Jim Marshall: Show Me the Picture

Images and Stories from a Photography Legend

Amelia Davis

• Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781452180373
• eBook ISBN: 9781452180595
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Rock Music

Jim Marshall created iconic images of rock 'n' roll stars, jazz greats, and civil rights leaders. He had the power to look into the soul of an individual and to capture the mood of an entire generation. This deluxe, career-spanning volume showcases hundreds of photographs: intimate portraits, heady crowd scenes, and haunting street shots evoking the sights and sounds of the 1960s and 1970s. Marked-up proof sheets offer insight into Marshall's process, while in-depth essays from his contemporaries tell a compelling story about this larger-than-life man. Nearly a decade after his death, Marshall's legacy is the subject of a documentary feature film.

THE GOLDEN YEARS

JOEL SELVIN

THELONIOUS MONK and his family in their apartment’s kitchen, New York City, 1963. This photo was shot for a Saturday Evening Post story.

JIM MARSHALL RETURNED TO SAN FRANCISCO in late 1964, humbled, if not necessarily chastened. He had gone to New York City two years before to make it as a music photographer in the big city and succeeded admirably. He took album covers for famous jazz musicians. He snapped indelible images of young folk performers in Greenwich Village. He traveled the country shooting assignments for the big glossy magazines of the day like Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and Look. But Marshall returned home in ignominy. He left New York after getting out of jail and being strongly advised to leave town.

He had pleaded guilty to charges of making obscene phone calls to women and having an unlicensed firearm and had been sentenced to ninety days for the phone calls and another month for the gun to Riker’s Island, although he did not serve the full sentence. Marshall came back to San Francisco and moved in with his mother and aunt in the childhood home he had left to move to New York. Compared to the heft, depth, and breadth of New York City in the jet age, San Francisco in 1964 was a sleepy, provincial backwater. Marshall must have despaired over this fall from grace, snatching him from the height of his world—mingling with Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez in the center of the hip universe—to the remote nothingness of the Richmond District in the fog belt of San Francisco. He had no idea what he was about to stumble into.

In the next three years, he would vault into being the premier music photojournalist of his time with images of Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and even the Beatles, whose final concert he photographed. These signature images would make him world famous. A volcanic eruption only coalescing when Marshall arrived home was about to explode San Francisco into the center of a new universe. Back in New York, he would have missed it all.

San Francisco was a different city from the one Marshall had left. The jazz scene in North Beach had almost dried up and blown away. Broadway had been taken over by topless bars. Marshall kept his connections to New York magazines and record company publicity offices, but he hardly knew where to start back in San Francisco. He did know to attend the Bob Dylan press conference held by television station KQED in November 1965. Dylan was one of his great subjects in New York, and he had once caught a bit of lightning walking to breakfast with Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, and their girlfriends in the Village when Dylan paused to kick an errant tire down the street.

In November 1965, Dylan had raised so much intense interest in the burgeoning subculture around San Francisco and Berkeley that San Francisco Chronicle jazz and pop columnist Ralph Gleason arranged for Dylan to appear before a brief televised press conference. Marshall squatted in the front row, clicking away.

Also attending the press conference was the impresario and office manager of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, trying to get some publicity for an upc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Early Years: Drive, Vision, and Integrity
• Showing Dignity in the Delta
• The Golden Years
• The Kid and The Old Man
• The Care and Feeding of Jim Marshall
• Acknowledgments
• The Authors
• Index
• Chronicle Ebooks