SXSWorld
Issue link: https://sxsw.uberflip.com/i/478870
3 4 S X S W o r l d | F I L M / I A M A R C H 2 0 1 5 | S X S W. C O M he late photographer Jim Marshall, whose lavish coffee table book The Haight: Love, Rock, and Revolution makes him the subject of a SXSW Music panel this year, was loud and aggressive, a self-professed gun lover with a manic, threatening air about him. He dressed conservatively and kept his hair cut neatly. In hip circles of '60s San Francisco, he didn't appear to be merely the most unhip person in the room; he appeared to be the very antithesis of hip. Yet the musicians at the center of the scene respected him unequivocally, giving him total access, and he docu- mented the scene from its earliest days so thoroughly that his output helps shape how that time and place is perceived today. "Oh, he was a complete nutcase," laughs Jorma Kaukonen, gui- tarist for Jefferson Airplane and one of the panelists. "But in reality, he absolutely blended in so well that you hardly noticed him there. He had that ability to be a fly on the wall, even if he was really more like a hornet." Marshall was born in Chicago in 1936, but he grew up in San Francisco. He spent two years in New York before returning home in 1964 (staying there until his death in 2010). In New York, he'd shot album covers for Atlantic, Columbia and ABC Paramount; he'd pho- tographed the established jazz scene of Monk, Miles and Ellington and the nascent folk scene as it went public via Dylan. After he came back to San Francisco, he was well positioned to shoot the LSD- fueled hippie movement that would soon be emerging there. That scene reverberated around the globe and still informs the music world of today. Yet when people talk about that influence, ironically, they rarely talk specifically about the music. Oh, there are musical influences. Rock writer Joel Selvin, who pro- vided the text for the Marshall book and speaks on the panel, cites, most obviously, the Dave Matthews Band and Phish. Kaukonen notes the subtle influences in the guitar work of Sturgill Simpson on his widely praised Metamodern Sounds in Country Music. "But it's not a musical tradition like Memphis blues," Selvin declares. "It's that San Francisco gave bands the freedom to use their experimental labora- tory, and to do things differently. That's the real San Francisco of the '60s, and music was only part of it." From Haight-Ashbury to the World, the Psychedelic Spirit Lives On by John Morthland T J e rry G a rci a o n s ta g e i n G old e n G a te Pa rk Jim i H e n d ri x E x p e rie n ce p lay in g a fre e co n ce r t in S a n Fr a n ci s co's Pa n h a n d le fro m t h e b a ck of a f la t b e d t ru ck , J u n e 25, 1 9 6 7 © J I M M A R S H A L L P H O T O G R A P H Y L L C © J I M M A R S H A L L P H O T O G R A P H Y L L C