Rock 'n' roll portraits
Herb Greene, who emerged as one of America's best-known rock music photographers of the 20th century, at first wanted to be an illustrator, like his mother. But, as the story goes, he took a high school arts class and discovered he had zero talent for drawing. Try photography, his teacher suggested. It turned out to be good advice. Around the time he was taking photography classes at City College of San Francisco and living in an apartment near the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, Greene bumped into a musician named Jerry Garcia and the two became friends.
Greene's entry into San Francisco's psychedelic rock scene and his knack for photography and particularly portraiture helped launch a threedecade-plus career during which he photographed bands and musicians including the Grateful Dead (with whom he forged a yearslong friendship), Jefferson Airplane and singer Grace Slick, Janis Joplin, Jeff Beck, the Pointer Sisters, Carlos Santana, Sly Stone, Led Zeppelin and more. His works graced magazine spreads, books and album covers, including the one for the classic Jefferson Airplane release “Surrealistic Pillow.”
Greene retired from rock photography in the late 1990s, and now the Haight Street Arts Center, 215Haight St., San Francisco, is opening what's described as Greene's first career retrospective, complete with scores of photographs and other aspects of his work and career and a reproduction of the famed “hieroglyphics wall” in his apartment that served as a backdrop to many of his best-known photographs.
Details: Through May 28; free admission; haightstreetart.org.