“I’ve got scotch older than you!”
That’s what Jim Marshall said to me once at dinner, when I had a night off on tour in San Francisco. I didn’t understand the mechanics of time then; no twentysomething does. Forget about the whiskey; Jim had photographs that were older than me, and later that night I would end up at his house, poring through long, flat metal drawers of unframed, unsigned prints. As I showed him each one that I loved, he would tell me all about it. “That’s an old Kodak print that’s not around anymore,” he told me in reference to the beautiful shot he took of Otis Redding at the Monterey Pop Festival. The chemical emulsion that produced the most gorgeous, vibrant colors I’d ever seen in a photograph had since been outlawed by the EPA due to environmental and health concerns. That made the work even more rock and roll than it already was; these were illicit works, relics from the freewheeling days that had come and gone. That made me want them even more.
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