I learned so much from Jim about the dark and the light sides of life, living in the moment, taking advantage of what the world presents to you. Just being in his orbit, I saw how instinctual choices can make all the difference and how one never knows where the next person you meet in life will take you.
Nowhere is Jim’s approach to work and life more evident, in my opinion, than in the way he chose to document the myriad festivals, across all major musical genres, of the ’60s and early ’70s.
Summer here in the SF Bay Area has finally kicked in full time, meaning we have days that start out foggy and 50 degrees and end up 90 degrees … mercurial, you might say, just like Jim. It’s got us here at Jim Marshall Photography LLC thinking about road trips, cold ones, food trucks and, primarily, kickass music festivals.
Searching Jim’s archives using “music festivals” as the filter is at once exhilarating and overwhelming. From 1960 to the early ’70s Jim seemed to never stop shooting.
I remember a visit to SF in the early 1990s on my way home from covering a conference in Australia. In addition to the writing thing, I had shot a ton of film (slides and Tri-X, remember those?) and Jim graciously offered to zip me around town on his Triumph bike: back and forth to the lab, to lunch, running errands, etc.
It was the mid ’90s, I was married and running my own new media company in downtown NYC when Jim, after winning a sizable copyright abuse settlement for yet another rip off of his “Johnny Cash Flipping the Bird” shot, decided to use that dough to acquire the next car of his dreams: a silver Mercedes C36 AMG 1996 edition.
When I met Jim in March of 1984, he was down on his luck, to say the least. Instead of a Spitfire or Jaguar, Jim was driving “Truck,” a venerable (dare I say beat to hell) ’60s era Ford Ranchero. Jim was very loyal to that car/truck hybrid, especially because he could get commercial plates allowing him to park in yellow loading zones in San Francisco’s notoriously impossible to park in commercial areas during the workday.
There was an integral part of Jim that always liked fast things and things that made his heart race, whether it was cars, guns, women, music, drugs. But maybe it started innocently enough back when he discovered he was an above-average runner – he was a miler in high school and told me that, for a time, he held the record for the mile in the Air Force.
The tagline on the Jim Marshall Photography LLC website and blog is Cars, Guns and Cameras … and there is a reason Jim always listed cars first. In my opinion these fast, sleek beauties were the true love of Jim’s life. Even though he was cutting out pictures of cameras and pasting them into scrapbooks at the age of 6 or 7, I think cars – the mechanical qualities, and especially the power and simple, elegant, loud-assed danger of hot rods – blew right past cameras as an object of his obsessive affection.
Bob Dylan was born in Hibbing, MN 70 years ago today. I’m listening right now to one of Jim’s favorite Dylan album’s “Blood on the Tracks,” specifically “Tangled Up in Blue,” Jim's favorite song on the album, and now one of mine.
Perhaps it’s the unseasonable cold we’ve been having lately here in the SF Bay Area, or perhaps it’s all this talk of Dylan and Baez and love and NYC in 1963, but I’ve been thinking a lot about Jim and staying warm and new beginnings. The early ’60s was a more innocent time for Jim and Dylan. They were both full of boundless energy, promise and ambition, just beginning to do great things, dreaming of spotlights. It was the time before fame and infamy; 1963 was also the year I was born.
You can’t talk about Bob Dylan’s early career without acknowledging Joan Baez’ catalytic effect on his work, his outlook and his emotions. They met at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village in 1961 when Baez (Joanie as Jim called her) was on tour. The 20-year-old Baez was already a big star on the folk scene; Dylan, the same age, was just a compelling wannabe.
