Sights, sounds and stages
Photos of rock stars by a thenteenage Joel Bernstein part of museum exhibit
“California Rocks! Photographers Who Made the Scene, 1960-1980”: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays.
July 1 through Sept. 13. $10. Sonoma
Valley Museum of Art, 551 Broadway,
Sonoma. 707-939-7862. svma.org
In the winter of 1967, Joni Mitchell was an unknown artist on the bill at the Second Fret Coffee House in Philadelphia. But Joel Bernstein was less than unknown. He was a 14yearold folkie, among maybe 10 others, at that small show in Philadelphia. The kid with braces on his teeth was able to raise his small Pentax and get a picture of Mitchell and deliver it a few days later to her dressing room upstairs.
Two years later, Bernstein had risen to the position of yearbook photographer at Cheltenham High School in a Pennsylvania suburb when Mitchell came to Philadelphia to perform again. This time, Bernstein presented an image that Mitchell described as “the best picture of me that has ever been taken,” he recalls. That’s when she asked Bernstein: “Will you be my photographer?”
This was a complicated job offer because Bernstein was still a junior in high school and had to ask his parents. But it all worked out because an image he shot of Mitchell in the backyard of her Los Angeles home in Laurel Canyon now makes its museum debut in “California
Rocks! Photographers Who Made the Scene, 19601980,” which reopens the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art on Wednesday, July 1.
“Collectively, the show captures this wide breadth of characters and talent that is uniquely Californian,” says Bernstein, now 68 and living in
Rockridge, Oakland. “I hope a viewer comes away with a sense of the richness of the time we were capturing.”
The exhibition, which is also available to view online, consists of 60 images curated by The Chronicle’s former pop music critic, Joel Selvin, who has been curating museum shows since the 1995 exhibit “I Want to Take You Higher” opened the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
The images for “California Rocks” were mainly borrowed from longtime San Francisco collectors Rick Swig and Nion McEvoy.
“Those guys have all the knowledge and all the taste and all the contacts to acquire worldclass music collections,” says Selvin, who also drew from his own collection of prints made by Chronicle photographers Robert Campbell, Steve Ringman and Michael Macor.
Selvin’s chronology is expansive. The show starts with Campbell’s shot of Elvis Presley at the Oakland Auditorium in 1956 and also includes Campbell’s shot of the Beatles at the Cow Palace in ’64, which Selvin discovered at the end of a roll of negatives of screaming girls. The show ends with Ringman’s shots of Prince in Oakland and Talking Heads in Berkeley, both taken in 1983.
Bernstein is represented by nine shots, just one less than his role model Jim Marshall, the most famous rock photographer of them all. The other major ’60s shooters are Henry Diltz, with six images; Herb Greene, with four; and Baron Wolman, with three.
“Greene, Marshall, Baron — they have books and reputations out there,” Selvin says. “Bernstein is a little more of a secret, but his subjects all know him, from the Crosby, Stills and Nash crowd to Tom Petty.”
The betterknown photographers all had a head start in the 1960s over Bernstein, but he caught up quickly. The day after his high school graduation, he came to New York to photograph Neil Young walking in Greenwich Village. That image ended up as the front cover of “After the Gold Rush,” with another Bernstein shot, of Young’s patchedup jeans, on the back cover.
“I was quiet and I was young, and they were surprised that the photographs were good,” he says. “I was fortunate enough to be around during a golden age of music and the musicians who made it.”
(Here’s just one example of how fortunate: When Bernstein decided to move to San Francisco in 1970, he had an inside track on a rental near Buena Vista Park. Graham Nash was his landlord. That gave him access.)
Bernstein’s parents finally let him move to Los Angeles, but not until he tried college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. That lasted five days before he dropped out to take up the offer from Mitchell, who invited him to stay in a guest room at her cottage (of “Our House” fame). He was 10 years younger than the musicians he was living among and photographing with his manual Pentax Spotmatic (the 35mm model Ringo Starr used in “A Hard Day’s Night”).
By then, Bernstein’s main subject was Young, who had moved into semiseclusion at his Broken Arrow Ranch, at the end of Bear Gulch Road, over the hill from Woodside (San Mateo County).
Bernstein was handy to have around. The rockers had known him since he was a kid and trusted him. Plus, he had added value as a guitar tech. When they would go on tour, Bernstein was usually backstage, tuning the instruments used by Young, Crosby and Nash, Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Prince.
“I was the guitar tuner for the Last Waltz at Winterland,” he says. “I had all my cameras but didn’t have time to take a single picture.”
Bernstein eventually shot enough of Young at his ranch that he was finally made an employee as Young’s archivist, for 20 years, from 1990 to 2010. That was his last fulltime job, Bernstein says.
But he is still at work at his studio in Rockridge, putting together images to accompany a box set of early material by Mitchell to be released by Rhino Entertainment this fall. That first image Bernstein took of her, when he was 14, will be printed for the first time in that set (though not featured at the Sonoma exhibition).
“I can still feel what it was like to be a teenager when I began this,” he says. “It’s a satisfying circle.” Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@ sfchronicle.com Instagram: sfchronicle_art