful Dead. When Rolling Stone launched Rags — a ‘60s fashion magazine — the editors assigned Wolman to get a four-color shot of Joplin. He set up some stage lights in his three-bedroom home studio.
“She came over and brought not a boom box, but a little tape recorder and put on the music and started humming and lip-synching,” said Wolman, who now lives in Santa Fe. “But she couldn’t do anything less than 150 percent. Within five minutes, she was singing full out for me.”
Wolman’s photographs show a young Joplin circled by a sequined cloak and grinning with an almost schoolgirl innocence.
“She had her dark side,” he said. “She was insecure. She didn’t believe in her success because she’d been beaten up so badly emotionally. I said, ‘Janis, it’s not like going to the dentist, this is fun,’ and she broke into this beautiful smile.”
In those early days of unlimited access, Wolman shared the stage with the musicians, always careful to position himself out of the spotlight.
Hendrix’s first appearance at the legendary Fillmore West still smolders in his memory.
“First of all, Hendrix himself was unbelievable,” Wolman said. “You couldn’t take a bad picture of him, he was so photogenic.”
It was Wolman who captured the iconic moment of the guitarist’s mouth locked in an ecstatic “o” as he squeezed out the notes.
“You need to anticipate what’s going to happen,” he said. “If you see the picture form in the viewfinder, it’s already too late.”
But as flamboyant as Hendrix was in performance, he was the opposite offstage.
“He was quiet and reserved,” Wolman said. “You couldn’t believe he was the same person, he talked so low.”
Wolman’s entry into photography began when he mailed shots of the Berlin Wall being built to the Columbus Post Dispatch, his hometown paper. He’d taken the pictures when he was in the Army in 1961. When Wolman saw the paper, he thought he’d struck gold.
“They used all my prints and all my text on the front page and sent me a check for $50,” he said.
After his discharge, he moved to Los Angeles, then San Francisco, where he freelanced for Look and Life magazine.
In 1968, Rolling Stone sent Wolman to London to photograph the Who while they were working on their groundbreaking rock opera “Tommy.”
“Jann loved Pete Townshend,” he explained. “He was intelligent and articulate. Not only did I hang out with him, but one night we went over to the film studio to see Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenburg working on (the movie) “Performance.’ ’’
“They were totally getting along then,” he said of the notoriously fractious Who. “Keith Moon was still alive.”
He said the band members sensed they were on the edge of a breakthrough.
“Everybody else was writing songs — this was an opera,” Wolman said.
His portrait of the Beatles’ George Harrison occurred during a serendipitous moment outside of the studio.
“He sat down at Apple Corps and started reading Dylan’s “Don’t Look Back,’ ’’ Wolman said. “I thought, ‘I could ask him to pose or I could capture this magic moment.’ ’’
Wolman wasn’t usually intimidated by his subjects, but, after all, this was a Beatle.
“I didn’t want to be a fan,” he said. “I wanted to be equally professional.”
Bob Dylan was a no-show for Wolman’s first photo session with the famously reticent songwriter. Wolman finally photographed Dylan while he was promoting “Slow Train Coming” during his flirtation with Christianity. Critics savaged the album almost as much as his earlier switch from acoustic to electric guitar. But Wolman loved the music.
“Well, he’s not nice,” he said. “But what do you do? You take people for what they are.”
He also photographed Joni Mitchell inside the Laurel Canyon house she shared with Graham Nash. The home was the subject of the Nash-penned song “Our House.”
“We just spent a delightful afternoon drinking tea,” Wolman said. “She’s so hospitable — a lovely, lovely human being.”
But after three years of photographing future legends, Wolman quit the magazine. As the business boomed larger than the music, access was one of the first casualties.
“It started to be the same thing with different faces,” he said. “For me, life is like a buffet table, if you stop at the appetizers, you miss the salad, you miss the dessert.”
For a while, he concentrated on Rags, then moved into book publishing. He bought an airplane and shot aerial photographs. Then he moved to sports after signing on as a photographer with the National Football League.
Wolman acknowledged he might have stuck around Rolling Stone a bit longer if he had known then what he knows now — that the music and the musicians he photographed would have lasting, historical impact. He still thinks about the ones that got away.
“I wish I had photographed two,” he said. “Well, I only got one Beatle. But I wish I’d gotten Tom Petty, and I wish I’d gotten John Mellencamp.
If You Go
WHAT: "Baron Wolman: The Rolling Stone Covers"
WHEN: 5:30 - 6:30 tonight. Through June 15.
WHERE: Andrew Smith Gallery, 122 Grant Ave.
CONTACT: 984-1234
