One night in San Fransisco I met up with Jim Marshall for dinner. He brought the same Leica camera with him that he’d used to shoot everyone from Muddy Waters to Janis Joplin. Jim could talk about the biggest names without dropping them. He really was there. They let him in. He told me how disappointed he was in recent times that publicists took all the magic of “all access” away. When Jim came to my show the next night I made sure he could shoot the entire performance, even the sweaty half of the show. You never see the sweaty parts of the show anymore because photographers are only allowed to shoot the first three songs. I get why. Who knows what these guys will do with a pic of you sweating your ass off, shirt half tucked? But Jim knew what was cool and what wasn’t, and that’s why he got the brilliant photos he did. He was a photographer who tried to capture you without capturing you the way they try to now.
I would spend evenings at Jim’s house drinking wine and rifling through drawer after drawer of his photographs. I’d make piles of images I wanted, and by the end of it I realized I had 40 of these things and would have to thin out the stack. That was a tough job. John Coltrane at dawn. Miles Davis in a boxing ring. Bob Dylan rolling a tire. Jimi Hendrix at Monterey pointing directly into Jim’s camera lens while bending a note. And, perhaps his most famous photo, Johnny Cash giving the middle finger.
That night before my show in San Francisco we brought our cameras to the bar and he taught me how to shoot a bit while hitting on women. Okay, while we both hit on women. After having said goodbye and walking our separate ways, I turned around and asked him to give me the “Johnny Cash” and he obliged.
I know Jim is getting some amazing photographs up there right now… Rest in peace my friend…
JM
