Glimpses Of Another Time - One I Remember With Nostalgia

[Peter Lemkin]

Collection of Iconic Photos of the 1960s Haight Street Scene


Photographer Jim Marshall delivers the faces, the icons, and the vibe of a unique moment in music history.

By Mark Murrmann
| Sat Oct. 11, 2014 5:00 AM EDT

The Grateful Dead's last free concert on Haight Street, 1968
All photos ©Jim Marshall Photography LLC.

Jim Marshall's name is often accompanied by adjectives such as "indomitable," "legendary," "genius," or "whirlwind." And not without reason.
Apart from being in the right place at the right timeSan Francisco's music scene in the mid-1960sMarshall had the right personality to get up close and personal with the bands who would provide the soundtrack to a generation. More importantly, he was simply a great photographer. As such, Marshall created some of the most iconic images in rock and roll history.
You know that famous shot of Johnny Cash flipping off the camera? Marshall. The Allman Brothers cover where they're all sitting in front of their road cases? Marshall. The Beatles running across the field at Candlestick Park for their last concert? Marshall. Just about any photo of Janis Joplin that comes to mind. Jim Fucking Marshall. Hendrix. The Dead. The Who. The Stones. Zepplin. Little Richard. Chuck Berry. Neil Young. He shot 'em all, and many, many more.

Jimi Hendrix films Janis Joplin backstage at Winterland, San Francisco, 1968.

A new book, The Haight: Love, Rock, and Revolution (Insight Editions), thoroughly documents the genesis of the Haight-Ashbury scene. Marshall was there in the earliest days, when the Charlatans, the Great Society, the Warlocks/Grateful Dead, Big Brother & the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Jefferson Airplane, and other bands were just beginning to spin their wheels, and the SF acid/psych-rock scene was just getting rolling.

The Poets (Allen Ginsberg, Robbie Robertson, Michael McClure, and Bob Dylan) in the alley next to City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco, 1965

The book, which goes on sale on October 14, includes lots of live concerts and behind-the-scenes photos of young rockstars with careers on the rise. There are also portraits, protests, reportage: Marshall shot it all. That's what makes this book so great: the top-to-bottom, inside-out coverage of the entire scene. He gives us a real taste of what it was like to be in the midst of things.

Dancers in the Panhandle, San Francisco, 1967


The Human Be IN, Golden Gate Park, 1967

Starting from the scene's origins, The Haight continues through the period whenLIFE was doing regular features on the hippies and the bands were starting to get too big for the Panhandle, and concludes in 1968 with the Dead's final street show: "One last time the band pulled out their gear, trundled down the hill, and played for free in the San Francisco sunshine."
The musicians Marshall shot would go on to become staples of the American music landscape, and these photos are every bit as culturally important, They are as much a part of that landscape as the music itself.

[Magda Hassan]

Good times. Great photos. Classic visual insights to our culture and icons of that time.

[Peter Lemkin]

Good times. Great photos. Classic visual insights to our culture and icons of that time.

...but all now gone...and in the USA not gone by their own natural evolution....rather, the CIA and others ACTIVELY infiltrated and destroyed this movement of peace, love, music, change, alternative thinking....even murdered many of the leading figures.....

....at this time I was living on the East Coast near NYC, but took a pilgrimage to San Francisco one summer (Summer of Love) when the Haight and Golden Gate Park were in their heyday.....it was an amazing and positive shock, even though much the same was going on in New York....it was more intense in San Francisco. Now, S.F. is just an expensive city for the yuppies of silicon valley et al....and the corner of Haight and Ashbury is just another street corner. I was also at Woodstock. All now moments and movements/feelings/happenings/events as dead as the dinosaur. It was more than anything a time of HOPE...real hope that things could be changed. Few failed to see how difficult the change would be to bring about...but we thought we could do it....and felt we had to and would.......

[Albert Doyle]

In some ways the movement was not sustainable because that many drugs and that much dropping out was bound to meet the hard boundaries of reality at some point. Never the less the time did manage to counter the uber state Kennedy was combating and challenge the permanent war state to the degree of being directly influential in the withdrawal of the American government from Viet Nam.


As Peter points out, what isn't so clearly photographed is the ugly counter-reaction by the same government that was waging the PHOENIX Program in Viet Nam. Today, that Grateful Dead concert would be broken up by cops in new military SWAT team gear who were almost directly brought into being in order to counter that freedom movement. What isn't so clearly known is that it is becoming more and more obvious that a domestic PHOENIX-type decapitation program was undergone in America where the perceived leaders of that movement were covertly murdered by the same perpetrators of the Kennedy assassinations using the same methods. The times burned themselves out on their own but they were helped along by a Covert War Against Rock that wasn't so quickly recognized by the generation towards which it was aimed.