Rolling Stone’s initial photographer dies at 83

Baron Wolman, Rolling Stone magazine’s first photographer, liked to tell of the time he took a picture of something that wasn’t there.

It was in 1969, and he was photographing Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. When Garcia held up a hand, Wolman thought he was just waving or some such. But when Wolman printed the picture, he noticed that much of Garcia’s middle finger seemed to be missing — some kind of trick on Garcia’s part, he assumed.

“I kept thinking, ‘ How did he do that?’ ” Wolman told the California newspaper The Marin Independent Journal in 2011. “How did he make it look like he made it look?”

Only later did he realize that the finger really was missing and that Garcia had given him a scoop of sorts — at that point, he generally hid the fact that he had lost a piece of the finger as a child.

“Jerry usually kept that missing digit out of sight,” Wolman wrote in “Baron Wolma n: T he Rollin g Stone Years” (2011), “and here he was holding it up for the world to see, and for me to photograph.”

That anecdote underscores one of Wolman’s particular gifts as a photographer at the heart of the rock scene during the Woodstock era: his ability to gain the trust of his subjects. That skill led to enduring images of Garcia and the rest of the Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and countless others.

Wolman died Monday at 83 at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A statement on his website said the cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, often known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

In the mid-1960s, Wolman was living in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco and working as a freelance photographer when one of his clients, Mills College in Oakland, staged a weekend seminar on the pop music industry. Among those who attended were Jann S. Wenner and Ralph Gleason, who were working on plans for a new music publication.

“Jann asked me if I would like to join the team as its photographer,” Wolman recalled in the 2011 book, “and, if so, did I have 10 grand to invest.”

He didn’t have the 10 grand, but he did have cameras, and he struck a deal with Wenner: He’d shoot for the soon- to- debut Rolling Stone free of charge if the magazine would cover his film and developing costs, let him keep the rights to his work and provide him with some stock in the new venture. The first issue, in November 1967, included a photograph of the Grateful Dead — the whole group; the Garcia missing- finger picture came later — on the steps of the band’s house; some members had just been busted on marijuana charges.

Wolman stayed with Rolling Stone only until 1970, but his brief tenure resulted in many memorable images. It was a time before rock and pop stars and their handlers had become masters of managing their own images, and as Rolling Stone caught on, Wolman had remarkable access to the rock scene.

The key to a good photograph, he always said, was getting the subject to relax, a delicate matter when dealing with music personalities as different as Frank Zappa, leader of the form-bending group the Mothers of Invention, and Tiny Tim, the quirky falsetto singer.

“You don’t put Tiny at ease the way you put somebody else at ease, right?” Wolman wrote. “So we bought a bouquet of daisies and said, ‘ Tiny, this is for you,’ and he went crazy, he held them to his chest and he kept smiling and thanking us, smiling and thanking, and that small gesture gave us the ability, number one, to do the interview, and, number two, for me to do the pictures.”