BRIAN JONES, NICO, DENNIS HOPPER, and JUDY COLLINS backstage at Monterey Pop Festival, Monterey, California, 1967

Jim was really curious, he was inquisitive, and more than wanting to just shoot it, you could tell he wanted to be in it. He wanted to jump in it and experience it. And he’d capture it too, but he wanted to have the whole feel. And I think you get that in his pictures.

MICHAEL ZAGARIS

One of Marshall’s big-time rock ’n’ roll queen crushes was GRACE SLICK. Just a few years younger than Marshall, she had it all—looks, talent, charisma, craziness, plus the upper-crust background (she went to “finishing school,” and her Daddy was an investment banker who always wore three-piece suits). If you wanted to wrap Marshall around your little finger, all you had to do was look good and act dangerously—but in a ladylike way. And, of course, stick with him through thick and thin.

For a time, Slick seemed to fit that bill. Whether it was guns or drugs (coke, not acid) and booze, she and Marshall saw eye to eye. Marshall delighted in recounting how Slick used to stand on the balcony in front of Jefferson Airplane’s manse at 2400 Fulton and shoot her shotgun into the air.

No wonder Marshall got all googly-eyed in her crazy-beautiful presence. It didn’t hurt that Grace could write a truly great lyric and sounded like she was singing through a guitar amp from Mount Olympus.

JANIS JOPLIN “happy” backstage at Winterland, San Francisco, 1968