Herb Greene, whose evocative portraits of the Grateful Lifeless, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and others helped outline the rock scene that emerged in San Francisco within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, died on March 3 at his dwelling in Maynard, Mass. He was 82.
His spouse, Ilze Greene, stated the trigger was pancreatic most cancers.
Mr. Greene pursued music portraiture in his spare time whereas working for a few dozen years within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s as a style photographer for the Joseph Magnin division retailer and the boys’s put on retailer Cable Automotive Clothiers.
As a substitute of photographing concert events, which didn’t curiosity him, he invited bands and musicians to studios in San Francisco and to his house, the place a few of them stood in entrance of a eating room wall crammed with hieroglyphics drawn by a roommate with information of Egyptology.
His photos of the Lifeless, a favourite topic, embody Jerry Garcia, the band’s chief, in a vest and tie, enjoying a banjo whereas seated on a stool, with a wall-sized American flag behind him; Ron McKernan, the Lifeless’s organist, generally known as Pigpen, hanging a threatening pose in entrance of Mr. Garcia; and the band on the nook of Haight and Ashbury Streets, within the district generally known as a middle of the hippie counterculture.
“Herbie was there on the very starting, so he was capable of make paperwork that no person else did,” Dennis McNally, a historian of the Lifeless, stated in an interview. “His title obtained out, and when Led Zeppelin handed by means of on their first tour of the USA, they requested to be captured by Herbie.”
Mr. Greene labored with Led Zeppelin in January 1969, when the band had simply launched its first album and wished publicity pictures.
“I didn’t give them a lot path,” he instructed Rolling Stone in 2014, when it revealed photos from the shoot. “These guys have been on the highway and actually didn’t wish to be there. I had 40 minutes, so I took particular person portraits and a gaggle shot.”
Throughout his session with Led Zeppelin, in a former theater, the Lifeless confirmed up unexpectedly. At one level, Pigpen took a .22-caliber revolver from its holster and began firing into the seats.
“It completely freaked Zeppelin out,” Mr. Greene stated in a video interview with the Morrison Resort Gallery in Manhattan, which exhibited his images in 2012. “They didn’t pay me. They have been identical to, ‘These Westerners and their weapons.’”
“That is my greatest story,” he added. “The day the Grateful Lifeless freaked out Led Zeppelin.”
A few of Mr. Greene’s images have been used on album covers. Top-of-the-line recognized was a gaggle portrait of Jefferson Airplane that turned the quilt of the band’s second album, “Surrealistic Pillow” (1967), which included the hits “White Rabbit” and “Any person to Love.”
One other image from the identical shoot confirmed the band’s singer Grace Slick, along with her again to the hieroglyphic wall, giving the digicam her proper center finger. Ms. Slick, who didn’t wish to pose for photos, made the gesture “as a result of it’s a pose I can take care of,” she instructed Rolling Stone in 2004, when it named the shot one of many 50 best rock pictures.
She added, “It’s so disagreeable, but it surely’s not like I’m doing any faux smiling.”
Not like Ms. Slick, Janis Joplin smiled for Mr. Greene’s digicam. In a shot taken throughout a stroll with Mr. Greene in his neighborhood in San Francisco, she wore a high hat, a flower-print gown and a darkish jacket.
Herbert Bower Greene was born on April 3, 1942, in Indio, Calif., within the Coachella Valley. He grew up on his household’s pear orchard in Medford, Ore., after which in Yuba Metropolis, in Northern California. His father, John, labored for fruit-packing firms earlier than shopping for the orchard. His mom, Lupe (Valencia) Greene, oversaw the house.
Herbie was inquisitive about artwork whereas in highschool. However when portray lessons pissed off him, a trainer urged that he shift to images. He studied the topic at Metropolis Faculty of San Francisco after which attended San Francisco State Faculty (now College), the place he studied anthropology however didn’t graduate.
Within the early Nineteen Sixties, at a beatnik coffeehouse in San Francisco referred to as Espresso & Confusion, Mr. Greene met Mr. Garcia, who on the time was enjoying with the Sleepy Hole Hog Stompers, a bluegrass band, and who would assist kind the Grateful Lifeless (initially generally known as the Warlocks) in 1965.
In 1964, Mr. Greene married Maruska Jiranek, an assistant to the rock impresario Invoice Graham. After he and Ms. Jiranek divorced in 1981, Mr. Greene moved right into a townhouse in San Francisco with a pal and her roommate, Ilze Kaneps, whom he married in 1983.
Along with his spouse, Mr. Greene is survived by their daughter, Charlotte Greene; one other daughter, Eden Tavares, from his marriage to Ms. Jiranek; two granddaughters; and his sisters, Delfina Greene and Rene Cress.
Mr. Greene obtained to know the Lifeless higher when he introduced his digicam for a brief go to to Olompali, a ranch in Marin County that the band rented within the spring of 1966 and the place they partied and performed music.
“I figured I’d take an image of the band or one thing,” he instructed The San Francisco Chronicle in 2020. “However there wasn’t only one band to take an image of because the social gathering obtained going. They have been all there — the Airplane, Huge Brother and the Holding Firm, Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Charlatans.”
Mr. Greene’s images at Olompali embody revelers dancing, a few of them bare, to the reside music.
Virtually a yr later, in January 1967, Mr. Greene photographed the Human Be-In, the countercultural gathering attended by hundreds at Golden Gate Park that got here to be seen as a preview of the Summer season of Love, which bloomed later that yr within the Haight-Ashbury district.
Mr. Greene instructed the California Historic Society’s commemorative Summer season of Love web site in 2017 that everybody on the Be-In appeared to have been smoking marijuana or taking LSD, and {that a} parachutist’s arrival from the sky was considered by the gang “like a latter-day miracle.”
In addition to the well-known pictures he took within the Nineteen Sixties, Mr. Greene’s initiatives included his Grammy Award-nominated artwork path of the Pointer Sisters’ 1974 album, “That’s a A lot,” which had a back-cover photograph of the quartet dressed as in the event that they have been going to church; the photograph of Sly Stone seemingly leaping within the air on the quilt of his 1975 album, “Excessive on You”; the quilt shot of seven pairs of eyes for the Lifeless’s 1987 album, “Within the Darkish”; and the within portrait of Bob Dylan and members of the Lifeless for his or her 1989 reside album, “Dylan & the Lifeless.”
Mr. Greene revealed two picture-filled books concerning the Lifeless: “Sunshine Daydreams: A Grateful Lifeless Journal” (1991) and “Lifeless Days: A Grateful Lifeless Illustrated Historical past” (1996).
Regardless of his immersion within the Lifeless, Mr. Greene stated it was his 1968 studio photograph of another person — a younger, soulful-looking Rod Stewart — that had the best maintain on him.
“There’s one thing about it,” he stated within the Morrison Resort Gallery interview. “If I die and I gotta go to St. Peter, and I’ve gotta take one piece to get in, it could be that.”