The Haight: Love, Rock and Revolution

The Photography of Jim Marshall

Jim Marshall, who died in 2010.

With last summer being the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Summer of Love in San Fransisco, I decided to get a retrospective from this astonishing coffee table book about the topic. I have read other takes in Rolling Stone magazine and the like, but this photo essay with minimalist storytelling is very engrossing. You can go through the book in a dedicated evening of reading. The historic photos are amazing: Jerry Garcia, David Crosby, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, and The Who, to name but a few.

I was much too young to participate in the Summer of Love - only nine years old that summer - but the twenty-somethings of the time were very swept up in it, and of course, the music revolution of the mid sixties continues to reverberate today. Jimi Hendrix was and always will be my all time favorite rock guitarist, and The Who my favorite "British Invasion" band - I listened to Quadrophenia just about every day when I was in high school - so these early and very candid photos astonished me. I had seen a few of them before, but most were entirely new to me.

So, if you are interested in the music of the sixties, this is a great place to learn the background of how it all came to be.

An interesting bit of trivia is that Marshall was the inspiration for Dennis Hopper's photographer character in Apocalypse Now.

Now I have to watch that again!