ROCK OF ANGELS

Jim Marshall is the definitive “rock” photographer--that is, he was the first photographer to become indelibly associated with the music and its musicians. Marshall moved back to his hometown of San Francisco in the mid-’60s after spending two years in New York photographing musicians and hanging around the Greenwich Village folk scene, where he met Bob Dylan. It was auspicious timing. Rock’s great paisley coming-out party was just then powering up, and Marshall became the court photographer, earning a reputation for photographing the musicians not as pop stars, but as people. Everywhere he and his Leica M4 cameras went (you can glimpse him at the side of the stage in “Woodstock”), he returned with pictures that betrayed an artist’s compassion for his subjects tempered by a journalist’s unsparing eye. You’ve likely seen the famous ones: Dylan booting a tire through the streets of New York; Janis Joplin slouched backstage, her face creased with an old woman’s worry and sorrow; Jimi Hendrix grinning impishly at a note coaxed from his Stratocaster; the Allman Brothers lounging with magnificent disdain among their equipment cases on the cover of “At Fillmore East.”

While he is most closely associated with San Francisco, Marshall worked frequently in Los Angeles in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. It was here, on assignment for magazines and the record labels themselves, that he shot the pictures on these pages. The images--from a 17-year-old Jackson Browne to Led Zeppelin at their flintiest--document with disarming casualness what no one then could have predicted would be a defining moment in 20th century popular culture. We’re not likely to see a time like it again.

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Jim Marshall’s photographs are on display through Nov. 15 at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles.

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