Photographer of Rock’s Golden Age
From Janis Joplin to Jimi Hendrix, Baron Wolman captured the revolution and changed music photography
From Janis Joplin to Jimi Hendrix, Baron Wolman captured the revolution and changed music photography.
Baron wolman didn’t know what to expect when he signed on as Rolling Stone’s first staff photographer in October 1967. For his first assignment, Jann S. Wenner, the magazine’s editor and founder, told him that the Grateful Dead had just been busted at their communal home in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Since the magazine’s offices were close by, Wolman made it to the bail-bonds office fast, and then followed the Dead back to their house for a press conference. “Jann said, ‘Make sure you get a group shot of them,’ ” said Wolman. Wolman got the shot Wenner wanted: Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, and their managers goofing around on their stoop, while keyboard player Ron “Pigpen” McKernan brandished a weathered rifle. “You see them laughing and flipping the bird and this whole gun thing between Jerry and Pigpen,” Wolman recalled. “I was happy to shoot those shots and get the fuck out of there before I got killed!” That photo appeared in the first issue of Rolling Stone a month later, and was the first of many classic images Wolman took for the magazine. Wolman — who died on November 2nd at age 83, after a battle with ALS, the nervous-system condition also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease — shot some of
the earliest and most iconic rock & roll images. During his three years at Rolling Stone, between 1967 and 1970, he captured the musical revolution as few others had: an open-mouthed Jimi Hendrix attacking his guitar at the Fillmore West, plus offstage moments like Janis Joplin relaxing at home with her cat, Grace Slick ironically wearing a Girl Scout uniform, Frank Zappa sitting atop a tractor at a construction site, and Jerry Garcia flashing his missing, chopped-off finger for the first time publicly. “There were no visuals published by musicians that weren’t formal PR pictures,” Wolman told Rolling Stone in 2011. “We were living with them in their neighborhood. They were our friends.”
“Everybody was approachable and appreciative in those days,” Wolman said. “It was never difficult. We’d sit around and talk, and I’d take pictures. There were a lot of changes going on, and people would show it in the way they put themselves together — long hair, granny glasses. For a photographer, it was a fucking gold mine.”
The affable and straightlaced Wolman would always confess to being the last person anyone would have expected to be in that position. Born in Columbus, Ohio, on June 25th, 1937, he grew up listening to his mother’s classical and showtune records. Wolman took to photography as a way to escape what he once called the tumult of his early home life. “I picked up that camera and looked through the lens, and I was able to quiet the chaos down and make sense of what I saw,” he said. “I was selecting the moments that had meaning for me. I knew it was something I’d be doing for a long time.”
At Northwestern University, he met a woman who extolled the glories of California. But before moving there, Wolman volunteered for the Army, serving time in its counterintelligence program in Berlin, in the early Sixties. “I was a counterspy in Berlin, basically!” he said. “I had a different name and dressed in civilian clothes. I didn’t have to kill anybody or get shot at. I learned the wisdom that compulsory service on the part of young men and women to their country doesn’t have to be military. You learn to give something back.”
In Berlin, Wolman took his first published photograph: a shot of the building of the Berlin Wall for The Columbus Dispatch, which paid him $50. “I thought, ‘I’m getting paid for something I’m doing — I’m gonna be a photographer!’ ” he said. After his service, Wolman relocated to L.A., where he put on ballet productions (his then-wife, Juliana, was a dancer) and shot publicity photos for his first music act, the Kingston Trio.
But the air quality in Los Angeles bothered him and Juliana, and after 18 months, they headed north to San Francisco. While taking photos for Mills College in 1967, Wolman heard about an upcoming rock & roll conference at the school that was gathering local legends like Jefferson
“Everybody was approachable and appreciative in those days. For a photographer, it was a fucking gold mine.”
— BARON WOLMAN
“I wanted portraits with elegance and style. Baron had that. He set the look for Rolling Stone.” — JANN S. WENNER
Airplane, promoter Bill Graham, writer Ralph J. Gleason, and others.
