I’m best known as a rock journalist, writer, and critic, but I’m also a photographer. Over the years, I’ve taken thousands of photos of musicians, and from those, I picked the approximately 250 photos that are in my new book, Jukebox: Photographs 1967 – 2023. The photos in this online gallery are drawn from Jukebox.
I first started taking photographs of musicians a few weeks before I turned 14 when I attended the KFRC Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival, a two-day festival in June 1967 that cost $2 a day and included a bus ride up to the event on Mount Tamalpais, California; it took place less than a week before the Monterey Pop Festival. The Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival was the first rock festival in the US and possibly the world. The Doors were the headliner for the first day; I photographed Jim Morrison there when “Light My Fire” was a huge hit in the US.
That summer, I photographed Janis Joplin and Sam Andrews of Big Brother and the Holding Company performing on Mount Tamalpais. This was after their debut album was released but before their hit album in 1968, Cheap Thrills. At another concert that summer, which took place at McNears Beach in San Rafael, California, where the Youngbloods headlined (“Get Together”) and the Sopwith Camel (“Hello Hello”) appeared, things were so loose that my friend Dave and I could walk to the backstage area where Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead was hanging out and photograph him as well as Peter Kraemer of the Sopwith Camel as he played his flute.
In the summer of 1970, when I was 17, a friend and I planned to publish a Bay Area music magazine, kind of a local version of Rolling Stone was our idea. We researched what it would cost, and I figured out that my savings could cover printing one issue. Confident our magazine would succeed, we thought we would earn more than enough money from the first issue to publish the second.
We agreed that we would call it Hard Road, after the title of a John Mayall album. One day that summer, we went to visit our friend, Tom Donahue Jr., the son of Tom Donahue (who originated underground freeform rock radio at KMPX and, before that, released hit records by the Beau Brummels, promoted the Beatles final concert at the San Francisco Giant’s Candlestick Park and was a DJ at KYA, a Bay Area Top 40 station). The Donahues lived in a big house on Mt. Tamalpais. I parked along the side of the road, and we walked up to the Donahues’ driveway.
Jerry Garcia stood at the top of the driveway leading to the Donahues’ house. This wasn’t as odd as it might seem, as many musicians would visit Donahue hoping he would have their records played at KSAN where he was station manager. I approached Jerry Garcia, told him about our new magazine, and asked if we could interview him. Amazingly, he agreed and gave me his house address in Larkspur.
A week or so later we showed up at the house, me carrying an unwieldy reel-to-reel tape recorder, my Pentax camera hanging from my neck. Mountain Girl (Carolyn Adams, Garcia’s girlfriend at the time and future wife) answered the door and saw three teenage boys standing there. What did we want, she asked. When I told her we were there to interview Garcia, she seemed surprised and said he was about to leave to play music at the Keystone Berkeley.
Still, she disappeared into the house, soon returned, and let us in. Garcia, who had forgotten all about the interview, sat and answered questions for maybe a half hour in his living room, which is where I took portraits of him, one of which we used for the Hard Road cover photo. The photos of Jerry Garcia in the book have not been seen before. We did publish a first issue, but that was it. Hard Road began and ended that summer.
Interviewing and photographing Jerry Garcia when I was 17 set me on my path to becoming a music journalist, who would eventually join the Rolling Stone staff and later founded the first internet rock magazine, Addicted To Noise.
See more photographs of rock musicians in my book, Jukebox: Photographs 1967-2023.
