FULL OF DREAMS

Trust: Photographs of Jim Marshall

My heroes aren’t musicians or photographers but writers like the late Jack Kerouac and Richard Brautigan. There is an exuberance in their work that I also find in this “must have” coffee-table book of Jim Marshall classics. His work is not the hype but the genuineness of such geniuses as Otis Redding, Janis Jopplin, Miles Davis, John Coltrain, Mick Jagger, Joan Baez, the original Weavers, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and just about any other top music performer from the fifties to the turn of the century. We’ve embraced their myths, but forgotten their humanity—at least until now.

Sure there is Jimi Hendirx burning his guitar and Bobby Dylan rolling a tire, but look at the tenderness in Odetta’s gaze as she embraces Elizabeth Cotton backstage at the Berkeley Folk Festival (Odetta had been all but forgotten working as a domestic for a long time until she was rediscovered). Or Johnny Cash’s thoughtful stride going into Folsom Prison in 1968 to do a recording his record company, Columbia, didn’t want him to do. Marshall recounts, “They weren’t expecting any trouble but they had armed guards up in the towers… Not all the men would have been Johnny Cash fans before but by the end they certainly were. If Johnny would’ve said follow me out of here to the prisoners, they would have followed him out.”

There’s the shot of  Miles Davis taking a call at a phone booth in the middle of a work-out; he cradles the receiver in a boxing glove. A young Aretha Franklin looking like a girl on a first date. A shirtless Frank Zappa looking like someone’s brother. I like Marshall’s Introduction and the little verbal sidelights he provides that put the pictures in context. There are a few surprises. Did you know that Harry Dean Stanton has a great voice? He and Willie Nelson played a half hour show together for the crew on the set of the Big Bounce with Owen Wilson.

Dylan: 100 Songs & Pictures

Never Ending Tour

ISBN: 9781846094460, Omnibus Press, Price: $39.95, Height: 12, Width: 10, Pages: 496, Binding: Paperback, Publication Date: 10/1/2009. Available here from amazon.com.

I took a bus to New York City form Chicago with my five-string banjo two years after Bob Dillon went there from Minnesota (he’d changed his name from Robert Zimmerman). We were born within two weeks of one another. The difference, he had talent. But looking at these pictures from the Greenwich Village days through our old age, it is easy to drift back. Putting Dylan in a neat little classification has been a bit harder over the years.

In the early days his records were not played on WFMT’s Midnight Special, though those of Pete Segar and Joan Baez were (maybe because he was a contemporary composer of songs— a radical concept in the days of traditional folk that paid tribute to earlier writers, like Woody Guthrie, but somehow felt it inappropriate to do anymore). Then came the famous Newport Folk Festival of 1965 where he was booed for going electric. Of course, he eventually went a little country, a little religious, a little…well, we all know because he brought us along with him on these unpredictable sojourns.