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4/24/2008 - 4/25/08
"Wanna see my smiling face on the cover of the Rolling Stone." — Dr. Hook and the Medicine ShowFrom its inception in the late 1960s, Rolling Stone magazine helped define rock 'n' roll. Entrepreneur Jann Wenner (whose company, Wenner Media, still owns the magazine) and his chief photographer, Baron Wolman, set out to document the musicians and lifestyles that made Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock, and Altamont synonymous with the '60s counterculture scene. Wenner was 21 at the time.
No one knows if Rolling Stone would have emerged if it were not for the heady atmosphere of 1960s San Francisco. In the same city where Allen Ginsberg publicly read his famous Beat poem "Howl" a decade earlier, Rolling Stone offered the younger generation something magazines like Time and Newsweek did not: a voice. At the time, no one was covering the music scene with the depth that Wenner's publication did. Popular music had become a means of mass communication about — and protest against — the Vietnam War, and Rolling Stone was a way for current events to reach an increasingly idealistic, vocal, and involved youth.
When Wolman shot his first cover for Rolling Stone, he already had experience working as a photojournalist for Life and Look magazines. His style was intimate, as if another band member had turned to the musician next to him to snap a shot. His portraits suggest he had an easy rapport with his subjects.
The list of musicians Wolman shot for the magazine includes Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, and the Rolling Stones. What stands out in many of Wolman's photos are the young faces of people who now live in our memory as symbols of a revolutionary time. Many were just kids, but some — like Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, and Muddy Waters (who wrote a song called "Rollin' Stone") — were veterans. Rock 'n' roll had come into its own but still owed a debt to earlier music styles, and Rolling Stone covered them, too.
Twenty-one classic images that Wolman shot as covers for the magazine can be seen at Andrew Smith Gallery's Grant Avenue location in an exhibit that opens Friday, April 25. Santa Fe resident Wolman spoke with Pasatiempo about his time shooting portraits for the magazine.
Pasatiempo: When you were at Rolling Stone you worked with some of the biggest rock 'n' roll icons of the '60s. Did working with rock stars make you apprehensive?
Baron Wolman: I was 30 when we started Rolling Stone. Jann was 21, so I was the old man. Most of these people that I photographed were not famous at the time I photographed them. In the late '60s their careers were just building. I lived in Haight-Ashbury. Many of them lived in the neighborhood, so it was people that we saw all the time. You see them performing locally; you see them on the streets; you hang out with them.
Pasa: So their celebrity status didn't necessarily impact the nature of the work you were doing?
Wolman: Well, I was a photojournalist, and these were photojournalistic subjects as far as the way I treated them. One of my fortes has always been informal portraiture. There's a difference between the action photos and portraits that I did. When I did the portraits, I enjoyed sitting with them and looking at how the light fell on them and trying to make them look as good as they can possibly look. You have to talk to them for a while and get them to trust you so they relax, and that's how you get the best pictures. Onstage it's something else again. Fortunately, I had access to the stage at all times: in front of the stage, in dressing rooms, just everywhere.
Pasa: Did you go on tour with them?
Wolman: It was more about catching them where they were because it [Rolling Stone] was a regular newspaper. If they lived in town, then we'd hang out with them and take a bunch of pictures. But I would go to L.A. and New York and all the places where they were performing or living. It was a little bit everywhere, just like a working photojournalist, man. Difference was I owned part of the paper at the time, so I was working for myself too.
Pasa: Was there a lot of input from the musicians about how they should be presented?
Wolman: That's an interesting question, because when music videos became real popular and they began to see how they looked, then they began to care how they were photographed. Before then, they trusted us. They knew we weren't going to make them look bad. But then with the music videos, they said, "Not only do we want to look as good as we can, we want to look a specific way." So things changed.
Pasa: Was there anyone in particular who defied your expectations in either a positive or a negative way?
Wolman: One really interesting experience that started with me being more nervous than I'd ever been and ended up being really a productive shoot was when I shot pictures of Frank Zappa. Zappa was hugely eccentric in every sense of the word, so I really didn't know what I was going to encounter. But ... he was just in a mood to get photographed. He just started running around and posing himself. I didn't have to do anything but follow him around with the camera and get these shots. He'd fall into these poses. It was fabulous. I didn't have to direct him.
Pasa: Are you still doing portraits?
Wolman: I don't shoot much anymore. The nature of photography has changed so dramatically with the advent of digital. I'm older, and to pursue a career in photography — I think it's more of a young person's profession these days. I love doing what I'm doing: sharing these photos and doing different things with them, making books. This is a very unique show because it has the 21 covers that I did for Rolling Stone when I was there — I was only there for about two and a half years before I left.
Pasa: And was this right at the very beginning?
Wolman: Yeah, man. I was there from day one. There were just so many opportunities. There was a film called Performance starring Mick Jagger. I was over in London shooting pictures of The Who recording the rock opera Tommy. At the end of the day, Pete Townshend said, "Hey, let's go over to the movie studio where they're shooting this film." We went on the set, and I shot a bunch of pictures of Jagger while he was prepping for the next scene. That was a lot of fun. That whole three years [at Rolling Stone] was filled with magic moments of one sort or another. Being on the stage at Woodstock, how fabulous was that?
Pasa: Rolling Stone was a magazine every musician wanted to be in. It helped define the popular culture of the day, and your images reached a lot of people.
Wolman: Absolutely. Rolling Stone was a major part of it, and I was a major part of Rolling Stone. I went to a concert once at Fillmore East in New York. My name was always on the list at the backstage door. So I went to the door and told them, "My name's on the list." And they'd look at the list and say, "No. You're already here." Somebody was impersonating me already.
I call myself a former minor celebrity. I had slight celebrity status back then. Nothing like the musicians, of course, but people knew who I was, and they welcomed me. There was never any difficulty getting access to the people I wanted to photograph. It was pretty wonderful.
Pasa: Maybe there's another Baron Wolman running around out there still.
Wolman: If you find the guy let me know, and I'll call my lawyer.
details
Baron Wolman: The Rolling Stone Covers
Opening reception 5-7 p.m. Friday, April 25, with music
by Phil Brown; exhibit through June 15
Andrew Smith Gallery, 122 Grant Ave., 984-1234