As he prepared to shoot the event, Wolman met Gleason and Wenner, who told him of their plans to start a serious, journalistically minded music and culture magazine. “Ralph knew of Baron, so when we were starting Rolling Stone, he said, ‘You should meet this photographer,’ ” Wenner says. “Baron was perfect. I didn’t want a photographer who was just going to go to shows and take photos from their seats. I wanted portraits with elegance and style, and Baron had that. He set the look for Rolling Stone.”
Wolman took Wenner up on his offer almost immediately. “Jann said to me in April 1967, ‘We’re going to need a photographer. You wanna be our photographer?’ ” he said in 2019. “We’d sit around and decide to do a story, and they’d say, ‘Go get pictures of this and that.’ ”
Though only 30, Wolman was older than most of the Rolling Stone staffers and preferred to watch NFL games and attend roller-derby matches than get stoned. “I knew that if I got high, I wouldn’t be able to take pictures,” he said. “There was no autofocus back then.” But he adapted to the new music. “The transition from classical into rock & roll was pretty easy,” he says. “The music got you high. It did something to my brain and kept me going and made me smile.”
The first concert Wolman shot for the magazine was the Who at San Francisco’s Cow Palace, in 1967, which turned into a transformative moment. “I had no idea what I was getting into. I’d not shot live music before,” he wrote. “When [Pete] Townshend destroyed his guitar, I was stunned, nearly traumatized. It would be like me pounding my Nikons and my Leica against the concrete, totally beyond my nature or comprehension. It shocked me to the point of being afraid that something bad was going to happen.”
“He was not a hippie, by any means,” Wenner adds. “But he was a pro. And he liked the culture for some reason — what the musicians stood for and what it was all about.” That approach, and his easygoing demeanor, led Wolman into dressing rooms and hotel rooms, where he captured Townshend at work, Jeff Beck practicing guitar, Steve Miller warming up before a show, and a gaggle of groupies for a magazine portfolio. For Wolman, Miller was “college-educated and articulate and had interests beyond music,” and Joplin was “a sorry soul in that she was so insecure and didn’t believe in her own talent.”
For the magazine’s 1969 cover story on the Dead, Wolman took individual portraits of the band at an old Victorian house. When it came to Garcia’s turn, the guitarist playfully held up his right hand, although Wolman at first didn’t know why. “When I took that picture I didn’t realize what I was seeing,” he said. “He held his hand up like that, and I had no idea what he was showing me. When I was printing, I was trying to do the same thing with my hand, bending a finger one way or another. It wasn’t until later that someone told me what the deal was. That’s the first time he revealed so publicly and joyfully that he was missing a piece of his finger.”
In 1969, Wolman attended and shot the Woodstock festival, and his image of a nude concertgoer in a local waterway made the cover. “I was so wired and so excited, and it was such an adrenaline rush because I’d never seen anything like this,” he told RS in 2019. “I always tell people it was a disaster waiting to happen that didn’t. That was one of the miracles of Woodstock: It could have been horrible, and it wasn’t. We all really believed, ‘Wow, we can all get along! And if we can get along, maybe the world can get along.’ ”
Wolman left RS about a year later. “I felt I was making the same photographs and different faces,” he said. “It wasn’t a challenge for me anymore. I thought, ‘I understand this world and I’m having a good time, but there’s a lot of other stuff going on out there.’ There was so much about life I was curious about, and I wanted to get out there and find out. It became repetitive for me a little bit.”
Wolman started a short-lived f ashionand-culture magazine ( Rags), moved on to aviation photography (he learned to fly), and started his own publishing house, Squarebooks. In 2001, he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lived for the rest of his life. A decade later, he published The Rolling Stone Years, a hefty collection of his work for the magazine. But in recent years his health began failing him, and on October 4th, he wrote on his Facebook page: “Sad to say I’m now in the final sprint to the end. I go forward with a huge amount of gratitude for the many blessings bestowed upon me, with no regrets and appreciation for how my photographs — my life’s work — have been received.”
In a 2011 interview, Wolman said he regretted not being able to shoot the likes of Tom Petty, Joan Jett, and John Mellencamp. But he nonetheless felt he and Rolling Stone had made a valuable contribution to the perception of musicians. “We never saw pictures that reflected their humanity and what we knew about them and their lifestyle,” Wolman said. “And it was fundamental to the mission of Rolling Stone to do that, to somehow reflect music as we experienced it rather than the business side.”