My All-Nighter with Rock 'n' Roll's Most Legendary Photographer
“I’ve got scotch older than you!”
That’s what Jim Marshall said to me once at dinner, when I had a night off on tour in San Francisco. I didn’t understand the mechanics of time then; no twentysomething does. Forget about the whiskey; Jim had photographs that were older than me, and later that night I would end up at his house, poring through long, flat metal drawers of unframed, unsigned prints. As I showed him each one that I loved, he would tell me all about it. “That’s an old Kodak print that’s not around anymore,” he told me in reference to the beautiful shot he took of Otis Redding at the Monterey Pop Festival. The chemical emulsion that produced the most gorgeous, vibrant colors I’d ever seen in a photograph had since been outlawed by the EPA due to environmental and health concerns. That made the work even more rock and roll than it already was; these were illicit works, relics from the freewheeling days that had come and gone. That made me want them even more.
Jim continued to lament the passing of time; he told me that photographing musicians had become something that hemmed him in. The photograph of Janis Joplin I was holding reminded him of how he’d had unguarded and endless access to her. He knew that nowadays, it would be impossible to get a shot of a singer lying on a couch with a bottle of Southern Comfort in hand. It was publicists that now stood in the way of magic happening. “These days you get thirty minutes with an artist, and they pull them away,” Jim said. He knew there was no way to make these photos again. And so did I.
By the end of the evening, I’d amassed a stack of photos that I showed to him one at a time as he wrote numbers down in pencil on a small sheet of paper. This was how Jim did business. There was no gallery director, no middleman. He signed each one in front of me, next to the edition number, which had already been written.
There was Cream, standing stoically together, hinting at the underlying tension inherent in all trios. There was John Coltrane, printed with a platinum chemical process, sitting deep in thought with his hand against his face. The most moving to me was another shot of Coltrane, standing at dawn in his backyard at his home in New York State. There was also Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival, pointing toward the camera with his eyes wide open, recognizing Jim and playing straight to him. There was Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis, and Bill Evans. I loved that Jim had taken the greatest photos of jazz musicians, even though these were somewhat overshadowed by his work with more famous pop and rock musicians of the time.
Jim came to my concert the next night. Knowing how the changing of the guard had affected his enthusiasm for taking photos, I gave him the access he had said was long gone. I’m so glad I did. Hanging in my house, next to these classic photos I mentioned, is a photograph he took of me onstage playing the guitar, a baby-faced kid who was younger than the scotch in his liquor cabinet. The film was newer, and the development process a little flatter. But the rest is classic Jim Marshall.
To have known Jim Marshall is to have communed with the type of artist that exists in short supply these days: a man who brought his battered Leica everywhere he went, even to dinner, where it sat on the table like his faithful companion. He’d dedicated his life to capturing the essence of musicians, and since his passing, I now find myself referring to the essence of who he was: a singular artist who was no different from the rock stars he immortalized. I’ll never forget his unlikely swagger, his distaste for the bullshit, and his love for honesty and straight shooting. In every photograph he made featuring an enduring rock and roll icon, there was another you might have missed—the one holding the camera.
Excerpted from Grateful Dead by Jim Marshall: Photos and Stories from the Formative Years, 1966–1977 by Amelia Davis and David Gans, © 2025. Published by Chronicle Books. Photographs © Jim Marshall.
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