LOVE, JANIS

Baron Wolman, freelance photographer (and the first photographer for Rolling Stone magazine), has been very generous in sharing his work with us – as seen in the publicity for ATC’s production of Love, Janis. We asked him some questions about that particular photograph and what it was like capturing a cultural revolution on film, as well as where his path has led him since then.

In 1967, I had the privilege to be living in the Haight-Ashbury. It didn’t seem like a “privilege,” exactly, it seemed like “home,” because in those days the Haight was alive with demonstrably creative people. The creative, artistic-types, among whom I felt the most comfortable were everywhere, making music, making art, making political statements, making love. They were on Haight Street, you could see them. Creativity in the late sixties was a public experience, particularly with how we played and listened to the music, particularly with how we were all dressing (long hair, no ties, only tie-dye), particularly with how we were willing to take a stance against the Vietnam war, against a government with whom we were out of synch.

Janis Joplin also lived in the Haight-Ashbury, in a flat near the “panhandle” of Golden Gate Park. I visited her on more than one occasion and photographed her in her bedroom, on her bed with her dog and her cat, and against a wall upon which she had hung several – no, make that “many” – posters of a semi-nude photograph of herself taken by my photographer friend, Bob Seidemann.

On another occasion I brought Janis to the home of an artist friend whose colorful house featured an oriental-carpet bedecked loft just under the roof. In this loft was a carved, throne-like wooden chair, on which I sat Janis to pose for me like a queen. She wore her signature, bejeweled cape and her fur cap. In one of the few instances I photographed Janis in color – Rolling Stone still couldn’t print color photos in its issues – I managed to make a series of lovely, “royal” photos of her.

In the late sixties, Janis was still in her early twenties. She was a complex woman but in many respects still a young girl. I always tried to bring out that “little girl” side of her, tried to make her smile, tried to uncover the innocence that hovered just below the hard-driving singer superstar she was to become.

Truth be known, the color photo of Janis with the microphone in her hand [on the ATC Love, Janis poster], belting out “Piece of my Heart” was a taken at a concert for one, for me. I brought her into my Haight-Ashbury studio for some “live” concert shots which I needed to illustrate a story about her for a national glossy slick hippie-wanna-be magazine (not Rolling Stone). Since she had no local concerts scheduled, we decided to make one of her own. She brought her boom-box to the studio, I arranged the lights as if she were onstage, and she proceeded to delight me with a very personal, very intimate, very memorable concert of my very own. Even in my studio she held nothing back – she never did – and the result was a series of photographs every bit as powerful as if she had been singing to hundreds at the Fillmore Auditorium.

It’s not easy to capture a live performance on film, particularly “on film,” which is what we were using in our cameras in the sixties. First of all, there were no auto-focus, auto-exposure cameras in those days. We were challenged by constantly changing stage-lighting, from its color to its intensity. During any single song the changes were so dramatic and so often we found ourselves constantly changing the camera’s shutter speed and the lens’s aperture, even the lenses themselves. This was before the advent of the fast zoom lenses that are available today. Then as now, the photographer has to watch how the microphone appeared in relation to the singer as he or she moved around the stage – does it cover his/her face, does it cast a shadow across him/her. Over time here have been many, millions, of performance photos made of thousands of musicians, yet only a few capture the power of the music, the power of the performance, the “decisive moment” of a musician at the peak of his or her musical tour de force. In order to make photos that reflect the joy and the intensity felt by both the musician and the audience, the photographer must find a way to get in synch with the musician, to both hear and see the music, to anticipate the moves. The photographer must be so in tune with the performer that he or she will snap the shutter in advance of those moves because if the image is in the camera’s viewfinder, the peak moment will have already passed by the time the shutter is released.

