Jim Marshall’s Unseen Grateful Dead
In a career immersed in rock & roll photography, the late Jim Marshall was long associated with certain iconic images: Johnny Cash flashing his middle finger at San Quentin, Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo walking the streets of Greenwich Village, Jimi Hendrix thrusting his left arm out during his soundcheck for Monterey Pop.
But Marshall’s ongoing documentation of the Grateful Dead embodied a unique bond between photographer and subject. Marshall, who moved back to his native San Francisco in 1964 after two years in New York, met the band soon after it formed. Since he rented an apartment on lower Haight Street, he became almost as much a part of their universe as Mountain Girl (Carolyn Garcia), acid king Owsley Stanley III, and promoter Bill Graham. “Because Jim was an established, trusted pro- fessional photographer and everyone knew him and his photographs, the Grateful Dead welcomed him into their circles, allowing Jim unfettered access into their world,” writes his archivist, Amelia Davis, in her introduction to The Grateful Dead: Photos and Stories From the Formative Years, 1966-1977, the first-ever Marshall collection devoted solely to his Dead work. “This is how Jim became part of their family and they became part of his.”
Marshall was known for the way he would immerse himself in whatever situation and gain the trust of his subjects. “I’m afraid to miss anything,” he said in a 1980 interview. “It’s a compulsiveness. But once I’m there, I want to photograph everything and every- body. I can’t stop.”
That approach was evident in his Dead archives, which amounted to 52,704 photos, 1,352 proof sheets, and 168 boxes of Koda- chrome slides that Marshall left behind when he died in 2010 at 74. In those thousands upon thousands of shots — like those included in The Grateful Dead, co-curated by Davis and Dead scholar and musician David Gans — Marshall snapped the band members backstage, onstage, at home, relaxing with their partners, and hanging with fellow musicians.
“Part of Jim’s genius as a photographer was his ability to capture pure chaos — the chaos of the Dead playing live onstage, going right up to the speakers and getting feedback from them while the others onstage were holding their ears,” Davis writes. “But he could also capture quiet and loneliness, as in the photo of Pigpen walking down the street by himself. Two very different images, yet in both, you can feel and see the emotions through Jim’s lens.”
Here are some of the most revealing — and never-before-seen — images of the Dead included in the book.