Baron Wolman: A Bounty Of Iconic Rock Photography

Photos by Baron Wolman

Ike & Tina Turner

​Every Picture Tells a Story - Baron Wolman: The Rolling Stone Years
Omnibus Press, 176 pp., $37.50

If you could point to one thing that makes today's music journalists most jealous, it would probably be the music journalists of the '60s and '70s. Back then, writers and photographers might spend days or even weeks hanging out with acts onstage, in studios, and at parties to get a story.

Complete access was the norm, and the artists themselves were often unguarded and accepting. Simply impossible to fathom in today's world of 15-minute hotel-room phone interview - that a frantic publicist usually cuts off just as they get interesting - and first-three-songs-no-flash photography.

Janis Joplin

​At an upstart publication called Rolling Stone, Baron Wolman was the magazine's first chief photographer from 1967-70. He, along with shutterbugs like Jim Marshall, Henry Diltz, David Gahr, Bob Whitaker, and the recently-deceased Barry Feinstein, were among the era's chief visual documenters. Many of these men's images have become iconic, appearing on posters, T-shirts, album covers and more; a number of them are Wolman's and represented here.

This large, coffee-table book features photos of many of the major '60s and '70s acts across genres, including Hendrix, Zeppelin, Zappa, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, the Doors, Pink Floyd, Neil Young, Dylan, Rod Stewart, Aerosmith, the Who, the Stones, Santana, and the Stooges, along with Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters, Miles Davis, Smokey Robinson, Lightnin' Hopkins, and many more.

Wolman's approach was interesting in that he rarely posed his subjects, preferring to catch an unguarded moment that said something about the performer and/or their music.