I was fortunate to photograph so many musicians who were or who were to become musical icons and for that opportunity I have Rolling Stone to thank. Being the first chief photographer for a magazine that became a central component of the sixties experience (and beyond the sixties, of course) gave me access to the musical community I otherwise would not have had. My first assignment was to photograph the Grateful Dead, my next assignment was to photograph The Who, then Johnny Cash, then Pink Floyd, then BB King. The list goes on and on. It was a memorable day when writer Jerry Hopkins and I visited Frank Zappa’s aerie high in the hills of Laurel Canyon. Frank was in a particularly playful mood and within a few short moments we made a series of photographs that have become unforgettable in the minds of many, representing the creative eccentricity of the beloved man. The day in 1978 that the great impresario Bill Graham gave me “all access” to the Oakland Coliseum Rolling Stones concert was a dream come true. For two hours, I roamed the venue taking pictures in front of the stage, on the stage and backstage. Graham was generous with a group of us photographers because he understood that we both loved the music and respected the musicians, knew that our pictures would reflect the best of the world of music to which we were all committed in those halcyon days of the late sixties and early seventies.

In the late spring of 1969, when fellow-photographer Jim Marshall and I embarked on a book project to photograph the many summer music festivals held in America each year, our list of festivals did not include a concert being planned for the Catskills region of New York state. Fortunately for us both, we were able to move fast, adjust our schedule, get the necessary photo passes, and fight the traffic to make it to Yasgur’s Farm in Bethel, New York, where in August of that year, 300,000 kindred souls were gathering for an event called the Woodstock Music & Art Festival, an event that in both reality and in retrospect achieved and deserves its mythical importance in the history of the sixties. For many of the photographers at Woodstock it was about the music. For me it was about the people. I spent hours wandering among them, photographing them, talking to them, wondering in amazement that such a gathering of like-minded, mostly young, Americans could gather so peacefully to share three days of togetherness and music. I have never been to anything to match that experience; so much could have gone wrong, so little did. Woodstock became a symbol of the underlying message of the sixties, that peace was possible. And then, of course, came Altamont and the dream was shattered, forever, it appears.

When we started Rolling Stone we had no idea of the importance the magazine would achieve as one of the few voices which honestly reflected the hopes, the dreams and the interests of the sixties. And that was just the beginning of the role Rolling Stone would come to play in reflecting the underlying truths of American society, from music to politics to life-style. We were simply a small group of journalists who were fascinated by the moment, who believed in the media and its ability to tell the truth about whom we were and what we thought. Jann Wenner who founded the magazine was, even at age 21, a consummate professional with impeccable taste and a love of both music and language. From day one, Rolling Stone looked good and read well. Although the magazine has matured (some would argue this) and gone through several metamorphoses over the years, it still looks good, it still reads well, and it still tells it like it is.
No matter that I cannot imagine a world without music, no matter that I still listen to rock and roll (classic rock, mostly), in the end my curiosity about life took me beyond the world of music. That is, I wanted to photographically explore other worlds. Because the changes occurring in the sixties were so visual, so evident to the eye, especially in how people presented themselves to the world, in the early seventies two friends and I started a newsprint fashion magazine called Rags (as in the “rag trade”). We saw ourselves as the Rolling Stone of fashion and although we were journalistically and artistically successful, the severe recession of that time caused us to cease publication after about a year. But thanks to my years at both Rolling Stone and Rags I had become “addicted” to the smell of printer’s ink, to the experience of taking an idea and turning it into reality, I started a book publishing company. Book publishing was not nearly as hectic and frantic as publishing a periodical; that company, Squarebooks, still exists today.

To paraphrase one of the characters on the early days of Saturday Night Live, “Photography has been berry berry good to me!” With my camera – and later my small Cessna -- I have explored the world, have experienced many of its lands, many of its people. I consider myself blessed to have been able to turn a hobby into a profession, to have documented a most significant time in the history of our country, and to have produced photographs which will long serve as a window through which others can peer at and indirectly experience the musicians and the events of the sixties.

Many of my music photos can be seen on my website www.baronwolman.com as well as my pages of the Wolfgang’s Vault website www.baronwolmanvault.com

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Janis Joplin